Theo Epstein, the man who runs the Chicago Cubs’ baseball operations, said this:
In this business of trying to win a world championship for the first time in 107 years, the organization has priority over any one individual.
He also said this:
We have clung to two important ideals during our three years in Chicago. The first is to always be loyal to our mission of building the Cubs into a championship organization that can sustain success. The second is to be transparent with our fans….To our fans: we hope you understand, and we appreciate your continued support of the Cubs.
Epstein included both of these comments in a statement he issued when the Cubs fired their manager, Rick Renteria, last October and hired Joe Maddon. If they sound familiar, it’s because I quoted them in last week’s column. I quote them again for this column about a Cubs’ player. Kris Bryant.
The last I looked Bryant had hit nine home runs, more than any other player in this spring’s exhibition games. I have long said it doesn’t pay to pay attention to spring statistics, but Bryant has forced the Cubs to pay attention.
A third baseman whom the Cubs are also trying in left field, Bryant has certainly caught the attention of Cubs fans. He has convinced them he is ready to help the Cubs win – a playoff spot, the National League Central title, the N.L. pennant, the World Series. Whatever it is, they’ll take it, though they prefer the World Series, which the Cubs haven’t won since 1908.
Bryant, however, can’t help the Cubs win anything if he’s not on the team, and when last heard on the subject, the Cubs said they plan to have Bryant start the season in the minor leagues. They’re playing a game I have chronicled here for the past several years. It’s the major league service time manipulation game. It’s legal under the labor practice, but it undermines the integrity of the game.
If steroids and Pete Rose’s violation of the game’s gambling rule undermines baseball’s integrity, so does the clubs’ manipulation of service time, no matter what an arbitrator said 30 years ago.
“It is injurious to baseball when you do something like this,” Scott Boras said Friday.
Boras is Bryant’s agent and could be said to have a vested interest in how the Cubs treat Bryant. But he is right regardless of his economic interest. He and I seldom agree on issues involving his clients, but in this instance I believe he is 100 percent correct.
The Cubs and the other clubs that behave similarly are hurting Major League Baseball. They are saving money, but they are cheating their fans. If they are not using their best players, they are not trying to win. That failing goes to the core of integrity. If Bryant begins the season in the minors, call them the Chicago Cheating Cubs.
“My 13-year-old son is a Kris Bryant fan,” said Tony Clark, head of the players union. “Every day when he comes home from school he wants to know if Kris Bryant hit another home run. These are the kids we are trying to attract.”
If the Cubs open the season with Bryant in the minors and keep him there for at least 12 days, they can ensure his presence with them through the 2021 season instead of the 2020 season, the first seven years of his major league career instead of the first six. Players need six years of service to be eligible for free agency.
A season is 183 days. For purposes of service time, a season is 172 days so a player can lack 11 days and still receive credit for a full season. If, however, he lacks 12 days and is in the majors the rest of the season, he has 171 days of major league service, one day short of a full year.
For years, the clubs have focused not on free agency but on salary arbitration, making sure players don’t achieve “Super Two” status. Players in that group are the top 22 percent (up from the original 17 percent) of players who have more than two years of service but less than three. The last two players eligible for salary arbitration earlier this year had two years and 133 days, meaning they missed the first 50 days, or nearly two months, of their first season.
As a result of clubs’ closely monitoring service time, they have kept major league-ready players in the minors longer than they should, calling them up usually in late May or early June. The accompanying chart tells a striking story.
In Bryant’s case, the Cubs care more about free agency because they could never keep him in the minors until late May or early June. If Epstein tried it, he would have to leave Wrigley Field disguised in a gorilla suit as he did in his departure from Fenway Park in Boston in 2005 when he resigned as general manager.
I had a lot of questions to ask Epstein, but a week’s worth of telephone calls and e-mail did not induce him to respond so the questions remain unasked and unanswered. Oh yes. I also tried reaching Tom Ricketts, the team’s owner, and he didn’t respond. Even the Cubs’ media relations director didn’t call back. I guess they are intent on not answering questions about Bryant.
Epstein, however, did speak with reporters at the Cubs’ camp in Arizona and talked in television interviews, and I frankly find it difficult to believe what he said about why Bryant may start the season in the minors:
“It’s not about business. People are trying to make this about business. There are valid baseball reasons. The process of developing a player, taking them from amateur to Major League player and every step along the way, that’s a baseball process and those are baseball decisions, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
Epstein pointed out that he had never had a player make his major league debut at the start of a season:
“I’ve never put a guy on an opening-day roster who hadn’t played in the big leagues previously. In 13 years, I’ve never done it. I’m not saying I’d never do it, but the general rule, the presumption, is to allow those guys to go out, play, get comfortable, get in rhythm, and come up when you handpick just the right moment for them to have success.”
Unfortunately, neither that interviewer nor any other asked Epstein why, then, didn’t he call up Bryant late last season, as he did with infielder Mike Olt and outfielder Jorge Soler.
Bryant had been the most valuable player of the Arizona Fall League the previous fall after winning the Golden Spikes award as the best collegiate player and was named minor league player of last season after leading all of baseball with 43 home runs.
The Cubs called up outfielder Jorge Soler to make his major league debut last Aug. 27. Another outfielder, Matt Szczur, played his first game Aug. 17. Infielder Javier Baez played his first game Aug. 5.
“They had Baez and Soler at Triple A,” Boras said. “Bryant performed far better. They get called up to the big leagues and Bryant doesn’t.”
Why not? Silly question.
Had they promoted Bryant with the others, he could open this season with the Cubs without violating Epstein’s stated practice. But they weren’t about to recall Bryant then because his service clock would have started ticking, in Epstein’s view like a time bomb.
No matter what Epstein claims, everything he has said and done points to the likelihood that the Cubs have acted and are acting in the strategic interest of manipulating and restricting Bryant’s service time to extend their control of him for an extra year.
Is that bad for the fans? A reader responded to a previous column about the manipulation of service time by saying he would rather have the player for a whole extra season than for a few extra games now.
But there are fans who have lived and died with the Cubs for their entire lives without seeing them win a World Series and may not have seven years left in their lives to see if it happens in 2021.
“Is this good for the game?” Boras asked. “Fans are aware these players are extraordinary. They have nothing left to prove in the minors. Every year Kris Bryant has separated himself from everyone else. What standards does he have to achieve to deserve promotion?”
Bryant’s nine home run are three more than anyone else has, his 15 runs batted in are only two behind the leading number in 14 fewer at-bats and he is hitting .459 (17-for-37).
Bryant is not expected to match his spring production in the early weeks of the season, even if he opens it with Chicago. Players who are torrid in spring exhibition games seldom take their paces into the season.
This goes back many years, but it remains a favorite of what I’m talking about. In 1982, Dave Revering had a great spring for the Yankees and was told he would be the everyday first baseman. An April snowstorm delayed the start of the season, and when it finally began, Revering went 0-for-4 in the opener and suddenly was no longer the Yankees’ everyday first baseman.
Before Bryant can be an everyday whatever, third baseman or left fielder, he has to make the opening-day roster, and no one has told him he has a job. “Theo’s not giving in on this,” Boras said.
Earlier this month the agent created a spring stir when he talked with Bob Nightengale of USA Today. Nightengale is one of the best baseball writers in the country, maybe the best, but even he swallowed Epstein’s excuse for delaying Bryant’s arrival in the majors.
“The Cubs simply believe that Bryant needs more defensive seasoning at Class AAA Iowa,” Nightengale wrote.
“In Kris’ case,” he quoted Epstein as saying, “we know he’s ready offensively, we just want to get him in a good rhythm defensively.”
Epstein was merely repeating the words of many other general managers who have used that excuse. The Pittsburgh Pirates have practically copyrighted that comment the last few years.
The union seems to be getting closer to challenging the clubs’ practice in a grievance. Management contends that an arbitrator’s decision in a 1986 grievance gave clubs the right to decide timing of call-ups.
Addressing the issue a few years ago, Rob Manfred said, “It has been long established that clubs have a right to call up players when they decide the timing is best for the club.”
However, that case was not on point with call-ups as they have developed, and a grievance probably is in order.
Clark, the Executive Director of the union, commented, “I think it’s disappointing that we are having any conversation that there is a question about the best players not to be available for fans to watch. It takes away from the game.”
Bryant is not the only players whose immediate major league status is in question. Pitchers Jon Gray of Colorado and Carlos Rodon of the Chicago White Sox also have not been assured of spots on major league rosters.
If all three players fail to win opening-day jobs in the majors, their absence will very likely encourage the union to seek a solution with a grievance.