On June 23, it was reported that Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association had agreed to terms to resume play in 2020 following the sport’s suspension due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This agreement came on the heels of the now-infamous March 26th agreement that was the subject of debate and contention between both sides of the bargaining table. Among other things, the agreement does not foreclose the right of the MLBPA to file a grievance and seek financial damages as it relates to the interpretation of the Agreement.

Specifically, the players may look to challenge whether the league did in fact negotiate in good faith as it relates to how many games were to be played in the abbreviated 2020 season. Further, the agreement also states that the Office of the Commissioner’s effort to issue a schedule for the 2020 season shall only be performed to the extent it is “…practicable and economically feasible.”

The term “economically feasible” is likely another point of dispute, as the league did not reveal any financial data, supposedly requested by the union, that would help to justify their claim that a season without fans would be a detriment to its bottom line. As the season now rolls along, we can explore the process by which the MLBPA may file a grievance to have its claims be heard and adjudicated.

What Is A Grievance?

Article XI of the parties’ 2017–2021 Basic Agreement (the CBA) sets forth the terms and conditions of grievance procedure. As defined, a “grievance” is “a complaint which involves the existence or interpretation of, or compliance with, any agreement, or any provision of any agreement, between the [MLBPA] and the Club…or between a Player and a Club.” Presumably, the March 26th Agreement would fall within this definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes numbers tell a story. Sometimes that story is a mystery.

I came across the Baseball-Reference page for Raymond Fagan and was stunned by what I saw. It says Fagan went 13-0 with a 1.16 ERA for the Class D Oklahoma City Senators in 1915. Now the stunning part – it says it was his only professional season. Despite those dominant results, it appears Fagan never pitched again.

What happened to Raymond Fagan? Did he suffer a career-ending injury? Did he get into legal trouble and change his name? A Google search yielded no answers. This mystery required a deeper dive. Read the rest of this entry »

We usually think of origin stories as the province of fictional superheroes or the real-life super rich. It could be an ordinary boy bitten by a radioactive spider or arriving on earth as refugees from an annihilated planet. Perhaps we think of a nearly destitute J.K. Rowling toiling away at her first novel in a coffee shop, or Jeff Bezos creating an empire from scratch on a computer in his living room. Yet many of us who came from humble origins and went on to live simple, unremarkable lives also have a narrative that informs who we became. Mine happened in third grade.

I am a husband, a father, and a teacher. To these three descriptors of my identity I would add one more, just slightly less central. I am a baseball fan.

I am not one of the true obsessives who grew up playing Strat-O-Matic and graduated to planning his whole calendar around the SABR conference or spending countless hours with multiple fantasy leagues (two is my limit). But I have been a fantasy league commissioner since 1992, and the majority of text messages that my adult son and I exchange have some connection to the top Atlanta Braves prospects for the coming year. I also get to sleep most nights not by counting sheep, but by silently reciting World Series winners backward from 1970.

Baseball, its present and its past, is deeply ingrained in my outlook on life. My bookshelf is 70% baseball, 30% history and politics.

Baseball on the field was part of my youth, first as a fourth-rate Little League catcher and then as a minor league batboy for the Class A Lynchburg Mets.

Family vacations have often included trips to Baltimore or Atlanta for games. My son’s youth and high school games with me as spectator, coach, or scorekeeper were part of the rhythm of our family life for over a decade. Our baseball bond defines our relationship.

As the immortal lyric of David Byrne plaintively asks, “well, how did I get here?” Read the rest of this entry »

I imagine most people reading this have a favorite team. And over time, you’ve likely had numerous players on that team whom you particularly enjoyed watching play. But when push comes to shove, who receives your greatest loyalty, the team or the players?

I’m a Cardinals fan, and I greatly enjoyed Albert Pujols‘ contributions to the Redbirds’ success during his 11 years wearing the birds on the bat. Since he’s left St. Louis? Sure, I’ve been happy for him when he’s done well — getting his 3,000th hit as well as his 500th and 600th home runs — but it’s not the same. He’s an Angel now, not a Cardinal, so I’m simply not as invested in his accomplishments.

This stance is probably understandably similar for most of you. Teams are (mostly) eternal, while players are ephemeral. Can I name the starting eight position players for the 2011 Cardinals? Probably not, but I still know they won the World Series that year.

When it gets flipped, however, is when we go off the playing field and into the negotiating room. When the owners and players are battling over matters of the game — particularly the divvying up of the loot — I largely stand behind the players. The owners become the faceless, monolithic corporations that extort billion-dollar ballparks from their communities and work extremely hard to give the players as small a portion of the pot as possible, while the players have short careers and are positioning themselves to take care of their families as much as possible before their careers end.

Of course, it’s not that cut-and-dried. Both sides have their virtuous and unseemly characteristics. Each group is willing to put their interests before others.

But regardless of who sticks it to whom for their own benefit, it’s largely the players who suffer the vitriol of the fans and media when the two sides clash. The question is, why is that? The answers actually make a lot of sense — even if they really don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2020 Major League Baseball season on hiatus due to the Coronavirus, one can’t help but wonder of a season that could have been. Do the Nationals, after losing slugger Anthony Rendon to the Angels, have what it takes to repeat as World Series champs? Can Pete Alonso be this season’s home run champion again? Will Trout win another MVP?

Hopefully we will know sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I took the liberty of looking at players who will become first-time arbitration eligible following the 2020 season, focusing on Lucas Giolito of the Chicago White Sox.

Rather than conduct an analysis based off of career numbers (excluding the vacant 2020 season), I utilized The BAT Projection System by Derek Carty, which is part of FanGraphs, to fill in the gap for 2020 season statistics.

The BAT is a standard projection system that predicts outcomes in accordance with basic factors such as hitter and pitcher, park quality, umpires, weather factors, and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball as a sport, like most activities of daily life, is one which we consume primarily through our eyes. While I’m certain some people still enjoy it by listening to the radio (a mode I’m still partial to), I think you would be hard-pressed to that argue baseball is not visual. That’s not to say we don’t listen to the sounds (personally I find baseball on mute to be close to a kind of torture). However, our judgments of the game, and more importantly our judgments of the players in it, are based on what we see visually. We don’t know Mike Trout is good just because the announcer tells us he is good, we know he is good because we can see how good he is. We can see the balls he snatches away as they clear the fence, as well as the balls he smashes over them.

There are other methods we can use to see that Trout is good as well. Sabermetrics and Trout have seemingly been tied together in their emergence into the public baseball consciousness. As he blossomed into a star, so did Sabermetrics as it rose to the forefront and into the view of the average fan. Like Trout, the way we digest sabermetrics is in a sense almost purely visual. We come to FanGraphs, and we read a stat line off the screen. When we look at exit velocity or launch angle, we’re looking at metrics we’re aware of because a computer system visualized them for us.

To a large extent, what I’ve said above is simply a result of us privileging sight more than our other senses. Baseball utilizes the other senses as well. We all likely have memories tied to the smell of the stadium or a leather glove. Maybe every time you go to a game you get a hot dog, and that taste is as connected to baseball as the sound of a cheering crowd. Baseball at its best is a palimpsest of all of these senses working together to create our experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Excitement. Disappointment. Tradition. They make baseball great! Following your favorite team for six months a year will cause any halfway-devoted fan to learn more about the 25th man on the roster than will ever be necessary. It also might mean that fans could always recite the name of the prospect that never was, even years after the fact. And if those fans continue to follow that same team for many seasons, the list of players that they remember will continue to grow. Not all the memories are pleasant, however. That’s not how life works. In fact, the not-so-happy moments from the playing field tend to be what most fans remember the most. It’s those memories of a certain type of player type that live on in the collective mind of fans everywhere, and it’s those types of memories that I will be delving into in this piece.

A recent Grant Brisbee piece at The Athletic set out to create an all time team of “lightning rod players” he loved from the San Francisco Giants, and I felt it was a delightful read. It seemed like a lot of fun to dig in on all those players, and as a Cardinals fan, it made me think about what a similar team of St. Louis players would look like. What follows is my detour down the cul-de-sac of memory lane that many would rather soon forget, an imaginary lineup dubbed the Tino Martinez All-Stars.

Let me be clear — this will not be a scientific process. There will be a statistical element, but it will not be a “who was the worst player at every position” contest. Maybe the players were overrated, maybe they are overpaid, or maybe they were just overplayed. The bottom line is, apathy is the enemy! Also, I was born in 1983, so the team I’ll be picking will undoubtedly be influenced by the Cardinals clubs I have seen the most. You have been warned. Read the rest of this entry »

[Editor’s note: I mentioned to my father that I run the Community Blog and that anyone can write in, and he decided to submit a piece. This is a reminder that you or anyone you know may send us words.]

In 1960, I was a 10-year-old baseball fanatic. For me, live baseball consisted of the Triple-A Seattle Rainiers, and access to major league baseball meant getting your chores done in time to get to watch Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean preach the baseball gospel on the game of the week every Saturday (and if you were living right, sometimes on Sunday). That summer I was lucky enough to get to fly back to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and spend a week with my grandparents. I was transported to a world where if the Tigers had a baseball game on Tuesday, then major league baseball was on the television on Tuesday! Long live Ernie Harwell!

The big buzz that summer was who got the short end of the stick in the big trade when the Tigers sent Harvey Kuenn to Cleveland for Rocky Colavito. Free agency was still a long ways in the future so trades were infrequent, and dealing away the league-leader in average, hits, and doubles (Kuenn) for the leader in homers (Colavito) was a big deal.

Being a young Tigers fan, it was easy to become a life-long Yankee-hater. The Tigers would finish the year 12 games under .500 and 26 games behind New York. From the year of my birth until the year of my 14th birthday, the Yankees were the American League champs every season but two. Back then there were no playoffs, which meant the AL and NL regular-season champs met in the World Series, and the only question at the start of the year was who was going to face the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »

Why don’t teams ever sign former quarterbacks to try and turn them into pitchers?

This thought stems from watching Patrick Mahomes and his pre-draft NFL tape and discovering that his father was a former major league pitcher. Can a quarterback’s arm strength transfer to pitching? What can be learned from football velocity to uncover a future successful pitcher?

ESPN was ramping up their coverage in the weeks leading up to the 2017 NFL Draft, and Mahomes was gaining momentum. A SportsCenter interview with the future MVP explored his multi-sport background, which caught my attention.

I was vaguely familiar with the story about Mahomes’ father reaching MLB as a pitcher. Apparently there was a time when Mahomes considered following in his father’s baseball footsteps. The interview spilled over into the prospect’s appearance in the Gruden QB Camp. He mentioned then that he was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in high school, but due to a strong desire to play quarterback at Texas Tech, he went in the 37th round. If his football passion wasn’t as strong, scouts told him that the top three rounds were a likely landing spot.

As the video continued, it featured highlights of in-game play and practices where Mahomes showed a dynamic skill set. He had special throwing abilities, and his baseball background and natural talent was obvious in just a few of his tosses. There were impressive clips of him throwing a football from his knees about 50 or so yards, and another highlighting a final pregame warmup toss and ritual: throwing the ball about 75-80 yards in the air. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 20, 1976, Dick Arndt got up in the morning and shuffled off to his job as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. Once his day shift ended, Dick headed to his part-time gig as the Brewers’ groundskeeper at Milwaukee County Stadium, where he was in charge of opening and closing the gate for the bullpen cart. This, however, would be no ordinary day for Arndt.

The sparse crowd of 10,134 that night — about a fifth of capacity — was there to see the Angels take on the lowly Brewers, part of the draw being 42-year-old Hank Aaron during his farewell season. In the seventh inning, Arndt was sitting in the left-field stands keeping a lookout for any signals that a pitching change was to be made. With the Brewers ahead 2-1, George Scott hit a two-run home run, increasing the Milwaukee lead. Aaron came up next and drove a Dick Drago offering on a line into the left-field seats, flying about 10 feet over Arndt’s head. The ball settled into an empty row, where Arndt quickly retrieved it. Read the rest of this entry »