So much for the general managers meetings, which began five days after the World Series and 10 days before the free-agency period opens. They're really the agents meetings, because the agents are in the lobby and can float whatever they want floated, while no one can adequately estimate the ceilings or destinations of
Matt Holliday or any other major free agent, no one accurately knows what salaries have to be dumped, or who will be on the non-tender list.We don't even know how cold the predicted cold winter will be. For more than 30 years, predictions of dire financial straits have beaten the first flurries of the winter, and the predictions are always most dire when owners and players get within two years of a new Basic Agreement. Yes, the economy is bad, and while Major League Baseball has done a remarkable job keeping corporate sponsors, there are understandable concerns.Now, it's not surprising that in The Rust Belt the Tigers, Indians, Reds, Pirates, Royals and others are facing strict belt tightening, but while MLB didn't get its usual annual 10 percent bump in revenues, it claims it made $6.2 billion to $6.4 billion as an industry. Franchise values continue to rise, and there are ways to make money taking each team's share of the MLB pie and putting it into the bank rather than investing in players and infrastructure.So, where did that $6.2B go? Not into the pockets of lower-level employees on the club or MLB side, we know that. Baseball is no different from other industries; hard times are the right times to force lower costs. "It's going to be awhile until a lot of us get our budgets," says one GM, "so how do we really know what we're going to do?"One thing to do is change the general managers meetings. Then, rather than have agents set the fall agenda and allow teams like the New York Mets to set themselves up for public failure by being drawn into every agent's speculation, continue to work by phone, see one another at the winter meetings and have the GM meetings at the end of January when serious issues from the draft to umpire development can be discussed.This week set the bar too high on expectations, too low on the coldest winter fear and loathing pages. "No one of any significance is going to sign before Thanksgiving," says one GM. "So calm down." And call up mlbtraderumors.com every couple of hours.
Halladay
The problem with all the
Roy Halladay trade stories is that the Blue Jays are not going to get as good an offer this winter or next June as they got from Boston --
Clay Buchholz,
Justin Masterson, Nick Hagadone,
Josh Reddick and one or two other players -- last July. At that time, Halladay's window was two postseasons, now it's one, and while it's understandable why Paul Beeston and ownership didn't care for the perception created by trading their franchise player within the division, it was reality. 1992 ain't coming back.Halladay indicated to then-general manager J.P. Ricciardi that he'd prefer to move on because of his concerns about Toronto being able to compete with the coastal Moneyball teams. He can play it out and hit the market at the end of the 2010 season, when Boston will have -- as
Joe Mauer knows -- close to $40M coming off the books.Alex Anthopoulos has his work cut out for him, but after last summer, he's going to have a difficult time coming close to what Ricciardi had in hand when ownership got cold feet.Buster Olney has written a lot about the Type A tag lessening players' values.
Marco Scutaro is Example A. Scutaro is 34, finally made $1.1M last season, and is coming off a year in which he was fourth among AL shortstops in OPS (behind
Jason Bartlett,
Derek Jeter and
Asdrubal Cabrera), his defensive metrics put him in the league's top three defenders, his OBP was .379 and he had a 90-75 walk-to-strikeout ratio.But how many contenders will be willing to give up a No. 1 pick for a 34-year-old shortstop, as good as he has been? The GM drift has been that he's worth two years at $4-5M per, but perhaps not with the draft choice attached.
The worst part of the public, salacious nature of the McCourt divorce (yes, there is a dodgerdivorce.com) is that there are four children involved, and there remain friends and neighbors from their previous home in Brookline, Mass., that have strong feelings for those boys. Everyone realized that what held up the
Manny Ramirez trade was that the Dodgers didn't want to take on money, and to get
Casey Blake they had to give the Indians Carlos Santana so that Cleveland would pay the remainder of Blake's contact. Now, Jon Weisman's Dodger Thoughts points out that the $8.5M spent in signing bonuses the past two years is the smallest amount of any major league team, and that their international investments are virtually nil.Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times ran a shocking story on the Dodgers' squeezing legendary scout George Genovese, informing him his salary would be clipped from $18,000 to $8,000 and his expenses from $5,000 to $2,000, in contrast to last weekend's story about the need for nearly a half-million dollars a month in alimony. The McCourt house in Cotuit, Mass., is on the market for $50M, the club had to get rid of its best prospect (Santana) because it couldn't afford Casey Blake, and the kids have to endure the public humiliation that has their real friends 3,000 miles away sickened.
