Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis and Andrew Miller are no longer with the Baltimore Orioles, but Dan Duquette is, and his presence may be more important to the team’s success than the contributions of the others.
The three players left the Orioles and went elsewhere as free agents: Cruz, the major league-leading home run hitter, to the Seattle Mariners; Markakis to the Atlanta Braves, Miller to the New York Yankees. The Blue Jays wanted Duquette to join them in Toronto, but he wasn’t a free agent. He was – and is – the Orioles’ executive vice president of baseball operations. The Blue Jays wanted to hire Duquette as their president and CEO, replacing Paul Beeston.
It is the industry practice that an executive under contract can leave his job for one with another team if the new position represents a promotion. “It’s the industry standard,” an executive said. “That’s the way it works. It’s the right thing. It’s good business.” In the case of Duquette and the Blue Jays, he added, “It was the top job in the other company. It’s CEO.”
I asked Duquette last Friday about the Toronto development, but he avoided a direct response. Instead, he said, “I said last week at Fanfest players get traded all the time in this business. Once in a while a manager is traded. Even rarer, an executive gets traded. It happens. That’s what was going on here. Fans need to know I’m focused on the Orioles, improving our team and having a good season.”
However, a person close to Duquette indicated to me that he would make the move in a minute. Blocking his way, though, was Peter Angelos, the Orioles’ owner, who apparently was prepared to defy the “industry standard.”
In mid-January Angelos told the Baltimore Sun that the Jays had expressed interest in Duquette but denied that the teams were negotiating compensation for him.
“That is not going to happen,” the Sun quoted Angelos as saying. “There have not been any changes in the status of Dan Duquette. He is our GM and he is going to remain our GM. He is concentrating on his efforts to determine the composition of our team for 2015. That is the answer. Period.”
I was shocked to see that Angelos used the term “GM.” He hates the title, objects to the title and never uses it for his chief baseball executive. I have heard him rail at writers’ use of the term. He seems to have an irrational hatred of the title. However, if any owner were to deny an executive the opportunity to improve his MLB status, it would be Angelos.
Whatever he has done to block Duquette’s move to Toronto, he has succeeded in keeping him in Baltimore. It’s possible that Angelos demanded steeper compensation than the Blue Jays were willing to pay. If that was the case, the Blue Jays could have asked Commissioner Rob Manfred to become involved in settling the teams’ differences.
In 2012 Manfred’s predecessor, Bud Selig, did that when the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs could not agree on the compensation the Cubs should pay for hiring Theo Epstein as their president of baseball operations. The teams submitted proposals to Selig on what they thought was equitable compensation but wound up deciding it themselves after Selig, in his typically prolonged fashion, delayed a decision for a month.
The compensation was a relief pitcher, Chris Carpenter, who had a short shelf life in the majors. “It’s always been my preference that clubs resolve matters like this amongst themselves, as they understand their unique circumstances better than anyone else could,” Selig said in a statement. “Though the matter required time, both clubs demonstrated professionalism throughout their discussions, and I appreciate their persistence in finding common ground.”
The Duquette matter didn’t reach that stage. On Jan. 26 the Blue Jays announced that they had extended for a year Paul Beeston’s tenure as president and CEO. That had not been their original plan. An executive with another club told me last September that the team did not plan to retain Beeston beyond the expiration of his contract, and another executive said the Blue Jays’ ownership was looking for a new president and CEO.
The trouble was the ownership went about it in an inept manner. A member of ownership was said to have contacted Duquette and Kenny Williams of the Chicago White Sox without first securing permission from their teams.
In Williams’ case, a Blue Jays’ representative, Ed Rogers of Rogers Communications, the team’s owner, belatedly asked Jerry Reinsdorf, White Sox chairman, for permission to interview Williams, the White Sox executive vice president.
“For what job?” Reinsdorf was said to have asked. Beeston’s, Reinsdorf was told.
Nothing wrong with that, except Beeston is one of Reinsdorf’s closest friends, and that apparently was the first Beeston had heard that the Blue Jays were looking for someone to give his job.
Although the issue of tampering seemed to have disappeared during Selig’s tenure as commissioner, it’s possible that the White Sox and/or the Orioles could file a tampering charge against the Blue Jays over their unauthorized contact with Duquette and Williams.
That Angelos apparently thinks so highly of Duquette that he seems to be intent on keeping him is a departure from his usual practice during his 21-year ownership. He has had eight general managers – oops, baseball operations chiefs – in that time, firing one, Frank Wren, after one season.
Duquette was an unusual choice for Angelos. When Duquette was hired in November 2011, he had been out of organized baseball for 10 years, ever since the new Red Sox owners fired him. I would say they acted rashly and prematurely, but they have won three World Series since.
During his involuntary hiatus, Duquette helped create the Israel Baseball League, though it lasted for only one season (2007). He otherwise had disappeared. Look, however, at what the Orioles have done since Angelos rescued Duquette from baseball’s scrap heap.
Taking over a team that had endured 14 consecutive losing seasons, Duquette built and steered the Orioles to seasons in which they had records of 93-69, 85-73 and 96-66, one division title and two post-season appearances.
Last season’s version of the Orioles was the most impressive of Duquette’s three teams, winning the American League East title by 12 games, the league’s largest winning margin.
The Orioles haven’t even begun spring training in defense of their title, but already so-called experts are predicting that they will finish in last place. The prediction is presumably based on the loss of Cruz and Markakis without replacing them. The only starting player Duquette has added this off-season is Travis Snider, who is expected to replace Markakis in right field.
Alejandro De Aza, whom the Orioles acquired late last season, will be the left fielder.
Not to be overlooked, though, is the return of three players – catcher Matt Wieters, first baseman Chris Davis and third baseman Manny Machado. Wieters had reconstructive elbow surgery June 17, Machado had knee surgery Aug. 27 and Davis has one game left on his 25-game substance-abuse suspension.
“The best thing we can do is get back Machado and Wieters, play defense and hit in the middle of our lineup,” Duquette said. “We didn’t have their services for much of the season.
WILL GEORGE STOP KISSING THE RING ALREADY?
About three months ago I wrote about the bizarre declaration of noted columnist and television commentator George Will, who in effect declared Bud Selig a baseball deity. Appearing on a FOX news show, Will called the then commissioner “one of the three most significant persons in the history of baseball, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.” Any intelligent baseball fan would find Will’s view laughable.
But once was not enough. In a recent column in the Washington Post, Will gave Selig another hug and a kiss on his way out the door. Crediting him with saving baseball after the 1994-95 strike, Will called Selig “one of the four most important people in baseball’s history: Alexander Joy Cartwright (the genius who in the 1840s placed the bases 90 feet apart), Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson and a fan from Milwaukee. Which is what Selig has been, first and always.”
Will conveniently ignored the irrefutable fact that Selig, as chairman of the owners’ player relations committee, led the owners into the disastrous strike with his ill-conceived quest for a payroll cap. But why shouldn’t Will ignore it? Selig does.
Why does Will continue to praise Selig and bow before him as a baseball deity? Because Selig gave Will entrée into his inner sanctum, giving him a status no one else had. As I wrote in November:
“Over a period of 12 years, 1999-2011, more than half of Selig’s tenure as commissioner, Selig named Will to four blue-ribbon panels or special task forces. There might have been a fifth, a pink-ribbon panel on women and baseball, but I was unable to confirm that one. Nevertheless, Selig seemed hard pressed to omit Will from his special panels. In fact, he was the only person who served on all of those panels, and only Len Coleman, the former National League president, was a member of two.”
At the end of Will’s recent column, the Post ran this note: “In the late 1990s, George F. Will was one of four members of the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics.” The Post missed a few committees on which Will was a member, but at least the newspaper didn’t describe him as one of the “most important people in baseball’s history.”