And they say baseball isn’t the national pastime, the fools!
Today the Athletic has the tale of Atlanta Braves back-up catcher Chadwick Tromp. He’s from Aruba. Tromp says he pays no attention to the politics of the nation in which he has spent half the year every year since 2013 and that now supplies him with over a million dollars each annum. For that reason, I have little sympathy for the problems he has encountered because some jerk in the Braves clubhouse gave him uniform number 45 in an election year, making Tromp a walking target and a bad pun. Supposedly this was accidental. Is everyone on the Braves from Aruba?
Astros first baseman José Abreu, 37, signed a three-year deal with a $58.5 million dollar guarantee last year that goes through the 2025 season. It was a risky free-agent signing: baseball position players peak at ages 27-29, and by 30, virtually all of them are declining unless they take the Barry Bonds route and cheat. Most are no longer MLB-worthy by age 34, though the better a player was, the more he can decline and still be valuable. (Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski had almost exactly the same season in his last year as he did as a rookie 22 years before: a perfect bell curve.) In the first year of his Astros deal, Abreu showed unmistakable signs that the jig was up. He had career lows in batting average, on-base pct., slugging pct., OPS (obviously: it’s slugging plus on-base average) and home runs. He was a below-average batter after a career of being All-Star caliber.
This season Abreu has been even worse. As the perennial World Series contender Astros have looked old, hurt and busted, he has been the worst of the bunch. He currently is batting .099 in 71 official at bats, with no homers; in fact, he ranks as the worst hitter in baseball right now.
Today came the stunning news that Abreu has agreed to go to the minors. As a veteran with over five years of major league service time, Abreu could not be optioned to “the bushes” without his consent, and veterans almost never give their consent. For an established star player to go to the minor leagues is like moving from the Ritz Carlton into a Motel 6. Abreu is a particularly unlikely exception, for he never played in the minors, coming directly to the major leagues as a refugee Cuban player.
Several things led me to re-posting this Ethics Alarms entry from 2017.
First of all, the MLB network showed a documentary on the career of George Brett today, and scene above, with Brett erupting in fury at the umpire’s call voiding his clutch, 9th inning home run, is one of the classic recorded moments in baseball history. There was also a recent baseball ethics event that had reminded me of Brett’s meltdown: Yankees manager Aaron Boone was thrown out of a game because a fan behind the Yankees dugout yelled an insult at the home plate umpire, and the umpire ejected Boone thinking the comments came from him.. When Boone vigorously protested that he hadn’t said anything and that it was the fan,Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt said, “I don’t care who said it. You’re gone!”
Wait, what? How can he not care if he’s punishing the wrong guy?
“What do you mean you don’t care?” Boone screamed rushing onto the field a la Brett. “I did not say a word. It was up above our dugout. Bullshit! Bullshit! I didn’t say anything. I did not say anything, Hunter. I did not say a fucking thing!” This erudite exchange was picked up by the field mics.
There was another baseball ethics development this week as well, one involving baseball lore and another controversial home run. On June 9, 1946, Ted Williams hit a ball that traveled a reported 502 feet, the longest he ever hit, and one of the longest anyone has hit. The seat was was painted red in 1984 (I’ve sat in it!), and many players have opined over the years that the story and the seat are hogwash, a lie. This report, assembling new data about the controversy, arrives at an amazing conclusion: the home run probably traveled farther than 502 feet.
But I digress. Here, lightly edited and updated, is the ethics analysis of the famous pine tar game and its aftermath:
***
I have come to believe that the lesson learned from the pine tar incident is increasingly the wrong one, and the consequences of this extend well beyond baseball.
On July 24, 1983, the Kansas City Royals were battling the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium. With two outs and a runner on first in the top of the ninth inning, Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-run home run off Yankee closer Goose Gossage to give his team a 5-4 lead. Yankee manager Billy Martin, however, had been waiting like a spider for this moment.
Long ago, he had noticed that perennial batting champ Brett used a bat that had pine tar (used to allow a batter to grip the bat better) on the handle beyond what the rules allowed. MLB Rule 1.10(c) states: “The bat handle, for not more than 18 inches from the end, may be covered or treated with any material or substance to improve the grip. Any such material or substance, which extends past the 18-inch limitation, shall cause the bat to be removed from the game.” At the time, such a hit was defined in the rules as an illegally batted ball, and the penalty for hitting “an illegally batted ball” was that the batter was to be declared out, under the explicit terms of the then-existing provisions of Rule 6.06.
That made Brett’s bat illegal, and any hit made using the bat an out. But Billy Martin, being diabolical as well as a ruthless competitor, didn’t want the bat to cause just any out. He had waited for a hit that would make the difference between victory or defeat for his team, and finally, at long last, this was it. Martin came out of the dugout carrying a rule book, and arguing that the home run shouldn’t count. After examining the rules and the bat, home-plate umpire Tim McLelland ruled that Brett used indeed used excessive pine tar and called him out, overturning the home run and ending the game.
Brett’s resulting charge from the dugout (above) is video for the ages. Continue reading →
I know, we’ve been seeing a lot of Sidney Wang lately.
Ja’han Jones is the blogger for Reid Out, the MSNBC race-baiting show (well, one of them) starring Joy Reid. As such, the fact that he has such a bone-headed and biased position regarding diversity is like finding out that water is wet, but it is still surprising to see anyone who can put his shoes on (I’m assuming Ja’Han can) write something as ignorant and idiotic as “The decline of Black players in MLB should be a warning about the war on DEI.”
If DEI proponents keep making arguments this bad, eventually even the dimmest members of the public will figure out that it’s a hustle. (Won’t they? Don’t they have to?) Another rule Ja’Han seems to have missed is “Don’t write about subjects you know nothing about when a lot of your readers do, because they will figure out that you are a fake.”
To summarize one of the worst published screeds I have read in a long time, this supposed “futurist,” journalist and pundit argues that Major League Baseball needs DEI programs to increase the percentage of black baseball players. (Baseball’s number of black players has been declining for a welter of cultural, financial and attitudinal reasons, none of which involve discrimination.) It’s difficult to know where to start a rebuttal of an argument that is only worthy of “What the hell are you talking about?” Might as well just dive right in…
Shohei Ohtani is, when healthy, the best baseball player alive as well as the most remarkable. No one since Babe Ruth (and no one before Babe either) managed to be a star slugger and an ace pitcher simultaneously, and Ruth never filled both roles in equal measure in the same seasons like Ohyani has. It may well be that the imported Japanese star isn’t as great a hitter as Babe or as overpowering a pitcher either, but never mind: he’s star quality on the mound and at the plate, and that is unprecedented.
The undisputed most valuable player in baseball signed a massive free agent contract with the best team in baseball (and, after the despicable Yankees, the best known), so Major League Baseball was confident that it had hit the metaphorical jackpot. And then…disaster struck.
During a Seoul, South Korea, series between the Dodgers and San Diego Padres, it was revealed that Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s interpreter since 2013 who followed the star to the United States in 2018, had been illegally gambling on sports; a law enforcement investigation of a bookie uncovered his activities. Ohtani’s name was bank transfers to the bookie to cover Mizuhara’s gambling losses, but Mizuhara insisted that his boss and friend knew nothing about the gambling. The Dodgers fired Mizuhara and the official story coming from Ohtani’s lawyers was that Mizuhara had been stealing money from Ohtani.
I will always be grateful to Curt Schilling. Along with David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and a few others (Dave Roberts, of course, for that clutch stolen base), he was among the most prominent Red Sox heroes in 2004, when the team I have spent far too much time thinking about and following finally won the World Series after 86 years of sometimes Greek tragedy-level frustration. I will also forever advocate Schilling’s admission to baseball’s Hall of Fame, an honor he more than deserves and has been so far robbed of receiving because of politics and woke biases against him rather than any lack of accomplishments on the field.
Make no mistake about it, however, Curt is an asshole. The last time I wrote about Schilling here it was to excoriate him for one of his worst a-hole outbreaks, when he betrayed his supposed friend and team mate Tim Wakefield by announcing that the former pitcher and his wife were both battling terminal cancers, a family tragedy that the Wakefields had wanted to keep private. That ethics alarms fail by Schilling was so serious that the Red Sox organization felt it necessary to repudiate their 2004 championship hero’s behavior.
I have never recycled a post so soon (this one was was featured in January) but these are special circumstances:
After my analysis of the Fani Willis conflicts scandal did not jibe with the judge’s decision, my self-esteem is at a low ebb, and I feel the need to point out my prescience in this matter
This, like Willis’s self-made disgrace, is a conflict of interest, and one involving law as well…but also baseball.
The conflict of interest I flagged in January has now had some of the adverse results I predicted, and attention should be paid.
Baseball is one of the few things that has a chance of cheering me up right now, having gone through my first two weeks without Grace’s companionship and support. We followed the seasons (and the Red Sox) together since before we were married, as I taught her the game by taking her to watch the Orioles play Boston in old Memorial Stadium.
Two months after I wrote the post that follows, Spring Training is almost over and the season is less that two weeks away. Yet the two star pitchers I flagged as the victims of their agent’s greed and unethical conduct remain unsigned. I strongly believe that the reason they are unsigned is that the agent/lawyer they foolishly employ has been pitting teams against each other while using each pitcher as leverage to benefit the other, or so Scott Boras would argue. There is no question in my mind that if Blake Snell (above, right) and Jordan Montgomery (above, left), both talented left-handed starting pitchers that fill the same niche, were represented by different agents, both would have signed rich, long-term contracts by now. Because they have allowed themselves to be marketed by the same agent–an unconscionable conflict that baseball should prohibit and Boras’s bar association should sanction—they will not be ready to start the season even if both signed tomorrow. Pitchers who have had to miss large portions of Spring Training have frequently had off-years as a result: Boras’s greedy practice of representing competing talents may result in off seasons and even damage to their careers.
All of this could have and should have been avoided, and would have been, if baseball’s agents were subjected to any genuine ethical regulation.
Sharp-eyed Ethics Alarms readers who pay attention to my baseball posts might recognize this one. It is like the most inexcusable lazy Hollywood franchise film, a sequel that is nearly identical to the original. I’m going to see how much of the post’s predecessor I can duplicate without having to change anything
Twelve years ago, Ethics Alarms began a post about baseball agents in general and Scott Boras in particular engaging in a flaming conflict of interest that harmed their player clients this way…
Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.
I could have written that paragraph today. Nothing has changed. Literally nothing: as baseball general managers huddle with player agents in baseball’s off-season and sign players to mind-blowing contracts, the unethical tolerance of players agents indulging in and profiting from a classic conflict of interest continues without protest or reform.
I may be the only one who cares about the issue. I first wrote about it here, on a baseball website. I carried on my campaign to Ethics Alarms, discussing the issue in 2010, 2011 (that’s where the linked quote above comes from), 2014, 2019, and in 2019 again, and last year, in 2022. There is no publication or website that has covered the issue as thoroughly as this one, and the unethical nature of the practice is irrefutable. But I might as well be shouting in outer space, where no one can hear you scream. The conflict of interest, which is throbbingly obvious and easy to address, sits stinking up the game. Continue reading →
“Jeopardy!,” the apparently eternal TV game show that has persevered even as its once difficult questions have become increasingly pitched to the less-than-astute, ended its 2023 with a surprise. Mayim Bialik, the actress who is also (for an actress) unusually credentialed educationally, announced this month that she has been let go as a host of “Jeopardy!” Since 2021, Bialik, who had previously portrayed “Big Bang Theory” head nerd Sheldon’s girlfriend on the series, had shared the role of host with legendary “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings. Bialik was the more reliable and professional of the two, perhaps because of her long performing background. Jennings was at the center of far more gaffes and controversies, though Bialik had her share. This season, for example, she disallowed all three contestants’ answers of ”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” because she found their pronunciations of the Russian writer and dissident’s name insufficiently accurate.
In Mike Flanagan’s latest horror epic, the Poe mash-up in which “The Fall of the House of Usher” is repurposed into a nightmare scenario for the Sackler family of Oxycontin infamy, the avenging demon named Verna, who sometimes appears as a raven, lectures a soon-to-be victim on the evils of greed:
So much money. One of my favorite things about human beings. Starvation, poverty, disease, you could fix all that, just with money. And you don’t. I mean, if you took just a little bit of time off the vanity voyages, pleasure cruising, billionaire space race, hell, you stopped making moviesand TV for one year and you spent that money on what you really need, you could solve it all. With some to spare.
Yes, Verna is a communist and deluded, but it was impossible to read about the $700 million ten-year contract the Los Angeles Dodgers just gave baseball free agent Shohei Ohtani without that speech creeping into my thoughts. $700 million dollars?
Ethics Alarms 