Chicago Cubs Lock Up Anthony Rizzo

The big news yesterday was the Cubs’ announcement that the team had extended 23 year old 1Bman Anthony Rizzo for seven years at $41 million.  This signing continues and extends the trend of major league teams locking up their young stars with long term contracts early in their careers.

At this point in his career, Rizzo has exactly 685 major league plate appearances, about one full season, with a career .253 batting average and .762 OPS.  At this point Rizzo is still more promise than production, even taking into account his awful debut with the Padres in 2011, when at age 21 he batted only .141 with a .523 OPS in 49 games.

By way of comparison, Starlin Castro and Paul Goldschmidt looked like seasoned veterans at the point that their respective teams extended them (Castro by the Cubs last August and Goldschmidt by the Diamondbacks this Spring) insofar as Castro and Goldschmidt had at least completed full seasons in which they had established themselves as star players before being extended.

The Cubs’ thinking is obvious — they’re sold on Rizzo and they’ve locked in for the best years of his career a still very young power hitter who is more likely than not to get much better over the next three to five seasons at a very reasonable rate.  In fact, the contract contains two club options for years eight and nine which, if exercised, would raise the contract to $70 million and would keep Rizzo a Cub through age 31.

Rizzo, on the other hand, has potentially left a lot of money on the table for the guarantee of what should be lifetime financial security at age 23.  He also gets to play his prime years in Wrigley Field, which gives him the one of the best chances to develop into a superstar slugger.

Clearly, there’s a risk here for the Cubs — as noted above, Rizzo really hasn’t done much so far in his major league career, and he strikes out a lot.  Major league pitchers will find holes in Rizzo’s swing, and we don’t yet know how good Rizzo will be at making the necessary adjustments to close or at least shrink those holes.  Even so, the upside of this signing is certainly high enough to justify the $41 million risked.

At this point, I think the only thing standing in the way of other teams signing their young stars as relatively inexperienced as Rizzo to long term deals is that some of these young stars will choose to defer the long-term deal for at least a couple of seasons in order to establish themselves as major stars and command the much larger deals that, for example, Matt Cain (five years and $112.5 million new money) and Buster Posey (nine years, $167 million) recently signed with the Giants, Felix Hernandez (five years, $135.5 million new money) signed with the Mariners and Clayton Kershaw will likely soon sign with the Dodgers.  Further, teams will likely wait longer to extend their young pitchers in order to see whether they can handle 200+ inning work loads for multiple seasons.

 

Contemporary Minor League Stars, Part II

Continuing on with my list of contemporary minor league stars, who I define as players with at least 4,000 plate appearances in the high minors (AA and AAA) on the theory that they had to be pretty good ballplayers to last that long.  Part I of this series can be found here.

3.  Scott McClain (5,160 AAA plate appearances, 800 AA and 88 MLB).  Before wrapping up his professional career at age 37 at the end of the 2009 season, McClain played a whopping 20 seasons of pro ball.  His 5,160 plate appearances at the AAA level was the most of any contemporary player I could find.

McClain hit 292 home runs in the minor leagues and another 89 in Japan’s NPB.  However, he only hit two HRs in the major leagues during cups of the coffee with the Rays in 1998, the Cubs in 2005 and the Giants in 2oo7 and 2008.

McClain played mostly 1B and 3B and didn’t become a great AAA hitter until he was age 26.  He was at least able to make some money in his professional career by playing five season in Japan’s NPB, where American players generally earn at least the major league minimum.

4.  Andy Tracy (4,519 AAA, 1,247 AA, 314 MLB).  Another great minor league thumper, Tracy has hit 296 minor league home runs but only 13 in the show.

Tracy wasn’t highly regarded as a prospect out of college (Bowling Green in Ohio) and thus played four years in college before signing with a major league franchise.  He had a huge year in the Eastern League at age 25, which got him substantial playing time the next year for the 2000 Montreal Expos.  He got into 83 games that year and hit .260 with 11 HRs and an .824 OPS, excellent for a rookie.

However, Tracy got off to a dreadful start in 2001, hitting only .109 with a .427 OPS in 38 games before being sent down the minors, except for the briefest cups of coffee in 2004, 2008 and 2009 (a total of only 33 plate appearances), for good.  Like McClain, Tracy played mostly 1B and 3B, and was a great AAA hitter for years.

Tracy’s last season was 2011, when he hit .288 with a .987 OPS in 85 games for the Reno Aces of the AAA Pacific Coast League.  Reno is a great place to hit, but Tracy’s numbers are so impressive that I have to think that it was accumulated injuries (Tracy was 37 that year) that ended his professional career.  For what it’s worth, I saw Tracy take Carlos Marmol deep in a game in New Orleans between the Zephyrs and the Iowa Cubs in May 2007.

5.  Mike Cervenak.  (3,785 AAA, 2,091 AA, 13 MLB).  One of my favorite contemporary minor league stars, I’ve written about Cervenak before here and here.  He’s playing in Taiwan this year, most likely finishing out his pro career at 36.  He’s hit 192 minor league home runs.

6.  Cody Ransom (4,455 AAA, 554 AA, 687+ MLB).  Another one of my favorite contemporary minor league stars, almost certainly because, like Cervenak, Ransom’s a former Giants prospect.  However, unlike Cervenak, who never really got a fair shot with the Gints, Ransom was once a highly regarded prospect even though he was 9th round draft pick.  The Giants like toolsy prospects, and Cody had tools.

As I’ve written before a number of times, Cody is one of those rare players who developed significantly as a professional hitter after age 27, and he got his first significant major league playing time last year at the ripe old age of 37 (282 plate appearances for the Brewers and Diamondbacks after never getting more than 86 in any of his nine prior major league part-seasons).

Cody, or “Babe” as I like to call him, started the 2013 campaign with the San Diego Padres, but they designated him for assignment after he started the year 0-for-11.  The Cubs claimed him off waivers and in three games he’s off to a 4-for-9 start with home run, two doubles and a walk.  Given his red hot start as a Cubbie, and the fact that Wrigley Field is a great place for a guy with power like Ransom, there’s a good chance he’ll stick around in Chicago for a while.  It doesn’t hurt that the 2013 Cubs look to be a bad team in need of players who can hit a little.

7.  Kevin Barker (5,140 AAA, 1,320 AA, 323 MLB).  Another minor league bomber, Barker hit 271 minor league home runs (but only six in the Show), finishing his professional career in 2011 for the Oaxaco Guerreros (“Warriors”) of the Mexican League.

Barker got into 78 games for the Brewers in 1999 and 2000 at ages 23 and 24, but he didn’t hit the second year, and got only a few cups of coffee after that.  His best minor league season was probably 2009 when he hit 22 HRs and had a .927 OPS in 101 games for the AAA Louisville Bats.

8.  Michael Restovich (3,503 AAA, 565 AA, 297 MLB).  A former Twins prospect, Restovich hit 214 minor league home runs, but only six in the majors.  He was a fine minor league hitter who just didn’t hit in the limited major league opportunities he got.  His professional career ended in 2011.

9.  Chris Richard (3,192 AAA, 1,065 AA, 1,006).  Originally drafted by the Cardinals, at age 27 Richard played 136 games for the 2001 Orioles in which he hit .265 with 15 HRs and a .770 OPS, while playing RF, CF, 1B and DH (a very unusual combination).  He didn’t hit well in 2002, however, and that was the end of his major league career except for cups of coffee with the 2003 Rockies and the 2009 Rays.  Richard slugged 198 minor league HRs in addition to his 34 major league jacks.  His professional career ended in 2010.

10.  Jeff Bailey (2,995 AAA, 1,826 AA, 159 MLB).  Yet another minor league slugger, he hit 191 minor league dingers but only six in the Show.  Bailey spent parts of six seasons with the Pawtucket Red Sox from 2004 through 2009 and got three cups of coffee from the true Red Sox the last three of those seasons.  He finished his professional career with the Rochester Red Wings in 2011.

11.  Tike Redman (3,549 AAA, 724 AA, 1,461 MLB).  Just in case you were thinking all contemporary minor league stars were sluggers, Redman was a center fielder who just wasn’t quite good enough on either side of the ball to have a long major league career.  However, the Pirates certainly gave him opportunities, as his 1,461 career major league plate appearances attest.

12.  Luis Figueroa (4,682 AAA, 1,602 AA, 16 MLB).  A shortstop who apparently hit just well enough to be a AAA starter for years and whose glove, I presume, wasn’t quite good enough to make him a major league late inning defensive replacement, Figueroa’s North American career appears to have ended last year with the Oaxaca Guerreros.  He got three major league cups of coffee in 2001, 2006, 2007, but appeared in a total of only 18 major league games.

13-16.  Joe Thurston (4,868 AAA, 633 AA, 384 MLB), Esteban German (3,720, 511, 1,170), Ray Olmedo (3,381, 734, 484) and Bobby Scales (3,342, 708, 158).  A quartet of middle infielders/jacks-of-all-trades.

Thurston got into 124 games for the 2009 Cardinals but didn’t hit.  German was a briefly hot prospect who played semi-regularly for the Royals from 2006 through 2008 but hit worse each successive year — he’s now playing in Japan.  Olmedo looks like a classic glove-tree shortstop who didn’t hit much even at AAA, but stuck around because of his defensive acrobatics.

Bobby Scales was a fine minor league hitter who played a lot of different positions but probably not well enough at 2B or 3B to keep him in the majors.  He had a .373 on-base percentage last year for Japan’s Orix Buffaloes, but the team didn’t bring him back in 2013, probably because he didn’t hit for power and his defense wasn’t very good.

I strongly suspect there are other contemporary minor league stars I have failed to identify, and I invite you to send in comments identifying them.  However, I think I’ve made a point: there are still a large number of minor league stars in today’s game playing great ball at the AAA level, who either through bad luck, late development or by virtue of being just a hair below the talent level of major leaguers have spent most of their long professional careers in the minor leagues.

Contemporary Minor League Stars, Part I

Before roughly 1955, it was possible for a fine baseball player to have a long and successful professional career even without ever playing in the major leagues or playing in the Show only very briefly.  The main reasons for this were that minor league teams had a lot more independence and thus were able to maintain loyal fan bases and hold onto star players and also the fact that the number of major league teams (16 and all east of the Mississippi River) compared to the total number of minor league teams was tiny.

In those days there were three of what we would now call AAA leagues (the Pacific Coast League (“PCL”), the American Association and the International League) and four of what we would now call AA leagues (the Texas League, the Southern League, the Eastern League and the Western League), compared to two and three such leagues today. There were also far more lower minor leagues and teams than now, with teams playing in cities with populations as small as 10,000 or 20,000.

Because the number of minor league teams relative to the number of major league teams was so much greater than today, you had to be both great and lucky to have a long-term major league career.  (You also had to be white, since black players were excluded from “organized baseball” until 1946 and instead played in their own segregated leagues).

As a result, many excellent ballplayers became minor league stars.  As a general rule, the greatest minor league stars of that era fall into these categories:

(1) spitball pitchers who weren’t in the majors in 1920 and thus were not allowed to throw one of their best pitches at the major league level (Frank “Shelly” Shellenback, Rube Robinson, Paul Wachtel and Buzz Arlett are examples — they could continue to throw the spitter in the high minor leagues in which they pitched during the 1920 season thanks to grandfathering, but could not throw it in the majors);

(2) players who hit like major leaguers but didn’t play major league defense (Ike Boone and Smead Jolley are examples — Bill James once wrote that these players had their defensive failures overstated by sportswriters of the era as a way to explain why they weren’t major league stars; however, there is enough objective evidence/stats to suggest their defense was pretty bad);

(3) players who fielded like major leagues but didn’t hit enough or hit with enough power for their positions (Joe Riggert, and Jigger Statz are examples — in fairness to Statz, his most valuable skill, on base percentage, was not as highly valued in his day as it is now; however, while Statz was fast, he was not an effective base stealer at the major league level);

(4) players who were good all-around players but a shade below major league regulars — particularly in the Pacific Coast League, these players had more value to their minor league teams playing in major league-size cities than they did to major league teams (examples are Dick Gyselman, Truck Hannah and Billy Raimondi);

(5) players who had major injuries at the wrong time in their careers (Joe Hauser and Ray Perry are great examples);

(6) players who didn’t take advantage of their major league opportunities, which were fewer than today’s minor league stars get (examples are Bunny Brief (birth name Anthony Grzeszkowski), a fantastic minor league slugger who didn’t hit in any of his three significant major league trials, Nick “Tomato Face” Cullop and Spence Harris);

(7) players who developed late, i.e., after age 27 (Ollie Carnegie and Ox Eckhardt are great examples of a common type of minor league star); and

(8) players whose careers were interrupted by World War II.

In fact, a majority of the great minor league stars of this era and most of those listed above fit into more than one of the categories I’ve identified above, along with others not mentioned.  Perhaps the one all-encompassing factor for minor league stars was simply bad luck.

For example, Buzz Arlett, probably the quintessential minor league star of this era, started his career as a pitcher whose best pitch was a spitball.  He was still establishing himself as a PCL ace in 1920, the only league in which he could throw his best pitch after that season.  He converted to a full-time hitter in 1923 at age 24, and by the time he had established his bona fides as a top PCL slugger, he was no longer young.

Further, his team, the Oakland Oaks, rightfully recognized Arlett as their franchise player and wouldn’t sell him to a major league team for less than $100,000, too high a price for a hitter his age.  When the Oaks’ price finally came down, Arlett was past 30 and had put on weight, which negatively impacted his outfield defense.  Despite a great year at the plate for the 1931 Phillies in his only major league season at age 32, this Phillies team sucked eggs, and Arlett spent almost all of his remaining professional career in Baltimore and Minneapolis, big cities with major league caliber fan bases and ballparks taylor-made for left-handed sluggers like Arlett.

Since about 1978, the Society for Advanced Baseball Research (“SABR”) has done a great job of educating today’s baseball fandom of the great minor league stars who played in this bygone era.  The purpose of this article, notwithstanding my long introduction, is to identify the minor league stars, if any, playing today.

I decided that in order to qualify as a contemporary minor league star, a player had to have at least 4,000 career minor league plate appearances in AA and AAA ball, based on the premise that you can’t have been a minor league star unless you spent a long time playing in the high minors.  Bear in mind, that given the shorter playing schedules of even the top minor league teams today, it takes nearly eight full seasons at the AA and AAA levels to meet this requirement.

[A couple of notes here: organized baseball (and thus baseball-reference.com) treat the Mexican summer league as a AAA league (the quality of play is probably closer to AA ball) but do not consider Japan's NPB (a true 4-A league) and South Korea's KBO (probably between AAA and AA in terms of level of play) as AA or AAA leagues.  I have followed the OB/baseball-reference definition since I'm interested in identifying American minor league stars, neither NPB or KBO is really a "minor league" regardless of the level of play (the countries' top players play in these leagues and are not readily available to MLB the way the best Mexican League players are), and it makes it much simpler to calculate who qualifies.]

At first, I thought that there would not be a lot of players meeting this requirement, because a number of the most well-known 4-A players since 2000 don’t qualify — specifically, Dan Johnson, Dallas McPherson, Tag Bozied, Brad Eldred and Joe Borchard don’t have enough plate appearances to qualify.  I also figured that there wouldn’t be a lot of player in today’s professional game who could play for years and years at a high level without substantial major league careers cutting into their high-minors playing time.

Turns out I was wrong.  There are a great number of contemporary players who qualify as minor league stars under my definition.  In no particular order, the following are the contemporary minor league stars I was able to find.

1.  Jack Cust (3758 AAA plate appearances, 568 AA, and 2581 MLB).  Cust is clearly the best of the contemporary minor league stars, and he has had a significant major league career.  Even so, he spent years and years in the high minors before the money-ball Oakland A’s decided his OPS was too high ignore, no matter how low his batting average or how many times he struck out, and he’s now back in the high minors since his major league run ended in 2011. Cust’s career minor league OPS of .936 and major league OPS of .813 are far and away the best of any contemporary minor league batting star.

The player Cust reminds me most of in baseball history is Ripper Collins.  Collins was a slugging 1Bman for great Cardinals and Cubs teams from 1931 through 1938, playing for three pennant winners and two World Champions and leading the NL with 35 HRs and 128 RBIs in 1934.  Ripper was a great minor league star before and after his long major league career.

Collins slugged 135 HRs in the Show and 193 HRs in the minors.  Cust has hit 105 in the Show and 225 in the minors.  Collins hit for a much higher average, but Cust has a slightly higher on-base percentage at the major league level.

This type of player was much more common in the pre-1955 era than today, in part because major league careers were more precarious than today (one bad year and the team often decided to give someone else a shot, sending the veteran back to the minors for good) and also because it was easier to accumulate plate appearances in the high minors which had schedules as long or longer than the major league schedule.  See Dale Alexander, Smead Jolley, Jack Bentley and Joe Hauser as examples.

2.  Mike Hessman (4530 and counting AAA plate appearances, 1008 AA, 250 MLB).  Mike Hessman is a great minor league slugger who has been identified as the real life “Crash” Davis because he is the active minor league home run leader by a wide margin.  Hessman has hit 369 minor league home runs (plus six in Japan and 14 in the Show) in his professional career, which likely places him in the bottom of the top ten all-time (I haven’t been able to find any information on the top Mexican League sluggers other than Hector Espino, who at 484 career HRs, is the all-time minor league HR leader).

However, Hessman has also struck out a whopping 2,168 times in his professional career.  His chronic inability to make contact has limited him to a career minor league batting average and OPS of .230 and .773 (.188 and .694 in the Show).  His ability to slug the long ball has kept him around in the high minors for years, but he’s clearly not a major league player unless a bunch of guys on the parent club get hurt.

Stay tuned for part two of this series.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen Passes

It was reported today that the woman who famously shot Phillies’ 1Bman Eddie Waitkus on June 14, 1949, inspiring Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural, which was later turned into the even more well known 1984 movie starring Robert Redford, has died.  Her name was Ruth Ann Steinhagen.

Waitkus had had an eventful life before he met Steinhagen.  His professional baseball career started in 1938 at age 19, when he was nicknamed “the natural” because of his abilities.  He reached the major leagues in 1941 but then lost four years of this career to the Second World, where he saw heavy fighting in the Philippines and was awarded with four Bronze Stars.

Waitkus returned to baseball in 1946 at age 26 and quickly became a star for the Chicago Cubs, being named to the NL All Star team in 1948.  Waitkus was bright, fluent in four languages in addition to English (Lithuanian, German, Polish and French), and outgoing, and he quickly became a media darling in Chicago.

As a result, Waitkus had many female fans, including Steinhagen, who was still a teenager.  She turned her bedroom in her parents’ house into a shrine for Waitkus, sleeping with a photo of Waitkus under her pillow and even setting an empty place at the family dinner table for him.

Obsessive compulsive disorder and stalking were unknown in 1948, and Steinhagen’s family apparently didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, or at least did not seek treatment for Ruth Ann.

What apparently set her over the edge was Waitkus’ trade (along with Hank Borowy, the pitcher whose acquisition from the Yankees in mid-1945 brought the Cubs their last pennant, for pitchers Monk Dubiel and Dutch Leonard) after the 1948 season.  The trade was almost certainly unpopular with Cubs fans, not least of whom was Steinhagen.  Apparently, she somehow blamed Waitkus for deserting her.

When Waitkus returned to Chicago to play for the Phillies against the Cubs in June of 1949, Steinhagen, who was now 19, rented a room in the same hotel and sent a cryptic note to Waitkus inviting him to her room to discuss something important.  He went to her room, possibly expecting a little action from a young Baseball Annie.  Instead, when he came into the room and sat down, she pulled a rifle out of the closet and shot him in the chest.

As he lay bleeding on the floor, she knelt down beside him and held his hand on her lap until someone roused by the gunshot came to her room.  Steinhagen was deemed insane by a court and spent three years in a mental institution.

The bullet just missed Waitkus’ heart, and he nearly died on the operating table before it was successfully removed.  He missed the rest of the 1949 season, but he was nevertheless again selected to the National League All-Star team that year.  By 1950, he had recovered fully physically, and in one of the best seasons of his major league career, he helped lead the Whiz Kids to their famous 1950 pennant.

The shooting was a huge and lurid media sensation of its day, and Waitkus did not contest Steinhagen’s release from the nut house in 1952, perhaps to avoid the media circus another court case would have created.

Waitkus played in the majors until 1955.  However, he suffered post-traumatic stress from the shooting (and quite possibly his long WWII service) which affected his later career and his marriage.  He ultimately died in 1972 at the relatively young age of 53 due to esophageal cancer.

Meanwhile, after release Steinhagen was successfully able to fade into obscurity.  She apparently spent much of later life living with her sister in Chicago only a few miles from where she shot Waitkus and spent as much as 35 years performing office work.  In fact, her decent into obscurity was so complete that she actually died in late December of last year, and her death is only now being reported.

The Greatest Baseball Mascot Ever

The Chicago Cubs are thinking about adding a mascot in order to make the team more “kid-friendly” in connection with the team’s five-year $300 million plan to renovate Wrigley Field.  The Cubbies are currently one of only four major league teams (the others are the Angels, Dodgers and Yankees, according to wikipedia — at least three teams have multiple mascots, not counting costumed idiots who run 7th inning stretch races — the Reds apparently lead the majors with four different mascots) without a mascot.

It’s a crying shame.  Mascots are a blight on the game, at least in the mind of this hard-core baseball fan.  When I shell out the bucks to see a major league baseball game, I come to see the action on the field, not to watch some costumed jack-ass parade around in the stands.  Mascots have always struck me as bush league entertainment which no major league team should dignify.

At least the Giants’ current mascot Lou Seal (some one dressed up in a fluffy seal costume at AT&T Park) largely stays out of the stands and instead rides around in a golf cart on the outfield and foul territory grass firing souvenir T-shirts and the like into the stands using an air cannon during the half innings.  At least a few lucky fans get something out of this silliness.

It could be a lot worse.  I went to a Phillies’ game at the Vet in 1991, and I can’t tell you how irritating I found the Phanatic.  Granted, we had paid for upper deck seats and then in the second or third inning talked our way into the lower deck box seats with a facile lie about how we joining our family but had lost our ticket stubs (we were college age at the time and I still locked like a high school student).  Now that ticket prices are really high, you can’t get away with that stuff anymore.

Even so, once in the lower deck, the Phanatic briefly blocked my view of the game in progress more than once with his “antics.”  Each time, I naturally enough shouted out, “Get the f@#$ out of the way — I’m trying to watch major league baseball!”  Even then I had a rapier-like wit…

It pains me to acknowledge that in three years of this blog, I have never once mentioned the greatest of all major league mascots by a wide margin — the San Francisco Giants’ Crazy Crab.

The Crazy Crab lasted only one season — 1984 — but he was worth his weight in, well, dungeness crab meat.  He would come out during the 7th inning stretch to his theme song, “Love That Crazy Crab” and the fans would go wild.  Everyone in the stadium would boo for the duration of the time that the Crazy Crab was on the field and probably half (including me once I saw others doing it) would try to throw garbage at the Crab or at least onto the field.

You have to understand that in 1984 the Giants were terrible (they finished 66-96, the worst record in MLB), and they played in a horrible stadium (Candlestick Park was one of the first 1960′s era multi-use poured concrete stadia — they hadn’t ironed out the kinks of what was a bad idea to begin with: the fans were miles away from the foul lines in order to make space for football games, and the winds at Candlestick Point which picked up around 3:00 p.m. and continued throughout the night were brutally cold).  After Opening Day that year, only serious baseball fans came out to watch the Giants and their opponents play, and we had little use for the Crazy Crab.

Even so, as someone who turned 16 that summer, I loved the Crazy Crab if only because it was so much fun to hate something that intently.  It was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to the “Two-Minute Hate” described in George Orwell’s 1984, except that the animosity towards the Crazy Crab was probably more sincere.  I have little doubt that if the 11,000 or so of those of us in attendance had had the opportunity to physically confront the Crazy Crab en masse, we’d have torn the poor SOB inside the crab suit to shreds.

The Giants’ website at the link above says that the Crazy Crab was always intended to be an “anti-mascot.”  I don’t remember it that way.  At first, the Giants’ organization seemed serious about the Crazy Crab as a mascot and only started playing up the Crazy Crab as a joke once the fans responded with utter ridicule.

I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports pages religiously in those days, and I don’t recall any claim that the Crab was presented as anything but legitimate at the outset.  Again, you have to remember that 1984 was the acme of the initial mascot craze.  The San Diego Chicken was introduced in 1977, was a huge hit, the Phillie Phanatic was introduced in 1978, was a huge hit, and then every team had to have a mascot.  The Giants were one of the last hold-outs, but they had to try something since the product they were putting on the field most seasons in the early 1980′s was poor.

At any rate, the Crazy Crab made the fans completely unruly, and the players on the field started getting into the act.  According to the Giants’ website, the poor SOB inside the crab suit was eventually tackled by a San Diego Padres player and later sued the Giants for an allegedly resulting back injury.  I guess that’s why the team generally keeps Lou Seal inside the golf cart today.

My Heart Bleeds for Mike Trout

With Spring Training still in the early stages, there isn’t much substantive, or at least particularly interesting, news about MLB today.  For example, the second story on both espn.com and sportsillustrated.com is Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman breaking his leg while sky-diving — he isn’t dead or even mentally incapacitated, so who really cares?

For this reason, I suspect, there has been considerable discussion about the fact that the Angels renewed Mike Trout‘s contract for 2013 for $510,000, only $20,000 above the league minimum, in spite of the phenomenal rookie year Trout had.

Fangraphs’ Dave Cameron wrote an article about the Trout contract and the MLB salary scale in general, which contains some good points, as Cameron’s stuff usually does, but which left me feeling a need to comment.

Cameron says that Trout’s second year contract is the norm under the system in place, as set forth by the collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) between the players’ union and the owners, and that this system is good for competitive balance because it helps the low revenue teams compete.

Cameron puts this system at the feet of “the union,” which is only half true.  It takes two to bargain a CBA, and inexperienced players’ salaries are low because the owners have fought like hell to keep them low.

In fact, the reason inexperienced players’ salaries are low is because the owners have a strong argument to keep them low: the fact that most major league players need a long minor league apprenticeship before they are ready to play in the majors.

Minor league systems are almost always big money losers for the parent teams, even if a few minor league franchises are profitable (the old Louisville Redbirds spring to mind — the Bats have done well too playing in a smaller stadium).  As such, major teams have successfully argued that teams should be able to keep player salaries low for the first few years to recoup their investments.

Cameron notes that other unionized sports have adopted similar pay scales to MLB.  Well, there are reasons for that.  The Baseball Players’ Association was the first real union in professional sports; as such, its CBAs constituted a starting place for negotiations in other professional sports.

Hockey, like MLB, has an extensive minor league system.  The NBA does not, and salaries for second and third year players are much higher than in baseball.  The NFL has the weakest players’ union, plus the fact that because of all the injuries, many marginal players have short NFL careers — both explain why inexperienced players (with the extremely notable exception of high draft picks) have low salaries in the NFL.

Further, the idea that low early career salaries are “unfair” to rookie stars like Mike Trout doesn’t withstand a lot of scrutiny.  Most of the best and most valuable players have careers long enough to reach arbitration and then free agency, at which point they get paid and then some.  Most of the players who don’t last long enough to reach arbitration or free agency either aren’t that good or get hurt before they reach their full potential.  [Don't suggest Mark Prior, who blew out his arm before he could get the big arbitation/free agent bucks -- he signed a record-setting contract as an amateur draftee out of college.]

There are exceptions, of course, but really not that many when you consider the whole of major league playerdom.  Cameron writes, “I sympathize with players in Trout’s situation. If his career goes the way of Grady Sizemore, he may never land the massive paycheck that his talent is worth.”  This comment only proves the point that Trout will eventually get paid unless he suffers an extremely severe and extremely rare injury.

Despite all the injuries, Grady Sizemore has been paid $26.37 million over the last five seasons, according to baseball reference.  This means that, unless there has been or is in the future some serious profligacy, neither Grady nor his immediate descendants will ever go to bed hungry.

All this being said, the Angels really did renew Mike Trout’s contract for too little.  The Angels apparently didn’t want to disrupt their “salary scale” for young players, which is why they gave Trout only a $20,000 raise.  As if the Angels had a young player like Mike Trout come along every year or three.

What the Angels need to be thinking about is how they are going to keep Trout around when he becomes a free agent five years from now.  If they low-ball Trout now, he’s going to want market rates, which the Angels can well afford to pay and have indeed paid as recently as Albert Pujols and C. J. Wilson.  Or even worse, Trout will want to test the free agent market to see what’s really out there for him.

By way of comparison, the Giants are relatively generous with their franchise players.  After Buster Posey won the 2010 rookie of the year award (and the World Series), the Giants bumped his 2011 salary to $575,000, still well within the pre-arbitration “salary range”, but more than most teams would give a second year player.  The Giants recognized that Posey was worth it and that it would help the team in contract negotiations in later years.

When Posey eventually reaches free agency, he is going to remember that the Giants have always been generous with him.  Don’t think this isn’t important — Posey is from Georgia and played his college ball in North Florida, and there are a lot of wealthy East Coast teams that could pay him top dollar while allowing him to play his home games closer to home region.

Meanwhile, the Angels saved $50,000 or $75,000 they don’t really need.  When Trout, who is a South Jersey boy, approaches free agency, he’s going to be lot more receptive to the kinds of offers the Yankees, Mets and Phillies can make him because the Angels low-balled him today.

It’s no knock on Buster Posey to say that Mike Trout is worth as much or more to the Angels in 2013 than Posey was to the Giants in 2011.  Trout is that young and that good.

Never Say Die

In Spring Time hope springs eternal.  Even the most aged or down-and-out ballplayers believe they have at least one last hurrah left in them.

The Reds have just signed perennial comeback kid Mark Prior to a minor league deal.  Since blowing his arm out in 2006, Prior has thrown a total of 49 professional innings over the last three seasons, after not pitching at all from 2007 through 2009.

Although Prior remains a real long-shot, his numbers at AAA Pawtucket last season at least create some room for hope.  In 25 innings pitched, Prior had a 3.96 ERA with a pitching line of only 15 hits, but four HRs and 23 walks, allowed and 38 Ks.  He’s still hard to hit, but his command is still long departed.

Vladimir Guerrero is looking for  a minor league deal this Spring.  He last played in the majors in 2011, but he’s still only 38 years old this year, assuming that 1975 is his real birth year (Guerrero admitted a couple of years back that he was older than he claimed when he originally signed with the Montreal Expos).

Guerrero played 12 minor league games for the Blue Jays last year, but asked for and received his release when the Jays did not immediately promote him to the majors.  His unwillingness to stick it out longer in the minors might impact teams’ willingness to sign him this Spring, since the odds of him getting a major league job out of Spring Training seem slim.

Guerrero could still hit when he last played in the majors (between .290 and .300 each of his last three seasons), but his on-base percentages declined precipitously, and his power numbers were also on the wain.  Even so, he could help a team in need of a right-handed hitter with pop, particularly if some one on the major league roster gets hurt.

Meanwhile, the Royals are still hoping to squeeze another year out of the soon to be 39 year old Miguel Tejada.  They signed him in late December to a minor league deal that promises him $1.1 million if he makes the major league club.

Tejada hasn’t played in the majors since 2011 and had a terrible .596 OPS in 343 plate appearances for the Giants that year.  Losing Buster Posey for most of the season was the biggest reason the Giants didn’t make the post-season in 2011, but giving Tejada so many plate appearances certainly didn’t help.

Tejada is hitting .267 with a .600 OPS in seven games so far this Spring Training.

Finally, Dontrelle Willis‘s most recent comeback, this time with the Cubs, hit a snag in his very first Spring Training game earlier this week.  Only seven pitches in, Willis came out of the game with “shoulder tightness” — apparently meaning that his shoulder hurt.

Willis has said the injury is minor, and he is reportedly resumed his throwing schedule in the Cubs’ minor league camp.  Willis wasn’t expected to make the Cubs’ major league roster this Spring, but it’s still disappointing that he couldn’t make it through one outing without hurting himself.

The Best Hitting Pitchers in MLB Baseball 2013

The most popular posts I’ve written for this blog identify the best hitting pitchers currently active in major league baseball.  Given the level of interest, I have decided to update this piece annually, starting with this 2013 update.

As I’m sure you know, modern pitchers as a group can’t hit a lick.  The rise of the designated hitter, not only in the American League, but also it’s wide-spread use in the minors and in the college game is perhaps the biggest factor for the demise of pitchers who can hit, but it’s hardly the only one.

Pitchers simply don’t get as many opportunities to hit today because of the steady trend of using more and more relievers throwing more and more innings, which means starting pitchers get fewer opportunities to hit, and there are more opportunities for professional hitters to be used as pinch hitters.

Also, no matter what the old-timers tend to say, the level of major league play has gradually and steadily improved since the professional game started in the 1870′s, which means that pitchers, who make the major leagues solely based on their ability to pitch (which has been the norm since at least the early 1880′s and probably much earlier) have undergone a slow but steady decline as hitters by virtue of the relative improvement of pitchers (as pitchers), fielders and professional hitters, even though most major league pitchers were great hitters in high school.

Nevertheless, there are always a few pitchers in any era who can hit.  This post ranks current pitchers with at least 100 career major league at-bats in order to weed out the pitchers who just haven’t had enough at-bats for their career hitting stats to mean anything one way or another.  I may have missed a couple of qualifiers, but not more than a couple.

By today’s standards, a good-hitting pitcher is any pitcher with a career batting average above .167 or a career OPS over .400.  That’s really pretty terrible as hitters go, and it shows just how hard it is even for professional athletes who have played baseball all their lives to hit major league pitching if the players have not been selected for the major leagues based their ability to hit.

A few pitchers can swing the stick a little bit, though.  Here is my non-scientific list of the best hitting pitchers currently playing as we approach the start of the 2013 season:

1.  Micah Owings.  Micah Owings remains far and away the best hitting pitcher in baseball (at least if you exclude Rick Ankiel, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2004).  Micah’s career numbers have slipped a bit the last two season, likely due both to the law of averages and the facts that he isn’t a starter any more and didn’t pitch much last year due to an elbow injury.  His career batting average is currently .283 with an .813 OPS in 205 career ABs.

As I’ve written previously, it’s clear the Arizona Diamondbacks made a terrible mistake when, after drafting Owings in the 3rd Round of the 2005 Draft, they decided to develop him solely as a pitcher.

Owings is now 30 years old, and it’s doubtful he’ll ever develop into a good major league pitcher.  In fact, Owings just signed a minor league contract with the Washington Nationals with an invitation to 2013 Spring Training — the Nats signed Owings as a 1Bman, which strongly suggests they will try to develop him as a hitter.

Owings is getting old to switch positions, and it isn’t clear if he could still pitch if he and the Nats wanted him to.  He had arthroscopic elbow surgery last July and hasn’t pitched since last April.  Nonetheless, I still have a hope he’ll become the next Brooks Kieschnick, pitching, pinch-hitting and occasionally playing the field, depending on his team’s needs at the moment.

2.  Dontrelle Willis.  One of the things I always loved about Dontrelle was his ability to hit.  While he hasn’t played in the majors since 2011, he recently signed a minor league deal with the Cubs with an invitation to 2013 Spring Training.  In 2011 his last year of play, Willis batted .387 (12 for 31) with a 1.032 OPS to bring his career numbers up to .244 with a .665 OPS, respectively.

Dontrelle is now 31 years old, so it’s probably too late for him to make the switch to a position.  Too bad — as a 6’4″ lefty, he probably could have been major league 1Bman or corner outfielder if he’d been developed as a hitter.

3.  Mike Leake.  Leake remains the top young hitting pitcher in MLB.  He hit .295 with a .749 OPS last year, and despite his 2011 sophomore slump year, he still has a career batting average of .274 with a .656 OPS in 164 major league at-bats.  Leake walked only once last season, dropping his career on-base percentage to .308, but he hit for power for the first time in his career with two taters and five extra base hits.

I wonder what is more discouraging to a pitcher: walking the opposing pitcher or giving up an extra base hit.  Even though the latter would seem to have more value, the pitcher on the hill can better rationalize it: the batter got lucky, he’s a good-hitting pitcher, etc.  Everyone on defense slumps their shoulders when the pitcher walks his doppelganger.

4.  Carlos Zambrano.  In 2012 Big Z had his worst season swinging the ash since his 2002 rookie season, hitting only .176 with a .441 OPS.  Even so, he still has a career .238 batting average with a .636 OPS.

Carlos is an all-or-nothing hitter.  He has only ten walks to go with 240 strikeouts in 693 major league at-bats, but he has hit an impressive 24 HRs and 53 extra base hits.  He’s scored 75 runs and driven in another 71 in his career.  That’s better than a lot of middle infielders given the same number of at-bats.

5.  C. C. Sabathia.  He’s one of the most interesting players on this list.  Unlike all the other pitchers on this list, he’s only played one-half of one season in the National League.  As an American League hurler, he only gets to hit about two games a year, yet hit he does.  Despite going 0 for 5 at the plate in 2012, he’s still hitting .238 with a .598 OPS in 105 career at-bats.

Sabathia is tall and heavy set, which doesn’t sound like a recipe for a good-hitting pitcher, but obviously he’s just a baseball player pure and simple.  One wonders what kind of numbers he would put up playing three or four full seasons in a row in the NL.

6.  Yovani Gallardo.  The still young Brewers ace is another pitcher with pop at the plate.  Despite his worst season with the bat as a regular starting pitcher, Yovani still has a career batting average of .2o7 with a .599 OPS, thanks to ten HRs and 27 extra base hits in 305 career at-bats.

7.  Daniel Hudson.  After a break-out season in 2011 at age 24, Hudson blew out his elbow tendon after ten starts (nine for Arizona, one for AAA Reno) before having Tommy John surgery in early July.  Presumably, he won’t be back in action until after the 2013 All-Star Break.  At any rate, Hudson has a .229 batting average and a .573 OPS in 105 major league at-bats to date.

8.  Dan Haren.   Haren has a .223 lifetime batting average and .572 OPS.  In 2010, his last season in the NL, he hit .364 (20 for 55) with a .902 OPS. He signed with the Washington Nationals this off-season, so he’ll get the opportunity to hit regularly again in 2013.

Haren and Sabathia are the best arguments against the designated hitter.

9.  Adam Wainwright.  Wainwright’s hitting has dropped off his last two seasons (2010 and 2012), but he still has a career .204 batting average and .545 OPS in 367 major league at-bats.

Honorable Mention.  Livan Hernandez (career .221 batting average, .526 OPS, but his career might be over — he’d still like to pitch, but hasn’t been offered even a minor league contract as of early February 2013); Darren Oliver (.221, .545 — the latest word is he’ll be back with the Blue Jays in 2013, but he hasn’t had a plate appearance since 2006); Chris Narveson (.227, .522 — he missed most of 2012 to rotator cuff surgery, but the Brewers have signed him to a major league contract for 2013); Jason Marquis (.202, .508 — he hit well last year and he’s returning to the Padres for 2013); Manny Parra (.183, .500 — he signed with the Reds for 2013); Javier Vasquez (.204, .478 — rumor has it he’s interested in resuming his major league pitching career after a strong season in the Puerto Rican Winter League); Jordan Zimmerman (.190, .463); and Edwin Jackson (.200, .462).  As you can see, the best hitting pitchers get bad pretty fast.

Young Hitting Pitcher to Watch.  Stephen Strasburg.  He hit .277 (13 for 47) in 2012 with a .759 OPS, highest of any pitcher with at least 50 plate appearances, just beating out Mike Leake.  Strasburg’s career numbers are only .192 and .521, so it has yet to be determined whether he’s closer to 2012′s best hitting pitcher or the guy who started his career a pathetic-even-for-a-pitcher 1 for 26.

Carlos Zambrano started his career 1 for 32, before developing into a good-hitting pitcher, so I tend to think Strasburg will continue to hit well for a pitcher in future years.  One thing is for certain, however: with Strasburg, Haren, Zimmerman and possibly Micah Owings, the Nationals should have the best hitting pitching in MLB in 2013.

Elijah Dukes Arrested on Warrant for Eating Bag of Marijuana

Remember Elijah Dukes?  He was once a highly regarded prospect for the Tampa Bay Rays and the Washington Nationals who apparently washed out of professional baseball in 2010 because of his problems off the field and, perhaps, his conduct in the locker room.

The Rays drafted Dukes in the 3rd round of the 2002 Draft.  In 2007 at age 23, he got 220 plate appearances for the Rays, and while he hit only .190, he also slugged ten home runs.

2007 was also eventful for Dukes off the playing field.  In May, his wife sought a restraining order against him for threatening her life and their children.  In June, it was reported that Dukes had impregnated a 17 year old foster child of one of his relatives and threw a bottle of Gatorade at the girl when she informed him of the pregnancy.  Luckily for Dukes, the sex was consensual and the age of consent in Florida is below 18 years of age.

The Rays decided that Dukes needed a change of scenery and traded him to Nats for a Glenn Gibson, a minor league pitcher who never pitched higher than the A+ level.  The Nats hired a former police officer as a “Special Assistant: Player Concerns” whose job was to tail Dukes and keep him out of trouble.

In 2008, at age 24, Dukes rewarded the Nats with a season in which he hit .264 with a terrific .864 OPS in 81 games.  At that point he looked like a future star.

However, Dukes hit only .250 with a .729 OPS in 2009.  Still, he was only 25 years old, and his future looked bright.

While Dukes had apparently stayed out of trouble off the field after being acquired by the Nationals, the team didn’t consider him a positive influence in the clubhouse.  On March 17, 2010, in the middle of Spring Training, the Nationals gave Dukes his unconditional release.

While Nats’ General Manager Mike Rizzo said that the decision was performance-based (Dukes was 3 for 20 at the plate that Spring), Rizzo was also quoted as saying, “The clubhouse will be more united.  We’ll have a better feel around the ballclub. We’ll gain just by that alone.”  Rizzo also said the Nats would be a “more cohesive group” without Dukes.

Strangely, no other major league franchise would give Dukes another chance, in spite of his age and obvious ability as a hitter.  He reportedly reached a deal to play in the Mexican League, but then backed out after not showing up for the reporting date.

In early July 2010, he signed with the Newark Bears of the Independent A Atlantic League.  In 116 plate appearances over 28 games, Dukes hit .366 with a 1.007 OPS, but no major league organization was willing to give him another chance.

Dukes was arrested in November 2010 for failing to pay child support, and in March 2011, he was arrested again for assaulting a pregnant ex-girlfriend.  That was the end of any future baseball career for Dukes.

In February 2012, Dukes was arrested for drug possession and destruction of evidence when he tried to eat a bag of marijuana after the cops pulled him over.  He apparently failed to appear in court, because he was arrested yesterday on that warrant and also for driving on a suspended license.

In similar news, another of my all-time favorite clubhouse cancers, Milton Bradley, is facing the possibility of 13 years in prison for multiple alleged assaults against his estranged wife.  In one incident in November 2012, he is accused of pushing his wife up against a wall and choking her after she allegedly requested that he stop smoking marijuana in front of their children.  You can’t make this stuff up.

While Bradley got far more chances than Dukes got, and certainly far more than Bradley deserved in spite of his enormous batting talent, this blog is certainly the poorer for the end of Bradley’s professional baseball career in 2011.  He always gave me plenty to write about each time a team that should have known better acquired him.

Stan Musial Passes

I don’t really have much to say about the death of Stan Musial at age 92, but I will pass on one anecdote from Jim Brosnan’s 1960 classic The Long Season.

Brosnan wrote that most major league hitters with whom he played tended to ask what they were doing wrong as hitters when they went into slumps.  However, when Brosnan was traded from the Cubs to the Cardinals, the first thing that Musial wanted to know from Brosnan was how the Cubs’ pitchers were pitching to Musial.  In Brosnan’s opinion, this was one of the reasons Musial was the only $100,000 salaried player in the National League at the time.

Thanks to video tape and books like Brosnan’s, major league hitters are more aware today how pitchers are trying to exploit their weaknesses as hitters.  Even so, media reports on hitters trying to break out of slumps still focus on what the hitters are doing in terms of their stances, where they stand in the batters’ box, their timing mechanisms, etc. to get their strokes back.

Part of this is likely comes from the fact that hitters don’t want to tell pitchers through the media that they have figured out what pitchers are doing to get them out and have adjusted accordingly.  However, for many young hitters in particular, there is probably still a tendency to look at slumps as something the hitter is doing wrong instead of how the pitchers, with the help of advance scouts, are working to set up and exploit that hitter’s weaknesses.  The sophomore slump that so many young hitters hit in their second or third professional season is just as real today as it’s ever been.