Monday roundup: summer, Magic & baseball broadcasts

Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer. Someone should tell Mother Nature, because it’s still 81 degrees as I write this — a half hour before midnight — and we’re looking at highs in the 90s for much of the week.

Looking back, I feel like this was the summer that wasn’t. If I wasn’t working, it was either too hot or too rainy to do a lot of the things that I would’ve liked to do. And then there were the days that it was a challenge to make myself do anything. Here’s hoping that your summer was better than mine, and that fall will be better to us all.

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My local grocery store has a vending machine near the entrance with various sports cards, Pokemon cards and Yu-gi-oh cards in it. Today it had some envelopes of 10 assorted Magic: The Gathering cards for $1. I bought a couple.

I played Magic a bit in the mid-1990s. It’s a fun collectible card game that puts you in the role of a wizard dueling another wizard. You each build a deck of cards, with lands that you can tap for mana to summon creatures and cast spells, creatures that can battle your opponent or her forces, and spells that you can cast that have a variety of effects.

 Obviously, I wasn’t going to find anything especially rare or valuable in a repack package from a vending machine. But there were some “new” old cards that have some cool art, and they inspired some nostalgia. I’d like to start playing Magic again, though I’ve gotta admit that I’m a bit intimidated by the thousands of cards that have come out since I last played. And it’s not helping that I don’t know anyone who still plays.

But hey, participating locations will be holding open house events to promote the new Guilds of Ravnica during the weekend of Sept. 21-23. Amazing Heroes in Union is listed to run an open house on Saturday, Sept. 22… if I’m not working, maybe I’ll be able to go and check it out.

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Over the weekend, I read an article by Richard Dyer calling for a revolution in baseball broadcasting. While his modest proposal isn’t entirely practical, he’s not wrong. Baseball’s traditional broadcast formula, which pairs an ex-player analyst with play-by-play man and a sideline reporter, has worked for a number of years and still works for part of MLB’s audience. But it doesn’t work for everyone.

For each baseball broadcast, create a menu of commentary choices for fans. Have just one visual presentation, but allow fans to pick the style of broadcast they want to hear.

Watch your game, but pick from these broadcast menu choices:
1. Traditional play-by-play guy/color guy broadcast.

2. Sabermetric broadcast (which has already been done several times by Brian Kenny on the MLB Network). Brian Kenny, SABR President Vince Gennaro, or ESPN’s Keith Law, to name a few.

3. Comedian and humorist broadcast. Bill Murray, Jerry Seinfeld, Hank Azaria (“Brockmire”), Paul Rudd, or Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Robert Smigel). Let’s have some real laughs for once.

Dyer suggests five other menu choices which is at least five more than would be feasible. But really, why couldn’t you offer some different options for different fans? You might just manage to build baseball’s audience.

 

Snowed out

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Only one playin today is this dude!

A post shared by Kevin Plawecki (@kplawecki26) on Apr 2, 2018 at 10:30am PDT

The New York Mets were indeed snowed out on Monday, so the New York debut of Gabe Kapler’s Bullpen Follies has to wait until tonight.

Instead, I watched the Houston Astros beat the Baltimore Orioles 6-1 in their home opener. Before the game, the Astros unveiled their 2017 World Series Championship banner (with the help of a leafblower.)

I found it interesting that while the Astros have won seven division championships and three wild card berths, it looked like they only have two banners on display – their 2005 National League pennant and the 2017 World Series one. I think I like the “keeping to essentials” approach.

The Astros are a fun team to watch. Charlie Morton may be the best number five starter in baseball, but as good as their pitching is their hitters are better. At this stage, everyone knows about Jose Altuve… but George Springer is every bit as exciting. Alex Bregman impressed me with his hitting and defense and Marwin Gonzalez impressed with his versatility.

I could easily see the Astros successfully defending their World Series title.

Other odds & ends:

• The Texas Rangers selected Bartolo Colon’s contract and sent him out to start against the Oakland Athletics Monday night. Colon, the Majors’ oldest player this year, held the Athletics to one run through six innings.
• Sporting News contributor Nick Stellini wrote about the effects of expanding Major League bullpens on the entertainment (or lack thereof) that they provide
• Uni-Watch’s Phil Hecken took a look at the throwback uniforms the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays wore this weekend to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their first games.

Enjoy baseball marathon memories while you can…

On the second day of the 2018 baseball season, I got to watch the last couple of innings of the New York Yankees’ 4-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays and just enough of the San Francisco Giants’ 1-0 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers to see Chris Taylor end Johnny Cueto’s perfect game bid.

That’s probably a lot more baseball than I will find time to watch today, but it’s a lot less than fans who were attending the Philadelphia Phillies 5-4 victory over the Atlanta Braves (11 innings), the Pittsburgh Pirates 13-10 win over the Detroit Tigers (13 innings) or the Miami Marlins’ 2-1 win against the Chicago Cubs (17 innings.)

In the not-too-distant future, games like those will probably be unimaginable. Minor League Baseball is already testing a rule change that puts a runner on second base at the start of each extra inning.

Friday’s marathons are sparking more discussion about making a rule change at the Major League level. It’s coming and I hate it.

One of my favorite baseball memories is a game that didn’t want to end between the Miami Marlins and New York Mets. On June 7, 2013, young stars-to-be Jose Fernandez and Matt Harvey matched up and left with a 1-1 tie. By inning 13, journeymen Kevin Slowey and Shaun Marcum were pitching for the two clubs, respectively. They’d been scheduled to start a game that had been rained out the night before, and they took the game to the 20th. It was awesome – the only part I would’ve changed was the end result (the Mets lost.) If tinkering with the rules brought the game to an end in 11 or 12 innings, I guarantee you I wouldn’t remember it five years later.

Sports reporters and baseball managers hate extra innings, because it makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs. I think most fans like them – sure, there’s a point where you have to leave the game or turn off the tv. But that could happen anyway – the deciding game of last year’s World Series lasted over five hours and only took nine innings to play. But if you get to stay for a marathon, you get to see something special and I hate to see that get tossed away in some misguided pace-of-play initiative.

So here’s my compromise proposal: save the extra runners for the All-Star Game, and start inning 10 with the bases loaded. Regular season games that remain tied after 12 innings go in the books as a tie. Playoff games are played to their conclusion without any gimmickry.

It still sucks & fundamentally changes the way baseball is played, but it does so in a way that I can live with.

Other odds & ends:

• Ichrio Suzuki was in the lineup for the Seattle Mariners for the first time in seven seasons, which just seems right. It also gives me one more season in which there’s a Major League player older than I am, so thank you, Ichiro.
• Adrian Beltre met a giraffe that the Fort Worth Zoo named after him when he recorded his 3000th hit last year. Because that’s just fun.
• Phil Hecken examines 20 years of Arizona Diamondbacks uniforms to try to identify the team’s signature look for Uni-Watch.

Baseball is back, and that is awesome

Baseball is back.

I got to watch the Opening Day introductions of the Mets players live on SNY before it was time to start work, so I saw the new Mets trainer get cheered for not being Ray Ramirez. Jacob deGrom earned applause even without his trademarked long locks. Wilmer Flores, man of the people, got one of the biggest ovations. So did David Wright, though it was sad to realize that the cheers were for what he’d already done and not what he might still accomplish on a baseball field.

Philip Evans looked like he was trying to run Brandon Nimmo competition for having the biggest smile on Opening Day. After a too-long winter, it was great.

I had to wait for the SNY Encore to watch the game, which the Mets won 9-4.

Noah Syndergaard was impressive, striking out 10 while walking none. But I agree with him that there’s room for improvement… forget about Yadier Molina’s fluke home run, because Molina hit a pretty good pitch and it barely stayed fair. But Jose Martinez (who the hell is Jose Martinez, anyway?) looked way too comfortable.

Amed Rosario had one of the biggest hits in the game. Brandon Nimmo was on base just about every time he came up. Yoenis Cespedes was Yoenis Cespedes (in a good way.) Nobody could touch Robert Gsellman when he came in in relief.

It was awesome. The cherry on top is that Michael Conforto might be back next week, almost a month ahead of schedule. (Adrian Gonzalez, you should probably consider yourself on notice.)

I got to see a few minutes of the Yankees’ opener, though not any of the exciting bits. Giancarlo Stanton lived up to the hype — at least on Day 1. A homer in his first official Yankee at bat gave John Sterling the chance to debut his awful home run call. (Dude, you had all winter and this is what you came up with?)

Here's the audio of John Sterling's HR call for Giancarlo Stanton — in Italian. I don't even know what to say. pic.twitter.com/GY9HQ8z5My

— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) March 29, 2018

The other big star of the winter, Shohei Otani, singled in his first Major League at bat and drove in a run. He went 1-for-5 as the DH in the Los Angeles Angels’ Opening Day loss. Otani is set to make his MLB pitching debut on Easter Sunday.

Thanks to Easter and all the daytime baseball scheduled during the season’s opening week, it will be a little while before I can settle into a rhythm of watching games… but it’s nice to know that baseball and the Mets will be there for the next six months, at least.

Congress saves baseball’s billionaires

Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed a $1.3 billion omnibus spending bill into law to avoid a government shutdown. Of course, Washington being Washington, there was a bunch of unrelated stuff in the bill, including the rather perversely named “Save America’s Pastime Act.”

The law allows Minor League Baseball clubs to avoid paying players for overtime wages, requiring instead that they pay the minimum wage for a 40-hour work week during the baseball season.

Players are typically required to arrive at the ballpark around 1 p.m for a 7 p.m. game, and are there at least a half hour after they leave the field, so you can see that they’re working more than eight hours on a typical day. It’s also unlikely that they’ll have a five-day workweek. And the one day off they might get is probably spent on a bus to the next city.

Glamorous, the minor leagues are not. Deadspin has collected some accounts from players that are downright nauseating. Here’s one:

One time the clubbie bought a single rotisserie chicken for 25 guys to share. We ended up allowing each player to grab a fork and you got one stab at the chicken using only one hand. He then charged us $11 for the meal. https://t.co/RdWvtJmPo0

— Matt Taylor (@MaTaylor24) March 23, 2018

But minor league baseball players all get big signing bonuses, right?

Yeah, not so much. Sure David Peterson got almost $3 million from the New York Mets after being drafted in the first round last year. But those bonus amounts drop off fast. Connor O’Neil got $10,000 from the Mets in round seven. And it’s not uncommon to see players get $1,000 or less to sign. (Bonus info from Spotrac)

But they’ll make the big bucks once they reach the Major Leagues, right?

Sure, if they’re among the handful who do reach the Major Leagues and stick around.  See, every organization has somewhere between five and nine minor league affiliates, ranging from the almost-but-not-quite Major League level Triple-A teams to developmental teams filled with Latin American teens. So figure that each organization has around 200 minor league players under contract, all hoping to win one of 25 Major League roster spots someday. Most of them won’t get there, and many who do will stay for less than one season.

Major League Baseball is a $10 billion business, and they are the ones paying player salaries at the minor league level. Yet they spent $1.3 million to lobby politicians last year… and we see that it worked. It’s not clear which lawmakers got this measure included in the spending bill, but the Washington Post reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) supported it and that Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) were willing to “entertain” the measure.

So “America’s Pastime” didn’t exactly need saving, at least at the Major League or the affiliated Minor League levels. The Minor League players did, and this act doesn’t help them at all.

On the other hand, Baseball America reports that it will hurt most of the independent baseball leagues around the country. These leagues give players who weren’t drafted a second chance to play baseball. A handful will find their way into the affiliated Minor Leagues. Occasionally, somebody will come from independent league baseball and make it to the Major Leagues, but mostly when that happens it’s a guy who already had some Major League experience.

See, most of the independent leagues don’t even pay their players the equivalent of minimum wage for a 40-hour work week.

The Frontier League has a $75,000 salary cap per team , which is an average of $725 per player, per month. The American Association and Can-Am Leagues have similar salary caps, although their caps stretch into the low six figures. Leagues like the United States Professional Baseball League, Pacific Association and Pecos League have significantly lower salary limits.

These teams don’t have Major League Baseball’s billions behind them… but I can’t think of a reason that they should continue to exist if they are only profitable because they exploit their players by paying sub-poverty level wages.

Yeah, I’m not too excited about professional baseball this spring…