The 2013 baseball season is upon us, but unlike previous seasons this one apparently doesn’t have to be played. Many, if not most, people are conceding the season to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and if they must play the World Series, the team most popularly viewed as their American League opponent is the Toronto Blue Jays.
I wish, Alex Anthopoulos, the Blue Jays’ general manager, said in reaction to that thought (which I happen not to agree with).
The Blue Jays occupy that position of lofty expectations because young Anthopoulos was the busiest general manager of the off-season, just as his Dodgers’ counterpart, Ned Colletti, has been the busiest general manager of the past eight months.
As has been said often, however, teams don’t win pennants in the winter. The games are played in the summer, and teams need to win games to win pennants.
The Dodgers are the popular favorite because they have spent a record amount of money under their new owners. The Yankees, however, could tell them that having a gigantic payroll doesn’t guarantee a spot in the World Series.
The Yankees had the highest opening-day payroll for 14 successive seasons, from 1999 through 2012, but played in the World Series in only five of those seasons and won it three times. Nine times they spent the most money and didn’t play in the ultimate games.
Their highest payroll during that period was $209 million in 2008, until now the record for opening day. Now the Dodgers are prepared to begin the season with a payroll of about $221 million. Of that amount, $105 million will go to players the Dodgers have acquired through trades or free agency in the last eight months.
The Blue Jays’ payroll will be about $100 million less, at $120 million, but will nevertheless be the franchise’s highest ever opening payroll. The Blue Jays opened last season at $75 million so the 2013 figure represents a 60 percent increase. The Dodgers’ payroll is up 133 percent.
I asked Stan Kasten, the Dodgers’ president and veteran executive, what the team has to do to justify the highest payroll with which he has ever been associated.
“We just don’t think of the payroll numbers as an element,” he said Saturday, “because the fan base and sponsorship justify what we do.”
As an example, Kasten cited the all-time franchise high 31,000 season tickets the Dodgers have sold for the coming season. He could also have mentioned the new $7 billion television deal the Dodgers have looming on the horizon.
“Our longer term plan is to develop players in all ways to get back to what the Dodgers used to do,” he said. “What we’re doing now is the bridge to that. It’s the plan, and the fans deserve it. It’s already justified by the support fans have given us in terms of tickets and sponsorships.
We have done all this in hopes of winning, but we know that writing checks doesn’t make it happen.”
A few days before the July 31 trading deadline last season the Dodgers acquired shortstop Hanley Ramirez from Miami. In August they made a deal with Boston, adding first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, outfielder Carl Crawford and pitcher Josh Beckett. They signed pitcher Zack Greinke as a free agent.
On the international front, which Kasten said the Dodgers plan to mine, they signed a Cuban outfielder, Yasiel Puig, and a Korean pitcher, Hyun-Jin Ryu.
What does it all mean for the 2013 Dodgers?
“We have on paper what should be an excellent pitching staff,” Kasten said. “It was last year and we’ve added Greinke and Ryu. That’s a very good place to start on paper. Next is offense. We’ll play the whole season with the players we added last year.”
The Dodgers will play for about eight weeks without Ramirez, who tore a ligament in his right thumb. But even that is a break for manager Don Mattingly. When Mattingly was a first baseman, torn thumb ligaments required 12 weeks of recovery.
“I think we have a chance to win,” Kasten said. He did not declare victory by proclamation. Neither did the Toronto general manager. Anthopoulos, in fact, disputed the view that his off-season activity should automatically result in a division championship.
“That’s so inaccurate,” Anthopoulos said by telephone Friday. “We added a lot of players, spent significant dollars, but I’d rather have a season like the Tigers. Sign Torii Hunter and you’re done. When you lose 89 games, you have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do.”
Anthopoulos, a Montreal native in his fourth year as general manager, acquired pitchers R.A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson and infielders Jose Reyes and Emilio Bonifacio and catcher Josh Thole in trades and signed outfielder Melky Cabrera, infielders Macier Izturis and Mark DeRosa and catcher Henry Blanco as free agents.
Three-fifths of the starting rotation, half of the infield and a third of the outfield will be players Anthopoulos has brought in for 2013. The newcomers will need to produce runs and innings to get the Blue Jays out of the rut in which they have been stuck, finishing fourth the last five seasons.
“We need players to perform up to their capabilities,” Anthopoulos said when I asked him what the team needed to do to win. “Beyond that, we’ll need health.”
The American League East figures to be an interesting playground this season. The Yankees, on an unprecedented austerity plan, are old and injured. The Red Sox, hoping to recover from their 2012 disaster, need substantial pitching comebacks from Jon Lester, John Lackey, Clay Buchholz and Ryan Dempster as well as improved offensive production from Shane Victorino, Jacoby Ellsbury and Stephen Drew.
The Orioles will be hard pressed to duplicate their 2012 success in one-run games (major league-best 29-9) and extra-inning games (major league-best 16-2), achievements that fueled a stunning season.
The Rays seem to have the best balanced team, headed by a formidable starting rotation deep enough to allow Tampa Bay to trade James Shields for young slugging outfielder Wil Myers, whom some view as the next Mike Trout.
“I believe all five teams have enough talent to win,” said Anthopoulos, who was not prepared to write off any of the division’s teams. “Our game plan was to try to adjust the rotation. Our thought was to add two starters and go from there. Some opportunities presented themselves with the Mets and the Marlins, and ownership gave us the means to make deals.”
It’s not every off-season that a team can add the caliber of pitchers of Dickey, Buehrle and Johnson to its rotation, but if all three pitch to their optimum and Johnson stays healthy, which he has had difficulty doing, the Blue Jays should not be a fourth-place team for a sixth successive season.
Last season was unusually busy for Johnson, who started 31 games and pitched 191 1/3 innings, but he had an 8-14 record and a 3.81 earned run average. He was available because he has a $13.75 million salary for this season and can be a free agent at the end of it.
The Marlins, who historically have expended more energy shedding high-priced players than signing them, wanted to get rid of Johnson’s salary as well as the pay for Reyes and Buehrle, both of whom they signed as free agents only a year ago.
Rogers Communications, which has owned the Blue Jays for a dozen years, has not generally been a big spender. In fact, Rogers registered the franchise’s record season-opening payroll of $98 million in 2008, which turned out to be the start of the perennial fourth-place finishes, and Rogers quickly reduced the payroll.
Now, however, Rogers has forged financially forward and has committed to contending. The Canadian owner, though, has not elevated itself onto an economic plateau remotely close to the nouveau-riche Dodgers.
It was a year ago that the Guggenheim group, led by Mark Walter, bought the Dodgers out of bankruptcy for $2 billion plus $150 million for parking lots and land adjacent to the team’s ball park. And then the new owners began spending money.
MLB VERSION OF AN INVESTIGATION
Except for nabbing the occasional player who tests positive for illegal substance use, Major League Baseball has done very little to catch drug cheats. Not that its testing program is ineffective; it certainly has deterred players who might otherwise use performance-enhancing substances.
But without outside help, MLB would not succeed in catching cheaters. There would have been no 2007 Mitchell report, for example, without Kirk Radomski, the Shea Stadium steroids salesman, who agreed to give Mitchell names of his clients so he could avoid prosecution for his own crimes.
Now MLB has been stymied in its quest to secure documents of a South Florida anti-aging clinic that allegedly show substance abuse by players. MLB officials unsuccessfully sought the documents from a weekly newspaper, the Miami New Times, which obtained and published clinic data.
Showing its utter desperation, MLB has sued the closed clinic and people associated with it, seeking whatever information it could find. It is a pitiful and embarrassing act by a highly professional organization.
MLB has an investigative staff created and hired for just this purpose, but MLB has to opt for legal action on the basis that the clinic and its associates have injured baseball, its business and its reputation.
“It’s just a power play to try and put pressure on Bosch,” said a lawyer who is familiar with baseball’s efforts to obtain information from the clinic’s chief, Anthony Bosch. “It just shows MLB is ready to pull out all stops.”
Is it an act of desperation? “It could be,” the lawyer said.
The lawsuit, filed in Florida state court, faces an uncertain future. The court could agree to hear the suit, or it could dismiss it unheard.
The suit raises an interesting question in my mind.
As reported by The New York Times, the suit alleges that each “of the defendants participated in a scheme to solicit major league players to purchase or obtain, and/or to sell, supply or otherwise make available to major league players substances that the defendants knew were prohibited under baseball’s” drug-testing program.
One of the bylines on the article was Michael S. Schmidt. A couple of years ago Schmidt identified a few players whose names he said appeared on a list of about 100 players who had tested positive for steroids use in what was supposed to be an anonymous testing year.
The list became the center of a court case between baseball and the union, and the judge ordered the list sealed. That meant that any lawyer or anyone else who had access to the list could not disclose information – i.e., names – from it.
Nevertheless Schmidt admitted in an interview that he questioned every lawyer and law clerk he could find in an attempt to learn names of players on the list.
More than one lawyer told me Schmidt and the Times violated the law. Bill Keller, then the newspaper’s executive editor, disputed that characterization, saying they were just practicing journalism.
Having worked for the Times for four decades, I was not aware that the paper encouraged its reporters to break the law in the pursuit of a story.
If Major League Baseball can establish that the Bosch clinic damaged it, it should take on the Times next.
MLB’S WAY OF TREATING EMPLOYEES
Every industry has petty, selfish owners, and Major League Baseball is no exception. Most owners have wisely abandoned their woeful efforts to get their millionaire players to accept a payroll cap, but now some have turned their economic guns on another target, their non-uniformed employees.
They want to strip their employees of their pension plan.
According to a report last week by ESPNNewYork.com, owners are scheduled to vote on the issue at their quarterly meetings in May. A vote never materialized last year, the report said, after Jerry Reinsdorf, chairman of the Chicago White Sox, accused the owners who favored a vote against the employees’ pension plan of being petty.
Reinsdorf and I have not been friendly over the years, but I give him credit for thinking right on issues like the pension plan and minority hiring.
The report quoted an unnamed source as saying a majority of owners favor elimination of the pension plan.
Rob Manfred, executive vice president for labor and human resources, told the Web site it wasn’t a matter of whether the pension plan would survive but what kind of plan clubs wanted. He suggested clubs could gain greater flexibility.
What that means to me, though, is a weaker plan for employees. The baseball industry’s revenue has risen steadily in recent years and last year reached or exceeded $8 billion. MLB doesn’t have to dilute or eliminate the pension plan. It is doing well enough to let its poorly paid employees share the wealth.