Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The House That Corruption Built


We've long known that the Bloomberg Administration bent over to deliver all manner of financial favors to the Yankees, but now the emails are out, and it's pretty ugly:

Mayor Bloomberg's aides secretly pressured city tax assessors to inflate the value of land under the new Yankee Stadium so the team could qualify for nearly $1 billion in tax-free bonds, city e-mails show.

In March 2006, the city's chief tax assessor put the market value for the stadium site at $27 million, far lower than the Yankees wanted. A Finance Department official ordered him to redo the report. Within hours, he jacked up it up to $204 million . . .

. . . "This is the smoking gun," said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who has spearheaded a state probe into the stadium deal. "The professionals did their job. The political appointees then ordered them to change the assessment - and they did."

This is important, because the higher assessment allowed the Yankees to take advantage of a billion bucks in tax-exempt bonds that an honest assessment would not have.

New Yankee Stadium is built on a foundation of graft. The sad thing is, this fact will almost certainly not be mentioned by the announcers when the Bombers take the field for the first game in April because there will be too many fancy baubles on which to train the cameras.

Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:38pm (24) Comments

Mike Scioscia Weeps


ShysterBall's International Correspondent, Ron Rollins, alerts us to this interesting development in the final and deciding game of the Philippines World Series (or whatever it is they call it):

Joseph Orillana made Game 2 of Baseball Philippines Series 4 finals a one-man show.

The 28-year old national team member performed an all-around effort to lead the Cebu Dolphins to their second championship in team history with a 1-0 blanking of the Dumaguete Uni-Bikers.

Orillana dominated the Dumaguete batters with his arms while droving in the game‘s only run with a surprising suicide squeeze that clinched a sweep of the best-of-three series . . . Orillana, who posted a batting average of .461 with four RBIs, two doubles and a .615 slugging percentage, stunned everyone with a perfectly placed bunt to the left side that allowed Orobia to slide home beneath the legs of catcher Edmer del Socorro.

As Ron put it: "The series winning run scored on a squeeze by a guy hitting .461? Somewhere, a sabermetrician's head just exploded."

By the way: Ron, who is a longtime friend of ShysterBall -- one of the longest, in fact -- has his own baseball blog now called Baseball Over Here, which focuses on the game from an international perspective. Ron, a father, an Army veteran, a Missouri native, and Royals fan, has somehow found himself living in the south of England for the past several months, and his experiences there have caused him to look at the game from a new perspective. Based on some of the crazy stuff he has found in the past few weeks, it may end up being baseball's version of News of the Weird. Wherever it goes, however, I highly recommend that you check out his blog.

But do it quickly! Once the restraining orders keeping Ron away from Trey Hillman and Dayton Moore expire, he may be back in Missouri.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:52pm (2) Comments

WBC Dream Team


I find it insanely difficult to pretend to care -- let alone genuinely care -- about the WBC. Thankfully, there are guys like FanHouse's Matt Snyder around who do. Matt has put together a Team USA roster which, at first blush, looks pretty darn good.

My only quibble is a political one: I'd have Youkilis and Howard as my first basemen. Not because of skill, necessarily, but because I'd really like to have a Jewish and a black player lead our team to victory and really stick it to that dirtbag Hitler.

Like I said, I really don't follow the WBC all that closely.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:17pm (4) Comments

The worst seats in the house


The Rangers are spending a few million bucks for upgrades at The Ballpark. One of them makes sense:

The Rangers also announced they are widening the home-plate screen an extra 50 feet so that it will run from one photo well to another next to the dugouts.

"We want to make sure that fans sitting in the locations closest to home plate are adequately protected from foul balls and broken bats," Ryan said.

But another is simply terrifying:

The Rangers are also installing 91 premium seats in front of home plate . . .

Personally, I'd prefer to sit in foul territory, thank you very much.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 12:14pm (4) Comments

Manny to NY?  Why not?


In response to the Yankees' reported interest in Manny Ramirez, Jason at IIATMS says "But three years? On THIS team? With this many 35 year olds who will need to have a day or two in the DH role? Good lord, no!!!!"

Good point! Everyone knows that the Yankees are getting old, but it's worth remembering that, if Manny signs, the opening day starters would look something like this (2009 season-age in parenthesis):

C Posada (37)
1B Swisher (28)
2B Cano (26)
3B Rodriguez (33)
SS Jeter (35)
RF Nady (30)
CF Cabrera or maybe Cameron (24 or 36)
LF/DH: Some combination of Manny, Damon, and Matsui (37, 35, and 35).

That's not a baseball team. That's the cast of "The Big Chill," with Cano playing the Meg Tilly character. Between innings they can listen to oldies and talk about what happened to their vanished youth.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:29am (28) Comments

The Ponson Case


Peter Schmuck has a good column today about an arbitration most of either forgot was going to happen or knew nothing about in the first place: The Sidney Ponson Case:

Ponson was a highly talented young pitcher who came up through the Orioles' system and seemed ticketed for stardom. He also was a wild child who loved to party and wore his devil-may-care attitude proudly on his sleeve. The more successful he got, it seemed, the more fun he tried to have after hours and during the offseason, which led to a series of incidents that would eventually persuade the Orioles to terminate his contract.

The most famous instance of his misbehavior was a Christmas Day incident in Aruba that involved an alleged assault on a local judge and led to Ponson's being jailed for 11 days while awaiting disposition of the case. He also had a series of drunken driving incidents, the last of which precipitated the end of his Orioles career while he still had more than one year remaining on his guaranteed contract.

The Orioles based their refusal to pay the remainder of the deal on this clause in the standard contract: "The Player agrees to perform his services hereunder diligently and faithfully, to keep himself in first-class physical condition and to obey the Club's training rules, and pledges himself to the American public and to the Club to conform to high standards of personal conduct, fair play and good sportsmanship."

At issue is the $11 million the O's still owed Sir Sidney when he was cut from the team. I agree with Schmuck that, based both on Ponson's history with the O's and the way these things tend to go in baseball generally, Ponson will probably get the money the Orioles withheld.

Should he? In my view it's hard to find a guy who has done more to waste his talents and harm his teams than Sidney Ponson has. In an ideal world, teams would have a right to void their deals with guys who utterly refuse to take care of themselves, behave horribly, or refuse to obey club rules. The problem, though, is that while it's relatively easy to make the call when a guy is a drunk or puts on a hundred pounds or punches out a teammate, it's inevitable that teams would use any precedent set by the Ponson case to cut and not pay guys for more questionable reasons, and it's the very broadness of the conduct clause Schmuck quotes that would allow for that undesirable situation.

What, exactly, is "first-class physical condition?" It's different for a shortstop than it is for a corner outfielder, right? It's also dependant on how the player performs. My guess is that, if the teams are afforded greater power in connection with the conduct clause, the Phillies wouldn't exercise the clause in the less-than-svelte Ryan Howard's contract as long as he hit 47 homers a year, but they'd think hard about it if he hit 22, even if he lost a few pounds. And what of the "high standards of personal conduct?" Quick: can the Yankees cut A-Rod for messing around with that stripper? What if instead of a stripper it was a prostitute? What if a utility infielder in Minnesota was messing with a prostitute, but didn't have his dalliances splashed on the front page of the New York Post? Is the clause aimed at bad behavior or just bad publicity?

I'm sure if I thought about it I could come up with a dozen more tough calls in connection with the conduct clause, and for this reason, baseball has to be extremely careful if it wishes to give teams a stronger hand in policing player conduct. I'm not sure I have any good ideas on the best way to go about it, but my suspicion is that a boilerplate conduct clause like we have now isn't the answer.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:01am (16) Comments

Today at THT


Sabermetricians! Whoa. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Whiteyball, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

  • Adam Guttridge, a fellow who has worked in Major League Baseball and would like to again, writes of his experiences looking for a baseball job in Las Vegas last week, and titles the article "Three Things I Learned in Vegas." Here are three things I once learned in Las Vegas: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese.


  • Brian Borawski wraps up the week in his business of baseball column. All of the items this week deal with the great difficulties faced by team owners such as Moores, Zell, Wilpon, and Wolff. Please dear readers, as the Christmas holiday approaches, say a special prayer for those unfortunate billionaire plutocrats who are struggling.


  • Over at Fantasy Focus, Derek Carty looks at the ramifications of the Indians signing Kerry Wood (short version: their bullpen won't suck as much), and Jonathan Halket explores the relative merits of a points league versus a rotisserie league. Many of you may know this already, but the name "rotisserie" comes from the fact that Daniel Okrent, the game's inventor, used to play the game with his friends at the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise. Did you ever stop to think how lucky are we that he wasn't playing at Arby's?
    • Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:51am (6) Comments

    The Furcal Follies


    I read stuff like this . . .

    Rafael Furcal might not be an Atlanta Brave just yet, much to the dismay of the Atlanta Braves.

    Because while certain people in the organization were confirming Tuesday that, yes, the Braves had come to an agreement to bring their former shortstop back to Atlanta after three years in L.A., Furcal’s agents – Paul Kinzer and Arn Tellem – were still doing business with the Dodgers.

    . . . and can't help but wonder if these sorts of backs and forths have always happened with most deals. It's just that now there are 539 outlets covering each deal, each of which has a monster incentive to get whatever whiff of anything they hear out in the open before the competition does.

    Think about it: it's very possible that, as you're reading this, the Furcal matter has been settled and he is going to sign with either Atlanta or Los Angeles. Ten or 15 years ago, yesterday's drama would have unfolded all the same, but would have gone mostly unreported. Maybe a quick blurb on the evening SportsCenter, but nothing else. Today or tomorrow the newspapers would have the story of the signing, with very little if any mention of the Atlanta-Los Angeles dynamic.

    It's just a news nugget, but one made bigger and more complicated by quick-to-press nature of things these days. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I like it because it gives us something to talk about in the winter. It's just something to keep in mind as you read stuff about all of the alleged intrigue surrounding Furcal's signing.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:35am (2) Comments

    More on the Astros leaving Venezuela


    I got a pretty informed and insightful comment regarding the Astros bugging out of Venezuela and I thought I'd share it with the rest of the class. It's from reader James Van Awesome (pretty sure that's German), who is writing his undergraduate thesis on baseball in Venezuela. James writes:

    In my opinion, the Astros’ operations in Venezuela have been in jeopardy at least since Andres Reiner’s resignation in early 2005. With Andres and Gerry Hunsicker gone, there was no one left to fight for Venezuela.

    Like with anything there are multiple reasons for the shut down:

    1. This is a cost cutting measure above all else. Drayton McLane is a very frugal owner. If, as it appears, the current higher-ups in the Astros organization do not deem an Academy in Venezuela an absolute necessity, then Uncle Drayton is going to cut it. Budget cuts have hampered the Astros’ Latin America efforts since their infancy, and McLane would cut this program in any economy, but the current climate certainly can’t help. See Ty Wigginton.

    2. Personal safety truly is an enormous issue to consider in Venezuela. Crime rates are out of control and Caracas is currently the murder capital of the world. Venezuela is especially dangerous for Americans given recent political climates.

    3. I suppose you can include the gibberish from the Astros’ official reasoning, but as Craig pointed out, what’s to stop them from holding kids too long other places?

    I was surprised by this news even though I suppose I shouldn’t have been. The Astros think they can compete for talent in Venezuela without infrastructure onsite, and I hope for their sakes they are right. Venezuela is a hugely important market with three times the population of any of the other Latin American baseball playing countries. All I know is that if I was a young Venezuelan kid looking to sign with a Major League team, I would be more inclined to sign with one that has an Academy in my home country where I can train rather than one that wants to ship me overseas at age 17 (or I would want to sign with the team that is going to pay me top dollar, and since that will never be the Astros, how can they get away with cutting their Academy?). Am I wrong?


    Sounds pretty right to me, James.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:31am (2) Comments