Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Royals signing Terrance Gore and turning themselves into a bad-but-entertaining team of stolen-base threats, the Angels signing Matt Harvey and how they stack up, the renaming of Safeco Field, and the new posting system for Cuban players. Then (28:18) they talk to left-hander Rick Teasley about becoming the first pitcher ever to strike out Willians Astudillo twice in one pro game, the significance of getting big leaguers out, his itinerant career, staying safe in Venezuela and the deaths of Luis Valbuena and Jose Castillo, why fan participation in other countries kicks MLB’s butt, how he weighs where (and whether) to keep pitching, his time as a Tampa Bay farmhand, and more, followed by a few outro updates.

Audio intro: Elliott Smith, "Speed Trials"
Audio interstitial: Bob Marley, "Do it Twice"
Audio outro: The Flashing Lights, "Same Thing Twice"

Link to Ringer Royals article
Link to Jeff’s Harvey post
Link to Gore episode
Link to Octavio’s brawl video
Link to closeup video of brawl
Link to summary of latest Russell revelations

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It’s been long known that the Chicago Cubs would likely form their own regional sports network (RSN) after their partnership with the White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks, and Comcast ends at the conclusion of the 2019 season. The news that the White Sox, Bulls, and Blackhawks would stick with Comcast, as reported by Bruce Levine, left the Cubs needing their own partner for a new network. The specific details vary, with the Sun-Times reporting the Cubs had agreed to a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group while Bruce Levine indicated Sinclair were merely frontrunners, with Jon Greenberg hearing the same. In addition to the Cubs, Sinclair is also in the bidding to buy 15 more FOX RSNs. That should worry Major League Baseball, but perhaps not just for the reasons many think it should.

Sinclair has been in the news most recently for its political leanings. According to FOX Business, Sinclair “control(s) more than 200 stations in over 100 local markets. The local media empire was built on snapping up these stations around the country and adding an extra element of right-wing commentary to its programming.” The company has come under fire for its content practices across those affiliates and been defended by the President for the same. Those content-based criticisms are surely a concern for many, but their business model also presents a separate potential issue for baseball. While baseball is trying to expand its reach and ensure young people have access to the sport, Sinclair is tied to an older model that could threaten massive carriage fee disputes and blackouts for fans in local markets.

The vast majority of the Sinclair-owned stations are the traditional, over-the-air networks like FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the CW. Anyone with an an antenna and in range of the broadcast tower can view those networks for free, but cable and satellite providers aren’t allowed to simply broadcast those networks. Instead, cable providers must pay a retransmission fee to broadcast those networks on their cable packages (here’s a primer on retransmission fees). Sinclair has leveraged those fees in the past and been a part of the largest blackout in television history.

The biggest issues with Sinclair’s retransmission fees occurred in the lead-up to its eventual purchase of the Tennis Channel. Back in 2015, Dish Network, which has had its fair share of carriage fees disputes, indicated that it had reached agreement to broadcast 129 Sinclair-owned stations, but was being blacked out due to Sinclair’s attempt to gain leverage in its carriage negotiation with an unnamed cable network it was planning to purchase. Roughly five million Dish customers went without local programming.

In 2016, Sinclair bought the Tennis Channel, which was then available in about 30 million homes, and said it planned to pair negotiation for that channel with its broadcast networks. For the most part, the plan worked. The Tennis Channel now has roughly 55 million subscribers while nearly every other cable channel has been seeing its numbers drop. But those increases did not come without collateral damage. In addition to the previous Dish Network blackout:

• In the beginning of 2017, Frontier Communications and Sinclair could not agree to a deal in a dispute that affected customers in the Pacific Northwest.
• In September, failure by Sinclair and Hulu to reach an agreement led CBS corporate to undercut Sinclair in markets with a Sinclair CBS affiliate.
• PsVue and Sinclair couldn’t reach an agreement earlier this year.

Sinclair’s attempt to buy half the regional sports networks offering baseball comes on the heels of a failed merger with the Tribune Company that might have meant an even greater reach of local broadcast networks, including those in Chicago and New York. That deal failed when the FCC determined that approving the merger would violate the law that caps the percentage of households into which one owner can broadcast. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai found fault with some of the sales Sinclair proposed to bring it under that cap, saying the sale “would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law.” Tribune Media Company has since sued Sinclair for the part they played in halting the deal.

A deal for the Fox RSNs would not require FCC approval, as they are cable channels, but would fall under anti-trust regulations. The problem for baseball is less the federal regulations, and more in how Sinclair would negotiate carriage fees. Of the cities with Fox RSNs, Sinclair owns local stations in Minneapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. They also own stations in a whole host of smaller markets in Michigan, Ohio, California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and New York. It’s not difficult to imagine how Sinclair might attempt to leverage retransmission fees to extract even more money for the RSNs. With few exceptions, RSNs have had little difficulty gaining entrance to cable providers basic digital package. This isn’t a situation analogous to the Tennis Channel, as the RSNs are already in a large percentage of homes. But if Sinclair raises the price higher than providers are willing to pay, disputes become more likely.

We could also see the RSNs used as leverage to gain greater access for the Tennis Channel; Sinclair could make getting an RSN on cable contingent on the provider accepting the Tennis Channel as well. Both situations would find the RSNs that broadcast baseball games caught in the middle of disputes having very little to do with the popularity of the sport or the desire of fans to watch baseball. While carriage disputes are in some respects inevitable, the results, with the Dodgers being the prime example, can be messy and deprive fans of access to the game and limit the number of new fans the sport can draw. With Sinclair potentially owning the rights to the broadcasts of 16 teams in 16 different markets, might they let a dispute drag out in Cincinnati or San Diego if they thought they could get a better deal in large-market Dallas?

As baseball moves forward, it’s imperative that it avoid these types of disputes, particularly as its audience grows older. Sinclair’s current difficulties negotiating with newer streaming platforms like Hulu and PSVue could be a warning sign that the company will likely cling to its older methods of extracting revenue from customers, and disputes could get worse as the number of cable subscribers shrink. That would be bad news for baseball as it tries to reach the consumers who are ditching cable for these streaming services.

Disney is in the process of buying a large number of Fox Entertainment assets. In order to receive regulatory approval for that purchase, it agreed to sell Fox’s RSNs to ensure that Disney, which owns ESPN, wouldn’t control too much of the cable sports market. The first round of bids was just received and were apparently underwhelming, coming in below the more than $20 billion expected price. According to reports, Sinclair is currently in the driver’s seat to purchase the RSNs if all of the networks are sold as one. It’s possible the RSNs aren’t worth the $20 billion, as initial estimates proposed, but a large part of that misestimation could be because MLB has said it retains control of the digital streaming rights, leaving any potential buyer with an uncertain future and more negotiations to contend with. It could be that at some point, MLB joins the fray in bidding for these networks, so as to easily combine streaming and broadcast rights, but it seems likely they would prefer someone else pay for that guarantee. In the end, Fox may attempt to buy back the stations they’ve sold, but if the highest bidder ends up being Sinclair, it could be in the league’s best interest to make their own bid and ensure a bigger say in controlling its own future. There is considerable risk in making such a purchase, but Sinclair’s track record indicates there is also significant risk in letting it control who gets to watch baseball across the country.

I don’t think I need to tell you what Matt Harvey was. Earlier, in his prime, he was a bona fide celebrity, someone whose presence stretched well beyond just his excellent pitching. And, of course, that pitching was excellent. Harvey blossomed as one of baseball’s best starters, and he did so on New York’s massive stage. Given that Harvey is and has been a Scott Boras client, one could envision an enormous free-agent contract down the line. The target would’ve been this very offseason. Boras would’ve extolled Harvey’s many virtues using language only Boras could design.

At this writing, Harvey is 29 years old. Indeed, he found himself represented by Boras on the free-agent market. And he’s agreed to a one-year contract with the Angels, worth at least $11 million, and at most $14 million. In the same market, Nathan Eovaldi was guaranteed $68 million. J.A. Happ was guaranteed $34 million, and Lance Lynn was guaranteed $30 million. Garrett Richards was guaranteed $15.5 million, and he won’t pitch at all next year. Kurt Suzuki was guaranteed $10 million. Jesse Chavez was guaranteed $8 million.

This wasn’t the free agency Harvey or Boras imagined. There are reasons for that. You can squint and still see a similar pitcher. But the years, I’m afraid, have taken their toll.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2018 season brought with it a number of unexpected developments. The Braves won their division! The Athletics were good! Max Muncy hit 35 home runs! But those sorts of developments are why we watch baseball: the unexpected and the fun. There was another development in the 2018 season, though: the return of the opener, a baseball strategy that isn’t novel, but had mostly fallen out of fashion. It started with Tampa Bay and Sergio Romo, then spread through the rest of the league. Even teams like the Dodgers, who always seem to have more competent starting pitchers than available rotation spots, employed the strategy. The Athletics even used an opener for their playoff game against the Yankees, though there it was borne more from necessity.

The baseball logic for the opener is pretty straightforward. We know that pitchers, especially starting pitchers, face a times-through-the-order penalty. In general, the more times a hitter faces the same pitcher in a game, the worse the results will be for the pitcher and the better the results will be for the hitter. This makes intuitive sense. Pitchers get tired; batters adjust. Pitchers make more mistakes when they get tired, and hitters gather more data the more they see of a pitcher’s repertoire. An opener can help mitigate that. Having a reliever, especially one with a handedness advantage, face the top of the order in the first inning means that the pitcher who comes in afterwards won’t face that third-time-through-the-order penalty – at least, in theory. A pitcher who begins his night by facing the middle of a team’s order instead of the top can go five innings and face the top of the order only once – again, in theory.

But there’s a part of the opener we really haven’t explored yet – and it’s one the always-thoughtful Zack Greinke discussed with Steve Miller earlier this year.

“[The opener is] really smart, but it’s also really bad for baseball,” Arizona starter Zack Greinke says. “It’s just a sideshow. There’s always ways to get a little advantage, but the main problem I have with it is you do it that way, then you’ll end up never paying any player what he’s worth because you’re not going to have guys starting, you’re not going to have guys throwing innings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

If Roger Clemens has a reasonable claim as the greatest pitcher of all time, then the same goes for Barry Bonds as the greatest position player. Babe Ruth played in a time before integration, and Ted Williams bridged the pre- and post-integration eras, but while both were dominant at the plate, neither was much to write home about on the base paths or in the field. Bonds’ godfather, Willie Mays, was a big plus in both of those areas, but he didn’t dominate opposing pitchers to the same extent. Bonds used his blend of speed, power, and surgical precision in the strike zone to outdo them all. He set the single-season home run record with 73 in 2001 and the all-time home run record with 762, reached base more often than any player this side of Pete Rose, and won a record seven MVP awards along the way.

Despite his claim to greatness, Bonds may have inspired more fear and loathing than any ballplayer in modern history. Fear because opposing pitchers and managers simply refused to engage him at his peak, intentionally walking him a record 688 times — once with the bases loaded — and giving him a free pass a total of 2,558 times, also a record. Loathing because even as a young player, he rubbed teammates and media the wrong way and approached the game with a chip on his shoulder because of the way his father, three-time All-Star Bobby Bonds, had been driven from the game due to alcoholism.

As he aged, media and fans turned against Bonds once evidence — most of it illegally leaked to the press by anonymous sources — mounted that he had used performance-enhancing drugs during the latter part of his career. With his name in the headlines more regarding his legal situation than his on-field exploits, his pursuit and eclipse of Hank Aaron’s 33-year-old home run record turned into a joyless drag, and he disappeared from the majors soon after breaking the record in 2007 despite ranking among the game’s most dangerous hitters even at age 43. Not until 2014 did he even debut as a spring training guest instructor for the Giants. The reversal of his felony obstruction of justice conviction in April 2015 freed him of legal hassles, and he spent the 2016 season as the Marlins’ hitting coach, though he was dismissed at season’s end.

Bonds is hardly alone among Hall of Fame candidates with links to PEDs. As with Clemens, the support he has received during his first six election cycles has been far short of unanimous, but significantly stronger than the showings of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro, either in their ballot debuts or since. Debuting at 36.2% in 2013, Bonds spun his wheels for two years before climbing to 44.3% in 2016 and 53.8% in 2017 thanks to a confluence of factors. In the wake of both Bonds and Clemens crossing the historically significant 50% threshold, the Hall — which in 2014 unilaterally truncated candidacies from 15 years to 10 so as to curtail debate over the PED-linked ones — made its strongest statement yet that it would like to avoid honoring them in the form of a plea to voters from vice chairman Joe Morgan not to honor players connected to steroids. The letter was not well received by voters, but Bonds gained just 2.6 percentage points. Like Clemens, he needs to recapture his momentum to have a shot at reaching 75% by the time his eligibility runs out in 2022.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Thomas Pannone was featured here in April 2017, I wrote that he was “quietly emerging as a legitimate pitching prospect.” Playing for Cleveland’s High-A affiliate at the time, the Rhode Island-born southpaw hadn’t allowed an earned run in his last 38 innings. Amid negligible fanfare, Pannone was on a roll.

His address and level of notoriety have since changed. Sent to Toronto in the 2017 trade-deadline deal that delivered Joe Smith to Northeast Ohio, Pannone proceeded to test positive for a performance-enhancing substance, prompting a suspension that kept him out of action until this past June. He flew through the minors upon his return. Called up in August, Pannone appeared in 12 games for the Blue Jays— six as a starter — and logged a 4.19 ERA over 43 innings. He picked up four wins, to boot.

As for punch outs, while they aren’t particularly prominent in Pannone’s resume, he did manage to send 29 batters back to the dugout as an official scorer entered a K into a scoresheet. Kevin Kiermaier — the first player to step into the box against him — went down looking on a hook. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Astros’ signing of Michael Brantley, the curious cases of blocked prospects Kyle Tucker and Alex Verdugo, the Mets’ signing of Wilson Ramos, and the unique career of globe-trotting Trey Hillman. Then (20:49) they talk to Charlie Olson, co-founder and CEO of Pando Pooling, about his company’s plan to provide a security net for poorly paid minor-league players by pooling their future earnings, how they approach players and whether the service is an easy sell, how it works and where the concept came from, what type of players tend to take the company up on its offer, how Pando ensures that the terms are upheld, what might change in the future, other industries where pooling might make sense, and more.

Audio intro: Tonedeff, "Safety First"
Audio interstitial: Real Estate, "Pool Swimmers"
Audio outro: Camera Obscura, "Swimming Pool"

Link to Ben’s article about Hillman
Link to Pando site
Link to SI piece about Pando
Link to Big League Advance episode
Link to Agostinelli episode

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