Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Pettitte to the Yankees

The New York Yankees and Andy Pettitte are close on a deal that will bring the veteran left-hander back for a year, Major League Baseball sources told Buster Olney on Monday.

The deal, sources told Olney, could be done as soon as Monday afternoon. It would pay Pettitte nearly $6 million, with incentives that could make it worth as much as $12 million.

MLB Front Office Manager

On Tuesday, 2K Sports will release its MLB Front Office Manager, and for those addicted to the stat-heavy pastime of running fantasy leagues, being a Major League Baseball general manager may never get closer . . .

. . . There is no end to the roster of baseball video games that pay homage to the complexities of building a team from the ground up. They have mechanisms for relying on stats to determine which players are best in different kinds of situations -- and many have had the endorsement of real-life players and the blessing of big league baseball.

But MLB Front Office Manager isn't like any of them. That's because the game is really about the process of running a team rather than the play-by-play action in which gamers have to swing at pitches, try to dive in the hole for sharp-hit grounders, and master all kinds of joystick button combinations in order to steal a base or pick someone off first.

The new 2K Sports game puts all the focus on what it takes to get a major league team going, and operates on a calendar that begins the moment the World Series ends and commences from there. That's because that's how it really is for each of the real-world big league general managers.

Greinke Extended

The Royals reached agreement Monday morning with right-handed pitcher Zack Greinke on a four-year contract that buys out his first two seasons of free-agent eligibility.

Financial terms were not immediately available.

The deal comes after Greinke, 25, produced a breakout season in 2008 by going 13-10 with a 3.47 ERA in 32 starts. He achieved career highs in numerous categories, including victories, innings and strikeouts.

POTUS baseball factoids

I’m waiting for the Chester A. Arthur “Redstockings” model

The Chicago White Sox are aiming to release a President Barack Obama-themed version of their cap in time for the start of spring training.

The club has developed two prototype designs of its club hat with Obama marks on the side and back. The hats have been approved by MLB Properties, and the White Sox now are awaiting a formal blessing from the Obama administration before league licensee New Era goes into production. Both designs will be made if accepted by Obama.

The White Sox enjoy a special relationship with the newly inaugurated president due to his roots in south Chicago. Should the hat happen as intended, proceeds from its sale would be donated to charities, likely ones that provide services near U.S. Cellular Field.

The next Rays

Trying to find the next Tampa Bay Rays a year after their meteoric rise to the top of the American League is a bit of an insult to what the Rays accomplished in 2008. Going from worst to first in one season just doesn't happen very often in baseball.

The 2008 Rays were the next 1991 Braves, if anything, so trying to find the heir to the Rays one year later when it might actually take a full generation for that team to emerge could be a fool's errand.

On the other hand, if we look at the 2008 Rays as following in the footsteps of the 2007 Rockies and 2006 Tigers, it's much easier to find a team that could take the mantle of enormous surprise in 2009. Enter the Texas Rangers.

Tal Smith moonlights

When it comes to salary arbitration in baseball, Smith has seen it all. He argued his first cases in 1974, the year baseball adopted the process, when he was an executive vice president with the New York Yankees.

Over the years, Smith and his staff have prepared more than 900 arbitration cases, with more than 160 going to a hearing . . .

. . . When Drayton McLane bought the Astros in 1994, he recruited Smith back to the organization. Smith was leery to give up his consulting business, which over the years had a staff of as many as 10, including part-timers who worked during arbitration season. McLane said it would be OK for Smith to keep his consulting business, as long as his work was limited to arbitration cases. Smith was named president of baseball operations. He is 75 - although he looks years younger - and this will be his 52d year in pro ball.

Smith's role with the Astros has led to small amounts of criticism, particularly from the media, that his handling of other clubs' arbitration cases is a conflict of interest.

"People who raise that issue don't understand," Smith said. "When you represent a club in arbitration, you're acting in the best interests of ownership as a whole. If you prevail, it helps the salary structure for the entire industry.

Under the Hood

Lie down with dogs . . .

One week before Brian McNamee and Roger Clemens testified before a House committee at a contentious public hearing last February, McNamee sat down for a deposition with committee investigators.

During questioning behind closed doors in a Capitol building office, McNamee said that as part of his job as Clemens’s trainer, he had injected him with steroids and human growth hormone. McNamee gave the deposition under oath. He was asked several times if he had ever informed Kirk Radomski, a steroids dealer, that he was injecting Clemens with drugs. In each instance, McNamee answered no, he had not.

That assertion has been contradicted by a passage in “Bases Loaded,” a new book by Radomski, in which Radomski says that McNamee indeed told him that he was injecting Clemens. That contradiction and others have raised concerns that Radomski has hurt his credibility as a government witness in the perjury investigation against Clemens, and that he might have damaged McNamee’s credibility as well.

Stronger than dirt