Monthly Archives: January 2023

Robby the Umpbot steps closer to the Show

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Ángel Hernández

Ángel Hernández, Exhibit A on behalf of Robby the Umpbot’s eventual major league advent.

Almost two years ago, when the automated strike zone was on the threshold of its tryout in the low-A level Southeast League, you could hear the so-called traditionalists waver between tears of sorrow and tears of rage. Wait until they hear Robby the Umpbot is going to get a tryout behind the plate at the AAA level this year—in all thirty parks across the Pacific Coast League and the International league.

If they haven’t already, they’re liable to palpitate, have kittens, scream themselves into strokes, or plot to storm the baseball commissioner’s office. There are plenty of reasons to wish Rob Manfred’s ouster. This isn’t one of them.

First, let’s look at how it’s going to operate in the AAA leagues. Half will be full Robbies to call every pitch with earpieces relaying the calls to the plate umpire. Half will operate similar to tennis’s challenge system: each team receives three pitch call challenges a game—the batter, the pitcher, or the catcher can call for them—and, if Robby upholds the challenge, the challenging team won’t lose the rest of its game challenges.

And to think Robby will now be one step up from the Show itself.

When Robby prepared for his Southeast League premiere, the trad thunderings went along the line of one I quoted from an online baseball forum: “The game is played by humans . . . why take away one of the most human elements of the game???” That’s what makes it beautiful.”

Well, now. The beautiful human element (a phrase once uttered by Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre, when he was the commissioner’s top cop, and that was only uttered about replay) leaves too little room for getting it right, particularly when postseason advance or maybe even a World Series championship is on the line squarely enough.

There were bugs to work out of the technology during that Southeast League tryout. There may yet be bugs to work out during its Triple-A tryout this year. But work them out baseball must, because that beautiful human element is still only too human, too prone to error, and too little held properly accountable. Including baseball’s government, which seems to believe the human element’s accountability and competence are consummations devoutly to be avoided.

It’s not impossible to think that the Manfred regime glommed onto Robby the Umpbot not because he might tend to get the calls right but because the regime has a lazy side powerful enough to reject holding umpires as accountable as any other baseball employee as . . . what? Too intrusive? Too troublesome? Too likely to launch a war with a Major League Baseball Umpires Association that was born of such a war in the first place?

The regime had no trouble launching a war against the players with last winter’s lockout. Does the regime think the umpires are as gods? Does it remember nobody comes to the ballpark to see the umpires? Does it pine for the so-called good old days when skirmishes between even Hall of Fame managers behaving like toddlers over umpires behaving like judicial tyrants were must-see television?

(That little [expletive] called me names that would get a man killed in other places, and that was on days I didn’t throw him out.—Steve Palermo, a mild-mannered and respected umpire, to say nothing of courageous, about Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager who was as mild-mannered as a saltwater crocodile. There was even a time when a Baltimore-area Oldsmobile dealership used a Weaver tirade as a television commercial. Charming.)

That beautiful human element still insists, too much of the time, that the strike zone is whatever the umpire says it is, Rule 2.0 be damned. At least, they do until they see the latest mischief Ángel Hernández, Laz Diaz, and Doug Eddings commit. There’s perverse pleasure in abusing the Hernándezes, Diazes, Eddingses, and their like for their errors. “Kill the ump!” has yet to become an unpopular chant.

The worst umpiring jobs are done behind the plate. Last season, the median major league umpire averaged 95 percent correct pitch calls. While you may think that a sterling record, keep in mind that a 95 average might get you a medical school scholarship but a five percent error rate in the operating theater might get you a malpractise suit.

Within that blown five percent might be and has been, often enough and too often for comfort, the blown call that turned a key pennant race game, a postseason series, or the World Series, all the wrong way around. Very few umpires, still, own up when they blow it. Chad Fairchild, now-retired Jim Joyce, Jerry Meals, and long-retired Tim Welke are only four such exceptions.

EV Analytics, a statistical company whose work includes rating and ranking sports officiating, says Hernández and Diaz are considered “neutral” umpires, not disposed excessively toward either pitchers or batters: they’re equal opportunity butchers. EVA also considers Eddings among pitchers’ best friends for butchery behind the plate.

Sam Fels, a Deadspin baseball writer who is on board with Robby the Umpbot’s advent, has one concern, that about whether “cantankerous umps” such as Hernández or Eddings respond when challenged during any game: “No chance they’ll hold a grudge, right? Or start their own argument with a batter or catcher after having their authority and precision questioned?” It might be mad fun to see whether the Replay Command Center  sends them to the showers.

What a long, strange trip it’s been . . .

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Carlos Correa

Correa took a medicals-inspired, coast-to-coast trip back to the Twins in the end.

This much we should understand about today’s typical Met fan, and it’s not the first time this lifelong (theirs) Met fan has said so: Today’s typical Met fan is ready to push the plunger on a season over one bad inning—in April. The least shocking thing when Carlos Correa didn’t go from likely signing to donning a Met jersey at an introductory press conference was any Met fan surrendering 2023.

From the moment the Twins with whom Correa played last year came back into play for the shortstop, when the Mets proved as alarmed over Correa’s long-term health as the Giants had previously, many Met fans did. Social media was as crowded with them as a major subway transfer station is crowded during a New York rush hour. But there were voices of reason to be heard if you knew where to listen.

And what those voices said, from the top down, possibly including the fellow lifelong Met fan who owns the team now, was, If this guy’s rebuilt lower leg betrays him when the deal is halfway finished or less, he’s going to become a fan target and we are going to resemble the village idiots for signing him. At least, at the full thirteen and $350 million originally planned.

Now the Twins—who weren’t exactly circumspect about wanting to have Correa back longer term—have brought him back for six years and $200 million. ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke that news aboard Twitter Tuesday. The deal is now official with the physical passed.  Even if it took Correa two long stops aboard what sometimes resembled the crazy train to get there.

Remember: The Giants had landed him—until they didn’t. They quaked over something in Correa’s medical profile, enough to let him walk right into the Mets’ open arms on the day they expected to present him at a presser climbing into a Giants jersey. First it was thought to be Correa’s back. Then, as the Mets were ready to wrap him up for Christmas, the discourse turned to that now-notorious rebuilt ankle.

The Mets had Correa ready to place under New York’s Christmas tree—until they didn’t. They, too, quaked over something in the medical profile. Unlike the Giants, the Mets were willing to adjust. We know now they worked up an adjusted deal for six years and $157.5 million (were willing to go six assured at $175.5 million (roughly $27 million annually), with additional years up to six to follow based upon annual physical examinations.

The Giants’ prudence (if that’s what it was) about Correa in the end still leaves them with more holes to fill. The Mets’ such prudence doesn’t leave them with more than maybe a dent or two to fix. Remember: the Mets won 101 games last season before they collapsed in postseason round one. They’re not exactly in terrible 2023 shape, either.

But it looks as though Steve Cohen isn’t going to be the wild free-spender the rest of baseball world believed and maybe feared. It also looks as though he’s not willing to be as risky as people thought when it comes to players with injury histories no fault of their own but profound enough. Even players he says publicly, as he did about Correa, might be necessary pieces for a full-distance championship team.

Remember: Cohen once let a shiny draft pick (pitcher Kumar Rocker) walk rather than sign him over concerns about shoulder issues. He’s the owner who let Jacob deGrom, the arguable best pitcher in baseball when healthy (underline those two words), walk. (To the Rangers, for five years and $185 million.) If he was willing to let the game’s best pitcher when healthy (underline those words) walk, he wasn’t going to fear letting one of its best left-side infielders walk over similar alarms.

Is it unrealistic to think that the Astros, who raised Correa in the first place and saw him shine with them for seven seasons, let him walk into free agency in the first place because they, too, had long-term concerns about his long-term health?

Cohen may be willing to open the vault wider than any other major league owner, but it doesn’t mean he’s going to be that drunk a sailor. Remember: He had a plan and executed it regarding deGrom, signing seemingly ageless future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander for two years.

He also locked down late-game relief ace Edwin Diáz and outfield mainstay Brandon Nimmo. Extending first base anchor Pete Alonso isn’t unrealistic, either, especially after letting talented but too-firmly blocked Dominic Smith walk into the Nationals’ arms. The plan for Correa was moving him to third to play aside uber-shortstop incumbent Francisco Lindor. Without Correa? They have a pair of talented third basemen, veteran Eduardo Escobar and sprout Brett Baty.

The Mets aren’t hurting without Correa. The Twins are risking that they won’t be hurting if and when Correa begins hurting. As it was, Correa on his 2022 deal—three years, $105.3 million, and three opt-outs, the first of which Correa exercised to play the market in the first place this winter—proved a second half godsend, when the Twins became injury riddled enough but Correa managed to stay the distance.

The Twins also liked Correa’s clubhouse leadership and prodding teammates to improve. “The vision he has,” assistant pitching coach Luis Ramirez told The Athletic, “the awareness, the anticipation about what is going to come next. When he needs to talk to a teammate about an adjustment that needs to be made, or just, to like, picking up a teammate, or paying attention to small details in the game that others don’t see—he makes us better in everything, in the field, everywhere.”

They’re also banking on Correa maturing further and further away from his Astrogate past. Correa was once the staunchest public defender of the Astros’ 2017 World Series title. Yet he said not so fast, more or less, at that notorious February 2020 word salad-bar presser; their illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing Astro Intelligence Agency was “an advantage. I’m not going to lie to you.”

If you know what’s coming, you get a slight edge. And that’s why [then-general manager Jeff Luhnow and then-manager A.J. Hinch] got suspended and people got fired because it’s not right. It’s not right to do that. It was an advantage. But . . . it’s not going to happen moving forward.

Correa also took the Astros’ superstar second baseman José Altuve off the Astrogate hook, insisting—and the evidence since brought forth backs it up—that Altuve not only declined to work with stolen signs transmitted to him but actively objected to the infamous trash can banging of the pilfered intelligence while he was at the plate.

“The man plays the game clean,” Correa insisted, after then-Dodger Cody Bellinger fumed that Altuve should return his 2017 American League MVP award. “That’s easy to find out. [Astrogate whistleblower] Mike Fiers broke the story. You can go out and ask Mike Fiers: ‘Did José Altuve use the trash can? Did José Altuve cheat to win the MVP?’ Mike Fiers is going to tell you, straight up, he didn’t use it. He was the one player that didn’t use it.”

That’s what SNY’s Andy Martino said, too, in his Astrogate book, Cheated. It’s what Evan Drellich—one of the two Athletic reporters (with Ken Rosenthal) to whom Fiers blew the Astrogate whistle—is liable to reiterate in his forthcoming (next month) Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess. It’s what too many fans continue to ignore.

Without Correa, and placing their shortstop present and future into Gold Glove-winning rookie Jeremy Peña, last year’s Astros were down to only four or five remaining from the notorious 2017-18 Astrogate roster, including Altuve. The facts didn’t stop fans from hammering Altuve along with the others with chea-ter! chea-ter! chants—all the way into the World Series they won straight, no chaser at last.

The Twins bring Correa back with a front-loaded deal that includes no opt-outs and a full no-trade clause. They’re still taking a big risk on his health even for six years. God help Correa if his ankle or anything else breaks down and reduces him to journeyman status if he can play at all. Fans never let facts get in the way of fuming rants against what they think are fragile goldbrickers. Ask any Yankee fan when it comes to Jacoby Ellsbury.

But would a cynic suggest that, maybe, just maybe, in his heart of hearts, Correa was happy enough in Minnesota to let this weird coast-to-coast, medicals-scripted swing bring him back there in the first place, for a few more dollars than the Mets were willing to go on the same six guaranteed years? Maybe a cynic would. Maybe enough Met fans would. Did I just repeat myself?

The realist knows that, as fine as he’s still going to be, Correa’s ancient ankle repair did cost him in the long run. That, and not his controversial uber-agent Scott Boras, wrote this costly script. Costly for Correa. As The Athletic also points out, he lost seven years and $150 million compared to the original Giants offer, ended up with a lower offer from the Mets (half that $315 million over half the time), and signed with the Twins for four years and $85 million less than the ten/$285 million they first offered.

But realism isn’t half as much fun as ranting your head off about a season blown because of a signing blown, is it? Such is one of the major headaches of being a Met fan since the day they were born.

The Dodgers purge Bauer at last

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Trevor Bauer

Bauer’s a former Dodger at last. Would another team chance surviving his baggage and its justifiable blowback?

Almost the full two weeks from his suspension’s lifting were needed for the Dodgers to declare Trevor Bauer persona non grata in their colours. Notwithstanding a wi-fi disruption and power outage in Dodger Stadium causing its further delay Friday, the team announced they designated Bauer for assignment. Even those who believe the Dodgers did the right if delayed thing at last can’t and shouldn’t claim to be happy about this entire business.

There’s nothing happy about what one woman testifying under oath said was his bruising her after she fell unconscious and thus unable to extend any further consent. There’s nothing happy about two other women saying he’d taken rough sex too far and into plain assault upon them, too. There’s nothing happy about Bauer jeopardising if not ending a major league pitching career because his sport determined he violated its domestic violence policy.

In that order.

Arbitrator Martin Scheinman cut Bauer’s original suspension from 324 to 194 games. Even at 194 games, it remains the longest suspension yet under baseball’s seven-year-old-plus policy, and Bauer remains the only player disciplined under the policy to appeal his suspension. Baseball’s government investigated as thoroughly as conceivable before imposing the original suspension.

The Dodgers, we thought, had time enough during the suspension to decide it was time to mop the egg off their faces and let Bauer go whenever the suspension might end. We know by way of USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale that, after Scheinman reduced the suspension late last month, the Dodgers tried to find a trading partner willing to take Bauer off their hands first.

Assuming there is a team immune enough to outrage to take Bauer on willingly, such a team would likely prefer waiting for Bauer to clear waivers (it takes seven more days), then sign him to the major league minimum salary. Leaving the Dodgers still required to pay the rest of Bauer’s salary, minus the fifty games worth Scheinman docked him when lifting the suspension.

The Dodgers won’t “eat” what they still owe him. They swallowed and digested that dinner when they signed Bauer in the first place. (His original contract, like all MLB contracts, was guaranteed unless he exercised either of two opt-outs, chances his suspension denied him.) Paying him seven figures to beat it is child’s play compared to all the other head and heartaches Bauer inflicted.

Well before he was suspended by MLB, the Dodgers resembled due diligence failures for signing him despite a too-well-evidenced image as a misogynistic man no matter how good he was as a pitcher. We hark back to Dodger president of baseball operations Andrew Friendman, speaking after the Dodgers signed Bauer after the pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 season, during the press conference introducing Bauer as a Dodger. “[W]e’re all gonna make mistakes,” he said.

What’s important for me … is how we internalize it, and what our thoughts are about it going forward. From our standpoint, it was important to have that conversation. And we came away from it feeling good about it. Now, obviously, time will tell. But I feel like he is going to be a tremendous add, not just on the field but in the clubhouse, in the community, and that’s obviously why we’re sitting here.

Time, alas, told an awful lot more than Friedman or the team imagined. They chose to believe Bauer learned from prior, mere misbehaviours. He made them resemble fools. Not quite as profoundly as NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson makes the Cleveland Browns look, with 24 sexual misconduct suits against him, twenty of which were settled confidentially. But horrifying enough.

ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez cited one unnamed player agent saying “nobody’s touching” Bauer now but another unnamed player agent saying, discomfitingly, “I think there will be teams that will at least be interested.” Gonzalez also notes an unnamed team executive saying the challenge of taking Bauer on would be “unique.”

As he described, it isn’t just the stain on an organization’s reputation or the backlash from its fans or the general negativity that would surround it — it’s that Bauer hasn’t shown an ounce of contrition throughout this process. In fact, he has taken the opposite approach, fighting every allegation vehemently.

“If you sign someone with that type of baggage,” one agent noted, “you have to walk him through the reclamation tour. And I don’t think he’s coachable for that.”

Bauer himself released a statement after the Dodgers announced his DFA, posted first by the Los Angeles Times‘s Bill Shaikin:

While we were unable to communicate throughout the administrative leave and arbitration process, my representatives spoke to Dodgers leadership immediately following the arbitration decision.

Following two weeks of conversations around my return to the organization, I sat down with Dodgers leadership in Arizona yesterday who told me they wanted me to return and pitch for the team this year.

While I am disappointed by the organization’s decision today, I appreciate the wealth of support I’ve received from the Dodgers clubhouse. I wish the players all the best and look forward to competing elsewhere.

“There is zero chance whatsoever,” Craig Calcaterra of Cup of Coffee tweeted in response, “that anyone with actual decision-making authority with the Dodgers told Trevor Bauer, yesterday, that they wanted him back.” Indeed. “Dodger officials declined to go into details of their conversation,” Nightengale has written since, “but privately revealed that they didn’t hear any remorse, apologies or anything in the slightest from Bauer to change their mind.”

Gonzalez cited another unnamed team executive saying, “Some teams will just take the arm, and they’ll deal with the blowback later.” Too many have done that, in baseball and other sports. They forget playing professional sports is a privilege they can revoke for moral as well as performance cause. They forget athletes’ rights (indeed, responsibilities) to rehabilitate and redeem themselves don’t carry automatic rights to do it under their umbrellas.

They forget what Gonzalez and his ESPN colleague Jeff Passan observed when Bauer was hit with the original 324-game suspension in the first place: “The standards in criminal and civil cases differ from those of a private business. The judge dissolving the temporary restraining order and declining to issue a permanent one does not absolve Bauer of liability within the [domestic violence] policy. Neither does a prosecutor passing on pressing charges.”

They get their tails waxed in the public mind, in the press, and aboard the social media scrawl for forgetting the common good of their games doesn’t end on the scoreboard or at the bank.

Those are the parts the Nationals must have understood, without having to say so, during the 2021 season, when faced with veteran infielder Starlin Castro’s suspension for violating baseball’s domestic abuse policy. They said they’d cut Castro loose when his suspension concluded. They did just that. Castro’s full suspension was fifteen percent of what Bauer ultimately served. The Nats looked as decisive as the Dodgers didn’t look.

What time told Friedman and the Dodgers also, and especially, includes just the first known of Bauer’s victims, testifying during hearings to decide a restraining order against him. And, as Calcaterra observed, reiterating—without one word spoken by Bauer’s legal team trying to refute or discredit it—her number one charge: I did not consent to bruises all over my body that sent me to the hospital and having that done to me while I was unconscious.

That, and the scars upon her psyche, are the parts no formal discipline can undo.

When will it be “practical” to decide about Bauer?

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Trevor Bauer

The Dodgers must decide whether to re-admit pitcher Trevor Bauer after what’s still the longest suspension a player’s served for violating baseball’s domestic abuse/sexual assault/child abuse policy.

From the moment Trevor Bauer’s suspension was lifted, I’ve waited for the Dodgers—who said when informed of the lifting that they would comment “as soon as practical”—to decide when it would be practical. Almost twelve days later, I’m still waiting.

At which point, I wonder along with (I’m sure) scores of others, would a team with omelette all over its face over a player signing that turned upside down from the player’s own doings decide it was “practical” to be done with them, and him?

Bauer was suspended, recall, for violating the joint policy on domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse to which baseball’s government and the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed in 2015. That was after Bauer missed 99 games on paid administrative leave in 2021.

The original suspension was 324 games. Bauer appealed, and arbitrator Martin F. Scheinman reduced it to 194. Essentially, Scheinman called it time served. It still remains the longest such suspension served under the policy. Longer than the single full season for which then-Twins relief pitcher Sam Dyson was suspended over domestic violence against his former girlfriend.

The Dodgers were handed fourteen days to decide whether to keep or cut Bauer. Surely Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke wasn’t the only one to say, “It should only take them fourteen seconds.” They had far longer than that to think and plan for the prospect of Bauer’s reinstatement. They may yet use the entire 1,209,600 seconds worth to decide.

That would satisfy the contingency to whom Bauer is actually innocent on no grounds further than that the Los Angeles County District Attorney elected against filing criminal charges against the righthander almost a year ago. That contingency won’t be satisfied fully, alas, until Bauer is suited up in a Dodger uniform again.

But it’s worth a reminder that electing not to file such charges doesn’t mean “not guilty,” it means only that the D.A.’s office believed getting a criminal conviction would be difficult, not that it believed the evidence was false or non-existent. It’s also worth a reminder that the MLB/MLBPA joint policy enables baseball’s commissioner to suspend players believed or found violating the policy regardless of any criminal charges, court trial, or trial conviction.

The commissioner’s office investigated Bauer starting in 2021, after a San Diego woman accused him of taking rough sex far too far into assault during two encounters and obtained a restraining order against Bauer that was lifted in due course. But almost a year ago, two other women told the Washington Post they, too, had been victimised by Bauer while taking rough sex too far into assault; hence, the suspension.

When the first victim’s restraining order was lifted, it followed hearings in which Bauer’s attorneys isolated inconsistencies in her based on secondary items, but—as Cup of Coffee writer Craig Calcaterra observed—the woman’s central claim of terrible assault wasn’t discredted even once.

“[T]he central truth of this entire affair—the stuff that Major League Baseball will look to regarding Bauer’s behavior, irrespective of whether charges are brought—points pretty clearly to Bauer doing exactly what his accuser said he did. Everything else is secondary,” Calcaterra wrote.

After 12 hours of testimony, his accuser said, under oath, “I did not consent to bruises all over my body that sent me to the hospital and having that done to me while I was unconscious.” There was zero evidence presented which explained how those bruises appeared in a way that was benign or refuted the idea that the woman was unconscious when Bauer inflicted them. That, in my mind, is all that matters. (Emphasis added.)

After Scheinman ended the suspension, Calcaterra tweeted, “[W]hen Bauer fanboys try to claim his reinstatement as some sort of victory or vindication, remember: Bauer has been adjudged to be the worst sexual assault offender in Major League Baseball in the era of the Joint Policy. Worse than anyone else.”

Before the Dodgers signed him to a three-year, $102 million contract as a free agent, Bauer was merely problematic and known concurrently as a misogynist. It should have put the Dodgers into more powerful due diligence mode when pondering his signing. Such a failure puts one in mind of Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog’s observation (in You’re Missin’ a Great Game), “Does a [player] with personal problems and holes in his game merit that kind of money? . . . Off the field, will his PR kick you in the ass?”

Bauer’s PR has kicked the Dodgers in the ass, the head, the spine, and the stomach,  several times over. They may have a genuine baseball need to bring him back to their pitching staff, but they have a far more serious human need not to bring him back.

It’s grotesque enough when a ballplayer loses it after a bad game or a bad season and takes it out violently (physical, psychological, both) on his wife or significant other. What should we call it when a player faces domestic violence discipline not because he lost his temper but because he didn’t know or care where the line between consent and abuse is drawn when practising rough sex?

I did not consent to bruises all over my body that sent me to the hospital and having that done to me while I was unconscious. 

Bauer’s deal would pay him $32 million for 2023 regardless of whether he suits up to pitch for the Dodgers, minus fifty games’ pay Scheinman docked him when ending the suspension. “By releasing him,” Plaschke wrote, “they will owe him his final year’s salary minus those fifty games, but it will be the best $22.5 million they ever spent.”

It would also begin sending two long overdue messages. One is the message that the common good of the game can’t stop at making money for or in it. The other is the message not sent when players suspended under the domestic abuse/sexual assault/child abuse policy are readmitted to their teams, or signed by new teams, without more than perfunctory, boilerplate apologies:

If you’re a domestic or sexual or child abuser, you’ve lost your place in major league baseball. Such a place is a privilege, not a God-given right. Now, you have every right and every responsibility, especially, to atone for your abuse[s]. You have every right and every responsibility, especially, to rehabilitate yourself as a man, as a human being, and to earn your keep anew. You’ll deserve every credit on earth for doing that if you do. Your chance simply can’t happen in baseball any longer.

As of midnight tonight, the Dodgers will have 259,200 seconds to decide. It adds up to about 1,209,599 seconds more than they should have had to decide.