Tag Archives: Brent Rooker

Manfred’s just thinking aloud. Isn’t he?

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Rob Manfred

Manfred insists he’s done when his contract is. What manner of mischief might he wreak before then?

This is commissioner Rob Manfred’s story and he’s sticking to it. For now. Ask him whether he’s going to want to rethink his previously-enunciated intent to retire when his current contract expires in three years, and he digs in like a batter who knows he’s facing not Bob Gibson but Bobo Garglebargle.

“I’m done at the end of this contract. I’ve told [the owners] that, and I’m gonna stick to it,” Manfred insisted in a WFAN radio interview last week. “I’ll be 70. It is enough . . . You have a certain period of time when you have things that you want to accomplish, you take your best shot, you try to get as much done as possible. And then it’s sort of time for the next guy with his set of things. And I think that’s healthy and good for this.”

So far, so good. So, what does the most inveterate tinkerer who ever held the commissioner’s office want to get done before he moseys off into the sunset?

Without saying he’s committed to it—yet—Manfred mentioned discussions about inflicting a split season and in-season tournaments upon major league baseball. “We do understand that 162 (games) is a long pull,” he said. “I think the difficulty to accomplish those sort of in-season events, you almost inevitably start talking about fewer regular-season games.”

But not fewer postseason rounds and games, of course. Manfred isn’t that sensible. “It is a much more complicated thing in our sport than it is in other sports,” he continued. “Because of all of our season-long records, you’re playing around with something that people care a lot about.”

You’re playing around with a lot more than that, Commissioner Pepperwinkle.

Wait until it gets to the part where he speaks of bringing MLB to 32 teams. And, realigning baseball into eight divisions of four teams each. Presuming it’s going to be one new team in each league, would it do to suggest something a lot more sensible?

You guessed it. I’m going there again. Instead of eight divisions of four teams each, how about four divisions of eight teams each? How about two such divisions in each league? If you wish, you can keep them named the National League East and West, and the American League East and West. Goodbye three-division lunacy and wild-card whackadoodling.

Think of the benefits that would come forth. I’ve made the argument before, but it’s worth making it yet again. Four divisions, eight teams each, and you don’t get to play for a championship unless your butts were parked in first place at season’s end. Let’s not forget to put an end to the farce of regular-season interleague play, either. Save that for where it really belongs, the All-Star Game and the World Series.

And won’t it be fun to have something we haven’t really had in this century—namely, real pennant races again. No more of this Bizarro World nonsense of the thrills, spills, and chills of teams fighting to the last breath to finish the season . . . in second place.

Come to think of it, let’s be done at long enough last with those hideous All-Star and City Connect uniforms. They go from ugly to disgusting and back to repulsive before turning nauseating. Haven’t you missed seeing All-Stars wearing their own uniforms, the fatigues of the teams they represent in the game?

And we haven’t arrived until now at the truly fun part. You want to get rid of postseason saturation as much as I do? You want to make the postseason both meaningful and fun again? You want more World Series such as last fall, when a) the only combatants were teams who finished first in their divisions, anyway; and, b) those two went tooth, fang, claw, and anything else they could think of until somebody finally won it? You want to relieve Manfred’s discomfort over the long season?

Of course you do. So . . .

We’ve simplified the game’s alignment to two divisions each for each league. We’ve made for real pennant races again. Now we get to call for best-of-five League Championship Series. That’s the way they played it from divisional play’s birth in 1969 through 1984. Now, you restore the World Series’s primacy by keeping it a best-of-seven. Did I mention that it also means no baseball under snow or November watch anymore?

You also have postseasons of—maximum—seventeen games under the foregoing back-to-the-future remake/remodel. Meaning you have yearly totals of—maximum, again—179 major league games for each league. You can’t tell me that’s not plenty of baseball. And who says an earlier opening to the Hot Stove League won’t be a little more fun, either?

Speaking of which, beware. Maybe the only thing worse than Manfred pondering in-season tournaments would be landing a hard deadline for free agency signing. Athletics outfielder/designated hitter Brent Rooker called it the most anti-player idea Manfred could have. So, naturally, Commissioner Pepperwinkle started stumping for it harder the day after Rooker spoke against it.

“I think there’s going to be some more conversation about it, because I do believe that there’s a marketing opportunity,” Manfred told WFAN. “Let’s face it, we operate in a really competitive environment. Just put entertainment, generally, to one side—just sports, right? It’s really competitive. And I think that you make a mistake, particularly during the offseason, when you don’t take every advantage to push your sport out in front of your fans during that down period.”

Some think you make more of a mistake taking the fun out of the Hot Stove League. For owners and players alike. The owners aren’t saints, but they’re not wholly brainless. The ones who can (will) spend love the chase. The ones who can’t (won’t) spend love to bitch about the ones who can. Fans who kvetch one moment about swelling player dollars cheer the next when their team lands an Alex Bregman.

(By the way, don’t pity the Red Sox for failing to convince Bregman to stay. Not when they seem to have quaked over including a no-trade clause in his new deal but the Cubs had no problem giving him one. Well, there’s still Bo Bichette to whom the Red Sox might turn, within reason.)

“[W]hat they said back was, they thought that kind of [signing] deadline would work to the disadvantage of the players,” Manfred said of player reaction to the idea. “And you know, I just—I don’t put much credence in this.” Shocker.

At least, Manfred promised that any realignment would not include forcing two-team cities into the same division. But the bad news is that, historically, it was easier for pitchers to hold Hall of Famer Rickey (The Man of Steal) Henderson on base than it is to put most commissioners’s promises in the bank.

“I don’t really get the owners pinching pennies . . . “

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So what is with A’s owner John Fisher suddenly opening his purse?

Dave Roberts supports a players’ salary cap and a salary floor. Clayton Kershaw probably thinks his now-former manager could use a little extra enlightenment. It would have made for some lively discussions in the Dodger clubhouse if Kershaw hadn’t retired after the World Series.

“You know what? I’m all right with (a salary cap),” Roberts told Amazon Prime’s Good Sports a month ago. “I think the NBA has done a nice job of revenue sharing with the players and the owners. But if you’re going to kind of suppress spending at the top, I think that you got to raise the floor to make those bottom-feeders spend money too.”

Kershaw picked a slightly showier place to say he thinks the owners bleating for salary caps are talking through their scalps, actor Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast. But it ain’t the venue, it’s the verdict. “I don’t understand some of the ownerships’ arguments with this stuff,” the future Hall of Fame lefthander began near December’s end.

Because there’s probably hundreds of multi-billionaires that would love to own a professional baseball team. I bet we could get a list of 100 guys right now that are uber-wealthy, that would love to run a baseball team . . . It might not make the money you would want it to make, but over time it’s just like a stock. It’s going to continue to appreciate.

It’s just like anything else. [The Dodgers are now] worth 3x of what it was . . . I don’t really get that part of it, of the owners pinching pennies.

Grammar aside, Kershaw has the amplifier of Roberts’s second point. But what he doesn’t quite get is that the penny-pinchers have one view of baseball. They think, and they have a commissioner who behaves accordingly, that the good of the game is nothing more than making money for themselves.

My Internet Baseball Writers Association of America newsletter colleague Bill Pruden says responsible baseball ownership begins with a full commitment to fielding a competitive team, but you don’t have to look fast to see that’s not exactly every team’s aspiration. “The A’s and the Pirates immediately come to mind,” he continues, “when one thinks of teams that have, for years, offered little evidence of a real commitment to winning.”

It depends upon what your definition of “winning” is.

For years, A’s owner John Fisher wanted nothing more than to dump Oakland like an inconvenient wife. He let his A’s shrink to compost but failed to strong-arm Oakland and its home county into handing them a new home almost entirely on the house. He finished what was started long enough ago and let the Coliseum and his team finish becoming compost. He said it was the fans’ fault for not wanting to watch scrap heap baseball.

Then Las Vegas’s mouse-like political (lack of) class signed off on $380 million tax dollars with no public hearings or votes toward building the A’s a garish new playpen on the Strip. The owners rubber stamped Fisher’s betrayal while agreeing to waive the normal $1 billion relocation fee.

Fisher got off the way wealthy husbands only dream of getting off when dumping their aging wives for younger mates. While playing in Sacramento’s minor league playpen awaiting the finish of their glass house, we wonder reasonably whether Las Vegas bought the proverbial pig in the proverbial poke.

But lo! As Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills once wrote and sang, there’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Or is it? All of a sudden, the A’s are spending. In the past year, Fisher’s purse has opened wide and said, “Aaahhhhhhhhh.” Sort of.

* The A’s extended right fielder Lawrence Butler with seven years at $65.5 million.

* They extended designated hitter/outfielder Brent Rooker with five years at $60 million.

* Most recently, they extended left fielder Tyler Soderstrom to seven years at $86 million, with an eighth-year team option that includes escalators which could hike the value as high as $131 million, according to The Athletic‘s Devon Henderson and Will Sammon. It’s the largest guaranteed deal in the history of the A’s.

No, those aren’t exactly the kind of glandular long-term deals bestowed upon the Shohei Ohtanis, Bryce Harpers, and Mike Trouts of the game. Bo Bichette could land a more valuable deal than those three combined. And optimists think the A’s are prepping for 2028, when their new playpen is supposed to open where the Tropicana Hotel and Resort used to stand.

But $256.5 million is money not heretofore seen flying out from the A’s piggy banks, even if it’s less than a) some teams’ entire payrolls, and b) a third the full value of Ohtani’s ten-year contract. And it might be hard to remember Fisher speaking the way he did to another Athletic writer, Evan Drellich, earlier this offseason.

“At the end of the day,” Fisher told Drellich, “our goal is to put the greatest team on the field that we can and payroll is an important part of that. But our [front office has] demonstrated over decades now that they can see things in players that other teams don’t see . . . We’re going to sign our guys to longer-term deals, as well as sign free agents who can make our team better.”

Until they aren’t?

Those three extensions, wrote Yahoo! Sports’s Mark Powell, were “a stark reminder that [Fisher] always had the money, but chose not to spend it.” Tell the abandoned wife named Oakland what she didn’t know.

Real cynics think you can tell most baseball owners lying when you see their lips move. The current collective bargaining agreement’s coming finish at the end of the 2026 season already has “salary cap” on those lips, with “salary floor” seeming to be a sotto voce side or afterthought.

Maybe few to none among those owners might dare to ponder Kershaw’s thought about wealthy men and women willing to buy in and actually invest in building competitive teams. They might sooner respond to him, now that he’s retired with only his Hall of Fame election ahead of him so far, “Beat it, buster.”

Ask Oakland whether Fisher’s words are his bonds. They’re liable to demand polygraph proof.

First published at Sports Central.

The All-Scar Game

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Austin Riley, Pete Alonso

Austin Riley’s (Braves, left) kneeling throw to kneeling scooper Pete Alonso (Mets, right) ended the bottom of the All-Star Game eighth with a double play . . . (MLB.com photo) . . .

The best thing about Tuesday night’s All-Star Game? Easy. That snappy eighth inning-ending double play into which Athletics outfielder Brent Rooker hit. He shot one up the third base line to Braves third baseman Austin Riley, who picked and threw on one knee across to Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, who scooped on one knee to nail two outs for the price of one, doubling Blue Jays second baseman Whit Merrifield up.

That play preserved what proved the National League’s 3-2 win over the American League in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. They got the second and third runs in the top of that eighth, when Elias Díaz (Rockies) pinch hit for Jorge Soler (Marlins) with Nick Castellanos (Phillies) aboard after a nine-pitch leadoff walk and nobody out. Díaz sent Orioles righthander Félix Bautista’s 2-2 splitter off a bullpen sidewall, then off an overhang into the left field seats.

It meant the first NL All-Star win since 2012. It also meant Díaz becoming the Rockies’s first-ever All-Star Game Most Valuable Player award winner. Otherwise? It meant almost nothing. Because the worst thing about this year’s All-Scar Game was . . . just about everything else.

Mr. Blackwell, call your office. All-Star Game specific threads have been part of it for long enough. They began ugly and devolved to further states of revulsivity. But Tuesday night took the Ignoble Prize for Extinguished Haberdashery. The only uniforms uglier than this year’s All-Star silks are those hideous City Connect uniforms worn now and then during regular season games. Both should be done away with. Post haste. Let the All-Stars wear their regular team uniforms once again.

Who are those guys? They sort of anticipated long ovations for the hometown Mariners’ All-Star representatives. But they didn’t anticipate they’d be longer than usual. To the point where two Rays All-Stars—shortstop Wander Franco, pitcher Shane McLanahan—weren’t even introduced, when they poured in from center field among all other All-Stars. (Rays third baseman Yandy Díaz, an All-Star starter, did get introduced properly. But still.)

Maybe the two Rays jumped the gun trotting in while the ovation continued, but they should have been announced regardless.

While I’m at it, what was with that nonsense about bringing the All-Stars in from center field instead of having them come out of the dugouts to line up on the opposite base lines? Some traditions do deserve preservation. Not all, but some. What’s next—running the World Series combatants’ members in from the bullpens? (Oops! Don’t give the bastards any more bright ideas!)

Down with the mikes! In-game miking of players has always been ridiculous. But on Tuesday night it went from ridiculous to revolting. When Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi took the mound miked up, the poor guy got into trouble on the mound almost at once. He had to pitch his way out of a two-on, one-out jam in the second inning. He sounded about as thrilled to talk while working his escape act as a schoolboy ordered to explain why he put a girl’s phone number on the boys’ room wall.

What’s the meaning of this? We’ve got regular-season interleague play all year long now. The National League All-Stars broke a ten-season losing streak? Forgive me if hold my applause. So long as the entire season is full of interleague play, the All-Star Game means nothing. Wasn’t it bad enough during those years when the outcome of the All-Star Game determined home field advantage for the World Series?

The road to making the All-Star Game mean something once more is eliminating regular-season interleague play altogether.

Elias Díaz

. . . saving the lead (and, ultimately, the game) Elias Díaz gave the NL with his two-run homer in the top of the eighth. (And, yes, the All-Star uniforms get uglier every year. Enough!) (AP Photo.)

Tamper bay. Sure it was cute to hear the T-Mobile Park crowd chanting for Angels unicorn star Shohei Ohtani to come to Seattle as a free agent. The problem is, he isn’t a free agent yet. He still has a second half to play for the Angels. I’ll guarantee you that if any team decided to break into a “Come to us!” chant toward Ohtani, they’d be hauled before baseball’s government and disciplined for tampering.

I get practically every fan base in baseball wanting Ohtani in their teams’ fatigues starting next year. If they don’t, they should be questioned by grand juries. But they really should have held their tongues on that one no matter how deeply you think the All-Scar Game has been reduced to farce. Lucky for them the commissioner can’t fine the Mariners for their fans’ tamper chants. (Not unless someone can prove the Mariners put their fans up to it, anyway.)

Crash cart alert. Cardiac Craig Kimbrel (Phillies) was sent out to pitch the ninth. With a one-run lead. The National League should have put the crash carts on double red alert, entrusting a one-run lead to the guy whose six 2018 postseason saves with a 5.90 ERA/6.74 fielding-independent pitching still felt like defeats. The guy who has a lifetime 4.13 ERA/4.84 FIP in postseason play.

Kimbrel got the first two outs (a fly to right, a strikeout), then issued back-to-back walks (six and seven pitches off an even count and a 1-2 count, respectively) before he finally struck Jose Ramirez (Guardians) out—after opening 0-2 but lapsing to 2-2—to end the game. Making the ninth that kind of interesting should not be what the Phillies have to look forward to if they reach the coming postseason.

Sales pitch. How bad is the sorry state of the Athletics and their ten-thumbed owner John Fisher’s shameless moves while trying and failing to extort Oakland but discovering Nevada politicians have cactus juice for brains? It’s this bad—when the T-Mobile crowd wasn’t chanting for Ohtani to cast his free agency eyes upon Seattle, they were chanting “Sell the team!” when Rooker whacked a ground rule double in the fifth.

Can you think of any other All-Star ballpark crowd chanting against another team’s owner in the past? Not even George Steinbrenner’s worst 1980-91 antics inspired that. That’s more on Fisher, of course, but it’s still sad to think that a team reduced to cinder and ashes with malice aforethought captured an All-Star Game crowd’s attention almost equal to the attention they might have paid the game itself.