At first glance, any plan for the Rays to split their home games between the Tampa Bay area and Montreal — the exploration of which was reported last week by ESPN’s Jeff Passan — seems like a cockamamie idea. At second and third glances, too, not only because of the numerous legal and logistical hurdles involved, and the specifics of how those will be overcome so lacking, but because the underlying premise is so flawed.

That aspect was underscored on Tuesday, when Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman held a press conference in St. Petersburg to discuss the plan. Let’s cut to the chase:

Anyone who has followed the past quarter-century or so of Major League Baseball ought to be able to see the problem instantly. A franchise that has otherwise proven itself to be highly resourceful and competitive over the past 12 seasons has nonetheless been unable to convince area taxpayers and public officials to fund a new ballpark to replace Tropicana Field, where their lease expires following the 2027 season. Said franchise now hopes not only to build a new ballpark in that region, but also one in Montreal, a city the Expos and MLB abandoned in 2004 after a similar failure. You don’t need an Excel spreadsheet to do the math: convincing two cities to build ballparks for roughly half a season of usage per year is in no way going to be easier than convincing one city to build a ballpark for a full season of use, particularly given that in both cases the public will be expected to bear the lion’s share of the cost while the team profits.

Likewise, convincing two fan bases who have historically shown themselves to be particularly resistant to attending games to make a similar investment while confronting the reality of what amounts to a half-season road trip seems farfetched, to say the least. Let us consider the attendance histories of both cities:

The Expos spent their first eight seasons (1969-76) in Jarry Park before moving to Stade Olympique (1977-2004). Aside from 1970, their second season of existence, all of the seasons when they ranked among the NL’s upper half in attendance occurred during the 1977-83 span, when Stade Olympique was new. It helped that their lineup featured three future Hall of Famers (Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, and Tim Raines) for most of that period, but even so, they never ranked higher than third in the league in attendance, and made the postseason only in 1981.* From 1986 onward, only once did they rank higher than 10th (ninth out of 12 teams in 1987), and in their final seven seasons, they were dead last out of 16 teams, cracking one million fans just once.

*One aspect I neglected to note when I first published this was the fact that the team was robbed of a potential postseason berth — and with it, the long-term impact upon attendance and revenue — in 1994, when they had the majors’ best record (74-40) before the strike it. The powerhouse squad was dismantled before play resumed in 1995; attendance dropped by 26% that year, and for the remainder of the Expos’ tenure, only once did they even average half as many fans per game as in 1994.

In their final two seasons, they played a total of 43 games at Estadio Hiram Bithorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Despite the park seating just 18,000, they averaged more fans there (14,222 in 2003, 10,334 in ’04), than at Stade Olympique, which in its post-1992 configuration could seat 45,757 (12,081 in 2003, 8,876 in ’04). As Jonah Keri — a Montreal native who coincidentally wrote a book about the Rays — recently wrote of the two-city arrangement, which would seem to be relevant here: “[I]t was still a split-the-baby approach that ultimately left no one happy, and did nothing to help the health of the team in its original city.”

While much of the blame for the latter-day Expos’ attendance woes falls upon owner Jeffrey Loria (who bought the team in 1999) and MLB (which assumed control of the franchise in 2002 while allowing Loria to purchase the Marlins), the underlying reality is that the team could not secure public funding for a new ballpark. Ultimately, the franchise moved to Washington, D.C. following the 2004 season and became the Nationals.

The Rays are now in their 22nd season at Tropicana Field, where only twice have they ranked higher than 10th in the AL in attendance. They ranked seventh out of 14 teams in 1998, their inaugural season, and ninth out of 14 in 2010. They have ranked last or second-to-last in every season since, and, despite winning 90 games last year and being on pace to improve upon that record this year, are currently on their way to their fifth straight season of ranking last among the AL’s 15 teams. The ballpark’s location in downtown St. Petersburg is a major problem, as it’s far from the area’s corporate base and wealthiest suburbs, with significant traffic congestion problems and a lack of sufficient mass transit service. As Keri noted, “Fewer people live within a 30-minute drive of Tropicana Field than any other stadium.”

The Rays have spent more than a decade trying to get another ballpark built in the Tampa-St. Petersburg vicinity, but have been unable to get a plan off the ground. They can’t escape their lease, which has commonly been described as iron-clad. Earlier this week, colleague Sheryl Ring delved into their use agreement’s “exclusive dealings” clause, which forbids the team from even negotiating to play elsewhere. She also noted a similarly restrictive memorandum of understanding that allowed the team only to seek new stadium sites in the two Florida counties that encompass the Tampa-St. Pete area, Pinellas and Hillsborough.

You may recall that at the 2018 Winter Meetings, Sternberg made a show of announcing that a plan to build a glitzy, $900 million new ballpark in the Tampa neighborhood of Ybor City had fallen through, with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred blasting Hillsborogh County’s lack of specifics (read “public funding”). That came near the end of the three-year window granted by the aforementioned MOU, which expired on December 31, 2018.

If the Rays’ attempt to sell a dual-city plan weren’t already underwater enough, St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman handed ownership an anvil last week when he said, “I have no intention of bringing this idea to our city council to consider.” Without that, the Rays can’t get another MOU that would allow them to discuss any proposal with Montreal. In fact, there’s already an inquiry into whether Sternberg violated the lease agreement by discussing his plan with Montreal mogul Stephen Bronfman, son of former Expos owner Charles Bronfman and a prime mover in a group spearheading effort to return baseball to Montreal.

If the Rays were hoping to find high-level civic support elsewhere, Pinellas County Commissioner and 2021 St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Ken Welch said, “I am not open to funding a part-time stadium where our home team is shared with another city.” Meanwhile, former St. Petersburg mayor Bill Foster likened the two-city plan to the team wanting a wife and a mistress. Good times.

“I’m confident it’s an amazing idea,” said Sternberg on Tuesday while denying that this plan was part of “a staged exit,” or “a page out of a playbook to gain leverage.” His main selling point appears to be the fact that both new ballparks would be intimate, open-air venues with 30,000 or fewer seats, which would be less costly than building parks with retractable roofs, as in Arizona, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Toronto (the Trop is currently the only dome). According to Neil deMause, who has spent the past two decades chronicling MLB’s stadium shell game in his co-authored book Field of Schemes and a long-running blog of the same name, the “ballpark figure” for such a roof is an additional $200 million to $300 million, though “it depends what kind of roof, and how it affects the overall design.”

Secondarily, Sternberg claimed that such an arrangement will drive plenty of Canadian fans to the region, the kind of vaporous “economic impact” claim so common in stadium proposals. As FloridaPolitics.com’s Noah Pransky wrote:

In short, he suggested losing 41 home games a year — while also paying for a new Rays stadium — would pay for itself, as new Canadian tourists would come down to see their “home” team early in the season.

Back-of-the-napkin math on this suggests St. Pete would need tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of new Canadian tourists to make this work, which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that no Montreal fan is going to want to watch their team in Florida’s June humidity when they could wait three weeks and watch them up north in July.

You could also simply count all the empty seats at Blue Jays’ spring training games in Dunedin to know hundreds of thousands of fans aren’t coming down to watch their home team play baseball in Florida.

DeMause has his own debunking of Tuesday’s presser at Field of Schemes. His conclusion:

Whatever exactly Sternberg has in mind, this is clearly a long, long con, or if nothing else a way to kill time and build momentum for something while waiting out the remaining eight years of his lease. It’s transparently a classic non-threat threat — even Twitter noticed — but the question now becomes what the Rays owner plans to do with any leverage that he’s savvily created, especially considering he faces an opponent in St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman who isn’t afraid to sue to enforce the lease’s gag rule on stadium talks.

Of course, it’s always possible this non-threat threat is all Sternberg plans to do, in hopes that it will shake loose more stadium talks in Tampa Bay, given that he’s tried that move (albeit without the Montreal gambit) roughly a billion times before:

DeMause then linked to a tweet promoting this Pronsky article enumerating five separate occasions over the past decade in which Sternberg suggested the Rays’ future in the region was in doubt.

The one unplayed card Sternberg appears to have is that once the Trop is replaced, the team will receive 50% of the revenues that come from redeveloping the current site’s 86-acre footprint — but only if they remain in St. Petersburg. Any escape route from their current lease probably runs through that arrangement, with the Rays either forgoing some percentage of that revenue or paying the city a lump sum. Even if that happens, the obstacles to building two part-time ballparks remain, and it is difficult to imagine the Major League Baseball Players Association signing off on putting its constituents through the extra hassle. Even though players are well compensated relative to most Americans (and Canadians) — admittedly, less well compensated in the case of anyone in a Rays’ uniform — they and their families already lead lives that are bifurcated by the realities of the baseball season. Adding another temporary residence to that arrangement, particularly one in a foreign country, will be a tough sell.

Given all of the above, it hardly seems worth scratching the surface as far as the Montreal aspect of this plan, which surely has its own obstacles. While it would be wonderful to imagine major league baseball returning to the city, which would appear to be at or near the top of any short list of desirable expansion sites, it’s nearly impossible to believe that this is how it will happen. While Bronfman’s group has made progress towards a downtown ballpark, as Keri wrote, “It’s even harder to imagine the city, provincial, or federal governments kicking in a big chunk of the construction cost (which could easily approach or even exceed $1 billion Canadian) for partial seasons.”

Thus, the Rays’ plan makes for an interesting thought experiment, but that’s about it. Don’t hold your breath for this tale of two cities to end happily.

Edgar Martinez’s story — at least as recounted in Edgar: An Autobiography, written with veteran Seattle sports scribe Larry Stone and published by Triumph Books earlier this month — reads like something of a fairy tale. Born in New York City in 1963, he moved to Puerto Rico when his parents split, and was raised in the Maguayo neighborhood of Dorado by his maternal grandparents, whom he chose to stay with at age 11, even after his parents reconciled and returned to New York. Though his love for the game was kindled by the heroics of Roberto Clemente in the 1971 World Series, and his development stoked by his relationship with cousin Carmelo Martinez, who spent nine years in the majors (1983-91), he didn’t sign a professional contract until just before his 20th birthday; putting aside $4-an-hour work on an assembly line, he received just a $4,000 bonus from the Mariners. Despite hitting a homerless .173 in his first professional season (1983), and battling an eye condition called strabismus, in which his right eye drifted out of alignment, the Mariners stuck with him.

While Martinez debuted in the majors in 1987, he spent three seasons trying to surmount the Mariners’ internal competition at third base, wound up shuttling back and forth to Triple-A Calgary, and didn’t secure a full-time job until 1990, his age-27 season. Though he won a batting title in 1992, a slew of injuries — shoulder, hamstring, wrist — threatened to derail his career until the Mariners convinced him to become a full-time designated hitter. Once he did, he became one of the AL’s most dominant players; from 1995-2001, he hit .329/.446/.574 for a 162 wRC+ (third in the majors) and 39.9 WAR (seventh, less than one win behind teammate Ken Griffey Jr.).

His heroics not only helped the Mariners reach the playoffs for the first time in 1995 (a year in which he also won his second batting title), but he became a one-man wrecking crew in that year’s Division Series against the Yankees, capping his .571/.667/1.000 performance with a series-winning double in Game 5 that basically saved baseball in Seattle. Remaining with the team for the duration of his career, which lasted through 2004 and included three other postseason appearances, further endeared him to a city that watched Griffey and fellow Mariners Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez depart for greener pastures. When he retired, Major League Baseball renamed its annual award for the best designated hitter in his honor. Earlier this year, in his 10th and final cycle of eligibility, he was elected to the Hall of Fame, that after more than tripling his support from just four years earlier.

Martinez’s arc seems so improbable, and yet it’s all true. Over the course of Edgar’s 352 pages, Martinez candidly details the highlights and lowlights of his career, the big decisions, unlikely events, and tactics that helped him surmount so many obstacles. Stone provides testimony from his former managers, coaches, and teammates in the form of sidebars that offer additional perspectives and enhance the narrative.

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It’s been a weird season thus far for Justin Verlander. On the one hand, the 36-year-old righty has enjoyed dominant stretches and generally pitched well enough to put himself in the conversation for another All-Star appearance (perhaps even a start) and that elusive second Cy Young Award, all while advancing his case for eventual election to the Hall of Fame. On the other hand, he’s struggling to keep the ball in the park like never before — but then, that describes most pitchers in a year of record-setting home run rates. The combination has created some very unusual, extreme statistics

On Sunday, Verlander threw seven strong innings against the Yankees in the Bronx, allowing just four hits, two walks, and three runs while striking out nine. The runs all came via a three-run homer by DJ LeMahieu, but the blast was of trivial importance, hit at a time when the Astros owned a commanding 9-0 lead. The trivia was shared by both teams. It was the 26th straight game in which the Yankees homered, a franchise record and one short of the major league record, held by the 2002 Rangers. It was also the first time since April 15, 2017 — back when he was still a Tiger — that Verlander had surrendered a three-run homer.

I’ll get back to the home runs momentarily. The Astros’ 9-4 win gave Verlander his 10th victory of the season and the 214th of his career; he’s second among active pitchers behind only CC Sabathia, who claimed his 250th win last week. His 142 strikeouts trail only teammate Gerrit Cole for the league lead, while his 2.67 ERA is good for fourth. However, because he’s served up 21 homers in 114.2 innings — a career-high 1.65 per nine — his FIP is a less-impressive 3.77, and his ERA-FIP differential of -1.10 ranks third in the AL. Depending upon one’s choice of pitching value metrics, he either looks like a Cy hopeful (second in bWAR at 3.8) or just a solid All-Star candidate (tied for ninth in fWAR at 2.5). Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, and greetings from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where I’m just beginning my 10-day stay  — working the rest of the week, then on vacation — but contending with some nasty weather that temporarily knocked out our Internet connection this morning. Hopefully it holds out for the next 90 minutes or so; check @jay_jaffe on Twitter in case there’s a sudden gap in the conversation here.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: I don’t really have a good answer for this yet; he’s on my list of players to look into, but something else usually pops up, perhaps because I’m still not clear about what’s going on. He’s barreling the ball less but still averaging above 90 mph in terms of EV. There’s a big gap between his xwOBA (.375) and wOBA (.330) despite slightly better sprint speed, so it may be something of a run of bad luck.

12:10

Jay Jaffe: given how sketchy defensive metrics are in small sample sizes, I am skeptical that working with UZR and DRS in such increments would give you more signal than noise. BABIP, sequencing, and batted ball info (including Statcast now) give us a lot of information to help tease out the gap between a pitcher’s actual and expected results.

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On the heels of five straight losing seasons, the last four with at least 94 losses, the Reds are at least relevant and interesting again. Despite a 29-35 record entering Tuesday, their +33 run differential is the league’s fourth-best. Luis Castillo is showing signs of developing into an ace. Derek Dietrich is fighting off bees and retrograde broadcasters. Yasiel Puig is entertaining even when he’s not hitting, Michael Lorenzen sometimes plays the outfield when he’s not pitching, and top prospect Nick Senzel has arrived. And now, finally, Joey Votto is starting to heat up.

For the second season in a row, Votto has started slowly. On the heels of his 36-homer, 6.5-WAR 2017 season, a few frosty weeks to start 2018 (his age-34 season) could be easily dismissed, but the full-season lows Votto wound up setting in batting average (.284), slugging percentage (.419), wRC+ (131), home runs (12), and WAR (3.5) look considerably more ominous in light of his current line (.256/.347/.379, 5 HR, 93 wRC+, 0.2 WAR), which looks bad until you peep at his stats through May 10: .206/.333/.333 with three homers, an 80 wRC+, and -0.1 WAR.

As noted, the now-35-year-old Votto is showing signs of life. In his past 23 games and 106 PA, he’s batting .316/.377/.432 for a 115 wRC+, which isn’t exactly Votto-esque, but it’s a significant uptick within an offense managing just an 81 wRC+, the worst of any non-rebuilding team. Of his 15 multi-hit games this year, nine of them have taken place in that span, including all three of his three-hit games. This past weekend against the Phillies, he went 5-for-12 with a pair of walks, a homer — his first to the opposite field this year, off Zach Eflin — and a game-tying two-run single off Jose Alvarez in Sunday’s victory, Cincinnati’s only one of the three-game series. Here’s the homer:

As Votto noted after that shot, “I’ve been thinking my swing has been coming around since the beginning of May. I know I had some rough stretches, but it’s a very good sign. I haven’t done that yet this year.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, Blue Jays rookies Cavan Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. added another item to their set of historic firsts: the first sons of Hall of Famers to bat consecutively in a single game. The particular sequence of events could have gone better, though. Facing the Diamondbacks’ Zack Greinke, Biggio flew out. Then Guerrero smoked a first pitch slider (106.4 mph off the bat) 404 feet off the center field wall, yet only wound up with a long single after beginning his home run trot while rounding first base. The gaffe — the Jays’ first miscue in a game they lost 6-0 — didn’t escape the notice of manager Charlie Montoyo, who, in reference to Guerrero’s rookie mistake, told reporters afterwards, “You should always go hard.”

After a slow start following his belated arrival, Guerrero is hitting .248/.313/.445 (102 wRC+) with seven homers in 150 plate appearances overall, and .292/.352/.563 (142 wRC+) in his last 105 PA, starting on May 11. That’s not too shabby for a 20-year-old who might be the most hyped prospect in baseball history. No, he wasn’t a number one overall pick like Ken Griffey Jr., Stephen Strasburg, or Bryce Harper. But he’s the only consensus number one prospect to be the son of a Hall of Famer, which made his debut, forestalled by several months due to injuries and service time hanky panky, that much more hotly anticipated.

The sons of Craig Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero (who debuted on May 24 and April 26, respectively) are the first to be teammates within a group that numbers just 15 thus far. Only seven of those 15 reached the majors after their fathers were enshrined, which means that the rest of this group joined retroactively. Comparatively speaking, we’re in a boom time for such familial connections, given the activity not just of the two young Jays but also Giants pitcher Dereck Rodriguez, son of Ivan Rodriguez. The younger Rodriguez even has a Cooperstown-linked teammate himself, namely outfielder Mike Yastrzemski — not just the grandson of Carl Yastrzemski but the first grandson of a Hall of Famer to reach the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

As if the Dodgers weren’t already rolling along with the NL’s best record (43-19) and top offense (116 wRC+), over the past couple of weeks Corey Seager has begun rounding into form. The 25-year-old shortstop had started the 2019 season slowly after returning from a lost year in which he played just 26 games before undergoing both Tommy John surgery in May and an additional surgery to repair a torn left hip labrum in August. Over his past 12 starts, he’s collected 11 extra-base hits and the Dodgers have gone 10-2.

In case the injuries have clouded your memory, it’s worth recalling that Seager hit a combined .302/.370/.497 (132 wRC+) while averaging 24 homers and 7.8 UZR in 2016-17, leading all shortstops in WAR in both seasons, with 7.0 during his NL Rookie of the Year-winning campaign and 5.9 in his follow-up. He was an All-Star in both seasons, and finished a solid third in the NL MVP voting in 2016. In our 2018 preseason staff poll, he tied with Nolan Arenado as the third-most popular NL MVP pick behind Bryce Harper and Kris Bryant (only one staffer out of 40 picked Christian Yelich).

At least to this scribe’s reckoning, that optimism was based on the notion that the elbow soreness that had limited Seager to pinch-hitting duty for nearly two weeks in August and September 2017 was a thing of the past. But while the shortstop spent the winter working on strengthening the elbow, that proved not to be the case. He exacerbated his elbow problems with some questionable relay throws, his power never materialized, and he hit just .267/.348/.396 with two homers before being sidelined in late April. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Hi folks, and welcome to today’s chat, the last one I’ll be doing before heading up to Cape Cod for a week and a half.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: it’s an annual tradition in the Jaffe-Span household, spearheaded by my awesome mother-in-law, Paula Span (who writes for the New York Times). I’ll be doing at least one chat and filing a few articles from up on the Cape (Wellfleet, to be more specific), and I just booked a very cool interview to conduct while I’m up there. Also scheduled to see at least one Cape Cod League game, which should be fun.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Anyhoo, let’s get to…

12:10

Jay Jaffe: If Stanton were to opt out, he’d be 30 years old and bypassing a minimum guarantee of $218 million over his next seven seasons, including the final buyout. Given last year’s dip in productivity, this year’s absence, and the industry’s changing free agent dynamic, right now I have a hard time imagining he’s going to do better than that, particularly as most of the other situations to which he’d be checking in lack the guaranteed commitment to compete that comes with being a Yankee.

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On Tuesday, the Phillies snapped a five-game losing streak and maintained their razor-thin margin atop the NL East, but not before suffering a different kind of loss when they learned that Andrew McCutchen will miss the remainder of the season. The 32-year-old outfielder tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee while trying to avoid being tagged during a rundown in the first inning of Monday’s game against the Padres. It’s a costly loss for the Phillies. Not only has McCutchen — the leadoff hitter in 59 of the team’s first 60 games — been one of the team’s most productive players, but Philadelphia’s outfield depth has been depleted by a variety of other means.

The play on which McCutchen got hurt was a strange one. After he led off the game by drawing a walk, Jean Segura popped up but lost his balance and fell to one knee in so doing. Rather than catching the ball, Padres second baseman Ian Kinsler alertly let it drop, then barehanded the ball on the first hop and threw to first baseman Eric Hosmer for the first out. That left McCutchen in no man’s land; he broke for second, then reversed towards first, threw on the brakes, then tried an ill-advised spin move to elude Hosmer. By the time he was tagged, Cutch was clutching his knee:

Rotten luck. “I didn’t feel it pop or anything,” McCutchen told reporters after the game. “Something felt uncomfortable, something that made me grab my knee and go down. I’ve had an ACL injury before and I know what that feels like. This didn’t feel like that.” Alas, the outfielder’s optimism proved to be ill-founded, as an MRI taken on Tuesday showed the tear.

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Six in a row, 10 out of 11, 16 out of 19, 27 out of 35 — however you slice it, the Dodgers have been steamrolling everything in their path lately. They haven’t lost a series since dropping two of three to the Giants April 29 to May 1, and now own the NL’s best record (42-19) by a margin of 7.5 games. Their +96 run differential is nearly equal to the sum of those of the league’s second-ranked Cubs (+53) and third-ranked Diamondbacks (+46). Their offense owns the league’s highest wRC+ by a wide margin (117 to the Cubs’ 109), and their rotation owns the NL’s best ERA (2.88) and FIP (3.46) while also the most innings per start (5.89).

Which brings us to their bullpen. Sure, it hasn’t been a dumpster fire on the order of the Nationals’ (6.81 ERA, 5.08 FIP) or Orioles’ (5.84 ERA, 5.66 FIP), but there are only so many teams who can be that lucky. Through Monday, the Dodgers’ bullpen ranked 10th in the NL in ERA (4.71) and ninth in FIP (4.48). The former number doesn’t even account for the fact that the unit has allowed 43% of the runners inherited from the starters to score, the league’s second-worst mark; include all inherited runners and the rate falls to 39%, third-worst. While their relievers’ 7.6% walk rate is a league low, their 22.2% strikeout rate is the second-lowest, and their 1.37 homers per nine is mid-pack. Their clutch score — a measure of whether a player or team has done better or worse than expected in higher-leverage situations — of -2.54 is second-to-last in the NL, ahead of only the Nationals.

As you can see from those numbers above, the offense and rotation have largely papered over the bullpen’s problems. The week-long span from Sunday, May 26 through Saturday, June 1 — during which Dodger relievers combined for a 7.08 ERA and 6.64 FIP in 20.1 innings — illustrates the point in dramatic fashion:

• Sunday, May 26 vs. Pirates: Caleb Ferguson entered with a seven-run lead and turned it into a four-run lead, though the Dodgers still won, 11-7.
• Monday, May 27 vs. Mets: Joe Kelly entered with a five-run lead and failed to retire any of the three hitters he faced, the highlight of whom was a two-run homer by Adeny Hechavarria, the owner of a career .346 slugging percentage and a total of 29 homers compiled in eight seasons. When Kelly’s successor, Dylan Floro, got into trouble, manager Dave Roberts called upon Kenley Jansen for a five-out save, which he converted in the 9-5 win.

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