I agree today's player is better trained and in better shape and health, the 60's and 70's era players often had other jobs outside of baseball unless they were top players. I remember when Johnny Bench was shocked Pete Rose made a million dollars with the Phillies, he said NO MAN was worth that. Now it's a common. The League minimum in 1975 was 16K (72K in today's money), the average was 44K (199K today). The league minimum now is 507K.. plus meals and expenses). Sometimes it seems the older player had to be tougher, maybe it's just me.
Great article about the Anderson Monarchs (of Mo'ne Davis fame). http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/1...uni-baseball-and-black-history.html?referrer= Baseball is such a great metaphor for American life and this article has a lot to say about growing up faced with challenges and the lessons baseball can bring to effect change.
okay, I can talk about baseball again. I thought for a bit I was gonna see a repeat of 2013.... I had no idea you guys were having an interesting discussion here
Well, this would certainly be really bad news if it holds up: St. Louis Cardinals under investigation by FBI for hacking Houston Astros The FBI and Justice Department are investigating members of the front office of the St. Louis Cardinals to determine whether the organization hacked the computer network of the Houston Astros in order to steal player personnel information. An investigation is “ongoing,” a federal law enforcement official told The Post’s Ellen Nakashima. There’s “a lot of work going into” the investigation, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe is underway. Generally speaking, officials and experts say, the tools to hack someone else’s network are readily available online. “By itself, it doesn’t represent anything illegal,” the official said. But once a person intrudes into another person’s computer system without permission, “you’ve crossed the magical line,” the official said. Accessing someone’s computer without authorization is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This is the first suspected case of corporate espionage in which a professional sports team has allegedly hacked the network of another team, according to the New York Times, which first reported the investigation. Officials told the Times that they have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials hacked the Astros’ database, known as Ground Control, and obtained information and internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics and scouting reports. The names of the officials under investigation were not revealed. The Cardinals, who have the best record in baseball this season and are one of the sport’s most successful teams since the turn of this century, said in a statement that they have “fully cooperated with the investigation and will continue to do so. Given that this is an ongoing federal investigation, it is not appropriate for us to comment further.” Major League Baseball said in a statement that it “has fully cooperated with the federal investigation,” adding “Once the investigative process has been completed by federal law enforcement officials, we will evaluate the next steps and will make decisions promptly.” ---------------- A lot more at the link. In any sane world this would make steroid scandals pale in comparison. I don't know that MLB can come up with sufficient punishment for the Cardinals if this is true and wasn't just some schmuck who works for the Cardinals acting on his own. Stripping the owners of all rights to the team without compensation and forcing management out isn't enough. I'd rate this just a notch below the Black Sox level if it pans out, and at the same level if it's sufficiently more widespread.
I'm going to say it's significantly worse than the Black Sox scandal if the organization was behind the hack. And I'd also go further on punishment. Here's commissioner gul's recommendation: Dissolve the franchise Permanently ban from baseball all owners and high level management Place players in a supplemental draft Establish a new National League Baseball Club in St. Louis This is serious shit, it's not messing around with internal rules that may or may not be relevant to on field performance. It's actively stealing from another club. However, we all know that in reality, a low level guy will take the fall, and the Cardinals will survive largely intact, continuing to benefit from whatever decisions resulted from the knowledge obtained by the hack.
I certainly might be convinced of that. "A notch below" is just my first reaction to breaking news, not a particularly well thought out belief.
Oh Please, do go and FUCK OFF!!! Dissolve the franchise? Disperse the players via supplemental draft? You're talking out of your ass!!! Sure, if all this holds up it looks bad, but we're talking about some scouting reports and pie-in-the-sky internal trade scenarios. NOTHING AT ALL compared to throwing the World-fucking-Series like the Black Sox!!! And you want to dissolve one of the most storied franchises in baseball history? You CANNOT be fucking serious! This is quite rich, especially coming from a guy who pooh-poohed InflateGate as no big deal. If you were at least consistent in your approach, you'd have had Tom Brady drawn and quartered in front of NFL Headquarters, and the NE Patriots would've been forcibly relocated to Albuquerque. The worse I see coming out of this is Mozeilek (Cards GM) being suspended for a year, team loses some draft picks, and gets a hefty fine.
The minute you try to equate this to deflate-gate or biogenesis or anything done by an individual player to get a performance boost, is the moment you lose the debate. If this proves out, it is organizational law breaking, which is a vastly different scale.
Here's a feel good story. Brock Holt hit for the cycle. Damn how I wish I had been at that game! http://m.mlb.com/news/article/131034830/brock-holt-completes-first-red-sox-cycle-since-96
With ZERO impact on the field! For chrissake, we're talking about some hacking...it's not like they threw a game, bet on baseball, or enslaved thousands of juveniles to make high-end sneakers. This is, at worst, essentially "industrial espionage". You are WAY over-reacting (as is Liet)!!!
The charge is that they stole compensation data and analytics. You don't think that might have influenced how they negotiated with free agents? If they assembled the team using stolen data, that is indeed a big deal with impact on the field.
I guess it depends upon the timeframe of the compensation data, as well as how much it coincides with players they've signed since then, what level those players are playing at, etc.... The analytics aren't very meaningful in this regard...every MLB organization has their own bunch of proprietary analytics that they value differently. Assuming there was influence in how they negotiated w/ free agents, this case then takes on a parallel to the Denver Broncos manipulating contracts to avoid the NFL Salary Cap, and any punishments (beyond criminal charges that are in the realm of the FBI) should likewise reflect similarly to those received by the Broncos.
Of course it all depends on the results of the investigation. I outlined a worst case scenario. If it is less than that, then the punishment should be proportionate.
Teams spy on each other. this time it was high-tech. Being privy to a teams inside info would be a big plus, BUT IT'S THE ASTROS!! Up until now they were kinda the worst team in baseball.. Why not spy on the Giants or Yankees??
I figure there was either something very specific that they wanted to know, say about just one player, or else there will be more revelations involving additional teams. I agree, a general spying program focused just on the Astros doesn't make much sense.
The Astros very recently deployed an online database for use by executives, something other teams may not have or may have better secured. And, as a bad team it's especially useful to know what they're considering for what good players they have, who are prototypical trade-deadline bait.
Scuttlebutt I've heard is that one or two individuals still hold a grudge against Luhenow (sp?) from his time with the Cardinals, and wanted to expose things within that system in order to make him look bad. /shrug
unless I've missed something - the "hack" involved a former Cards exec who went to work for the Astros and didn't bother to select a different password - they hacked the Astros because it was the only team they could. And yes, frankly, it seems very likely this was a mid-level grunt, not an organizational master-plan.
The executive in question claims that he didn't reuse old passwords. It seems to me that would be an easy claim for the FBI to check and one he wouldn't likely make if it weren't true, although he could easily have used minor variations on old passwords.
I think he still has an outside chance, mostly due to this: There is a strong case for banishing him if he bet against the Reds or Phillies. But there really is nothing in this document that is any worse or different from what was already documented. He had previously admitted betting on the Reds as a manager. I'm not sure how betting on them as a player really changes things. At any rate, I really hope he is re-instated. He was one of the best players of all time by any reasonable evaluation of his record. And there has never been a shred of evidence that he didn't play the game honestly. He had an untreated addiction that did not interfere with his activities on the field.
The problem is betting with mob-connected bookies as a player and player/manager. A player who risks falling in debt to the mob is a significantly bigger threat to the game than a manager who does so. Baseball managers have surprisingly little effect on the outcome of either games or individual player performances.
I saw this headline and it struck me as the perfect encapsulation of how the game has changed over the years regarding pitcher usage: Teixeira sets switch-hitting HR mark Homers from both sides of plate in a game for 14th time ---------------- Think about that: Mark Texeria (and Nick Swisher!) has more games with home runs from both sides of the plate than Mickey Mantle did! How many more times in a career does a player today face relief pitching than back then?
Yeah, that's something that has changed significantly just in our lifetime. Complete games are not just anomalous, they are anachronistic. There used to be short relief and long relief. Now we have 6th inning specialists. I keep telling my kids only half in jest that we are heading to a time when teams routinely use 9 pitchers in a game.
Which is why, in the end, Cy Young's record for wins is not safe. Use of starting pitchers has already changed so dramatically, and we're going to find over time that having them pitch even five innings makes for suboptimal usage. The definition of a pitcher win is going to change at some point, and the Clayton Kershaw of the next generation is going to pitch once or twice through the lineup every two or three days, racking up 60 wins a season.
I went to the Sox-Rays game last week, and both starters were completely shot by the end of five innings. Neither pitched horribly, they just lacked enough efficiency to get through five without blasting past 100 pitches. The Sox used 4 more pitchers, and the Rays, though they didn't have a bottom of the 9th used three. So after the starters, it's an inning per pitcher, max. If that is the best way to use relievers, why is it not the best way to use starters?
While it's the case that starters are much better in the first inning than at any other point in the game, they're also starters for a reason: they're a lot better than relievers at pitching. Still, I think at some point some team will hit on the idea of building a pitching staff around having six "starters" who each generally pitch three innings every other game.
Except most teams have trouble finding five legitimate starters. There isn't enough talent for 150 major league starters. How do we get to 180?
