On the West Coast, fans in Los Angeles are ecstatic and excited. On the East Coast, fans in Boston are dumbfounded and devastated.
Some Red Sox supporters say the trade of Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett to the Dodgers is a smart one because it rids the Red Sox of huge contracts. Let’s be honest and call it what it really is – a salary dump, exactly the same as the Marlins have perfected and what the Pirates and other losing teams have used.
The only difference between this salary dump and those that preceded it is the amount of money being dumped – $275 million. Such records aren’t kept, but it’s safe to say that no team has ever lopped off that much money from its payroll, and in one simple trade yet.
But this is what desperate teams do. Can’t win this year? Get rid of your high-price players and plan for next season.
In the Red Sox circumstances, however, with one exception, the people doing the planning are the same ones who planned for this year’s disastrous team. Theo Epstein, the boy wonder, who was general manager when the Red Sox won two World Series, defected to Chicago and the Cubs after last season but left behind a legacy of the $154 million Gonzalez contract and Crawford’s $142 million deal. Epstein also signed Beckett to a $68 million contract and gave John Lackey an $82.5 million deal.
No wonder the Red Sox let him leave with one year left on his contract.
Epstein, though, wasn’t alone in that decision-making progress. He had an assistant, Ben Cherington, who became his successor, but more important, he had an overseer, Larry Lucchino, the team’s president and chief executive officer, who fancies himself a knowledgeable baseball executive. None of those contracts was signed without Lucchino’s ok, and Cherington has made no deals without his assent.
It was Lucchino who overruled Cherington’s choice of Dale Sveum to be Terry Francona’s successor as manager and to hire Bobby Valentine for the job despite warnings to the contrary.
Last week’s trade was so stunning that Valentine’s name never surfaced. But what the Red Sox did was go against the book. The book says a team can’t fire the players so it fires the manager instead. Here the Red Sox fired the players.
If the Red Sox had a bunch of recalcitrant players, it was the failure of the manager and the general manager to straighten them out before the season spiraled out of control.
“I think we recognize that we are not who we want to be right now,” Cherington said at a news conference Saturday “And it’s been a large enough sample of performance going back to last year that we felt like in order to be the team that we want to be on the field, we needed to make more than cosmetic changes. So as we look forward to this off-season, we felt like the opportunity to build that we need, that the fans deserve, that we want, required more of a bold move to give us an opportunity to really reshape the roster.”
Cherington also emphasized a need for greater discipline. Again he didn’t mention Valentine, but the manager needs as much discipline as any of the players. His comments to and about players (Kevin Youkilis and Will Middlebrooks, for example), publicly and in the clubhouse, need to be deleted from the manager’s mind and mouth. Valentine’s acerbic humor can be as destructive as fried chicken and beer in the clubhouse.
Beckett, of course, paid the price for eating fried chicken and drinking beer during games last season. Those in-game refreshments, shared by several players, presumably contributed to the Red Sox’s great September collapse. Besides getting rid of a bad clubhouse influence and a pitcher who has underperformed this season, the Red Sox are saving several thousand dollars shy of $35 million Beckett is owned for the rest of this season and the next two years.
Gonzalez is owed $131.6 million and Crawford $106.7 million. Utility infielder Nick Punto, the fourth player going to the Dodgers, has $1.8 million left in his contract. The total of $275 million is offset by about $11 million the Red Sox will send to the Dodgers. It was not immediately clear why that amount is involved. The Dodgers might have been expected to ask for more money, but they were so eager to make the trade for first baseman James Loney and four prospects that money was said not to have been a stumbling block.
“We’re comfortable with what we had to spend to get them,” Stan Kasten, the Dodgers’ president and c.e.o., said in a telephone interview Saturday night. “Ownership was involved all along. I kept them in the loop. Once we got what we were asking we felt comfortable with it and we did it.”
Kasten said the teams tried to get a deal done before the July 31 nonwaiver trading deadline but couldn’t do it.
“We went through a bunch of ups and downs,” he said.
Asked if the Red Sox seemed desperate to make the trade, Kasten said, “I didn’t sense desperation on either side. It was never a factor at any time.”
As for the large financial commitment, Kasten said, “We’re trying to build a team that fits in the market.”
Under the new ownership group, which purchased the team for $2 billion last May, the Dodgers have been rescued from the bankrupt operation of the previous owner, Frank McCourt. This deal delights the fans and the players, who see it as a commitment to winning.
The Red Sox are committed to winning as well, but they have lost their way and have now guaranteed a post-season without them for a third straight year.
A SCOUT DOING HIS JOB
In this age of statistical analysis, where scouts are downgraded, a sheet of computer paper filled with a pitcher’s statistics would be hard pressed to feel any emotion or stand up and cheer for the pitcher. 
, however, can still have those feelings and has had chunks of them in recent weeks.
McPhail is an area scouting supervisor for the New York Mets and has had two pitchers he signed make sparkling major league debuts four weeks apart. On July 26 Matt Harvey pitched 5 1/3 shutout innings against Arizona, allowing 3 hits and striking out 11 batters. On Aug. 23 Collin McHugh pitched 7 shutout innings against Colorado, allowing 2 hits and striking out 9. Harvey has started 5 more games since his debut and has a 2-3 record but a 2.75 earned run average. In his last 3 starts he has a 1.83 e.r.a.
Harvey is a 23-year-old right-hander whom the Mets made the seventh player selected in the 2010 draft out of the University of North Carolina.
“Harvey basically came to North Carolina with a reputation built up from his high school days,” McPhail said in a telephone interview. “These kids are on our radar from the get-go. But it was the beginning of Matt’s junior year when everything seemed to change. His command was better, his delivery was more refined. He was a pitcher and not a thrower. The transformation was the biggest thing. He also went from a teammate to a leader. That was big for me. He always had the power arm; he just didn’t throw it for strikes.”
McPhail used a different method to find McHugh, also right-handed and now 25. He found him at Berry College in Georgia.
“I have an affinity for looking at small schools,” he said. “The coach at Berry is a friend of mine. Any good kid the coach puts him on my radar. He showed slow and steady improvement. He was always a pitcher. He wasn’t about throwing to the radar gun. He threw hard but he was cerebral enough to know it was about getting kids out. Others knew about him. I was fortunate enough to get him.”
The Mets picked McHugh in the 18th round of the 2008 draft.
McPhail has been scouting for 18 years, all with the Mets, beginning his career after 10 year as a minor league player and three years as a minor league coach. He did an especially productive job during Omar Minaya’s tenure as general manager, signing Mets’ reliever Bobby Parnell as well as Harvey and McHugh.
RESULTS SHOW MLB RATES DRUG CREDIT
Critics of Major League Baseball’s testing program for performance-enhancing drugs say recent positive tests of Melky Cabrera and Bartolo Colon show that baseball needs a stronger program. I say the positive tests show that baseball needs smarter players.
I am not suggesting that the players need to be smarter so that they can figure out how to beat the tests if they have used steroids or testosterone. I am saying that players have to stop being dumb enough to use banned substances and think they can get away with it. Maybe some players have used stuff and avoided detection, but it’s not very likely. Although I’m not an expert on the subject, if the testing program is good enough to catch Cabrera and Colon, it is good enough to catch anyone.
It’s the players who have to come to their senses. Don’t cheat, and you won’t get caught. It’s that simple. If a player has a legitimate need for testosterone – and there can be a legitimate health need – apply for a Therapeutic Use Exception, and it will almost certainly be granted. Cabrera and Colon, however, did not apply for or have a TUE and foolishly thought they could beat the system.
Neither player has said why he wanted to load his body with extra testosterone, but we can guess the reason. Cabrera and Colon can be free agents after the season and wanted to enhance their chances of securing lucrative contracts. Now prospective bidders will have to decide how legitimate their 2012 performances were.
Cabrera, 28 years old, was leading the majors with 159 hits and was hitting a career-high .346, second in the National League, when he was suspended Aug. 15. He was one plate appearance short of the 502 plate appearances needed to qualify for the batting title but could still win it if the addition of one hitless at-bat left him with the highest average. Cabrera was named the most valuable player in this year’s All-Star game and figured to be a highly regarded candidate for the league m.v.p. award.
“Ultimately it was just a bad decision,” his teammate, catcher Buster Posey, said.”
Colon, 39, had a 10-9 record with a .3.43 earned run average for Oakland when his season ended a week later. His incomplete record gave him his most wins since 2005 and his lowest e.r.a. since 2002.
Cabrera and Colon, both from the Dominican Republic, were the fourth and fifth major leaguers who tested positive this year out of thousands of players who have been tested. Two of the other three players, Guillermo Mota and Freddy Galvis, are also Latino, following the pattern of positive drug tests in both the majors and the minors.
Of the 87 major and minor league players who have tested positive this year, according to figures from the commissioner’s office, 48 percent were Latin and 49 percent American.
The breakdown of the number of those players who were on 40-man major league rosters will not be available until the independent program administrator, Dr. Bryan Smith, submits his annual report after the season. Last year players on 40-man rosters had 3,868 tests, of which 13 were positive. Those figures compute to three-tenths of one percent of positive tests.
Those results hardly justify cries that the sky is falling, Chicken Little, as sounded by The New York Times last week in an article about the positive tests of Cabrera and Colon.
“To Baseball’s Chagrin, Steroid Era Goes On,” the headline read. The article ridiculed Commissioner Bud Selig for declaring in 2010 that the steroid era “is clearly a thing of the past,” pointing to positive tests this year. The article also quoted the usual steroids zealots the Times runs to for comment every time it writes a steroids story.
I’d have to say that three-tenths of one percent gives Selig a good reason to declare the steroids era over. By comparison, I would guess that if all employees of The New York Times were tested, they could very likely find at least three-tenths of one percent positives.