Still Salary Contretemps in South Korea’s KBO

Yamaico Navarro, a player who played oh-so briefly for four major league teams through 2013, just re-signed with the Samsung Lions of South Korea’s KBO.  No big deal, really — Navarro had a terrific rookie season in the KBO in 2014 at age 26, so he was virtually certain to return for at least one more year at a substantial raise over 2014.

The Samsung Lions reported re-signing him for $850,000.  However, ESPN reports that Navarro actually got $950,000 plus another $400,000 in performance bonuses.  What’s the difference, you’re probably saying to yourself.  However, It’s apparently a big difference in South Korea, based on the media reports.

The back-story is that until last year, the KBO had an official cap of $300,000 per year for foreign players which everyone who follows the KBO knew most of the teams weren’t obeying.

The KBO did away with the cap this year, but their are still rumors that KBO teams are under-reporting what they are paying their foreign stars. It’s a little hard to understand why anyone cares, but I suspect it has something to do with east Asian concepts of fair player, which perhaps value fairness among teams more than fairness to individual players.

As with every other top professional league in existence, the KBO has its rich teams and its poor teams.  The Samsung Lions have won the last four championships and led the league in wins each of those regular seasons.  They are clearly one of the wealthier teams in the KBO, probably due to subsidies from the Samsung Corporation.

The idea behind the salary cap is that by limiting the salaries of foreign players and restricting them to one-year contracts, the KBO would have more competitive balance.  Of course, the rich teams simply under-reported the salaries they were paying to foreign players.

The removal of the salary cap for foreign players was supposed to do away with all the past nonsense, but it seems that teams are still under-reporting salaries, most likely not to create a backlash among KBO fandom and the less wealthy team owners.

To an American, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Teams want to get the best talent they can to help them win and put a product on the field that fans want to see.

KBO is growing fast, adding a second expansion team in 2015, bringing the league up to ten teams from eight in 2012, and they will be playing a 144 game schedule, up from 128 the last two seasons and 133 before that.  Attendance was up in 2014 from 2013 at about 12,000 fans per game, but did not reach its high set in 2012.  While the KBO attendance is still affected by South Korea’s play in international competition, all signs indicate that it is a growth industry that is working hard to put a high-level product on the field and build up its fan base.

Whatever money Yamaico Navarro actually got, it’s entirely reasonable given the 2014 season he had, his age, and what even fairly pedestrian KBO free agents are now getting.  The best foreign players deserve to get paid more, because of their out-size contributions to their teams, and the fact that only one bad season is likely to get them dumped in favor of someone new.

What a lot of this comes down to, I think, is that the KBO has done an excellent job of holding down salaries for most players.  As a result, salaries for potential difference-makers, whether in the form of KBO free agents or foreign players, are increasing rapidly as team revenues or the advertizing value to the league’s corporate owners that come with successful teams is increasing.

What About Jonny Gomes?

With Michael Morse having moved on the Marlins, the Giants are in a need of a right-handed power bat to fill a left field platoon with left-handed hitting Gregor Blanco.  How about Jonny Gomes?

Gomes is from Petaluma, so he’d probably jump at a competitive offer to play for the Giants.  He’s also coming off a relatively poor season at age 33, so he can probably be had for a very affordable one-year deal for no more than the $5 million the Giants gave Morse last year.

Gomes was dreadful against right-handed pitchers last season, as he usually is, but he still hit lefties reasonably well.  The Giants have no shortage of left-handed hitters for Gomes to platoon with, since aside from Blanco, there’s also Travis Ishikawa, who proved during the post-season he can play left-field if the Giants need him to.

mlbtraderumors.com suggests that Gomes may sign with the Cubs to provide some veteran leadership on a young team.  However, insofar as 2015 is concerned, his chances of going to the post-season would be better with the Giants.  The Cubs have a lot of young talent, but I don’t think they’ll go from 73 wins to the post-season in one year, even with Jon Lester fronting their rotation.

Two other outfielders who are still available are Nori Aoki and Colby Rasmus.  However, neither seems as good a fit for the Giants as Jonny Gomes.  Aoki might be had relatively cheaply, but his skill set doesn’t look significantly different from Gregor Blanco, and he’s also a left-handed hitter.

Colby Rasmus comes into his free agency with his value down after a poor 2014 season.  However, he’ll be only 28 in 2015, and he has some power, so someone will almost certainly give him at least a three-year deal at at least $10 million per.  Also, as a left-handed hitter, his power would probably drop playing his home games at AT&T Park.

Hiroki Kuroda Returns to Japan

Hiroki Kuroda signed a deal today with the Hiroshima Toyo Carp of the Japan’s NPB for a reported 400 million yen ($3.32 million).  Given that Kuroda could easily have gotten a one-year deal from an MLB team for a full $10 million more, Kuroda’s decision can only be explained as a desire to finish his career in Japan where it all began for.

Kuroda’ 2014 campaign was his least effective since 2010, but it was still right within the range of his remarkably consistent seven year major league career.

The Carp and their fans must be overjoyed, but the deal represents a tremendous bargain for them even by the standards of NPB.  The Carp finished third in the Central League in 2014, making the play-offs for the second year in row and improving their record for the fourth year in a row.  With Kenta Maeda also coming back, the Carp look like a great bet to challenge the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers for league dominance.

The fact that Kuroda will not be returning to the Yankees certainly makes me think the Bombers will get in on the Max Scherzer bidding to fill that rotation slot.  Signing Scherzer certainly won’t solve all the Yankees’ current woes, but it’s hard to imagine the Yankees not making a splash this off-season, particularly when their team salary was down below $200 million in 2014 for the first time in seven years.

The Yankees will be paying Alex Rodriguez $21 million this year for what is anticipated to be very little production, $20+ million they didn’t to pay last year because of ARod’s suspension.  Still, signing Scherzer might be the one thing that keeps them above .500 in 2015.

Aces Chihiro Kaneko and Kenta Maeda to Remain in Japan at Least One More Year

Both Kenta Maeda and Chihiro Kaneko re-signed with their old teams, the Hiroshima Carp and the Orix Buffaloes.  I feel fairly certain we will see Maeda posted next off-season, but it looks like Kaneko has decided that his best future lies in Japan’s NPB.

The Carp gave Maeda a one-year 300 million yen deal ($2.49 million) which makes Maeda the first player in team history to make 300 million yen in a season and the youngest player in Central League history to accomplish this feat.   However, it represents a raise of just 20 million yen ($166,000) over 2014, in spite of the fact that Maeda has been one of the top starters in NPB since 2010 and the Carp set a single-season attendance record in 2014.

Given the Carp’s stinginess, I fully expect the team to post Maeda next off-season, rather than risk him becoming an unrestricted free agent.  Like Kaneko, Maeda is a small right-hander, but seems to hold more interest for MLB clubs, probably because he’s several years younger.

Kaneko has seemingly cast his lot with playing out the remaining prime years of his career in Japan.  He signed a four-year 2 billion yen deal ($16.6 million), which should keep him in Japan through his age 34 season.

It’s possible that Kaneko could opt out after a year or two and try signing with an MLB team.  However, now that he’s 31, his value to an MLB team should decline each year he remains in Japan.

I suspect that Kaneko did indeed test the waters regarding MLB interest this off-season and didn’t get enough positive feedback to give up the guarantees of remaining in Japan, where he should continue to be a major star and likely has or will get a lot of endorsement deals.  Kaneko’s two billion yen deal matches the contract the Yomiuri Giants gave Toshiya Sugiuchi three off-seasons ago and is probably the maximum deal a veteran pitcher can get from an NPB team.

Keeping an Eye on the Waiver Wire

With many teams making a lot of moves recently, the waiver wire is extremely active, with at least six players filched from other teams today.  The two who impress me the most are both named Preston — Preston Claiborne, whom the Marlins claimed from the Yankees, and Preston Guilmet, whom the Padres claimed from the Orioles.  Both Prestons will be 27 next year.

Preston Claiborne has done more in the majors.  He has a career 3.79 ERA in 62 career relief appearances with a pitching line of 71.1 IP, 75 hits, eight HRs, 24 BBs and 58 Ks.  He missed some time last year with a shoulder injury, which may have been why the Yankees were willing to drop him from the 40-man roster.

Preston Guilmet hasn’t done much at the major league level, but his minor league numbers are sensational.  Despite a 3.91 ERA in his second season in the AAA International League in 2014 and a 4.09 ERA as a starter in his first minor league season in 2009, his numbers have been eye-popping.  He has a career minor league ERA of 2.76 with a pitching line of 346 IP, 274 hits, 29 HRs, 74 BBs and 378 Ks.

The home run total is a little high, and the long ball hurt him in 2014, but his strikeout and strikeout/walks rate are terrific.  He apparently still needs to learn how to be effectively wild, meaning knowing when not to give in to hitters.

Guilmet had a 5.23 ERA in ten major league relief appearances in 2014, but he struck out more than a batter per inning, and had a 6/1 K/BB ratio.  Pitching in Petco Park, Guilmet has a great chance of establishing himself as a major league pitcher in 2014.

In waiver news closer to home, the Cubs claimed former Giants’ prospect Michael Kickham.  Kickham has great stuff, but at age 25 in 2014, he still lacks major league command.  I’d suggest that the Cubs move Kickham to the bullpen (he’s been a starter throughout his minor league career).  However, in 30 major league innings to date, mostly in relief, Kickham has had his brains beaten out.

Collective Bargaining Agreement Foo, Part II

Continuing on with my series on interesting tidbits in the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the teams and the players’ association:

The CBA specifically provides that players cannot be made to ride buses to their games if the ride would be more than 200 miles one way.  I imagine that for most rides this short, the players simply drive themselves in most instances, except perhaps in the Northeast or Southern California, where it may be simpler to travel together due to traffic congestion.

Major league players get first class airfare and a meal/tip allowance to travel to Spring Training and to their off-season home cities at the end of season.

The daily meal and tip allowance for players on the road was $92.50 per day in 2012, with cost of living increases (COLAs) every year since then.

During Spring Training, players get a weekly allowance of $291.50 (Murphy Money) plus $51.50 a week if not living in team facilities, $82.50 per day meal allowance and $40 a day room allowance, if not living in the team’s facilities and eating the meals provided by the team, if any.  Most teams provide lunches or sandwiches to training players, which don’t come out of the allowances listed above.  Again, these are 2012 rates subject to COLAs in subsequent years.  I think at this point only minor leaguers making peanuts stay in the team dormitories during Spring Training.

All major league players now get a single hotel room when traveling on the road.

All-Stars get a $1,000 stipend to be in the All-Star Game in addition to whatever bonuses their specific contracts might provide.

If a player is traded mid-season to a team more than 50 miles away from his current team, he gets $850 to $1,450 for travel expenses depending on the distance.

The Post-Season player pool breaks down as follows:

World Series Winner = 36%

World Series Loser = 24%

League Championship Series Losers = 24%

Division Series Losers = 13%

Wild-Card Series Losers = 3%

Since the total adds up to 100%, this must mean that each LCS loser gets 12% of the total, Each LDS loser gets a little over 4% and each Wild-Card loser gets 1.5%.  Clearly, it pays to win, but that is obviously the idea.  The rules are very specific about how the vote by players to split the post into shares is made, with the intent to prevent management from having much say in what the players elect to do.  The vote is cast on or before the last day of the regular season, so there is no way to reward players who perform exceptionally well in the post-season, even if they joined the team late in the year.

The only persons other than players who may receive any portion of a share from the players’ pool are two Club Certified Athletic Trainers and one strength and conditioning coach from each team.

You can find Part I of this series here.

Someone Wins Bidding on Jung-ho Kang

An as yet unannounced MLB team won the bidding on South Korean shortstop Jung-ho Kang with a bid amount just over $5 million.  Kang is said to be seeking a deal that pays him at least $5 million a year for as much as four years.

That will almost certainly not happen based on the winning bid amount.  My guess is that if Kang agrees to sign, it will be a two-year deal with $6 million or $7 million guaranteed in total, with an option for a third season at about $6 or $7 million.  I just don’t see how he gets more than an $8 million guarantee max at this bid amount.

All that said, $3 million a year is a lot more than anyone is making in the KBO, and the contract I’m proposing is also right about the high end of what Kang could get presently from an NPB team.  In short, if everyone behaves rationally Kang will be playing in MLB in 2015.

San Francisco Giants Finally Making Some Moves

After nothing happening for more than a month, the Giants are suddenly quite active.  Following the re-signing of Sergio Romo to a two-year deal a few days ago, the Giants re-signed Jake Peavy for two-years and $24 million, and are on the verge of completing a trade of two minor league pitchers (Kendry Flores and Luis Castillo) for Miami Marlins 3Bman Casey McGehee.

While neither Peavy nor McGehee gets me particularly excited, it does address a couple of the team’s needs in a way that leaves the Giants with a lot of flexibility in the next two off-seasons.  McGehee is arbitration eligible, and will get a substantial raise, but since he made only $1.1 million last year playing for the Fish, he’s still likely to be pretty affordable in 2015.

The youngsters the Giants gave up for McGehee both have fine arms, but good young arms are something the Giants still have in surplus.  McGehee came back from his 2013 season in Japan a different hitter in 2014, with much less power but a much higher batting average and on-base percentage.

I’m not overly confident that McGehee will continue to hit in 2015 the way he did last year, but like I said, he addresses a need at an affordable price.  As a 3Bman, McGehee appears to have little range, but turns the double play very well.

In another piece of news, the Dodgers today released Brian Wilson today despite the fact that they are still on the hook to him for $9.5 million in 2015.  I would certainly not be surprised if the Giants made a push to sign Wilson at the major league minimum.

Wilson had an unimpressive 4.66 ERA last year, but his main problem seemed to be command in his first full year back from his second Tommy John surgery.  Otherwise, his numbers for the Dodgers last year look a lot like his numbers for the Giants in 2011 when he had 3.11 ERA and 36 saves.

When Wilson left San Francisco there seemed to be some hard feelings on Wilson’s part, as he seemed to think the Giants owed him more than they thought they did.  Also, with the Dodgers picking up more than 90% of his 2015 salary, I would expect a lot of teams to be in on Wilson right away.  Nevertheless, a strong push by the Giants to show Wilson they’d like him back might add a very promising bullpen arm at a bargain price.

Do the Oakland A’s Think They’re Going to Get to Move to San Jose?

The A’s have been the most active all of MLB teams this off-season on the trade market, and the trades they’ve made all seem to be geared at seasons after 2015.  This has me wondering if they are convinced they’ll be leaving Oakland and moving on to financially sunnier climes at some time in the relatively near future.

Today, the A’s traded Derek Norris for a couple of very promising young pitchers who aren’t likely to help the team a whole lot in 2015.  This is on top of a whole series of moves that I won’t repeat here, all of which are more likely to help the team in 2016 and after at the expense of the 2015 season.

The A’s just barely made the play-offs in 2014 and drew 2.00 million fans, which, sad to say, was their best attendance since 2005.  The Oakland Coliseum is a toilet, and the A’s won’t draw there any year they don’t win at least 95 games for the second year in a row.

The A’s weren’t an old team in 2014, so I have to think that Billy Beane’s decision to sell off the club’s best players has something more in mind than casting off 2015 in favor of uncertain future greatness.

I’ve written this so many times, but I simply can’t understand why a deal can’t be worked out with the Giants to allow the A’s to move to downtown San Jose.  The SF Bay Area is a two-team market — it’s Philadelphia in the 1880’s or Chicago in the 1910’s, only with better future demographics.  Pay the Giants off and let them reap the rewards that will come when young fans in Contra Costa, Solano and Northern Alameda Counties all decide the Giants are worth their love rather than a team playing miles away in San Jose.

 

Collective Bargaining Agreement Foo, Part I

As a lawyer by trade, I feel a certain obligation to occasionally provide a little legal analysis, as Wendy Thurm does over at fangraphs.com.  However, since I write this blog mainly as a baseball fan, I can’t resist mixing said legal analysis with the kinds of factoids most baseball fans (including this one) love.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the current collective bargaining agreement (2012-2016) between the teams and the players.

During contract negotiations, teams can require a player to appear in person at the team’s offices only once.  If so, the team must pay the player first class airfare and hotel accommodations and the regular season meal-and-tip allowance (not surprising that a labor union would require the employer to pay for the player’s reasonable tips to service persons for the meals they eat).

The only thing surprising about this provision is that players can still be required to appear even once in person in an era when the right to have a professional agent conduct the negotiations is so entrenched.  This clearly harkens back to the days when teams made players, all of whom are relatively young, come in to negotiate with General Managers who were always older and more far experienced than the players.

The 162-game schedule must be played within 172 to 183 games unless a team starts the season with games played abroad.

The rules concerning playing split-game double-headers (fans have to pay twice) after rain-outs are quite detailed.  The Red Sox and the Cubs have special provisions that apply only to them in this regard, almost certainly because they play more day games than other teams in the current era.

The collective bargaining agreement (CBA) has provisions regarding what happens when post-season games have to be cancelled that are almost certainly the result of the 1989 Earthquake World Series, when the San Franciso Giants and the Oakland A’s had to take a week off because of the Loma Prieta Earthquake.  History does matter; and since the CBA is a mature contract (negotiated and revised many times by now) in a mature industry, the CBA is full of provisions that reflect specific situations that have occurred during the long bargaining history.

In the current CBA, exhibition games (i.e., non-league games) during the regular season are expressly banned.  This is interesting because from the advent of professional league baseball in 1871 though at least 1971, exhibition games were a given.  Until the late 1880’s, major league teams played at least as many games against non-league opponents as they did against league teams, and, although the number of exhibition games steadily decreased over time, the playing of exhibition games lasted a full 100 hundred years.  Needless to say, the exhibition games were essentially unpaid, so it was only a matter of time before the players’ union did away with them.

As of the 2013 season, players get at least one day off during Spring Training.  This is hardly surprising, as Spring Training has been starting earlier over time during the last generation.  There’s too much money in the game now not to have major league players training nearly year ’round.

For what it’s worth, Spring Training starts in mid-January in Japan’s NPB and South Korea’s KBO.  In fact, the KBO players’ association is “investigating” whether the Nexen Heroes set a mandatory work-out day on December 12, 2014 in violation of an agreement not to conduct unpaid training sessions between December 1st and January 15th.  Asian culture does not favor strong labor unions fighting hard for workers’ rights, so it’s unclear whether the KBO players’ association will, or even can, file a formal grievance if an agreement has been violated, if a formal written agreement exists.

Throughout baseball, what it comes down to is this: teams want players to train during the off-season, but they don’t want to pay them to do it, particularly given what they now pay players during the regular season.  The motivated players train themselves, the unmotivated ones do not, with relatively predictably results.

MLB players have been paid for Spring Training since about 1946, only because a lawyer named Murphy tried to form a ballplayers’ “Guild” to contest some of the grosser abuses teams foisted on players in those days.  To this day, the money that players get to attend Spring Training is still called “Murphy Money” in MLB circles.  The players also got their first pension benefits as a result of Murphy’s efforts.

I always thought that most off-days in MLB were Mondays and Thursdays simply and solely because they were determined by history to be the worst attendance days (you can make beer out of wheat, and bread out of barley, but the determination of history is that wheat makes better bread, and barley makes better beer).  It turns out that the CBA includes terms which also favor these days off.

Under the current CBA, teams can’t start an away game after 5:00 p.m. before a “home” off-day, unless the game is broadcast on national television (i.e., Sunday night Games of the Week).  Sundays are the last day when baseball games are routinely scheduled for day-time (typically around 1:00 p.m.) start times.  This also explains why almost all day-time mid-week games are played on Wednesdays (since Thursday is typically a day off).

Until night-time baseball became a regular occurrence after WWII, almost all major league games were played with late 3:00 O’clock start times on week days, 1:00 p.m. start times on Saturdays and noon start times for Sunday doubleheaders.  As time passed, Sunday has become the only day with regular mid-day start times.  However, the CBA rules designed to give players at least one full day off a week in season mean that there will almost always be at least one day-game every week.

As a final note, teams cannot start games before 12 noon more than four times a season, except in circumstances under the both the CBA rules and the economics of MLB which almost never happen.