Category: MLB

You’re probably aware of this by now, but Jose Bautista got punched in the face yesterday.

The blow was the result of a hard slide into second base that attempted to break up a potential double play.  The slide would result in an out because of the new rules regarding interference at second base; however, the result of the slide would be what we’re talking about today and what we’ll be talking about for a long time.

The inning started with this pitch from Matt Bush that drilled Joey Bats squarely in the elbow.  The intentions of the pitch are debatable but you can see it for yourself here:

Matt Bush just earned a ton of respect in the clubhouse. #Rangers pic.twitter.com/1YhovX4d65

— Mike (@TXMIKE817) May 15, 2016

An Edwin Encarnacion fly out would be the first out of the inning. Jake Diekman subsequently entered the game and induced a ground ball to second from Justin Smoak.  And that’s when all hell broke loose.  (WARNING: video may be disturbing for some.)

Odor landed a right hook to Bautista’s face that would qualify as a knockout punch.  A full-blown donnybrook broke out, and Bautista, Odor, and Josh Donaldson were ejected after the fight.  It was a legitimate brawl; far from the usual baseball “fight” that consists of players running in from the bullpen and both dugouts only to stand around and yell at each other.

After the fight in the top of the 8th, Jays reliever Jesse Chavez thought it an intelligent idea to plunk Rangers DH Prince Fielder in the back to start the next half-inning.  It wasn’t.  Both benches cleared again and Chavez was ejected.  The Rangers ultimately won the game, 7-6. Nobody cared.

With all of this having occurred, one would think that the reaction to the fight would be negative.  One man punching another in the face is not generally well-received; just ask LeGarrette Blount.

Instead, some of the headlines and reaction were comparatively positive.  These are just a couple of the reactions to yesterday’s scuffle:

Deadspin: Blue Jays Call Rangers “Gutless” And “Cowardly” After Excellent Brawl

CBS Sports: WATCH: A montage of best right-handed punches in history of MLB fights

See? We don’t need these pansy new slide rules. Let the boys handle it themselves. Keep the nerds out, this game has always policed itself.

— CJ Nitkowski (@CJNitkowski) May 15, 2016

That reaction is real; people (even some involved in baseball) really think that throwing punches is cool.  In any other civilized setting, this action would be denounced as boorish and unethical behavior. In hockey, it’s called Tuesday, but fighting isn’t right in that sport, either. That being said, at least hockey players have some protection in the form of their helmets and the fight is at least somewhat controlled, often only involving one-on-one combat.  It doesn’t justify fighting, but it does explain why hockey continues to allow it, even as findings regarding concussions and brain injuries suggest that it should be banned.

That being said, how can baseball legislate its fighting problem?  It won’t be easy and it can’t be done by the umpires on the field.  It can be done on Park Avenue, by Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball.

One way to start would be to hand out major, major suspensions for this ridiculous brawl.  The MLB record for the longest suspension after a fight is 10; that record is jointly held by Michael Barrett, Ian Kennedy, Mike Sweeney, Miguel Batista, and Runelvys Hernandez. They were all suspended for some pretty wild actions, but it’s difficult not to argue that Odor’s right hook belongs up there with those fights as the most violent in baseball history.

This is another reason why there needs to be severe punishment for those involved in the fight: baseball needs a culture shock.  It needs to realize that fighting fire (or lesser things) with fire isn’t the right thing to do, that retaliation and violence are not avenues to deal with conflict over the course of a game.  Giving massive suspensions to Odor and others for their roles, even if they are unprecedented, can go a long way in changing baseball’s “eye-for-an-eye” culture.

But baseball must do even more to prevent fights like this from happening in the future.  One way the sport can stop the problem from growing is to educate its players on the dangers of violence and the serious harm that their actions can cause others.  Yes, players still will instinctually turn to brawling to deal with issues that arise, but if they are properly educated on the cons of these fights rather than the pros, the game will be far better for it.

And we can’t forget the elephant in the room: Jose Bautista’s actions in last year’s playoffs.  In a winner-take-all ALDS game 5 between these same two teams, Bautista launched a 7th-inning bomb to put the Blue Jays ahead to stay and into the ALCS.  Merely seconds after he made contact, Bautista launched quite possibly the most memorable bat flip throw in MLB history:

Some predictably took affront to Bautista’s actions, saying that he went over the top in his reaction to his home run.  For me, it’s very difficult to take issue with what Bautista did; it was the biggest home run of his life.  If you were him in that moment, you would celebrate too.  We need to stop having issues with bat flips and embrace them as a way of expressing the pure joy of this wonderful game; if we do this, we can make baseball fun again.

Finally, the last issue with baseball’s old school culture is that it is self-righteous and ignores the past actions of certain players if they play the game “the right way”.  For example, Odor has pulled plenty of dirty slides over the past year, as Padres pitcher Brandon Morrow points out:

blah, blah, something about glass houses… pic.twitter.com/Tdekg2c2Kq

— Brandon Morrow (@2Morrow23) May 16, 2016

And that’s not all when it comes to the second baseman.  In 2011, Odor was playing for the Spokane Indians of the Northwest League. On a play eerily similar to the one on Sunday, Odor slid well past second base.  After running in awfully close proximity to the Vancouver Canadians’ second baseman, a big fight like Sunday’s broke out, leaving Odor to fight the entire Vancouver team on his own:

So it’s only fitting that Odor was involved in the biggest MLB brawl in recent memory.

Baseball needs a change of culture, and it needs one soon.  The sport needs to relax its harsh critiques of bat flips, flamboyance, and harmless emotion so it can refocus its gaze on the very dangerous violence that sometimes exists between the white lines. Unfortunately, it may take a serious injury in one of these conflicts to make the sport change its ways.

However, baseball should change before we get to that point.

The 2015 New York Mets were something that the Mets have not been, aside from 2006, for the better part of fourteen years: good. Relevant. Fun. Exciting. Successful.

Behind a once-in-a-lifetime young pitching staff, the acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes and the absolutely masterful job Terry Collins did managing the team, the Mets eked by the Dodgers in five games in the NLDS and then proceeded to dump-truck the Cubs on their way to a sweep and the World Series.  Of course, we all know how the story ended: playoff star Daniel Murphy went cold, the pitching, especially in the bullpen, failed and the Royals essentially killed the Mets with 1,000 paper cuts.  So after that five-game World Series was over, you would surely think that the team would do their best to lock up free-agents-to-be Cespedes and Murphy, right?  Wrong.

Well, at least they would try to replace them with high-priced free agents at the same positions, right?  Wrong again.

To be fair, the team has basically replaced Murphy by trading for former Pirates’ second baseman Neil Walker.  The team also pursued the free agent who may have single-handedly stopped the Winter Meetings in their tracks, second baseman Ben Zobrist.  Zobrist decided to take less money than the $60 million the Mets were offering and signed with the Cubs for four years and $56 million. However this isn’t a huge deal, as Walker can step in to Murphy’s place and provide the same production he did, so that move should work out.  But who would the team acquire to replace Cespedes?

If you guessed Alejandro De Aza, you’re either a psychic or have inner knowings of the team’s front office plans.

The team announced the signing yesterday, along with its terms: one year, $5.75 million.  The opportunity to make that $7 million with performance-based incentives.  In other words, not someone who is going to be able to replace the production left behind by the departure of Cespedes.

To be clear, De Aza is a quality player, but probably one that is more suited to a bench role.  A career .267 hitter, he’s only averaged slightly over five home runs per year in his eight years in the majors.  In a platoon with current center fielder, right-handed hitter and 2014 Gold Glove award winner Juan Lagares, the left-handed hitting De Aza would probably get more playing time and bat near the bottom of the order.  The move for the team is not necessarily a bad one at a small level, but as part of the bigger picture, it doesn’t really work.  The team needed to somehow replace Cespedes’ big bat in the lineup, and they couldn’t even do it in the aggregate.

But this isn’t about a team’s free agent moves after making the World Series.  This is about the owners of that team, Fred and Jeff Wilpon, along with president Saul Katz, simply being unwilling to put in the money needed to keep the team near the top for several years to come.

On Monday, freelance writer Howard Megdal published a piece on Vocativ about how the team is more or less swimming in a pool of unpaid debt.  You have to read the whole thing for yourself, but here is an excerpt:

Back in 2008, the team’s investments with Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff were discovered to be a fraud. More than $500 million in assets Wilpon and Katz thought they had—and had borrowed against—vanished. Accordingly, just to stay afloat, they needed to take out a $430 million loan against the team and $450 million against their majority ownership stake in SNY (a network started with a loan from Madoff, incidentally).

Ever since, the Mets have managed to get by annually by diverting revenue from their baseball and television operation into the financing of debt. Prior to the refinancing of the past two years, the annual interest on these two loans plus debt balloon payments of more than $43 million have exceeded team payroll itself.

The refinancing of the two loans has extended their due dates out five years, so this arrangement is set to continue for a long time to come. And the debt balloon payments run until December 2045, when currently youthful pitching ace Steven Matz will be 54 years old.

The Mets will be paying these crazy debts until 2045.  It will take the team so long to pay off these debts that they will be finished paying off the rest of Bobby Bonilla’s contract before the debts are paid.  It’s a bad situation, and the main reason why the team hasn’t been spending big bucks in free agency for the last several years.

This is the problem, though: it isn’t like the team is not making money.  Even with the debt payments, the Mets experienced an attendance increase of 19.5% a year ago (and a similar, if not larger, increase should be expected next season based off the results of 2015).  Also, the team’s most conservative estimates state that they added around $20 million in revenue from the team’s playoff games. That same article says that ratings on the team’s television network, SportsNet New York (SNY, for short) increased by about 56 percent over the past year, which means more revenue because advertisers are far more likely to pay for commercial sports on the team-owned network.

The opportunity for the Mets to spend is right in front of them.  Their starting rotation is making so little (a projected $13.5 million next year) that this person is going to be the highest-paid starter on the team next season:

Mets fans are some of the best in baseball.  They’re smart, dedicated and they aren’t shy about letting ownership know how they feel about the job they are doing.  They’re extremely upset right now, and they have every right to be.  The opportunity to win a World Series doesn’t come around very often, but the opportunity is even more rare when teams who have a chance to win one fail consistently to spend the necessary money to be in contention year after year.  It’s a shame for their fans that the Mets are blowing the opportunity to win, but this is especially disappointing when you consider the fact that the team’s rotation is not going to be together forever.

But, if the past actions of Mets ownership is any indication, there’s no reason to think that the team’s frugal ways are changing anytime soon.

One of the NBA teams widely predicted to succeed and make the playoff in the 2015-16 season was undoubtedly the Houston Rockets.  Of course, the best laid plans of mice, men, and should-have-been-MVPs often go awry, and the Rockets have started 2-3.  They lost their first three games, and, most importantly, all by at least 20 points.  Granted, the team has won its last two and still has James Harden and Dwight Howard, but is it time to panic in Clutch City?

The short answer is yes.  The long answer, as is always the case, is far more complicated.

One of the good signs for Kevin McHale’s team is that it has not gone back on its style of play in the early going.  The team attempted 32.7 attempts from three-point range last season, and this season they’re not too far off that pace.  They’re all the way down to 31.4 attempts per night.  Still leading the league in beyond-the-arc attempts like they did last season, the Rockets aren’t about to go back on what has worked over the last three seasons.

But, of course, taking three point shots is the second most important thing for the Rockets.  The absolute most important thing is to actually make them, which is something that the Rockets have not done with really any success this season.  I never really thought I’d actually find myself saying this, but the loss of Josh Smith has not done Houston any favors in the three-point department this season.  Smith only shot 33% from deep a year ago, but his presence helped James Harden and others get open looks.  It’s a kind of domino effect; when Smith left, the other players (Harden, Corey Brewer, Ty Lawson, others) weren’t able to get quite the same open looks that they were last season.

Really, the inability to shoot from three is the main reason why the Rockets have struggled this season.  And as much as I appreciated and respected what James Harden accomplished last season (who remembers this one?), it’s difficult not to call him out for just how badly he’s struggled in the early going.  From beyond the three-point line this season, he’s a lackluster 9-55, and on all of his field goals, he’s gone 30-102.

If you look at his numbers from beyond the arc compared with his other shooting numbers, something becomes very clear: he’s taking more threes than twos.  Last season, 37.8% of his field goal attempts were threes, but considering that he is asked to carry so much of the load for an otherwise mediocre Rockets team and that he is a career 37% three-point shooter, that number is…. healthy.  For his career, his three-point attempts have accounted for about 40% of his field goal tries, which is sort of high.  For context, the best three-point shooter in the game today, Stephen Curry, has used about 41% of his attempts on threes.  All things being equal, Harden just isn’t aggressive enough.

To be completely fair to Harden, free throw attempts do comprise a large part of his game, and this year is no different (11.8 per game, 85%).  But he still needs to be aggressive, and it’s no different as far as the team is concerned.  The entire squad is shooting just 27.4% from deep this season, and Harden’s 16.4% figure is the biggest reason why.  If Harden isn’t making baskets, it becomes infinitely more difficult for others to get open, kind of like the aforementioned domino effect with Josh Smith.

Their inconsistency from the field, as well as in all areas of their overall game, is why they have come out so slowly this season.  As Calvin Watkins of ESPN points out, the team will be fine, but the thought of future inconsistency is a scary proposition for Houston:

Harden will undoubtedly be fine, and with Lawson finding more of a comfort level within the offense, things will improve.

It’s just the inconsistency that leaves you shaking your head considering how talented the Rockets are and how they’re not playing to their potential.

“Right now, we’re not in a great rhythm on either side of the ball, but we’ll find it,” McHale said. “We showed spurts of it, the 68 points in the first half was nice and then we kind of fell back to old habits.”

The inconsistency and the struggles from the field are two biggest reasons why the Rockets have struggled so far.  Another explanation for why they’ve fallen short of expectations?  Defense.

To date, the Houston defense has surrendered 109 points per game, the fifth most in the association.  That unit has floundered along with the offense.  If you put the two together, you’ll get this result: a -10 point differential.  Granted, it’s five games, and the team will make up the difference; not one team had a point differential as bad as -10 a year ago (not even the Knicks).  But this is the problem: it would be more likely that the difference is made up by the Rockets’ offense coming around than the defense suddenly turning it around.

One cannot simply expect the team to continue to fight its way through inconsistency and come up with lousy results.  This is too good of a team for that to happen, and with the reigning runner-up for MVP on the roster and the talent that exists, things will even out and the team will (sooner or later) escape from its short-lived swoon.

But, with things being what they are (and the Western Conference still being insanely good), there is some reason to panic in Clutch City. Given how quickly things change in a conference where just about every night brings a challenging contest, the Rockets need to figure out their issues that much more quickly if they want to have a middle to even high seed in the playoffs and a realistic chance to win a championship.  They’ll be fine eventually, but there should be some reason for urgency (but not necessarily concern) inside the organization.

But, I think this would be a good time for all Rockets fans to just close their eyes.  It will all be over soon.