Mike Napoli’s strange offseason has cost him a lot of money. After appearing to agree on a three year, $39 million contract with the Boston Red Sox in early December, he and the team finally agreed on a one-year contract worth just $5 million guaranteed dollars with up to an additional $8 million in incentives. As Eno Sarris wrote when the deal was announced, the team and player were both caught by surprise when a routine physical revealed that Napoli has a degenerative hip condition called avascular necrosis, which is what scared the Sox away from the multiyear deal. So what is avascular necrosis?
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Demonstrating a commitment to modernity, baseball’s rules committee has spoken: “The fake-to-third, throw-to-first pickoff move” is now a balk. As of now, implementation is uncertain as baseball waits for the Major League Baseball Players Association to consider the rule change. But as far as MLB is concerned, you can’t do that any more.

So here’s the current rule, which is on the cutting block:

A pitcher is to step directly toward a base before throwing to that base but does not require him to throw (except to first base only) because he steps. It is possible, with runners on first and third, for the pitcher to step toward third and not throw, merely to bluff the runner back to third; then seeing the runner on first start for second, turn and step toward and throw to first base. This is legal. However, if, with runners on first and third, the pitcher, while in contact with the rubber, steps toward third and then immediately and in practically the same motion “wheels” and throws to first base, it is obviously an attempt to deceive the runner at first base, and in such a move it is practically impossible to step directly toward first base before the throw to first base, and such a move shall be called a balk. Of course, if the pitcher steps off the rubber and then makes such a move, it is not a balk.

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The dugout phone is a thing of the past. At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, MLB and T-Mobile announced a partnership that will replace dugout phones with these. ESPN’s Darren Rovell reports the dugout phones will remain in place — in case teams want to use them — but teams will have to opt in, “depending on whether they have a competing carrier.” (Like AT&T or US Cellular.) Oh, and T-Mobile’s paying the league $125 million over three years.
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In a week, on Jan. 9, the Hall of Fame will announce its newest inductees. We can predict one thing: Few people will make it in, so the logjam of deserving players will only get longer. The Hall is a nebulous institution, and no two people have quite the same understanding of who qualifies, which means it’s awfully hard for any candidate to get the minimum 75% of required ballots needed for entry.

But some voters are having so much trouble making up their minds they’ve decided not to vote at all — in particular, ESPN’s T.J. Quinn and the Cincinnati Enquirer’s John Fay — which means the denominator is getting smaller. Though not by much.
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Josh Hamilton got $125 million. B.J. Upton got $75 million. Angel Pagan got $40 million. Shane Victorino got $39 million. Melky Cabrera got $16 million. And Michael Bourn, the best center fielder still on the board — at this point, he’s probably the best free agent position player left, period — is still waiting for the right offer.

In the meantime, many other teams that looked like a good fit for him have filled center field with another player: the Nationals traded for Denard Span, the Phillies traded for Ben Revere, the Athletics traded for Chris Young. In the meantime, bloggers like Martin Gandy of Talking Chop, the SBNation Braves blog, are starting to wonder whether Bourn will need to take a one-year offer and wait ’til next year for his payday. So did Bourn wait too long? Did Scott Boras, gasp!, make a mistake?
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ESPN just started a new project, Hall of 100, and the basic intention is to create a list of the 100 best players regardless of steroid use. It’s right there in the introductory sentence: “With some big PED-era names facing judgment day next month in the Baseball Hall of Fame voting and with the everlasting cacophony over who belongs in Cooperstown and who doesn’t, we decided to take a fresh look at the greats of the game.” The idea is to remove the asterisk.

Of course, lists of any kind are pretty much SEO gold, so ESPN is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it because it’s clickbait, and they can own the hashtag #Hallof100, and so on. But the methodology is quite interesting, and I’m fascinated by Halls of Fame, from the mythology to the difficulty of expressing something subjective — greatness — using objective criteria. Greatness is subjective because it has to do with how we feel about a player; it is separate from a simple ordinal statistical ranking, which you could call “bestness.” So what’s the best way to make a Hall of Fame?
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krem·lin·ol·o·gy, noun
Trying to guess or infer what things people say and do really mean, as opposed to what they seem to mean; after the Kremlin, the seat of Soviet power, the actions of whose leaders western powers struggled to interpret during the Cold War
Macmillan Open Dictionary

When asked if he had met with Hamilton, who is believed to be in the Nashville area this week, Amaro said, “No. But I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” When asked if he had met with Hamilton’s agent, Michael Moye, Amaro again said, “No. But I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 5

During hot stove season, it’s easy to get excited about a team’s possible acquisitions, especially during Winter Meetings week. But it’s hard to know what to believe. If an executive says that he is interested in a particular player, or that he is not interested in trading a particular prospect, does that mean anything? How do we read between the lines?
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[O]ne thing a trade union leader learns to do is how to count votes in advance. Whenever I took one look at what I was faced with, it was obvious to me it was not gonna happen…
[General Sherman] basically said, ‘I don’t want to be president. If I’m nominated I will not campaign for the presidency. If despite that I’m elected, I will not serve.’ Without comparing myself to General Sherman, that’s my feeling. If considered and elected, I will not appear for the induction if I’m alive. If they proceed to try to do this posthumously, my family is prepared to deal with that…
What [Groucho Marx] said was words to the effect of, ‘I don’t want to be part of any organization that would have me as a member.’ Between a great comedian and a great general, you have my sentiments.
   — Interview with Marvin Miller, 2008, after asking the Hall of Fame to stop nominating him

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Every so often, someone somewhere will write a “worst owners ever” list. It’s almost always timely, since between the four major sports there is always at least one horrendously incompetent or actively malign owner who is justifiably despised by fans. And it ticks off two key attributes for successful search engine optimization: the format easily lends itself to a photo gallery and a few casually-written sentences of snark. Most recently, there has been a glut thanks to Jeffrey Loria’s latest fire sale.

I’ve previously written about Loria and also Fred Wilpon, two of the most-criticized owners in baseball. But their perceived sins are very different. Loria has been criticized for being an unethical miser, profiting off the Expos and Marlins while keeping those teams impoverished, while Wilpon spent on his team but the Mets went broke as a result of the economic downturn and lingering fallout from the massive Ponzi scheme run by Wilpon’s friend and business partner, Bernie Madoff. So how do we determine an intellectually defensible process for making a non-arbitrary list of the worst owners in history?
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Bottom of the second inning, and as Upton walked toward the plate, he might have noticed that no one was referring to him as the future anymore…

It wasn’t much of a crowd, and therefore it wasn’t much of a heckle, but what it lacked in long and loud, it made up for in short and sweet. This was the sound of a crowd protesting spoiled brats and mouthy prospects and unpaid dues.
— August 2, 2006, Saint Petersburg Times

There’s no way around it: B.J. Upton and Justin Upton have disappointed. That is a true statement, even though it’s just as true that much of the criticism hasn’t been fair. They’ve both been booed by their home crowds and dangled endlessly on the trade market. And though B.J. is just 28 and Justin is just 25, it seems like they’ve been around forever, ever since B.J. signed for $4.6 million as the second overall pick in 2002, and Justin signed for $6.1 million as the first overall pick in 2005.
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