July 2021 - Marc Normandin is creating baseball coverage, featuring leftism

Curt Schilling, regrettably, will not be removed from his final Cooperstown ballot

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In what I hope is not even a little bit surprising at all to you, I have no love for Curt Schilling, for a number of reasons. You could just pick one of them and it would be understandable — that he basically defrauded Rhode Island taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars while lying to his own employees about their healthcare status, that he has a collection of Nazi memorabilia for “historical” purposes but also aligns himself politically with white supremacists making the entire “historical” thing even more questionable, that he’s especially racist toward Muslims, that he’s a disgusting transphobe, etc. — but the point is that there is a whole spectrum of reasons to think he sucks, and we shouldn’t forget that he stacks them on top of each other like this just because picking one would be disqualifying enough.

That being said, despite my right and true dislike of him and everything he stands for and believes in, I was hoping he would have his request to be removed from his 10th and final Baseball Hall of Fame ballot granted. Sure, he wanted off for extremely childish reasons, and asked for it in a tantrum of a statement following his failure to be elected to Cooperstown once again last year, but we could speed up this whole process by removing him from the Baseball Writers Association of America’s version of the election process, and gain a year of silence on the matter for our troubles, too.

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Cleveland’s MLB team finally picked a new name

Back in December of 2020, it was finally announced that the Cleveland Indians would eventually be known as the Cleveland… something else. The name was yet to be worked out, but we were all assured that the organization had finally taken that next step and decided to drop the old moniker that had fostered a racist culture around the team, one that used the excuse of “honoring” Native Americans as justification for its existence.

Now, we finally know what that new name is. It will take until 2022 for Cleveland to actually make the switch to become the Cleveland Guardians — sure, it’s not feasible for them to make a dramatic, mid-season wardrobe and name change, but it’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t have been fun to see them try it — but it’s happening. There’s a new logo and people from outside of Cleveland complaining that the name isn’t good enough for them and everything. I’ll let Scott Hines handle that particular angle, other than saying that more sports team names should be inspired by Lord of the Rings-ass statues that exist in real life, even if it means we need to build more statues like that now to prepare us for future name changes.

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A’s minor leaguers can’t afford to play home games

Back in June, I wrote about how Cardinals’ minor leaguers were struggling to pay for their hotels during home games — that they were spending more than they were making on homestands, even while staying at a discounted hotel. It certainly was not a situation unique to those Cardinals’ farmhands, just given the math involved in paying for a hotel for home games while making a salary well below the poverty line, but St. Louis’ minor leaguers were one of the first to speak out anonymously and with a team-level identifier attached.

Now, some Oakland A’s minor leaguers are saying the same thing is happening to them. Alex Schultz at the SFGATE wrote about how A’s minor leaguers playing for Single-A Stockton can’t afford to pay for a hotel during home games, even though the A’s got a bulk discount at one. The situation is the same as it was for the Cardinals’ players highlighted in June: thanks to coronavirus protocols during the pandemic, not being able to stay with host families, or stuff six of themselves into a three-bedroom apartment to rent at a severe discount, is sucking up what little pay the players usually manage to take home.

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Round-up: All-Stars’ labor priorities, and the A’s stadium plan vote

The ongoing collective bargaining negotiations between Major League Baseball and the Players Association have not been public to this point, which should not be a huge surprise. It’s just July, and the current CBA doesn’t expire until December. Plus, we just had a whole lot of public negotiating going on before the 2020 season, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic moving negotiations ahead of schedule: the PA didn’t seem like they wanted to go public at all until MLB forced their hand there, while MLB itself probably decided to rein things in a bit given how their extremely public, pandemic-related posturing went over — as one of my dad’s favorite sayings goes — about as well as a fart in church.

So yes, things have been quiet, with the only public knowledge at this point basically being that the two sides are in fact talking things over. The 2021 All-Star Game was last week, though, which means media availability for a whole bunch of high-profile players, many of whom were asked questions about what it is they want out of a new CBA. What struck me while reading about this was the uniformity of the answers: the players aren’t discussing the actual details of CBA talks, of course, but they seem pretty unified in terms of what it is they’re looking for out of a new CBA, in a general sense.

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Better Know a Commissioner: Ford Frick

Before Rob Manfred, before Bud Selig, there were lots of other aggravating, power-hungry men leading up Major League Baseball. This series exists to discuss the history of every commissioner MLB has had, with particular focus, where applicable, on their interactions and relationship with labor, the players. The rest of the series can be found through this link.

Following Kenesaw Mountain Landis’ habit of terrifying everyone around him and doing whatever he wanted to, and Happy Chandler doing what the players and fans — but not the owners — wanted him to do, Major League Baseball’s owners went in a different direction for the third commissioner. Ford Frick spent 14 years as MLB commish, starting in late-1951, and his bio at Society for American Baseball Research gets right to the point of his appeal:

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The MLB All-Star Game’s ties to player pensions

Major League Baseball players might have the best pension in American sports these days, but that wasn’t always the case. For one, they didn’t always have a pension at all, and secondly, MLB’s owners wanted nothing more than to never pay into the thing again immediately after creating one. The first strike in MLB history came in 1972, and due to disagreements over how to pay into the pension, which MLB’s owners were not giving cost of living adjustments to even though there was a way to do so that wouldn’t even cost them a dime of their own money.* Even before then, though, the pension was a point of contention.

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Taxes are one more reason you can’t trust MLB owners crying poor

Once Major League Baseball’s pandemic-shortened 2020 season came to an end, the financial leaks began. MLB wanted you to know they had lost money, so much money, and that it was going to impact them in so many ways for years to come — just something to keep in mind as collective bargaining came closer to center stage, you know? You couldn’t trust MLB crying poor back in October, and you couldn’t trust it in December, either, when team sources kept leaking unbelievable figures to journalists like Bill Madden, in the hopes of convincing everyone that these folks were truly going through something because there were fewer games played and no tickets sold for the 2020 season.

As I said at the time to counter Madden’s doom and gloom:

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Curt Flood should be in the Hall of Fame, and at least one member of Congress agrees

Curt Flood is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, which might be somewhat confounding if you’ve already forgotten that Marvin Miller was only just elected to partake in Cooperstown’s brand of immortality. Flood, though, deserves the recognition that enshrinement brings as well: he was a fine player, better than plenty of others who are in the Hall, but even if that weren’t true, he merits entry into Cooperstown’s halls for his role in bringing down MLB’s reserve clause.

It’s fair to argue, solely for Flood’s on-field, penciled-into-the-lineup contributions, that he didn’t have a Hall of Fame career, for the same reasons you’d say that, I don’t know, J.D. Drew didn’t have a Hall of Famer career*. It is far less fair, though, to say that Flood doesn’t deserve enshrinement in a place with “Fame” in its name. He refused a trade, writing a letter to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn to explain his reasoning for the refusal, and then challenged the reserve clause in the form of Curt Flood v. Bowie Kuhn. While Flood’s case against Kuhn ended in defeat, it still brought the reserve clause and its problems into the public consciousness, and the subsequent challenge of the clause and success of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally doesn’t happen without Flood opening the fl… well, you know.

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