Category: History

Notes: Jackie Robinson, Pirates debt, MLB broadcasts

A response to the federal government trying to erase Jackie Robinson, another responding to claim the Pirates are in debt, actually, and Rob Manfred’s latest on MLB’s broadcast plans.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

I had no inside knowledge that Steven Goldman would have a reaction to the Department of Defense briefly taking down Jackie Robinson’s military history to relabel it as “DEI,” but I knew he was good for it, and that it would appear if I would only be patient.

The reward for that patience was significant: Goldman wrote a wonderful rebuttal, explanation, whatever you want to call it to what went into the decision to remove Robinson, the history behind what made his being there in the first place such a significant deal, and some strong jabs at Thomas Jefferson’s trying-to-have-it-both-ways routine, for good measure.

Continue reading “Notes: Jackie Robinson, Pirates debt, MLB broadcasts”

In case it wasn’t obvious, Tony Clark is against a salary cap

It’s still good to hear it said, given everything else backwards happening in the world.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

You knew this to be true without the executive director of the MLB Players Association coming out and saying it, but just in case you needed the reassurance, here it is. Tony Clark has now said, out loud, that a salary cap “is not necessary,” despite MLB owners anonymously grumbling or outright saying the opposite to the press.

That’s per the Baltimore Banner, which has even more of a reason to cover this story than most, given Orioles’ owner David Rubenstein’s coming out in favor of a cap at the World Economic Forum in Davos, since MLB owners possess the kind of wealth that gets you interviewed while at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Continue reading “In case it wasn’t obvious, Tony Clark is against a salary cap”

Notes: Fay Vincent, Sacramento A’s, SABR Awards

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Fay Vincent, former Major League Baseball commissioner, passed away on Saturday at the age of 86. He had been receiving treatment for bladder cancer, according to ESPN, but complications in that treatment led to his death. MLB released a statement announcing Vincent’s passing on Sunday.

Vincent took over as MLB commissioner for Bart Giamatti in 1989, following his sudden death just five months into his tenure. Vincent has had his name come up in this digital pages on more than one occasion, as he was the commissioner during the 1990 lockout, and the stepping stone then-owner Bud Selig used to grab the commissionership for himself.

Continue reading “Notes: Fay Vincent, Sacramento A’s, SABR Awards”

Dick Moss, MLBPA legend, passes away at 93

One of the union pillars that helped banish MLB’s reserve clause passed away over the weekend.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

The names you so often hear associated with the end of Major League Baseball’s reserve clause are players Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, as well as MLB Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, for encouraging this challenge to be made in the first place. Those players didn’t argue their own case in front of an arbitrator, however: that job went to Dick Moss, who had been hired by Miller as the union’s general counsel in 1967, and won his most famous and vital case eight years later, representing Messersmith and McNally, but in reality, far more players than just those two. His is a name worth remembering, too.

Continue reading “Dick Moss, MLBPA legend, passes away at 93”

Rest in peace, Willie Mays

The baseball world says goodbye to a giant.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

There have been innumerable great baseball players in the history of the sport, in Major League Baseball and otherwise. Those you could describe as singular talents, however, makes for a much shorter list. The ones for which there has really just been the one of them, ever — even someone as incredible as Mickey Mantle has their future comparison point in Mike Trout.

Willie Mays was one such player, as we’re all being reminded of on Wednesday morning, after learning that the 93-year-old legend passed away peacefully on Tuesday. Maybe not the greatest at any one thing in history, except for being the level of great he was at as many things as he was. Consider that, as incredible as, say, Mookie Betts has been in his career thus far, as a threat at the plate and on the bases and in the field, he’s just nowhere near what Mays accomplished. Betts has a career OPS+ of 139, which is excellent, yes, but Mays finished at 155 even after his down years, of which there weren’t many. Really, just the one, at age 42 in 1973, after a career that kicked off as a 17-year-old in 1948. Mays had nine top-five MVP finishes, received MVP votes in 15 of his 23 seasons, led the league in homers as many times as he did steals — four a piece — and, oh, was a great defender, too. He lost a full year and most of another to military service in Korea, too, as the draft was still around when Mays was playing ball.

Continue reading “Rest in peace, Willie Mays”

Jerry Reinsdorf cares about winning, not money, says Jerry Reinsdorf

lol

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Jerry Reinsdorf purchased the White Sox in 1981. From 1981 through 2022, the White Sox have posted a record of 3,313 wins and 3,262 losses, for a win percentage of .504. They’ve made the postseason just seven times in that stretch, and in all but one of those appearances, they lost in the first round, whether said first round was an ALCS, ALDS, or Wild Card round. In 2005, they won the World Series, the franchise’s first even appearance in the Fall Classic since 1959, and the organization’s first championship since 1917 — two years before the Black Sox betting scandal.

Payroll data isn’t widely available or consistent past a certain point, but we can pretty easily look back to at least 2000 thanks to Cot’s Contracts, and get a look at where Reinsdorf’s White Sox tend to rank in that arena in the aftermath of two waves of expansion as well as the 1994 strike and its fallout, which eventually included a luxury tax and revenue-sharing. The number in parentheses is the team’s rank in a given measurement:

Continue reading “Jerry Reinsdorf cares about winning, not money, says Jerry Reinsdorf”

Dusty Baker, James Click, and Jim Crane’s cruel efficiency

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Jeff Luhnow might not be with the Astros any longer, and hasn’t been for a few years, but the culture he fostered certainly still exists in some form. No, no, I’m not talking about the cheating scandal — you can put down those pitchforks and alt accounts, Astros fans — but instead the central conceit of the Luhnow-era team: everyone and everything is a tool to be used until it can be thrown away. The fast-acting poison that is McKinsey’s obsession with efficiency and dehumanization has not vanished from Houston, just because the man who introduced it has.

Continue reading “Dusty Baker, James Click, and Jim Crane’s cruel efficiency”

Mailbag: Separate bargaining units, salary floor

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Mailbag time. If you have a mailbag question you’d like to see answered, either respond to this newsletter email, or hit me up on @Marc_Normandin on Twitter. Let’s get to it.

Continue reading “Mailbag: Separate bargaining units, salary floor”

Why the MLBPA hadn’t already organized minor leaguers

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

You aren’t about to hear me say that the Major League Baseball Players Association has always had the needs of minor-league players in mind during their negotiations, but there is at least one persistent criticism of the union’s handling of minor leaguers that doesn’t carry much weight, and that’s the fact that they weren’t already part of the MLBPA. There have been reasons for things being split the way they are for decades — for the entire history of the Players Association as we know it today — and it’s only just recently that the environment has changed in a way where the PA could more formally lend assistance to the organization of minor-league players.

Back in 2012, Slate spoke to the PA’s first executive director, Marvin Miller, as well as Gene Orza, who spent 26 years working with the PA after being brought on as an associate general counsel, about the decision to not include minor-league players in the organizing of the MLBPA:

Continue reading “Why the MLBPA hadn’t already organized minor leaguers”

NBA, NBPA agree to pension substitute for aging pension-less ABA players

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

​There is good news for former American Basketball Association players who didn’t play long enough to qualify for an NBA pension. Thanks to the work of the Dropping Dimes Foundation, 115 former players will receive a portion of $24.5 million, as agreed to by the NBA’s board of governors. The payments will come from both the NBA and from the National Basketball Players Association, and while it isn’t a pension, it still will serve somewhat like one.

Continue reading “NBA, NBPA agree to pension substitute for aging pension-less ABA players”