— Boston Red Sox (@RedSox) February 4, 2019
All of the time-saving ideas for improving pace of play are negated by time spent on instant replay. Get rid of it. I enjoyed the days when umpires actually made mistakes, and when managers would come out of the dugout to perform a colorful and entertainin argument, as Billy Martin and Earl Weaver once did. The technological advancements have made the game more boring.1. Cafardo, who is ensconced in one of the most prestigious baseball writing gigs in the world, admits his longing for those halcyon days when umpires made blatantly wrong calls.
A few issues to think about as we move closer to spring training:That's it. End of discussion. Cafardo does not write another word on this subject. He casually mentions the possibility of every major league player refusing to report to spring training - which is scheduled to begin in roughly two weeks - and believes, apparently, that typing the words is enough "thinking" about that issue. (Also, a boycott of spring training will do more than get the "owners' attention".)
The rift between team owners and players is growing wider by the day as big-name free agents remain unsigned in late January. Both sides are on a collision course toward a major blowup and threat to future labor peace.
Will the Players Association take major action to protest what it feels is unfair labor practices by the owners? There already are some discussions on the player side on things they could do to get the owners' attention. One suggestion was a spring training boycott.
Older players bring clubhouse chemistry. They act as leaders and de facto coaches. They bring all of the intangible things that younger players can't offer until they've gained a little wisdom and experience. They offer things that analytic models can't always calculate.Unquestioning huzzahs for the Yankees:
[He also says hard-working, blue-collar, family-supporting, quotes-to-Cafardo-giving scouts can't find work because teams are being run by boring nerds.]
When you ask the game's general hierarchy which team has won the offseason, a common answer is the Yankees. And with good reason.Funny and inconsistent things:
The Yankees hate finishing behind the Red Sox in the standings and getting beaten by them in the ALDS. ...A ton of questions (instead of doing the actual research, interviewing, and brain-work involved in finding possible answers, Cafardo the Baseball Insider asks the reader, as if she is writing the column with him):
The Red Sox seem to be in no hurry to sign a reliever. [then, in the next paragraph] There are still plenty of bullpen arms left ...
Imagine if the Red Sox didn't have 35-year-old Steve Pearce. Would they have won the World Series? ...Finally, there is this:
If baseball is a $10 billion business, why are so many teams on an austerity program? ...
Do we really think [the Red Sox will] be able to re-sign all of the players whose contracts are up for renewal over the next two years? ...
Could the Phillies wind up with both Machado and Harper? Or would they hold back on signing both so they can put themselves in position to sign Mike Trout when he becomes a free agent after 2020? ...
[A]re Gio Gonzalez or Ervin Santana possibilities for [the Yankees'] fifth [starter] spot? ...
Is the reason the Indians have shopped Corey Kluber and Trevor Bauer more because in his new deal Carrasco will earn $3 million if he's traded before the end of 2019, and just $1 million after it? ...
What will the Orioles do with the first pick in the June draft?
It appears the Red Sox have one more year to go for it.After 2019, the Red Sox will no longer be allowed to try to reach the postseason. ... Damn it!
Babe Ruth, 1936: 95.1% (not on 11 of 226 ballots) Ty Cobb, 1936: 98.2% (not on 4 of 226 ballots) Walter Johnson, 1936: 83.6% (not on 37 of 226 ballots) Joe DiMaggio, 1955: 88.8% (not on 28 of 251 ballots; his fourth year on the ballot) Ted Williams, 1966: 93.4% (not on 20 of 302 ballots) Stan Musial, 1969: 93.2% (not on 23 of 340 ballots) Willie Mays, 1979: 94.7% (not on 23 of 432 ballots) Bob Gibson, 1981: 84.0% (not on 64 of 401 ballots) Hank Aaron, 1982: 97.8% (not on 9 of 415 ballots) Rickey Henderson, 2009: 94.8% (not on 28 of 539 ballots) Greg Maddux, 2014: 97.2% (not on 16 of 571 ballots) Pedro Martinez, 2015: 91.1% (not on 59 of 549 ballots)Hall of Famers With 95+% Of Votes
Mariano Rivera, 2019: 100.0% Ken Griffey Jr., 2016: 99.3% Tom Seaver, 1992: 98.8% Nolan Ryan, 1999: 98.8% Cal Ripken Jr., 2007: 98.5% Ty Cobb, 1936: 98.2% George Brett, 1999: 98.2% Hank Aaron, 1982: 97.8% Tony Gwynn, 2007: 97.6% Randy Johnson, 2015: 97.3% Greg Maddux, 2014: 97.2% Chipper Jones, 2018: 97.2% Mike Schmidt, 1995: 96.5% Johnny Bench, 1989: 96.4% Steve Carlton, 1994: 95.8% Babe Ruth, 1936: 95.1% Honus Wagner, 1936: 95.1%
If you guys thought last year was special, wait till this year.As Alex Speier of the Globe writes:
And with that, the ballroom at the InterContinental Hotel erupted. ... Cora waved off the notion of complacency or satisfaction for a team that soon will be confronted by a million questions about World Series hangovers and motivations. ...Cora also said he is reconsidering his decision to visit the White House next month. "Right now I can say yes. It might change tomorrow. ... You read what's going on back home. It's not easy."
[Cora] will not be wedded to what worked so well in 2018 if he believes there is a way of improving on it in 2019.
On Thursday night, Cora outlined the ways that he believed the Red Sox were capable of being better: Full seasons from Nathan Eovaldi, Steve Pearce, and Ryan Brasier. The "eye-opening" performance of Jackie Bradley Jr. during the second half of last year sustained over the entirety of a season. Continued progress from Rafael Devers, Benintendi, even Xander Bogaerts. ...
By the winter meetings in December, he had charted the rotation through the entire first half. Cora is not merely inching forward from 2018; he's sprinting into what lies ahead.
Boxes of McDonald's Big Macs and Filet-O-Fish, along with burgers from Wendy's and Burger King, stacked on silver trays, alongside fast food salads and a bounty of McNuggets. Fries and Domino's pizzas provided variety. Handfuls of sauce tubs piled inside grand gravy boats; the room's dim lighting aided by candlelight from gold candelabras. ... Trump, in his uniform of an ill-fitting coat ... grinned at the fast food feast before him as he told reporters that it was a spread of "great American food." ...
Adam Serwer from the Atlantic tweeted, "there’s a certain cleverness to the fast food ... at the White House as a metaphor for Trump presidency as false advertising and underwhelming results."
Championship athletes are usually served a meal from the White House kitchen, but due to the government shutdown, Trump decided to go in a different direction. ...
"If it's American, I like it. It's all American stuff," Trump told reporters, as if the fast food needed clarification on its origins. "300 hamburgers, many, many french fries — all of our favorite foods." [In a tweet early the next morning, Trump would lie and claim there were 1,000 burgers.]
"I thought this was a joke," one athlete can be heard saying in a video from the dinner. ...
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with fast food, but anyone who indulges knows there is a hierarchy, and McDonald's sits squarely at the bottom. ... [L]eave it to Trump to have even abysmal taste in fast food. ...
[T]he president boasted of the value meal dinner as a success on Twitter, inflating the amount of food and even initially misspelling hamburgers as "hamberders." He also repeatedly emphasized that he paid for the meal, out of his own self-professed billion-dollar pocket. ...
Trump's banquet serving his own drive-thru favorites only further proved his unmatched ability to center himself regardless of the occasion.
[S]erving a meal of fast food at a fancy gathering is not inherently a bad idea. ... No less glittery an event than the Vanity Fair Oscar party has served In-N-Out burgers to its throngs of the gorgeous and powerful. ... [But] if you hire In-N-Out and Shake Shack to do the catering at your event, they show up in person and sling their burgers fresh.Before the event, Trump told reporters that the meal was for "very large people that like eating."
Trump's bulk order, on the other hand, was a dinner fighting against the odds. One imagines those poor sandwiches steaming limply inside their cardboard boxes on the drive to the White House, and during the fuss over arranging them on their silver platters ... and properly lighting the gilded candelabra. Then came the photo shoot: Trump, centered beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, flinging his arms out behind this table of quick-serve abundance, in a gesture that's equal parts ownership and invitation. There is a particular awfulness to McDonald's or Burger King once it's gone cold. By the time America's greatest collegiate football players arrived ... to pick up porcelain plates and work their way through this cardboard buffet, the French fries would have grown cold and mealy, the burger buns soggy, the precise half slice of American cheese on each Filet-o-Fish sandwich hardened to a tough, flavorless rectangle of yellow.
Trump, in typical form, spun Monday's catering as ultimately the fault of his political opponents ... Trump, a purported billionaire, made a big deal out of the fact that he paid for the fast food out of his own pocket. ... "We went out and we ordered American fast food, paid for by me," Trump boasted to the reporters gathered before the fast-food spread, grinning his fast-food grin ... "Lots of hamburgers, lots of pizza. Three hundred hamburgers. Many, many French fries."
He threw it out there. He said, "This guy really knows what he's talking about." ... J.D. had said how much he helped him and how knowledgeable about the game [he was, and] what it takes to be a pretty good hitter. I was introduced to him right before the All-Star break. ... I'm not trying to bog J.D. down because he also has a job to do, too. ... I wanted to go straight to the source. ... It was definitely starting to work. Things were starting to fall into place. But then also there were times I might have had a good game but I knew I wasn't doing it fully correctly and consistently. ... [T]here is just so much you can do when you're trying to explain things over the phone and show things from a distance.Bradley posted a .827 OPS in the second half (compared to .647 in the first half). His slugging percentage was 142 points higher in the second half and he raised his batting average 36 points by the end of the year. Bradley had an .835 OPS in the postseason. He was named MVP of the ALCS and knocked in 10 runs in the 10 ALCS and World Series games.
This is the first time I heard any of this stuff. What I've been taught my whole life is completely wrong. It's scary to say that, but it's wrong. I feel fortunate enough to make it this far doing it wrong. ... That's the good thing about the offseason, being able to make adjustments and get everything locked in and that can be your main focus because you don't have to compete. During the season there are other things you're thinking about ... I think forming good habits start now. It's night and day. ... [T]o consistently do it, that's the difference. All the great players in the game do certain things pretty consistently and that's what makes them great. ...When Alex Cora was asked who he's looking forward to watching in 2019, he did not hesitate:
We all have the talent. That's the thing. I think once you find a way to maximize the talent, that's what makes players great. Knowing I can hit the ball just as hard as them physically, it all comes down to the way I impact the baseball. Well, I hit too many ground balls so let's solve that problem. Let's get the ball off the ground, get it more in the air, on a line and that way the shifts will be beaten. Actually seeing it person and looking at videos of great hitters who already do it. They all pretty much do it. That's what makes them great. Some might not even know they do it. It's just the natural ability to do it. Other guys do know they are doing it and continuously work on it. I think one of the most difficult things for me is knowing my dominant hand is on the bottom instead of the top. So getting that motion I want down is going to take a little bit more work. But I took to it really quick and I'm happy with the direction I'm going, for sure.
Looking forward to Jackie the whole season. That's going to be cool. ... [H]e understands who he is now and I don't think the whole -- like the roller coaster Jackie Bradley will happen again. ... [W]ith that offensive approach over 162 games, we'll see what happens.
Story will be up later, but WEEI is going ahead with plans to do the talk-show format during its Red Sox broadcast. Saw the job posting sent to staatalentDOTcom subscribers last night.Unbelievable. ... While I could see someone rubbernecking her way past this accident for maybe five minutes (actually, that's probably being generous by about four minutes, forty seconds), I have to think fans would abandon Red Sox radio broadcasts in droves if this truly happens. It would make Dave O'Brien and Steve Lyons sound like Vin Scully in his prime, by comparison. What possible market research could WEEI have done to even half-seriously consider such an shitty idea?
This is not true. If you checked with me I could've told you that. The only thing I sent to StaaTalent was a reply confirming that the job was open and people can apply.Finn, 8:29 AM:
It says in the email: "STAA knows these plans to be true. WEEI wants to drop the concept of a conventional radio broadcast to make the game sound more like a talk show. WEEI PD Joe Zarbano is eager to receive applications ..."Zarbano, 8:36 AM:
Ok well STAA is wrong too. Again, you could have checked with WEEI and we would've told you that. We do not want the Red Sox broadcast to sound like a talk show and anyone reporting that is spreading misinformation.Finn, 8:42 AM:
Reply to my email. Glad to add your comments. What would you like it to sound like?Zarbano, 8:48 AM:
We will post the job later today on our website. @AlexReimer1 will have a story up shortly on http://WEEI.com.Alex Reimer, WEEI writer, 9:04 AM:
FWIW, @RedSox spokeswoman Zineb Curran tells me the team "does not plan any format changes to our (radio) broadcast." Will have more on this later.Finn, 9:09 AM:
Two weeks ago, they told me Tim [Neverett] was staying.And:
The @GlobeChadFinn story was misleading. It will not be a sports talk radio broadcast. He probably should have talked to someone at the station before he wrote itFinn:
The story isn't up yet.UPDATE: Now it is. Reporting by both Finn and Reimer.
A few well-done exceptions aside, there is nothing more annoying than sports talk radio. It tends to be constant, empty chatter about controversies real or imagined and overheated either way. ... It's almost always boorish narcissism masquerading as "analysis." ... My thoughts and prayers go out to Red Sox fans who listen to the games on the radio.
I chose to let my contract expire rather than go back and work for them. The Red Sox were very supportive of me during a very difficult year. They wanted me to return. It had nothing to with the Red Sox.Neverett shared the booth with Joe Castiglione for three seasons.
[W]e're going to maximize Mookie in a different spot. ... Talked to him, it makes sense. ... I put it this way to Mookie. And I know Beni's OK with it. But if you play 162 games, you're going to come up 162 at-bats with nobody on. And last year, what I wanted from him in the leadoff spot we accomplished. It's a different season and we have to make adjustments ... It's not that we did it wrong last year. It worked for us.While Betts had the highest OPS (1.083) and batting average (.346) of any leadoff hitter last year, 23 of his 32 home runs came with the bases empty.
Baines gained election largely on the basis of 2,866 hits, and no doubt was helped by influential committee members Tony LaRussa, his manager in Chicago and Oakland, and Jerry Reinsdorf, the White Sox owner who erected a statue of Baines in Chicago. If you stretch really, really, really hard you can make a case that being "a professional hitter" for so long is worthy of Cooperstown. When he retired in 2001, Baines held the "records" for most games, hits, homers and RBI for a DH – which just means he was the best compiler among only American League players in a 28-year window. (Edgar Martinez, now a lock for induction on the writers' ballot this year, and David Ortiz since eclipsed him.) Baines won just one Silver Slugger Award. ...The decision surprised a lot of people, including Baines himself.
How do you now not put Rusty Staub in the Hall? (He had 2,716 hits and more than 600 more games in the outfield than Baines.) Omar Vizquel? (More hits than Baines, 2,877, and a far superior defensive component.) Al Oliver? (He had 2,743 hits and a greater WAR, more MVP votes and more Silver Sluggers than Baines.) ...
Baines had two seasons with a WAR of at least 3.0. Two. That's it. There are 791 players not in the Hall of Fame with more than two 3-WAR seasons, including Brendan Ryan, Brad Ausmus, Corey Koskie, Larry Bowa and Oscar Gamble.
Baines never had 200 hits, never scored 90 runs, never hit 30 homers, never hit 40 doubles, never finished in the top five in OPS, never finished in the top eight in MVP voting, rarely played defense for his final 15 seasons, and had a .313 OBP against lefthanded pitching.
I was only on [the Hall of Fame ballot] one year, so I wasn't expecting this day to come. ... [People questioning the decision] can't take it away from me now, even if they don't think I should be there.(As noted above, Baines was actually on the ballot for five years.)
He was a slightly below-average base runner, a slightly below-average right fielder for most of the first half of his career, and a DH the rest of the way (almost 60 percent of his career plate appearances). During his career, he was never regarded as one of the best players in baseball, finishing in the top 10 in MVP voting only twice (in 1983 and 1985) and never placing higher than ninth. ...Jay Jaffe, Fangraphs:
JAWS — a system devised by writer Jay Jaffe that presents a player's career value as the average of his career WAR and his "peak" WAR (defined as the sum of his best seven seasons) — ranks Baines 74th among players whose primary position was right field. To offer some sense of the company Baines keeps on the right-fielder JAWS list, that's three spots ahead of Nick Markakis and two and three spots, respectively, behind Shin-Soo Choo and Nelson Cruz. Baines's JAWS score is 30.1, compared to an average of 57.8 for all other Hall of Famer right fielders. ...
Relative to the historical statistical standards of his position, Baines is now the seventh-least-deserving Hall of Famer, after fellow right fielder Tommy McCarthy, Lloyd Waner, Jesse Haines, High Pockets Kelly, Freddie Lindstrom, and Rube Marquard. ... Statistically speaking, Baines is probably the worst player to qualify for the hall in 42 years, and his election is shocking in an era of relatively enlightened evaluation. ...
Baines bypassed the BBWAA's approval and slipped in the side door because of the same combination of cronyism and sentimentality [the Eras Committee, formerly known as the Veterans Committee] that minted many of the least-deserving Hall of Famers. ...
[T]he committees are mostly made up of players and executives, [and] many of their members are professionally and personally linked to the players whose candidacies they're considering. In some cases, committee members have actively lobbied for former teammates who didn't come close to Cooperstown's established standards; Bill James wrote a book about it [Whatever Happened To The Hall of Fame?]. Frankie Frisch, a Veterans Committee member from 1967 to 1973 ... gerrymandered a museum on behalf of his friends. ...
Although there are no definitive criteria of Hall of Fame worthiness, it delegitimizes the museum when its honors are conferred by voters who are doing favors for friends, exhibiting bias (even if it's subconscious), or suffering from statistical illiteracy.
Not only is there no precedent for a candidate with so little BBWAA support [6.1%] gaining election by a small committee in the era of the "Five Percent Rule" (from 1980 onward), but there's really no precedent for a player from the post-1960 expansion era doing so. ...Neil Greenberg, Washington Post:
[T]here's no modern precedent for the election of a candidate such as Baines ... [With] Baines, 94 to 95 percent of [BBWAA] voters consistently judged him to be unworthy.
Every bit as unsettling is the fact that Baines accumulated just 38.7 WAR (using the Baseball-Reference version) and 30.1 JAWS. Considered as a right fielder — I consider every DH candidate at the position where he accrued the most value — he ranks just 74th in JAWS, below 24 of the 25 Hall of Famers (19th century outfielder Tommy McCarthy is the exception). From under-supported BBWAA candidate Larry Walker (10th in JAWS among right fielders), to players such as Dwight Evans (15th) and Reggie Smith (16th) who have never sniffed a small committee ballot, that's a troubling inequity. ... Tony Oliva, Rusty Staub, Dave Parker? All rank in the 30s in JAWS among right fielders, and appear to have stronger traditional credentials as well. ...
Baines' election is simply not a great day for the institution, or for anyone bringing an analytical, merit-based approach to it while reckoning with its objective standards. The precedent it sets is nearly unmanageable, if future committees are to take seriously candidates of his level.
While this is a time to celebrate for Baines, it's also a time to mourn for the standards of the Hall of Fame.Kyle Koster, The Big Lead:
Think that's harsh? ... Players ahead of Baines [in JAWS ranking] include Carl Furillo, Brian Jordan, Tim Salmon, Jesse Barfield and Brian Giles. Do any of those sound like Hall of Famers player to you? ...
Per FanGraphs version of wins above replacement, Baines ranks 70th in fWAR (38.5) among all hitters playing from 1980 to 2001. ...
[T]raditional metrics don't bolster his case much, either. He ranks 46th all time for hits (2,866), 65th for home runs (384) and 34th for RBI (1,628). His career .820 OPS was 21 percent higher than the league average after taking into account league and park effects but still pedestrian enough to place him 15th among the aforementioned DH peer group. Players ahead of him on that list also include Kevin Buckley, Travis Hafner, Ken Phelps, Tom Dodd, Troy Neel, Cliff Johnson and Jeremy Brown. ...
The selection of Baines makes it harder to argue against [players who performed far better than Baines, but still well below the established threshold for reaching Cooperstown], and that's why the news has so many baseball fans up in arms.
It's a joke. It may be an intentional troll as well, the last dying breath of those who hold pitcher's wins and batting average sacrosanct. A "screw you" to the analytical community, or any other sane person who looks at Baines' stats and critically concludes he has no business in the Hall of Fame.Rob Neyer, Twitter:
Let's be frank: The elections of Jack Morris, Lee Smith, and (especially) Harold Baines are fully intended by voters to troll everyone who believes in objective analysis. They've lost power everywhere but here, but by God they're gonna use it. Embarrassing to Hall (or should be).Aaron Gleeman, Twitter:
Harold Baines was on the ballot as recently as 2011 and received 4.8% of the vote. It was his fifth straight year with a vote total below 10%. Why, just seven years later, do 16 people get to decide that he's now a Hall of Famer when 95.2% of the voters didn't think he was one?Jeff Blair, Sportsnet:
There has been no Hall of Fame selection – by whatever committee or voting pool at any time – greeted with as much shock as Baines'. Ever. Baines was a lovely man and great teammate, but some of the serious national voices in the game have used words such as "embarrassment" to describe his selection. ...
Baines? My god ... I've covered baseball since 1989 and I didn't realize I was watching so many Hall of Famers. ...
[H]as Harold Baines' selection cheapened the Hall? Not as much as the sorry exclusion of Marvin Miller, who made millionaires of a lot of these players. You want to get exercise about something? Look there.
The Japanese have a saying: "The misfortunes of others taste like honey." The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people's suffering. The Danish talk of skadefryd, and the Dutch of leedvermaak. In Hebrew enjoying other people's catastrophes is simcha la‑ed, in Mandarin xìng‑zāi‑lè‑huò, in Serbo-Croat it is zlùradōst and in Russian zloradstvo. More than 2,000 years ago, Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia (literally epi, over, chairo, rejoice, kakia, disgrace). "To see others suffer does one good," wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. "To make others suffer even more so. This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle." ...
In historical portraits, people beaming with joy look very different to those slyly gloating over another's bad luck. However, in a laboratory in Würzburg in Germany in 2015, thirty-two football fans agreed to have electromyography pads attached to their faces, which would measure their smiles and frowns while watching TV clips of successful and unsuccessful football penalties by the German team, and by their arch-rivals, the Dutch. The psychologists found that when the Dutch missed a goal, the German fans' smiles appeared more quickly and were broader than when the German team scored a goal themselves. The smiles of Schadenfreude and joy are indistinguishable except in one crucial respect: we smile more with the failures of our enemies than at our own success. ...
There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce "epicaricacy" from the ancient Greek, but it didn't catch on. In 1640, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a list of human passions, and concluded it with a handful of obscure feelings which "want names." "From what passion proceedeth it," he asked, "that men take pleasure to behold from the shore the danger of them that are at sea in a tempest?" What strange combination of joy and pity, he wrote, makes people "content to be spectators of the misery of their friends"? Hobbes's mysterious and terrible passion remained without a name, in the English language at least. ...
And so we adopted the German word Schadenfreude. From Schaden, meaning damage or harm, and freude, meaning joy or pleasure: damage-joy. ...
Moralists have long despised Schadenfreude. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called it "an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness," the very worst trait in human nature. ...
I have come to believe that Schopenhauer was wrong. We might worry that a taste for other people's misery will corrupt our souls, yet this emotion is far from simply "bad." It touches on things that have mattered most to human societies for millennia: our instincts for fairness and hatred of hypocrisy; our love of seeing our rival suffer in the hope that we might win ourselves; our itch to measure ourselves against others and make sense of our choices when we fall short; how we bond with each other; what makes us laugh.
If we peer more closely at this hidden and much-maligned emotion, liberate ourselves from its shame and secrecy, we will discover a great deal about who we really are.
See what the Yankees did ...If you want to worry about the 2020 roster, I won't try to stop you. But keep in mind that pitchers and catchers are still two months away from reporting for 2019!
The challenge for the Red Sox will be to execute what Brian Cashman was able to for the Yankees ...
Mike Trout - 53.3
Josh Donaldson - 37.3
Paul Goldschmidt - 36.3
Mookie Betts - 35.2
Trout is on another planet, but please note that Mookie played 0 games in the majors in 2013 and only 54 in 2014. And he missed 26 games last season.Trout - 9.75
Betts - 8.85
Donaldson - 7.61
Goldschmidt - 6.60
It was widely speculated that David Robertson led an effort to stiff a bunch of Yankee employees.Bill Madden, Daily News:
Now we have the receipts.
The Bronx Bombers turned greedy with their postseason shares, a percentage of playoff ticket sales that are pooled and dispersed to all 10 teams, issuing the least amount of full shares out of any playoff team, according to an MLB press release.
Robertson, now a free agent, served as the club's player rep and was responsible for chairing ... what one source described as a contentious meeting.
The Yankees players' pool came out to $2.866 million, with the value of full shares equaling just over $43,000. The team issued 45 full shares, along with 21.47 partial shares and two cash awards.
Traditionally, full shares are given to all 25 players on the Opening Day roster, the manager and regular coaching staff. Players on the 60-day DL, such as Jacoby Ellsbury, who did not play a single game in 2018, also received a full share. ...
Trainers aren't guaranteed postseason shares, though it's customary for players to give them a healthy piece of the pot as opposed to what these Yankees pulled this time around.
In years past, folks like the team trainer and traveling secretary, for example, received full shares.
[David] Robertson, who chaired the shares meeting as the Yankee player rep, was the front man for what appears to be a shameful greed on behalf of the other players. It was reported that assistant hitting coach P.J. Pilittere was voted only a half share and the analytics liaison with the coaching staff [Zac Fieroh], who traveled with the team all season, got nothing. According to sources, Robertson and his co-conspirators cut a wide swath through the entire Yankee support staff, stiffing trainers, clubhouse attendants, BP pitchers and the like. In addition, they also attempted to have the media's pre-game clubhouse access in Boston cut off in a September game because of the cramped conditions in Fenway Park.
You hope all players all the time run things out, play hard or give it their all. But [it's] not necessarily the No. 1 thing I look at when I am defining whether a player is giving his all or is a gamer. ... There is an expectation that we have ... a certain way you go about things, and running balls out can certainly play into that. Frankly, it is a little bit down the list as far as what I define what makes a player.
I'm not with these people. I don't respect their judgment, actually, because I don't value what they value. I value winning the damn game more than the ERA. And therefore, it is analytical hijacking. They want to hijack baseball, they want to impose their will and tell you what's important. I don't share most of and maybe none of their values, and it's absurd.Wilbon was not satirizing older, fuddy-duddy sportswriters who cannot be bothered to learn anything new and pine for the days when Wins and RBI and Batting Average were the cat's pajamas. No, he meant what he said. (Attention-seeking "hot takes" are so important that having everyone ridicule you as a clueless moron is better than being ignored.)
Jacob de Grom: 1.70 ERA, best in MLB. He went 10-9 & Mets were 14-18 in his startsI was wondering what baseball will do when every single fan watching a game is more enlightened than the announcers, but then I read some of the other comments below that Awful Announcing story and realized that ignorance will never come close to going out of style.
Lucas Giolito: 6.13 ERA, worst in MLB. He went 10-13 & White Sox were 14-18 in his starts
That's the same number of pitcher wins and same team record... for the best and worst pitchers in MLB.
I'm going to use my platform that right way. I'm not going to embarrass anybody. Actually, I'm going to represent probably four million people from back home the right way when we go there.Right after Boston beat the Dodgers in Game 5 of the World Series, Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele of The Nation wrote that the Red Sox should stay far away from the White House:
Do the Red Sox want to allow Trump—whose presidency is rooted in appeals to racism, sexism, and immigrant bashing—to bask in the glow of their victory?Red Sox management may try to distance itself from Trump's inhumane policies, but accepting this invitation and then meeting and posing for pictures with him constitutes a measure of acceptance or tolerance of (or agreement with) what he has done during his time in the White House. Despite the team's possible denials, the Red Sox's participation in the ceremony will represent a stamp of validity for what Trump has done.
Does it really make sense for the Red Sox—who this year had nine players from five different countries (Hector Velázquez from Mexico, Eduardo Rodríguez, William Cuevas, and Sandy León from Venezuela, Xander Bogaerts from Aruba, Eduardo Núñez and Rafael Devers from the Dominican Republic, and Tzu Wei-Lin from Taiwan) as well as four African Americans (David Price, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., and Brandon Phillips), two American-born Latinos (J.D. Martinez and Christian Vázquez), and one Jew (Ian Kinsler) on their 40-man roster—to ask those players to ignore Trump's divisive comments and policies that degrade immigrants, people of color, and Jews?