Tomorrow, Jim Leyland’s Tigers will commence their interleague play this year with a visit to Pittsburgh, Leyland’s old employer. And Leyland doesn’t want any part of it. He doesn’t have any use for AL-NL games any more, and the reason he gives is a 38-year old elephant in the room. Baseball’s two leagues have different rules, and teams built to take advantage of different rules — yet teams in each league play games against each other, playing 15-18 games a year by a different rulebook than they play the other 140-odd games of the season. Leyland is quite vehement:

I think this was something that was certainly a brilliant idea to start with. But I think it has run its course… It’s not really doing what it was supposed to — there’s no rivalries for most of the teams…

We play with the DH rules. The American League gets penalized, even though the record’s been decent over the years. We get penalized. Their pitchers are hitting and bunting all year, and they get the advantage of letting their pitchers rest and using the DH when they come here, and we gotta use guys six straight days without Victor Martinez or Alex Avila or somebody. That’s ridiculous. Totally ridiculous, and they ought to look into it…

At some point, I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it, but at some point you’ve got to get baseball back to the same set of rules.

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“In 1987, on deck in Boston, and I was called an Alabama porch monkey… I’d like to be able to say yes [to the question of whether racism has declined], but my mail and my telephone calls suggest otherwise.”
— White Sox GM and former White Sox center fielder Kenny Williams, September 22, 2009

“I was a prisoner in my own home.”
— Milton Bradley, March 9, 2010

Milton Bradley was a complicated man. The usual word was “controversial”; it accompanied stories about him as often as the phrase “race card.” Bradley was rarely happy and always seemed to mention race, appearing time and again in stories in which he criticized people for making racially inappropriate remarks. I think that the frequency of these stories tended to dilute their impact. Many people found it hard to take Bradley seriously — he was frequently awful, and it was easy to believe that he was just blaming other people for his problems. That’s exactly what Chicago GM Jim Hendry believed: “He didn’t get the job done. It’s really unfortunate that you… try to use the other areas for excuses.”

Bradley admitted that much of the negative perceptions surrounding him were related to his lack of success on the field: “If I was hitting .300 every year, and on toward a Hall of Fame career, then maybe a lot of the minor BS along the way wouldn’t be such a big deal.” he told ESPN’s Karl Ravech in 2010. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong about race.
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Every so often, someone will mention that baseball parity might be improved through the use of “relegation,” common practice in European soccer leagues such as England’s Premier League. The English method wouldn’t exactly work in Major League Baseball, for a number of reasons, but apropos of Major League Baseball’s takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers — as well as the impending sale of the Houston Astros and part of the New York Mets, teams owned by two of the worst owners in sports — it’s worth re-examining the tools that baseball has to ensure that clubs remain competitive and well-run.

In general, relegation only affects the very worst teams in the league, who get relegated to a lower division while the best teams in the lower division get promoted. The teams in the highest division, like those in the Premier League, get the privilege of competing against each other for the most prestigious championship. They also get access to the highest revenue streams through television and advertising. (The Premier League itself is sponsored by Barclays; many of the lower leagues are sponsored as well.) Last year’s “floating realignment” suggestion — in which Bud Selig proposed that teams could be temporarily reassigned to different divisions, a Byzantine solution to the problem of the AL East — brought a number of responses discussing or recommending relegation. However, I’d prefer to propose it not as a competitive measure, but as a punitive measure.

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A few weeks ago, I heard some welcome news from the world of journalism, which doesn’t happen very often these days. The years-dormant Modern Drunkard Magazine, a Denver-based bimonthly paean to the joys of libation, has finally resumed publication. Speaking for myself, the web edition of the magazine helped get me through college, as I read articles like “You Don’t Know Jack Daniel,” “Andre the Giant: The Greatest Drunk on Earth,” and their most famous article, “The 86 Rules of Boozing.” Most everything is written by editor Frank Kelly Rich — author of the 86 Rules — or writer Rich English, author of the pieces on Andre and Jack. Yesterday evening, I spoke to English about alcohol, sports, and society. He’d like to see Americans loosen up about imbibing, particularly when it comes to their favorite athletes.

English and his colleagues are serious, even when they’re joking. In answer to a Frequently Asked Question on the website, editor Frank Kelly Rich explains, “While there is some satire involved, we believe to the very core of our souls every word we write.” In a 2005 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Rich revealed just how serious he was:

“I drink about eight drinks a day and maybe 30 on a heavy day,” he said cheerfully. “But as long as I remain healthy and happy, I have no intention of slowing down. I mean, when you have something good going, you stick with it, right?”

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A month ago, I wrote a column about Kim Ng, the senior vice president for baseball operations for Major League Baseball. Ng, the Dodgers’ former assistant general manager, wished that more women were hired to jobs in baseball and thinks that there are more women who want and deserve jobs in baseball than are able to get them. This blog post became, I think, the most-commented on post in the history of Fangraphs. Many of the comments were negative toward women — either incredulous at the idea that many women wanted to work in baseball or openly hostile toward the idea of women in the sport.

A few of the comments:

“The only way there will be more women working in MLB is if they start to have cheerleaders.”
“I think what the comments show is that there’s a lot of feminine men out there who are ruled by their women.”
“I’m not disappointed about the lack of women in MLB – I’m happy about it.”
“A lot of estrogen fueled whining about something that hasn’t been calculated.”
“Until they start putting kitchens in the dugout, women will not be in baseball. Period.”

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Suppose you’re the manager of the Milwaukee Brewers. You’re at home against the Chicago Cubs, and going into the bottom of the eighth inning, you’re up 5-0. So you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. On the other hand, your closer John Axford has been awfully shaky lately, and you’d probably love to scratch across an insurance run. With one out, Mark Kotsay walks, and you have Carlos Gomez on the bench. Would you let Gomez loose on the bases and see if he could make it around the bases with some old-fashioned National League speed?

Well, if you were Ron Roenicke on Saturday, April 9, that’s exactly what you’d do. Gomez came into the game and just abused Jeff Samardzija, stealing second base on the second pitch Samardzija threw to the next batter, Wil Nieves. When Nieves worked the count full, Gomez took off; it wound up being outside, and Gomez was standing on third and Nieves was on first. Samardzija managed to strike out the next batter, Jeremy Reed, but then he walked Rickie Weeks to load the bases, and walked Nyjer Morgan, which brought Gomez around to score. The Brewers won the game 6-0.

Now, we all know that there’s an unwritten rule that says that you don’t try to steal bases when you’re up by a lot of runs in late innings. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t often unreservedly praise Major League Baseball or the commissioner’s office, other than the John Thorn hire, which was admittedly minor news. But Major League Baseball appears to have taken an intelligent and decent approach to the very real problem of concussions, and I applaud their efforts. In the last couple of years, concussions have become a hot topic in three of the four major sports. Alan Schwarz’s crusading New York Times articles about concussion in the NFL have led to a culture change in the sport, as Ben McGrath has written in The New Yorker. Moreover, while concussions have always been a part of hockey — Eric Lindros had six diagnosed concussions over the course of his career — the issue has taken on a new prominence in the NHL as Sidney Crosby, possibly the best player in the league, has been out for three months since being injured in early January, with no clear return date.

Concussions aren’t as common in baseball as in either football or hockey, but both Jason Bay and Justin Morneau missed most of the second half of the 2010 season due to concussion symptoms, and Ryan Church’s career appears to be on the verge of ending due to concussions. So it’s a very real issue. Last Tuesday, Major League Baseball quietly announced a new concussion policy to deal with concussion in players and umpires: a mandatory seven-day DL with monitoring by doctors required before players could be cleared to play. The next day, I spoke to Julian Bailes, the chair of West Virginia University’s Department of Neurosurgery and former team doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers. “I would say at least it’s a start,” Bailes told me on Wednesday. “Seven days or a week is kind of standard for what I would call mild, or grade 1 concussion. It’s probably okay, and anything more than that would have been hard to get pushed through.”
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The top five teams on our list are all in the AL East or NL East, so four of them are likely to make the playoffs every year. After their first playoff appearance in five years, the Atlanta Braves jumped from #8 in last year’s rankings to #5 this year. They’ve rebuilt themselves into another perennial contender after a few years in the wilderness amid the departures of three Hall of Fame pitchers, a Hall of Fame manager, a Hall of Fame General Manager, and a borderline Hall of Fame center fielder. (Not to mention the departure of Dayton Moore, the man who built the best farm system in the history of whatever.)

They’re a solid fifth, though, ranked behind the Yankees and Red Sox in every category we tracked, and behind the small market Rays in all but financial resources and behind the Phillies in all but baseball operations. (Yes, we hate the Ryan Howard extension that much.) The Atlanta Braves look like the kind of team that could make the playoffs every year but get bounced in the first or second round — just like old times. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, y’all.

Current Talent – 85.00 (T-5th)

Braves Season Preview

Future Talent – 85.00 (T-5th)

Braves Top 10 Prospects

Baseball Operations – 86.82 (4th)
Financial Resources – 81.67 (T-9th)

Overall Rating – 84.45
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“Chicago is actually a better sports market than Los Angeles,” said my friend Jill. “She knows what she’s talking about,” said her Cubs cap-wearing friend, a classmate of hers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business. “She took a course in sports marketing at Kellogg.” We were sitting at the Wrigleyville Goose Island Brewbub yesterday, a huge sports bar with 20 TVs and 20 different kinds of Goose Island beer. I came to the Windy City for a rotisserie draft auction and got in touch with Jill, a lifelong White Sox fan who grew up in Evanston (Sox fans are a distinct rarity north of the city).

We agreed to meet up to watch the Cubs-Sox spring training game in Wrigleyville, the area of bars around Wrigley Field, the confluence of Addison, Clark, and Waveland streets where, in a simpler time, Sammy Sosa used to hit homers out onto the pavement. Chicago’s definitely a sports town, all right, but late March clearly isn’t baseball season.

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We’ve seen a lot of changes in baseball in the last few decades, but more than a half-century after the end of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the sport still often feels like an old boy’s club. In 2011, we’re seeing mixed signals pointing forward. Kim Ng, the highest-ranking baseball executive for nearly a decade, Assistant General Manager of the Yankees and then the Dodgers, recently accepted a job to work for Joe Torre as the Senior Vice President for Baseball Operations in the Commissioner’s office of Major League Baseball. And Justine Siegal, the first woman to coach a professional men’s baseball team — the 2009 Brockton Rox in Brockton, MA, unaffiliated with MLB or MiLB — this year became the first woman to throw batting practice in Major League spring training.

Every time a woman does something for the first time, it makes it easier for others to follow in their footsteps. “Things are definitely changing, but it’s slow,” says Siegal. “And that’s why the only way to keep my sanity is not to look at this experience for me as for the next generation coming up, paving the way. And that’s frustrating when we want the job.” The trouble is, there aren’t many women in the next levels of baseball. “I’m a little surprised that we haven’t seen more women come up in entry-level positions through the ranks, at this point in time,” Ng told me. “My only hope is that women do get recognized, and that we can put some programs in place to really at least get women into the system.”
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