It Feels Like the Padres Got Off Easy
Yesterday, following a league investigation into claims that the Padres withheld pertinent medical information from other teams with whom they were discussing trades, MLB suspended Padres GM A.J. Preller for 30 days. The Padres admit that they screwed up and vow to change their “medical administration and record keeping,” but in their statement about the suspension, claim to have done so unintentionally.
Obviously, as outsiders without knowledge of what the league found in their investigation, we can’t make any definitive claims about what is true and what isn’t, but the idea that the Padres accidentally kept two sets of medical records — one for their internal use and one to be fed into the centralized league database — is absurd. You don’t unintentionally create more work for your medical staff without knowing exactly why you’re doing so, and it’s not like everyone in the Padres organization hasn’t previously worked with other organizations; they all knew the standard protocol for reporting health information in trade discussions, and they knew this wasn’t how everyone else does things. The idea that this was an accident, and that no one in the organization realized what the team was doing, is laughably unbelievable absent a compelling explanation, which the Padres did not provide.
As best as we can tell, the Padres lied (by omitting pertinent information) to other teams about the health of their players in order to try and complete trades and secure returns that they might not be able to otherwise if the full scale of medical information was disclosed. And it worked. They made the Andrew Cashner deal with the Marlins by also including Colin Rea, a young starter the Marlins thought they were getting to bolster their rotation; when it turned out that Rea got to Miami and admitted that his elbow hurt and had been hurting for some time, the Marlins went nuts and the Padres had to agree to rework the deal, taking Rea back and sending one of the prospects they got in the deal back to Miami.
Unlike the Rodney/Rea deal, the Red Sox didn’t force the Padres to rework the Drew Pomeranz/Anderson Espinoza swap, but it is fair to wonder if they would have surrendered their top pitching prospect had they known that Pomeranz had been taking anti-inflammatory medications at the time of the deal. We’ll never know, of course, but it’s at least reasonable to think that the Padres believed there was some benefit to their trade discussions by withholding that information from the Red Sox, or else they wouldn’t have bothered to omit that information in the first place.
This feels very much like the Padres organizational stance was akin to the old “better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission” trope; if they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, well, whatever, at least they got some cookies first. And as Ken Rosenthal wrote last night, that was Preller’s reputation in the game before the Padres hired him, so that he’s brought that to San Diego can’t really be a surprise. While it had been discussed in baseball circles before the Padres hired him, his promotion caused the Padres and MLB to publicly admit that Preller had been suspended by the league for his actions while running the Rangers’ international department. From Baseball America, two years ago.
“The crux of it was we were accused of talking to an agent, a buscon, about signing a player that was serving an age/identity suspension,” Daniels said. “We never agreed to anything, we never signed anything, but when (the player is) on suspension you’re not allowed to sign a player. We were accused of engaging in negotiations with the buscon about a suspended player during the period he was suspended. It was investigated, there was some discipline to the club involved. I’m surprised it’s as big a deal as it’s being made now.”
Daniels said the team also paid a fine of less than $100,000; Rosenthal reported the fine as $50,000. Daniels declined to comment on the player involved or to elaborate on the specific penalties Preller and the organization faced.
…
Negotiating with a suspended player or agreeing to terms is against major league rules but is common practice in Latin America. Sources with knowledge of DePaula’s case have said MLB did investigate the Rangers with regards to DePaula, but that the allegations against the team involved more than simply negotiating with an ineligible player and extended to the process they went through to try to sign the player.”
The whole story of why Preller was previously suspended — originally for three months, but negotiated down to one month, per Rosenthal — isn’t entirely clear, but that also wasn’t an isolated incident. Per Jeff Passan, Preller was reprimanded by the league last year for an improper workout of an international player in Aruba. Back in 2012, while still in Texas, the Rangers also were in the middle of a big issue when they signed Jairo Beras to a $4.5 million bonus, despite the fact that MLB’s investigation showed he was lying about his age. Ben Badler wrote an in-depth piece on that story, and while the Rangers weren’t punished for their role in Beras’ signing, it was the kind of deal that earned Preller a reputation as being willing to do things other organizations wouldn’t do in order to secure talent.
Clearly, the first suspension didn’t deter Preller from seeing the benefit of pushing the boundaries of the rules, and a 30-day suspension in mid-September doesn’t seem like any kind of deterring punishment either. There aren’t any real serious decisions to be made at this point in the season, and the suspension will end before the offseason begins, so while Preller will miss out on some time to have some end-of-year meetings with players and coaches, this is effectively a slap on the wrist; everything he’s not able to do over the next 30 days can realistically be rescheduled, and the Padres won’t suffer any real serious harm from not having their GM for the next month.
Like with the domestic-violence suspensions and the PED suspensions relating to BioGenesis, this was an accepted suspension by the party being punished, which appears to be the league’s preferred outcome these days. But negotiating a penalty with the guilty party while avoiding legal fights and protracted ugliness — you can imagine the league doesn’t ever want to redo the A-Rod lawsuit — also means that the punishments are, by default, not going to be all that severe. The Padres basically got told to stop reaching into the cookie jar while being allowed to continue eating the cookie they were already holding.
Perhaps the league felt they didn’t need to be all that harsh to Preller, specifically, because the next time he gets caught doing something shady, it seems pretty likely that he’ll get fired; the pattern of behavior would then be too obvious to wave away as mere coincidence. But if you’re another organization, and you see that this is the end result of breaking the rules, it’s hard to think that this is going to act as a legitimate deterrent. If I’m an MLB team walking a thin line in some other part of the game that I hope MLB doesn’t notice, and I see that this is the punishment for getting caught, I’m not going to be scared to keep walking that line.
As Passan notes, there’s a pretty easy line to draw between what the Padres were doing here and what the Cardinals did in hacking the Astros: teams are incentivized to gain information advantages, and with the technological rise, there are now lots of different ways to do that then there were previously. The Cardinals’ punishment for the hacking scandal hasn’t yet been determined, but if this suspension for the Padres deceiving other teams about the health of their players is the precedent, it doesn’t seem like MLB is putting up serious deterrents to follow in these organization’s footsteps.
The Padres pretty clearly cheated the system, and the end result is they probably ended up better off than if they hadn’t. That doesn’t seem like the system MLB should want to be perpetuating.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
The Fernando Rodney trade and the Colin Rea trade were two separate deals. Rea was involved in the Cashner trade
Does the MLB have the power to 1) take away draft picks, 2) fine organizations multi-million dollars, or 3) increase league oversight of a team?
And, follow-up: if they have any of those powers, but didn’t use them here, when will they ever use them?
During the Cardinals hacking scandal, I saw someone write that MLB can’t make draft picks disappear because it would affect the amount of money slotted for the draft which is specified in the CBA. They might be able to transfer the picks and their slot money to other teams, which wouldn’t decrease the total amount of draft spending.
The Cardinals should have to give the Astros a first round draft pick.
That doesn’t work because it disadvantages all the other teams in the league who aren’t the Astros. You have to penalize just the Cardinals and reward the Astros in a way that doesn’t also disadvantage the rest of the league. I suspect this is going to be done monetarily after the season is over. I hope the fine is in the high eight figures, but knowing the MLB, they will lowball it. The only thing the MLB ever gets severe about is rumors of domestic abuse.
I don’t know if I’m reading too much into this, but I get the impression Dombrowski didn’t want to make a big deal of this, because there is no way we could get Espinoza back without making a giant stink. And ultimately, we need Pomeranz in the middle of a pennant race and Dombrowski didn’t want to risk alienating Pom by aggressively pursuing compensation from the Padres, because it might suggest Dombro wouldn’t have wanted Pom.
As a Red Sox fan, I definitely want some compensation from the Padres though.
agreed. While Sox got a useful pitcher, what they gave up is a bit high for a pitcher that had been taking anti-inflammatory medicine for some time. Maybe not get back Espinoza, but maybe an alternate player back from the Padres, essentially Pom + unk for Espinoza.
I doubt Pom has such thin skin that his feelings would be hurt. He knows this is a business.
I agree. Baseball players are not children. Why would Pomeranz possibly feel “alienated” by the thought the Red Sox management believes him to be somewhat less valuable due to whatever is causing him to take anti-inflammatory drugs than he would be at full health?
And even then the Red Sox could plausibly skew it to him that they saw an opportunity to get value and took it, and that they would do that even if he was totally healthy.
Honestly, I doubt it comes down to even that complex an issue.
Reportedly, the medical question surrounding Pomeranz was one of preventative treatments that were non-disclosed.
I think what it comes down to is that even with that information disclosed, the Red Sox probably would have gone forward with the deal. With the Rea situation, the Padres clearly hid a massive medical issue from the Marlins. With Pomeranz, it seems something comparatively minor and I doubt Dombrowski wants to wade back in to the absolute garbage pitching market this offseason over a non-disclosure.
Some form of compensation would be nice, but it would also be unfair to the rest of the AL East. Going back on the trade hurts the Red Sox over the next two plus years more than it helps, though.
The Colin Rea problem wasn’t a massive medical issue. He’d been treated for a sore elbow for weeks after every start, and went out and started again. Lots of rookie pitchers report soreness, especially when approaching their maximum innings thrown, but without an MRI, there was no way the Padres knew he had a partial UCL tear.
BTW, he’s not having TJ surgery. Apparently the partial tear is so minor that Dr. Andrews himself recommended rest and recuperation instead of TJ. His last outing was July 30, so he’d have six months off through January, enough time for the tear to repair itself.
Rea came with five future years of control, so even TJ wouldn’t have wiped out his future value, but the Marlins needed a starter NOW, and agreed to take back the prospect in exchange.
The Marlins got their prospect back after they found out Rea was damaged goods. The difference is that the Red Sox actually need Pomeranz and couldn’t just cancel the deal. The Chisox apparently got deceived about Shields too. The Pads owe them some money, I’d say.
The Padres are already paying over half Shields’ salary as part of the trade. The White Sox owe Shields $10 million per year for two years, plus the $2 million buyout of the third year option. There are other pitchers making that much or more who aren’t pitching as well. $10 million is the going rate for a mid rotation innings eater, and that’s what Shields is, and is doing for the White Sox.
It was the Red Sox who made the complaint, and the Commissioner’s statement specifically mentioned the Pomeranz trade.
He should have been banned from baseball. He has shown that he has no ethics at all.
well, this being his ‘second strike’ he should be banned for a longer time (than his current punishment), with a third offense maybe being lifetime (with an appeal letting him back in 2 yrs *lol* ) . But, he may get that anyways, as which team would want him, knowing that likely he will cost them in penalties/fines?
I have to agree. To use a relevant phrase it’s not in the best interests of baseball for the sport to be perceived as a friendly, lenient home for sheer sleazy unethical cheating like this.
Not to be a super downer but you are the guy who suddenly gets all concerned for the “due process” rights of players who have gotten shorter suspensions for domestic violence so i don’t want to crown you ethics guy.
This happened inside the game AND he got due process. You’re not just a super downer, you’re a hundred miles away on a completely different subject. Carry a grudge much?
yeah but after all this is just that, a game. no matter how heavily you personally invest yourself in the outcomes of adults playing a game, domestic violence issues are real world potentially life/death issues. it may be a different subject, and perhaps this isn’t the time/place, but to point out that there are people who get more heated over this than players abusing their spouses is something for people to reflect on.
ALLEGED abuse. Without a conviction, sometimes without charges, sometimes without an arrest, always without due process. Baseball has no business acting on rumors and allegations. Know anybody whose wife faked a domestic abuse charge to help themselves get a better settlement in a divorce? I know two of them. They weren’t convicted – charges were dropped in both cases – but lost all custody of their children. Leave the law to the law.
riiiiight. im sure those were just ‘ALLEGED’ bullet holes too.
and i dont give a shit who you know, because if youre gonna try to speculate that there are more instances of people ‘faking’ spousal abuse, than abuse victims who dont file charges because of fear or because they dont want the intrusive litigant ordeal that comes with it or any other reasons why they won’t/can’t speak out, youre on a different level of insolence.
i grew up literally watching my mom be abused by my dad, and she never pressed charges or even got police involved for her personal reasons, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
So we shouldn’t care about due process rights if the crime is bad enough? Sorry, I have to disagree there. Even giant pieces of human garbage deserve a fair process.
Everyone deserves due process. In a criminal matter, that means no punishment until after a conviction. Everything before that is just allegations.
Even Barry Bonds deserved (and got) due process.
It’s only cheating if you get caught (and suffer consequences that outweigh the benefit of cheating).
It’s always cheating. If you cheat, you’re a cheater by definition, whether you get caught out or not.
No one told me what the definition of ‘classifed’ was. How was I to know?
-Future Sec of State AJ Preller
Dave, any thoughts on whether other teams will be more hesitant to trade with the Padres?
This was the first question that popped into my head too. Then I realized the Padres don’t have much other teams would want anyway.
I hear Espinoza is a neat prospect…
I was thinking in terms of the major league roster. I’m going on the assumption, perhaps foolishly, that Preller doesn’t flip all his prospects and go for it in 2017.
Feels like MLB handed a lenient punishment because it is the Padres, one of the true also-rans of the sport. The team has only made the playoffs 5 times in the history of the franchise. Also, why cripple a team that might soon be the only the major league sports entity in the San Diego market? Bad for business.
Yet, insert the Red Sox or Yankees into the place of the Padres on this, and I can’t help feeling the social media outrage and league punishment would both be much greater.
I dunno, the Cardinals are a big team and they seem to be getting out of their hacking scandal without any real penalty to the organization.
Was there any evidence that anyone in the Cardinals’ organization knew what Correa was doing? Absent that, I don’t see how you could punish them severely, especially since Correa himself was punished severely by the federal government.
“Was there any evidence that anyone in the Cardinals’ organization knew what Correa was doing? ”
Yes, Correa. The team is responsible for making sure that their high ranking executives don’t do crap like this. The Cardinals organization absolutely should be held responsible for his actions, otherwise you leave yourself vulnerable to scapegoating.
Plus there’s no way he did this on his own.
Actually it’s incredibly likely that he did this all on his own, as someone more rational than Correa would have realized that the risks of that behavior grossly outweighed the potential benefits. The Astros are obviously not in the same division or even the same league as the Cardinals, so having access to their proprietary information would have limited use. Meanwhile if MLB or the federal government discovered that the organization itself was involved in such activity, the penalties would be immense. Quite clearly this was one rogue employee who, consumed by paranoia and bitterness, believed that Luhnow had taken and used proprietary information of the Cardinals. That employee is going to spend nearly four years in federal prison as a result.
He got coerced into taking the fall. Duh.
You have to punish the team. Otherwise, the organization coerces some poor scrub or intern into confessing it was all him and the team gets away with it.
You really don’t think that the front office was in on that? Do you really think that one schlub would do that on his own without getting permission from on high first? You must have never worked in a big corporation.
And in that hypothetical, why would “some poor scrub or intern” take the fall without implicating others? Correa is going to serve prison time as a federal felon, and I can’t imagine that any MLB team would ever hire him in the future. Between legal costs and restitution, I assume that he’s ruined financially. If some low-level employee ended up in that situation and could implicate others, why wouldn’t he do so? What would be such an employee’s motivation to protect his boss, who would also be the person throwing him under the bus in this scenario?
Dave that is easy. his dream job is to work in baseball, so he takes the fall hoping to get rehired for being a stand up guy when he gets out.
Traditionally corporations take care of their families and property while they are serving time and quietly reward them afterwards. It’s been done thousands of times.
Wow, the lynch mob is out in full force. I guess a lot of people hate the Cardinals because the reality is that neither Major League Baseball or the federal government have indicated that they found any evidence suggesting that other St. Louis employees even knew about Correa’s actions, much less participated in them. Downvote me all you want, but that’s the fact of the matter.
No way this scrub did it on his own. I used to respect the Cards; no longer.
Why? I don’t see how a rational person would think that anyone else was involved. Why would anyone else have gone along with it? Why wouldn’t MLB or the federal government have uncovered evidence of someone else’s participation if he hadn’t acted alone? Why wouldn’t Correa spill the beans on someone else being involved given his almost four year federal prison sentence?
This is extremely funny. You yell “due process” when MLB suspends alleged domestic assaulters…yet you’re willing to indict the whole Cards org based on zero evidence.
EDIT: This is for Johnston, since nested comments appear to be broken this far down the nest.
I think if there is a “hidden agenda” regarding the disproportionate punishments dealt to players versus those to the teams themselves, look no further than the age-old labor vs. management conflict. MLB is incentivized against punishing its own, even when its easy to argue that they should do exactly that (as Dave does) to prevent further line-stepping.
I think it’s clear Preller would be better off as some teams International amateur director or scouting director. Being a 1st time GM of a team is hard and between this and trading off everyone and everything in your org. in the 2014-2015 off-season, it seems like he’s overwhelmed.
I wouldn’t demote him that far down, but he would be better served if he answered to a VP of Baseball Operations, like Jed Hoyer answers to Theo Epstein with the Cubs. Preller answers to the Padres’ CEO, who in the past was the owner’s title, now held by a primarily business administrator. It’s probably better to have the GM answer to a baseball guy who knows the rules and guidelines.
The Rosenthal piece stated that this is not a technical breaking of the rules, but a breaking of the ethics / customs. The Cardinals committed federal felony corporate espionage. Very different legal situations.
No the Cardinals did not commit federal felony corporate espionage. Chris Correa did. Very different legal situations.
This is the equivalent of saying Wells Fargo didn’t commit the fraud, the 5,300 employees who have been terminated committed the fraud. The corporation, the Cardinals, employed someone who committed felony corporate espionage for the company’s benefit. The corporation will have to suffer consequences for the action of the corporation’s employees.
Had the Cardinals been found guilty of the “federal felony corporate espionage” they would have been fined and faced other sanctions. The DOJ did not pursue charges against the “corporation” in this case because they found no evidence of corporate culture or practices upon which to base such charges. Therefore, the Cardinals case is distinguished from both the Wells Fargo example that you cite and the Padres in the instant case.
Uhm, no, those are not equivalent in the slightest. If there is any evidence that the Cardinals knew what Correa is doing then I’m all for coming down hard on them, but my understanding is that investigations have turned up no such evidence.
“the Cardinals” are not a person. What precise people have to know about something to say the organization knew? GM? Owner?
In any case, you want to make sure the organization on the whole cannot benefit from the illicit activities of its employees, even if the employee is a lone wolf. The Cardinals should be penalized to an extent that removes any benefit they may have gotten from Correa’s actions, and properly disincentivizes this kind of action in the future.
No such PROOF. Anyone who believes the Cardinals were not involved in this up to their ears is either a Cardinals fan or someone who also believes in the tooth fairy.
Actually, it only requires a fully functioning brain to believe that the Cardinals were not involved. To believe otherwise you would need to espouse that the Cardinals’ leadership was willing to risk enormous penalties if they were discovered in order to undermine another organization that isn’t even in their league, much less their division. You would also need to espouse that they hid their tracks so successfully that neither MLB or the federal government discovered their involvement in Correa’s actions. Then you would need to espouse that Correa is such a loyal soldier that he would accept almost four years in federal prison without ratting out any of his supposed confederates. How is that in any way believable?
You know nothing at all about large corporations and how they behave, do you?
Would you willingly go to prison for 4 years for 4 million dollars? 10 million? 40 million? As soon as the incident came to light Correa’s baseball career was over. If he was offered a big pile of cash (that still pales in comparison to what the Cardinals stand to lose to a full criminal investigation), a lot of people would take the money rather than a chance to take people down with them for not very much in return.
I’m not saying that’s what the Cardinals did, but that scenario is entirely plausible.
Eh, the more you examine that scenario of paying Correa to take the fall, the less plausible it is. Making a big payment to him would require that the Cardinals (or Bill DeWitt) either (i) leave a paper trail that wouldn’t be that hard to uncover if authorities ever investigated or (ii) violate tax and money laundering laws in making that payment to Correa. There’d also be the potential for witness bribery charges.
You arrange for them to get a very lucrative position right after prison, and if you don’t think that they can then pass a lot of money to him without the law or the IRS ever catching on then you need to have a long talk with a crooked lawyer, a crooked accountant, or a former drug dealer. They can all tell you how it’s done.
Johnston, you appear to be Damaso-level biased here, because what you’re posting does not make any sense whatsoever. Major League Baseball is not going to allow the St. Louis Cardinals to give Correa “a very lucrative position right after prison,” and the Cardinals would have no interest in doing that anyway given how it would would be perceived. You’re the one who appears to “know nothing at all about large corporations and how they behave” because they’re not known for being loyal but they are known for being fanatical about their image. From your comments, it’s pretty clear that you’ve been watching far too many TV shows because you have a warped view of reality.
Preller and Correa may not be as different legally as you claim.
Preller could well have committed criminal fraud depending on what exactly he said. The elements of a fraud claim are (1) a misrepresentation of a material fact (2) by a person or entity who knows or believes it to be false (3) to a person or entity who justifiably relies on the misrepresentation; and (4) actual injury or loss resulting from his or her reliance. (See http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/fraud.html ). If Preller said to other GM’s before trades “we’ve disclosed complete medical records on the system”, then elements (1), (2), and (3) are easily covered. I do think those points are much more muddled if Preller never made that claim, particularly if teams routinely omit some medical information from the system. Element (4) shouldn’t be that tough to prove.
And the claim from Padres trainers that Preller said the purpose was to help the team in trades is damaging for Preller on all four points: it shows that he thought the undisclosed medical information was material, that he knew the information wasn’t complete, that he thought other teams would rely on the information, and that he thought he could get more value by not disclosing full medical information. Depending again on what exactly he said to other GM’s, one could look at all those elements and see a premeditated scheme to defraud.
In practice, Preller isn’t going to be charged with criminal fraud nor is another MLB team going to sue Preller and the Padres with a civil fraud claim. That doesn’t mean that a criminal fraud charge for Preller wouldn’t stick after a full investigation and trial: it might.
How could the MLB have suspended Preller for one month without pay if this was not technically a rule-breaking? A team does not have to break federal law to break MLB rules.
I really don’t see how MLB can “suspend” a GM. Preller may not be admitted to any Padres facilities or be allowed participate in any functions for the next 30 days, but how could MLB police all contact with other Padres employees? Maybe a suspension during the winter meetings would have been more appropriate.
I imagine it’s something along the lines of a plea deal. While it’s not technically not a rule that the they have to put into in that system, I believe there are rules about negotiating in good faith, which they weren’t doing.
I feel like Preller fell on his sword for a minor penalty to avoid the MLB digging much deeper.
By this time, all decisions to be made in the next 30 days have already been made, so it’s the least damaging to the organization. The teams are owned and the Commissioner works for the owners collectively. He’s not going to damage a team’s prospects, just display his displeasure at an individual, and let the ownership make its decisions internally. IOW, Preller is on secret double probation within the Padres organization, and the owners won’t fire him just yet, opting to reduce Preller’s and the CEO’s powers in the organization. Placing an experienced baseball executive above Preller in stead of the CEO would be a good idea, effecting a de facto demotion.
Even the 30-day suspension, it’s not like Preller doesn’t have assistants, and I would bet Matt Kemp’s salary that Preller can/will backchannel direct his staff while he is out.
Preller clearly believes rules do not apply to him. So he very well may engage in back channel communication with his staff.
But he is taking a serious risk. If anybody on his staff has a real sense of morality and is unwilling to lie to conceal cheating, they would report it. And even if nobody in the Padre front office has integrity, if anybody feels burned or vengeful toward Preller, they might report him.
MLB seems willing to tolerate Preller’s lies and cheating, but if he makes MLB look foolish by flaunting their punishment, they might find enough backbone to actually ban him from baseball.
Which is something that they already should’ve done.
I don’t think so. As Dave mentions, there actually aren’t that many things to do right now, so it’s easy enough for him to take a vacation with the fam and come back in time to get back into the swing of things before the offseason plans happen. His deputies will work on all of the offseason planning that needs to happen, and he’ll come back in time to see how that turns out.
I assume that teams will be MUCH more wary of dealing with the Padres from here on out, or at least be more vigilant with doing thorough medical checks on the players they are receiving
Just to take a devil’s advocate stance, from what I’ve read the Padres medical reports given to other teams had a very limited amount of info on them. Apparently a glaringly limited amount. Why didn’t this raise any read flags before the consummation of a deal? Hindsight is 20/20 and maybe Preller lied through his teeth to these teams, but it seems like they should have known something was off.
On another note, what would the Marlins have to say about the Chris Paddack trade? He blew his arm out 3 starts after being traded to the Padres. Did his medical reports indicate any problems may lie ahead, had he been treated for any sort of unusual imflammation or soreness?
Overall its certainly an interesting discussion that’s come up.
I don’t think the line is all that clear between the Padres and Cardinals. What the Padres did is an organizational deception overseen by one of their highest executives. The parallel to the Cardinals would be claiming the John Mozeliak ordered Chris Correa to hack the Astros database. There is absolutely zero evidence that is the case. While I know that most want to “chop of the heads” of the Cardinals because the team is not well liked but I can’t see how you can make the argument that the Cardinals organization deserves harsher punishment than the Padres when in the Padres case you have an organizational deception and in the Cardinals case you have what appears to be a rogue actor. I’m sure most will disagree with this take but I think it’s clear that there was much more organizational culpability in this Padres case than in the Cardinals case.
Because the Padres technically didn’t break any official rules, the Cardinals outright broke federal laws.
Additionally, just from a general “severity of the crime” thing, what the Cardinals did was objectively a lot more sinister. The Padres are guilty of crime by omission, which is bad, but a high ranking Cardinals executive literally hacked into an opposing team’s computer systems, which is massive and falls under the auspices of corporate espionage (A serious charge). People absolutely should be calling for the Cardinals’ heads on a plate.
The difference is that the Padres case is an organizational misdeed perpetrated by the head of their baseball operation whereas the Cardinals case was perpetrated by a rogue employee acting outside the boundaries of his job. And, the “Cardinals” did not break any federal laws. Chris Correa did.
I found the Cardinals fan!
If the federal government’s investigation had determined this to be the case then the Cardinals organization would have been subject to severe penalties. That obviously hasn’t happened.
Its not a crime by omission when you intentionally hide information that is supposed to be readily available. A crime by omission is when you don’t volunteer something that you think the other person doesn’t know and would want to know. The Padres were required to include all medical information to other teams for trade purposes and intentionally chose not to. Also, the trial judge in the Cardinals’ case said the value of the information Chris Correa stole was $1.7M. Don’t you think that the Pomeranz, Shields, and Rea deceptions amount to more damage than that?
Omitting when players took aspirin or received ice baths is improper within the customs of MLB teams and is being punished, perhaps too softly. Stealing proprietary information, such as draft rankings and scouting reports, then dumping them on the internet are felonious actions. They aren’t equivalent. If Odor punches Bautista on the field of play, he gets a professional sanction in the form of a suspension. If he punches his wife, he will get a legal sanction in the form of criminal prosecution.
In your example, Odor could also face criminal charges for punching Bautista on the field of play. It has happened in other sports, notably hockey. It still misses the point in that the Cardinals did not break any laws, period. One of their employees did. The DOJ could have charged the Cardinals organization and, if proven, the organization could have been fined or faced other sanctions under federal law. Furthermore, a corporation could be held liable for the actions of their employees if they directed the employees actions or were reckless or negligent and knew or should have known that these actions were taking place and did not stop it. From what we know of the Correa investigation, none of those conditions apply.
You have to realize there are guidelines, not rules, and there are a lot of grey areas, like regular measures to prevent a repeat of a hamstring strain, measures that are incorporated into the player’s pre-game preparation. Report that once, or every game?
More importantly, MLB is not in full control of medical information, that’s owned by the players, and subject to federal privacy laws. Clayton Kershaw refuses to allow the Dodgers to put details of his treatments into the database MLB keeps, and a number of other players have done the same. You can break federal law by releasing more data than a patient/player wants released but not by withholding information to others in the industry.
That’s why they’re guidelines – MLB doesn’t have full control of medical information, and the Commissioner isn’t going to damage the franchise of one of the owners who hired him over those guidelines. Those of you calling for mass executions will be, as ever, disappointed.
Great article, Dave. The whole thing seems really fishy. Without having inside knowledge, it seems impossible that full medical information would not be exchanged in a standard fashion. I am not sure how much I think walking the line on international signings, especially in South America, relates to this type of behavior, which seems much more clearly unethical. Negotiating with and signing children that are represented by buscones and agents not beholden to US law is never going to be a black and white ordeal. Until an international draft is instituted, or there is some other centralized system for all teams to evaluate and bid on talent, all teams are going to have to engage in shady enterprises that come close to whatever vague rules MLB tries to enforce.
Big money breeds corruption, look at the banks and financial institutions in the US.
So insightful.
A 30 day suspension for a GM is like a manager getting thrown out of a game. He just manages from the clubhouse, with better video.
Per Keith Law, Preller will lose thirty days’ salary.
That’s just not enough punishment for what he did.
Agree.
1) Question for someone who knows the GM culture — Isn’t this likely to make Preller a pariah, or at least severely limit his ability to make trades?
2) For that reason, if not just for the sake of appearances, I’m surprised that the Padres haven’t already fired him.
It feels like there must be something more to this story. Could it be that other teams have done the same thing, and Preller is just the first to get caught? I haven’t seen expressions of outrage from other GMs, though that could be due to the ongoing investigation.
Exactly – why did the Padres not fire Preller? His name is mud in the industry, and yet the organization comes out and says that they look forward to having this guy back steering the ship a month down the road.
The whole Padres franchise just took a big step backwards, both for screwing other teams and for the BS way they have lied to the public afterwards.
The Commissioner slaps a wrist, but sends a message to ownership (one of the group of owners who hired him). Ownership backs its employee and promises to make changes. Later, sometimes MUCH later, there’s a reorganization and the employee is rehabilitated, demoted, or let go. Meanwhile, the offending employee has some authority removed and is monitored internally.
As for Preller being a GM named “Mud”, there are only 30 of them to deal with, and if there’s an attractive trade available to the others, it will be made. The Padres, and all other teams, are now on notice to keep good records, and due diligence now requires that teams view those records closely. After awhile, it’s all back to normal operating procedure. After all, there’s a brand new “news cycle” beginning every day.
I suspect they were and are going to fire him, but MLB said please can we suspend him and then you fire him, and the Padres had no objection to getting a month of salary back. (This is suspension without pay I hope?)
They might not fire him at all, but yes, that’s done later, usually as part of a “reorganization” far enough removed in time to be a separate development. Preller is valuable to the Padres as architect of a totally revamped scouting, evaluation, and development system the team badly needed. His use of the June draft and international period have revamped their minor league system.
What SHOULD happen is the addition of a baseball executive above him who knows the rules and procedures and makes Preller stick to them. Preller will be kept on and probably extended when his 5-year contract is up, but he’ll in effect be demoted by answering to someone with more baseball experience. The owners don’t need another “learning experience” from Preller.
Just curious – does anyone have the wording establishing a selling team’s duty to disclose, vs. a buying team’s duty to inform itself? I’m curious if Preller is getting a slap on the wrist because this isn’t expressly prohibited, it’s just dishonest, or if there truly is a ‘thou shalt provide all known information’ clause in the MLB rules.
I don’t have the verbatim language, but according to the Olney article:
“All MLB teams feed medical information into a central database known as the Sutton Medical System, designed to both maintain the privacy of individual players and to be accessible to teams when needed — such as when trades are made.
Any time a player goes into the training room and receives treatment — down to hot tubs, aspirin and anti-inflammatories — those details are supposed to be entered into records.”
http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/17554327/san-diego-padres-face-discipline-hiding-players-medical-information-mlb-database
So yeah, they were supposed to disclose this information in trade discussions. Instead, they created a second database in order to hide this information from prospective trade partners.
Interesting, I read the article, and I’m still not so sure how codified it really was. This smells a little like an ‘understanding’ more than a rule, which means that if they’d really laid down the law Preller would’ve probably drug them into court.
This would be a good article idea for Nathaniel Grow, the Fangraphs legal guru.
I wonder also, and I’ll offer another bit of logic that hints at you being correct. It was completely foreseeable that these medical record discrepancies would be discovered if players were traded. A player traded by the Padres goes to a new team, tells the trainers there “I was receiving treatment XYZ with the Padres”, and the new team realizes that treatment XYZ was nowhere in the Padres’ medical records. It sounds like that chain of events is exactly what happened.
That’s not complete proof, because even generally smart people sometimes commit stupid and short-sighted acts that leave one thinking that they should have known they’d be caught. So it’s possible that Preller just didn’t really think this through out of shortsightedness or desperation (or whatever). But it’s also reasonable to wonder if his planned defense was that he was being aggressive within the letter of the rules. Or, as a similar hypothesis, that in fact a lot of teams don’t enter “all” of the details into medical records, but the Padres stretched the normal gray area to an egregious level.
Just seems odd – though admittedly conceivable – that a team and GM would decide to break a codified, bright line rule when there’s basically a 100% chance that they’d be discovered.
Yeah, that looks pretty blatant, but the medical records on the database are never complete. The player can tell trainers not to enter some data. Federal privacy law is controlling, so teams have to comply with the player’s wishes.
If Clayton Kershaw is traded in the off-season, his record will have NO information on this year’s back treatment. He told the Dodgers to enter only that he had treatment, but not what the treatment was. He owns his medical records and has federal privacy law to back him up.
There are lots of gray areas too. A treatment for a hamstring strain leads to the player doing specific stretching exercises before every game to prevent a recurrence. Is it now part of the player’s pre-game preparation, so do you report it? Do you report it once or for every game?
That’s why the wild penalties proposed can’t happen. There are too many gray areas, and MLB ultimately doesn’t have complete control over medical records, and can get in more legal trouble releasing too much information than withholding some of it.
I thought that disclosure of player medical records is well-covered in the CBA, including that players consent to disclosure to potential trade partners. See Article XII of the CBA and Attachment 18 to it – http://mlb.mlb.com/pa/pdf/cba_english.pdf
Great article. It is really bothersome how little accountability the league ever takes. The way the league responds to everything with their hands up like we had no idea this was going on is comical. I am all for cleaning the game up and enforcing the agreed upon rules of the league, but at what point do we start looking at the commissioner’s office as bearing some of the blame for what they allow to go on? The way they selectively enforce the rules and select scapegoats to take the fall for systemic issues they were well aware of is nauseating. As if they had no idea that they were breeding a culture of steroids that seeped down all the way to college and high school. Or that Pete Rose was the only player/coach to ever gamble on the game. I don’t buy for a second that the commissioners office is some poor group of innocent individuals tasked with trying to keep the evil players, coaches and personnel from breaking all of the rules. The $$$’s in their pockets is evidence enough that MLB knows very well what is going on in the league and they only choose to do something when the press or a team gets info and get upset. Maybe it’s the owners putting pressure on the commissioners office, but the league surely isn’t policed by the commissioners office as one might expect or hope.
I don’t think this is the end of the discussion for the Padres’ punishment. The Pads also deceived the Marlins and White Sox from what I read and this punishment only concerns their dirty dealing with the Bosox.
The MLB statement ends with “the matter is closed” or some such verbiage. Pomeranz has pitched well, the prospect is 18 and NOT a can’t miss, The Marlins trade for Rea was unwound, getting their prospect back for Rea, and the Padres are paying all but $10 million/year to the White Sox for Shields. That’s the going rate for a mid-rotation innings eater, which is what Shields is at this stage of his career.
Besides, the White Sox gave the Padres a pudgy teenage shortstop and a pitcher who started 4 games, threw less than 20 innings, gave up 20 runs and 9 homers (4.1 homers per nine!), and went on the disabled list for the rest of the season. The earlier Fernando Rodney trade with the Marlins netted a low-A fireballer who pitched four games and had TJ surgery. The Padres have a few complaints of their own.
Did they get off easy? Or has this just started? I suspect that the other 29 teams will be punishing the Padres for at least a few years: by either outright refusing to trade with them, or by making disadvantageous trade offers to them.
I’ll be surprised if the Padres aren’t in for a hazing.
Prepare to be surprised. The other 29 GMs aren’t in business to exact revenge, but to improve their teams. If they can do it dealing with Preller, they will. It’s a private club limited to 30 members, and operates by its own rules, which often means “every man for himself.”
Can they undo those trades now? of course not… Scoreboard: Preller=3,Teams that traded with the Padres=0.
To play Devil’s Advocate for all those people saying that teams will be less willing to deal with the Padres now: At the end of the day, each GM’s job is to win games and eventually championships. If making a certain trade with the Padres is going to increase their odds of doing either of those, they’d be stupid not to do it. If they don’t, some other team who doesn’t care about teaching Preller a lesson will do it and will reap the benefits from it. You’d have to be a fool to completely refuse to make deals with a team in all circumstances.
Nobody will refuse to trade with Preller out of principle, but most GMs will now check into the medical records of the players Preller offers in trades more carefully, which can only result in fewer trades actually materializing.
I’m in a spot with miserably slow internet and am having difficulty Google-checking my memory, so forgive me if I get a detail or two wrong from some 20 years ago. I’m leaving the more uncertain details vague for that reason.
But I recall a mid-90s trade between the Brewers and Yankees in which the Brewers were found to have hidden injury information from the Yankees, and the commish’s office subsequently took some 3 or 4 players away from the Brewers, including Bones, and gave them to the Yanks.
I’m having trouble seeing why a similar punishment wouldn’t be in order here.
Okay, now I can get this detailed and correct. In 1996, the Brewers traded Graeme Lloyd, Pat Listach, and a PTBNL to the Yanks for Bob Wickman and Gerald Williams. When it turned out they had hidden a sore elbow and a cortisone shot for Lloyd (which turned out to be due to bone spurs) and that Listach had a stress fracture in his foot of which they denied knowledge, but who knows, Selig awarded the Yanks Ricky Bones and another PTBNL, from his own (excuse me, his daughter’s, ahem) team.
Even looking back I think the fact that Selig was allowed to transfer the team to his freaking daughter is about all the information a consumer needs about what the commissioners office is all about.
He’s the owner’s pet, not the players’, and certainly not the fans. It has ever been thus.
Well, if the Commissioner is a former owner who transferred the team to his daughter, he has to look impartial when his “daughter’s club” trades damaged goods. I can imagine George Steinbrenner’s reaction.
Your memory is correct sir though it was Much much worse.
The Yankees got Graeme Lloyd (and discovered an injured elbow) AND Pat Listach (who had a BROKEN LEG).
This was during the first championship year in 1996 and Watson had a conniption in the press. The brewers ended up having to just give Yankees players including the legendary hair style of Ricky Bones
There’s a GM like this in every fantasy league. Can’t win by finding talent better than the other guy – gotta scam somebody for it.
the reason for veto powers!
From hero to goat. Life under the scope.
I have no problem with the penalties MLB placed on Boston with its international amateur FA dealings.
I also have no problem with this decided-on penalty for just an individual and not an organization with SD.
But I have a pretty big problem with both outcomes existing simultaneously. MLB should either be evenly heavy-handed in these situations, or light…not especially fair to be tough at times and not others, especially consider that the practice Boston got slammed for was one that many feel was done by a number of teams.
The risk of witholding information is getting caught and having a trade reversed as happened in the marlins deal.
Its not like teams won’t talk to the player and examine him. The player is not going to lie about past treatments, I don’t think.
In the Red Sox case, they did not want to reverse the trade. So presumably, the damages were minor. They were desperate for Pomeranz and were willing to pay the price even with the information they learned from Pomeranz.
I suppose these medicals could also factor into FA signings , since I believe the previous team makes such information to a team that is signing a FA. This is not in the best interests of the league.
I doubt the Padres are the first to withold information though. However, the systematic way they went about it made it fairly simple to get caught. There were just too few entries in the data base only covering injuries that ended up on the DL list. Another team might only fudge the entries for a couple of players they know they would like to move.
In any event, I doubt the Red Sox and Padres trade for awhile, at least as long as Preller is GM
Personally if I were the Padres I’d tell him keep doing it until there’s a harsh punishment, the only real thing they lost was probably a couple hundred thousand dollars and gain much more than that in talent. It maybe ethicly wrong but in this business ethicly wrong seems like just part of the business.
“Oh sorry officer, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that…”
He said, “That was good, wasn’t it?
Because I *did* know I couldn’t do that.”