The View from Right Field

The @Royals Are Attracting Undrafted Players by Being Nice to Their Minor Leaguers. Not Something the @Cubs Are Doing.

The Kansas City Royals have come up with a unique way to attract quality, undrafted players this year.  A “market inefficiency,” as people like to call it. 

In order to save money, MLB shortened the draft this year from 40 rounds to five and put a limit on how big of a bonus could be paid to undrafted players.¹  Which means there are a lot of good quality undrafted players out there.  Jared Diamond wrote in The Wall Street Journal on how the Royals made themselves attractive to those undrafted players: They didn’t treat their current minor league players like crap, releasing dozens of them to save the $400 a week they would have otherwise had to pay them.²

“To Be or Not To Be”: The Baseball Version

The question is not when baseball is going to start, but if – and whether I’m going to care whether it does or doesn’t.  I understand the players and the owners both think they are standing on principle.  The players think they agreed to a pro rata payment based on the number of games played, and the owners think they can’t pay the players full pro rata salary if there aren’t fans in the stands.  

Jeff Passan at ESPN.com goes into great detail on the two sides’ positions and the reasons and principles behind them.  And each side has lots of reasons for their positions, reasons that they think are legitimate.  But ultimately, you know what.  I don’t care.

#Cubs Convention Photos of Baseball Greats: Bob Feller

Pictures in this series of posts have been of Cubs players (or other people connected with the Cubs).  Bob Feller is neither, but he was at the Convention several times, promoting his museum in his hometown of Van Meter, Iowa (just off I-80 at exit 113),¹ and you can’t not include a picture of him (even if it isn’t the best picture in the world).

I’m not sure how much most baseball fans know about Bob Feller today, but I am pretty sure it’s not enough.  I’m not going to go into a long story.  Let me just mention a few things:

Let’s Talk Baseball. Or, Rather, Let’s Play Baseball.

The question is how are we going to get there.  MLB owners and MLB players are both, in made-up words of Paul Sullivan’s fictional Tom Hanks trying to negotiate a deal¹ between the owners and players: “bat[bleep] crazy.”  So how are they going to agree?  Let me make one small suggestion, which probably isn’t going to happen but could work (it would have a better chance than what is going on now).

Get a couple of people from each side together in a room, a large room, so they can socially distance.  Socially distancing shouldn’t be a problem since they don’t like each other all that much.  Take away their phones and their computers.  Make them talk to each other, face-to-face instead of via press releases and fancy statements.²  It’s easy to say “no” in an email.  It’s harder to say no to somebody in person.

A Thought on Baseball and Whether We’ll See It This Year

Actually, my main thought is that I don’t know.  But I do have a thought on why baseball is having the kind of problems that other sports are not   The reason: The owners in other sports already have what the owners in baseball would like – a salary cap.¹  Baseball doesn’t have a salary cap because baseball players have the strongest union in American team sports.  Players in other sports don’t have as strong a union as the baseball players do, so those sports already have a salary cap.

While salary caps can work differently, it is my understanding the salary caps in other sports are tied to a percentage of revenues.  Which is what the baseball owners suggested to the players this year – at least the percentage of revenues part.²  When the players told the owners where to put that proposal (where the sun don’t shine, in essence), the owners came back with their current idea: Because the teams won’t be getting ticket and concessions revenue, they want to reduce players’ salaries more than just pro rata for the number of games not played, and they suggested cutting the higher-paid players more than the lower-paid players (sort of a progressive income tax).  The union didn’t like this idea because the union wants the most money possible.  Basically, it’s the kind of thing workers and management frequently argue about.  And it’s happening in baseball now.

Roots Tours

Ever since Alex Haley’s famous book and miniseries “Roots,” people have said they were going on their own “Roots tour.”¹  Not just African-Americans going to Africa, but people going to Italy or England or countries in Scandinavia.  They want to see where their ancestors came from.  Sometimes they try to find long-lost relatives who stayed behind in the “old country.”  They look for customs or approaches to life from those countries.  For a while, it was “hygge” from Denmark.  Now, some people are talking about “lagom” from Sweden.

We have never gone on a trip like that.²  In fact, when people say they are going on a Roots tour, I respond that we have gone on a Roots tour – to Cooperstown.  To the Hall of Fame.  While that is a bit of a joke, it is also sort of true.³ 

The Hall of Fame – And My Favorite Cub

With the announcement yesterday of Derek Jeter’s election to the Hall of Fame on his first try, my thoughts went to other players elected to the Hall on the first ballot.  While recently elections to the Hall on the first ballot have not been unusual (there were twelve in the 2010s and ten each in the ‘00s, ‘90s, and ‘80s), back in the day a first ballot election was pretty unusual.  In fact, after the first election in 1936,¹ nobody was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot until 1962.  If you wonder about who might have missed out on a first ballot election during that time period, let me mention one name: Joe DiMaggio.

But, as I said, in 1962, two players were elected on the first ballot: Bob Feller, with 93.8% of the votes, and Jackie Robinson, with 77.5%.²  Only two more players were elected on the first ballot in the 1960s, though: Ted Williams and Stan Musial.  And in the first seven years of the 1970s, only three were elected on the first ballot: Sandy Koufax, Warren Spahn, and Mickey Mantle.

35th Annual Cubs Convention – January 17-19, 2020

Here is my annual report on the Cubs Convention.  As in the past, I will talk about things that didn’t make the mainstream media.  First, though, and indicative of the tone of the Convention, here is my tweet from last Friday morning, before the Convention started:

“In 1998 the Cubs signed Rod Beck the first day of the Cubs Convention! At the 2011 Convention the Cubs brought back Kerry Wood! This year they traded Tony Kemp for Alfonso Rivas? @Cubs #CubsCon #WheresOurWheelbarrowsFullOfMoney”¹

One of the most interesting sessions was an interview they had with Miguel Montero.  Miggy, if you remember, hit that two-out, 0-2-count, bottom-of-the eighth-grand slam to win game one of the 2016 NLCS, as well as driving in the eighth run in Game 7 of the World Series.  But when Miggy was asked what his biggest memory of the 2016 postseason, he said another one was catching the bottom of the ninth in Game 7.  It was the first inning he had caught in the entire World Series.  The score was tied.  One run, and the game, and World Series, was over.  And his pitcher was crying (because of the bottom of the eighth).²  

It’s Hard to Believe How Poorly MLB Treats the Minor Leagues – Except It’s Not

In an effort to show that it can make a World Series with record-low (or near-record-low) ratings plus a potential cheating scandal (at least it was the team that lost the World Series) not look so bad, Major League Baseball has decided to kill 42 minor league teams, out of 162 total (i.e., over 25% of minor team baseball teams).  All in an effort to save $20 million a year.  In other words, MLB as a whole would save less money per year than the Philadelphia Phillies are paying Bryce Harper.

Rob Manfred, head of MLB (and apparent head executioner of MiLB), said that the minor leagues had expanded in ways that

“produce[d] travel that is not acceptable for professional players. Bus rides, long, six, eight, 10 hours and trust me, in a lot of cases, it's not on a luxury cruise liner, it's on a school bus.”

The Solution to Foul Ball Injuries

Protective netting.  One of the big questions in Major League Baseball, other than why aren’t the Cubs doing better with all of the talent they supposedly have, is fan safety and how far to extend protective netting down the foul lines.  It’s such a big deal that the U.S. Senators from Illinois, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, apparently having nothing more important to do with their time, sent a letter last week to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred asking for information about injuries at ball parks.¹

Before the 2018 season, MLB required all parks to extend the protective netting to ends of the dugouts.  With injuries this year, some parks are extending the netting even farther.  The White Sox have extended the netting at Guaranteed Rate Field² all the way to the foul poles.