As The Common Man noted on Notgraphs earlier today, O-Cab is hanging up his spikes. The journeyman shortstop announced his retirement after a 15-year career, including eight years in Montreal, three years in Anaheim, and a series of one-off stints in Minnesota, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and the South Side of Chicago. But though he spent more than half his career in French Canada, and only 72 games in Boston (regular season and playoffs), Orlando Cabrera will forever be remembered for his time in Beantown. In that way, his career is a cruel synecdoche for the Expo experience.

As a low-OBP, glove-first shortstop with a bit of pop, Cabrera’s career value was somewhere in between the Alex Gonzalezes (retired Alex S. and still-active Alex S.) and Jose Valentin. But Cabrera was forever compared to — and always in the shadow of — Edgar Renteria, his smooth countryman. The two are the greatest players in the history of Colombian baseball, and they both happened to play the same position at the same time. In a situation like that, frayed nerves were bound to occur, as Jorge Arangure, Jr. wrote on ESPN in 2008.

I won’t accept dealing with him. I think he’s disrespected so many baseball people in Colombia who have been working to improve the sport.
— Edgar Renteria

These are ignorant comments from an ignorant person… I’ve always respected Edgar as one of the smartest people on the field, who, because of his intelligence, has excelled beyond his abilities. For him to make comments like that is disappointing.
— Orlando Cabrera

Source: FanGraphs — Orlando Cabrera, Edgar Renteria

Renteria immediately made a splash, getting the World Series-winning hit for the Marlins in 1997 as a 20-year old second-year player. Cabrera, two years older, had been called up for his first big league cup of coffee that season and went 4-for-18 with the Expos. Renteria had actually been discovered by Cabrera’s father, a Marlins scout who had trouble interesting the team in the undersized Orlando but had no trouble selling them on the smooth, tall, projectable Edgar.

Orlando’s great moment came seven years later, as the Red Sox swept Edgar Renteria’s St. Louis Cardinals for their first World Championship in 86 years, but Cabrera’s heroics weren’t about what he did — he went 0-5 in Game Four and 4-for-17 in the World Series — but who he was, a slick-fielding, high-energy shortstop who helped overhaul the moribund clubhouse as rookie GM Theo Epstein dumped Nomar Garciaparra for a defense-first infield of Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz. (Mientkiewicz retired last year.) Cabrera wasn’t a great hitter, but his energy nonetheless helped spark the team.

Cabrera wasn’t much of a hitter, with a career wOBA of .312, but he sure could pick it. Over the years of his career, 1997 to 2011, he had 29 WAR, the 12th-highest WAR among shortstops. (And many of them, including Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Tejada, Nomar Garciaparra, and Michael Young, accumulated a number of those wins at another position.) He played 1985 games in 15 seasons, including his 1997 cup of coffee; in other words, he played the equivalent of 13.2 150-game seasons, and averaged 2.2 wins a season each year. Orlando Cabrera was an above-average shortstop for a really long time.

And he’s retiring on his terms: MLB Trade Rumors reported that he actually turned down a one-year offer from the Braves earlier this offseason. So he didn’t have to choose retirement as a default after a winter’s worth of the phone not ringing.

He made his retirement announcement on a Colombian radio station, but I can’t speak Spanish. Can anyone listen to this and let me know what he said?

The 2011 Rays opened the season with their designated hitter position filled by a Hall of Very Good platoon: Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez. I don’t need to remind you how many people around here and elsewhere thought the combined pickup was a great idea, and one reason that they came to the Rays so cheap — just $7.25 million combined, just $2 million of which went to Manny — was that their mutual agent Scott Boras negotiated a package deal. Once Manny retired, Johnny Damon picked up nearly all of the slack, winding up with 150 games played — his 16th straight season with at least 140 games played.

But after hearing that the Rays weren’t bringing him back, Damon is right where Manny is: at the back of the breadline. Manny is currently unemployed because he has announced his desire to unretire, as Matt Klaassen wrote Monday. One reason Manny says for his desire to return is that, as he told ESPN, he wants to be a role model:

I want to show people that Manny can change, that he can do the right thing.

Manny will still have to serve a 50-game suspension, and his one-for-17 performance in 2011 won’t inspire much confidence either, so he may have a difficult time convincing another team to take a chance on him. (Much like Barry Bonds in 2008.)
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The Yankees have raised a lot of eyebrows this winter by standing pat on pitching and sending unambiguous signals that their unwillingness to spend money is predicated on wanting to avoid the luxury tax. A Yankee source went so far as to tell ESPN’s Wallace Matthews that the team was staying away from Hiroki Kuroda because, “We simply don’t have the money to pay him.” I guess that depends on what the meaning of “have” is. But I think a better translation is that the Yankees are tired of all their years of spending stupid money, paying the price through luxury tax and literally watching their dollars be spent by their 29 competitors. (In an earlier version of this story, I fell into the common fallacy of believing that luxury tax money went into the revenue sharing pool. It does not.) The New York Times’ Tyler Kepner surmises that they might be saving up for Cole Hamels or Matt Cain next year; Brien at It’s About the Money Stupid thinks that they’re making an emotional overreaction to their history of overspending. Of course, it could be both.

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The Miami Marlins just announced plans to give their new ballpark an aquarium theme, and they have already installed two 450-gallon fish tanks. One each will be along the first- and third-base lines — the fish safe in soundproof, shatter-proof glass. In an exclusive interview with MLB.com, team president David Samson explained: “The reason this has never been done before, is not that it can’t be done…. It’s because no one thought to do it.”

But Samson is wrong. In fact, the other Florida team got there first. All the way back in the hazy mists of 2006, the then-Tampa Bay Devil Rays installed a 10,000 gallon aquarium — with 22 Cownose rays — beyond their outfield wall in right-center field. The Rays Touch Tank is still there, and the number of Rays’ rays has increased to 30. It was controversial at the time because the team offered to donate $5,000 to charity — half of it to the Florida Aquarium — any time a batter hit a home run into the tank. But both the team’s and the aquarium’s officials took pains to maintain that the rays themselves were not in danger.
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One hundred forty-nine years ago, two teams made up of members of the Union Army faced off against each other in a Christmas Day baseball game in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The Civil War is widely credited as having been a factor in spreading baseball across the country, and historical records exist for a number of the games played during the war — Baseball Almanac notes at least five in 1862 alone. The Christmas Day game was probably the best-attended game of the war, perhaps one of the best-attended games of the 19th century. But we don’t know that for certain, or indeed much of anything about the game, not even its final score.

One reason for the confusion is the unreliable source at the heart of the story. The game’s most famous player was A.G. Mills, the namesake of the Mills Commission, which established Abner Doubleday as the “founder” of baseball and Cooperstown as its birthplace on the basis of virtually no evidence. Mills played in the game when he was an 18-year old private with the New York Volunteers, as James Mallinson of SABR writes. Mills later became a lawyer who helped established many of the league rules that banned teams from raiding each other’s players and strengthened player contracts. The Mills Commission itself was created as a force for patriotic propaganda, to establish as fact that baseball was invented in America, not in England, and Mills freely admitted he had no factual basis for Cooperstown as baseball’s birthplace: “None at all, as far as the actual origin of baseball is concerned.”

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We’ve all known for a long time that the Mets are in trouble financially. But we may not have realized just how much trouble. Four days ago, it emerged that the Mets had received a secret $40 million loan from Bank of America approved by MLB, still not having paid off a $25 million loan from Major League Baseball a year ago. As Forbes reports, the loan was prompted by their inability to pay bonds used to finance the construction of Citi Field, and the Mets will owe $32 million more in each of 2013 and 2014. It’s not exactly robbing Peter to pay Paul, but for a team snookered by a major Ponzi scheme, taking out loan after loan definitely isn’t a good trend.

The need for cash was exacerbated by the dissolution of the David Einhorn deal in September, in which the wealthy investor eventually decided against investing $200 million in a minority stake in the cash-strapped team. The team tried to put a brave face on it, but they had lost out on money they thought they’d sewn up, and the new loan proves that they didn’t raise as much money through new sources as they hoped. The trouble is that the loans, and the mammoth amounts of debt owed from the construction of Citi Field, detract from the book value of the team in the event that there is a sale. The New York Daily News reported that MLB isn’t about to step in and take the team away just yet, but is growing increasingly nervous about their ability to repay their loans and service their debt.
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It’s official: “Non-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation were added to Article XV.” We’ve focused more on the new CBA’s likely effect on the playoffs and on large-market and small-market teams in the draft and in player development. The new language regarding sexual orientation is going to be hard to enforce — both in terms of punishment and in terms of baseball culture, more broadly. And it’s still unclear when baseball will get its first “Gay Jackie Robinson.” But it’s a step in the right direction.

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It’s been a week since Wilson Ramos was kidnapped and rescued, in what was one of the most shocking baseball stories in a long time. In a certain sense, the Wilson Ramos kidnapping was not an isolated incident: just in the past five years in Venezuela, kidnappers have abducted Yorvit Torrealba’s son, Henry Blanco’s brother, Victor Zambrano’s cousin and mother, and Ugueth Urbina’s mother. (Blanco’s brother and Zambrano’s cousin were killed.) Money appears to be the basic rationale: baseball players are relatively wealthy, and have a supreme incentive to pay whatever the price for the safety of their loved ones.

But Ramos was a major leap from what had happened before. He’s the first major leaguer every kidnapped in Venezuela, and some Venezuelan major leaguers have begun to question whether they can continue to return to Venezuela in the winter, year after year. Ramos was rescued a couple of days after being kidnapped, in a commando rescue operation personally authorized by President Hugo Chavez. Still, the question remains: what will be the long-term aftermath of the Ramos affair?

It’s no surprise that Chavez got involved. The Venezuelan state has a major stake in resolving a matter like this as quickly and forcefully as possible. Venezuela’s baseball players are some of their most famous and important global ambassadors, both inside and outside the country. And baseball is a major part of the country’s economy. The Venezuelan Winter League benefits from the star power of the many major and minor leaguers who return home, the Venezuelan economy benefits from the remittances of professional players making huge amounts of money in the States, and baseball is a large part of Venezuela’s public image in the United States and throughout the Americas.
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Playing around on baseball-reference today — as, I think, we’ve all done — I noticed that today was the 92nd anniversary of Clark Griffith’s purchase of a controlling share in the Washington Senators in November 1919. Like Nolan Ryan, Griffith was a former star pitcher who purchased the team he played for at the very end of his career.

(Appropriately, the team Ryan bought began its life as the Washington Senators, though today’s Rangers were not Griffith’s Senators, which moved to Minnesota to become the Twins a year before the new Senators were created as an expansion team in 1961. Also, yes, I know that the word “bought” is a little imprecise; neither Ryan nor Griffith was the sole owner of the team, having other partners. But they were the public face of team ownership.)

Clark Griffith is essentially synonymous with winning baseball in Washington. First, he gave his name to the only stadium ever to have hosted a World Series game in the nation’s capital, Washington’s Griffith Stadium. (Griffith Stadium also hosted the Redskins and the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues for a time, meaning that its grass was graced by Walter Johnson, Sammy Baugh, and Josh Gibson.)
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It’s a good thing Major League Baseball isn’t going to, you know, overreact to the Boston Red Sox collapse. After the famous Boston Globe article that gently blew open the clubhouse, revealing that — shockingly! — some of the Red Sox pitchers ate chicken and drank beer during the ballgames, the commissioner’s office felt it had no choice but to explore a total ban on beer in the clubhouse. Joe Torre finally decided against such a ban, but Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon was wise enough to call the ban what it was: “asinine.”

All of this knee-jerk stuff that occurs in our game absolutely drives me crazy. If you want to be proactive about some thoughts, go ahead, be proactive and I’m all for that. But to say a grown-up can’t have a beer after a game? Give me a break. That is, I’m going to use the word, ‘asinine,’ because it is. Let’s bring the Volstead Act back, OK. Let’s go right back to prohibition and start legislating everything all over again. All that stuff pretty much annoys me, as you can tell.*

* Not only do I agree, I give Maddon major props for referencing the Volstead Act, the 1919 law that led to accompanied the passage of the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicating beverages. It remained on the books until December 5, 1933, when the 21st amendment, repealing the eighteenth and ending Prohibition, was ratified. Both of these events have been commemorated by modern distillers and brewers: on December 5, 2008, Dewar’s Whisky celebrated the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day, and the 21st Amendment Brewery was founded in San Francisco in 2000 as a celebration of the law that let us drink again. I’m a fan of their Back in Black IPA. Later in the interview, Maddon identified himself as more of a wine drinker. De gustibus non disputandum est.
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