I’m going to look at the 2000 draft, which is far enough back that we can make some conclusions about how the acquisitions turned out, and how the teams dealt with draft compensation.
I grew up going to Mariners games, but while visiting family in San Francisco, I always enjoyed seeing a good team play outdoor baseball in Candlestick. I loved the Giants teams from 1985-1993. They played in the sun, they were young and good, and people came out to see them, all of which made for a dramatic difference in the amount of fun I had. While I still follow the team, I’ve never been as big a fan since 1993. Because after the 1993 season, when the Giants were the best team ever to not make the post-season, Will Clark wanted to stay in San Francisco, and it didn’t happen.
After any article in which I include a toss-off reference to politics, like calling our president “President-by-court-order,” I get a lot of email that says, essentially, that I shouldn’t talk about politics. For those of you in this group, I’m going to get to baseball here in about four paragraphs.
Baseball is steeped in politics. The issues of tax burden and allocation: is it right to build a stadium for a team, and what good (if any) does it for the city? Labor relations and the roles of unions in the modern economy.
I picked up Last Commissioner for a couple of reasons — I wanted to read his take on Rose, labor issues, and Vincent’s own ouster.
Of the many, many dumb things in the United States tax code, there’s a provision that allows teams to write off the salaries of players when they acquire the team on a limited schedule as depreciation. It’s an easy, fun way for them to show massive losses while they make tons and tons of delicious cash money. The write-off lasts five years, and then you sell the team for its increased value and find something else to do, like buy an arena football team, or make a nuisance of yourself in another sport.
Baseball ownership groups have for too long resembled Dark Age European royalty–closely related and weak. Hand-picked for convenience and agreeability rather than on any objective basis, they’ve given us undercapitalized owners like Steve Schott, lapdog owners like Jeff Loria, evil owners like Carl Pohlad.
When we got our new collective bargaining agreement this season, I figured the results would be predictable: dumb teams would remain dumb and squander their new money, smart teams without money would do better, smart teams with lots of money would do a bit worse.
I figured the Yankees might do one of two things. They could tone things down a little. With the free agent winter, they could easily spend much less on the supporting cast and save a lot by not exceeding the salary cap as greatly. It looked like they were headed this way, throwing little fits over hours of elevator operations, making big deals out of little cuts.
I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail this week asking if I’m going to weigh in on the possibility of a Pete Rose reinstatement to baseball. This is in the wind because Rose met with Bud Selig to discuss how this might happen, and Selig, lacking both a backbone and any sense of integrity, didn’t say “You’re not getting back in, thanks for swinging by, I’ll have my assistant call you a cab.”
I’m taking a quick break from writing my chapters for Baseball Prospectus 2003. I want to re-visit something I’ve already hit twice, because I’m a glutton for punishment. I wrote two articles where I took a crack at whether it ever makes sense to walk the 2002 Barry Bonds, first here and then on ESPN.com.
The price of loyalty is $22 million and an extra year. The two contracts Jim Thome agonized over between turkey and potatoes were Cleveland’s five-year, $60 million deal, plus a vesting option year, and the contract he took, which started with six years for $82 million plus a vesting option year.
Like me, you may find yourself adrift after the World Series. In my case, I fell asleep on my kayak in McCovey Cove at some point during game 5 and are now stranded on a small island in the Pacific, filing stories on the last of your laptop power and sending them into the home office via coconut satellite. For most fans, though, the feeling comes from this boring period before spring training, when we’re supposed to speculate endlessly on whether or not Tony Clark will get a minor-league invite or not, and twiddle our thumbs waiting for Baseball Prospectus 2003 to come out.
When I’ve written about Peter Rose in the past, I get tons of email from readers, and many of them point to Bill James as a prominent, intelligent Rose defender who presents “a compelling argument.” In the past, I’ve referred readers to the Dowd Report, which is available online at www.dowdreport.com. This has proved to be an inadequate response.
I’ve written a piece for this site on Pete Rose, Bill James, and the Dowd Report. It took me far too long to write it: I was reluctant to pursue the project, because the volume and tone of the hate mail anyone who writes about Rose gets is numbing. I dedicated myself to getting it done after Major League Baseball trotted Rose out as part of the MasterCard Major League Baseball Memorable Moments event. Rose got cheered, I made a snippy comment in an ESPN chat, and everyone moved on. But the scene continues to bother me. Baseball’s treatment of Pete Rose under the leadership of Bud Selig has been shameful.
“I could imagine it in my dreams, but I never thought I’d do it until now. It helped take the tension down a little bit for us, but games aren’t won in the first or second inning. They’re won in the ninth inning.” –Barry Bonds, Giants outfielder, on homering in his first World Series at-bat
The price of our national pastime, it turns out, is $40-$50 million, which is how much MasterCard is spending on their ‘MasterCard Presents Major League Baseball Memorable Moments’ campaign. I can’t believe it’s that low, considering they’ve shown those commercials so frequently that I get nauseous looking at that shot of Jackie Robinson. Keep in mind, Robinson is one of my favorite baseball players, one whose autobiography I wore down reading repeatedly.
The Angels beat the Yankees, the Twins beat the A’s. Are teams that depend on
the single and the stolen base better in the post-season than teams that play
for the three run-home run?