Outside The Confines: Getting into the game

I’m going to direct you to Al’s articles yesterday on how close we are to missing games and the results of yesterday’s bargaining session. Because that’s the big baseball news at the moment and takes care of three articles that I was planning to share here. Everything else is secondary.

• This is some good news in regards to baseball, so I thought I’d start with it. Several owners and general managers of minor league teams that were left out of affiliated baseball during last season’s re-structuring say that things haven’t been too bad for them and that some of them are really enjoying being an independent team or a draft league team. Obviously this doesn’t apply to the teams that went out of business entirely, but some of those teams that were contracted are doing just fine on their own. Still, there’s a lot of distrust remaining towards MLB from both the contracted teams and those that remain.
• R.J. Anderson has three problems with the current proposals to use WAR to help determine pre-arbitration player salaries.
• Sam Blum looks back to 1995 and the “replacement players” recruited by the Angels to play in Spring Training that year. (The Athletic sub. req.) No one thinks that MLB will try something similar this year, but the players who did cross the picket lines have fond memories. Also, the Angels refused to recruit any player whom they thought might have a future in pro baseball, so for these guys it really was the chance of a lifetime.
• Andy Martino thinks the Yankees are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the market once the lockout ends. Yeah. Having the most money will do that for a team.
• MLB has agreed to “significantly” increase the salaries of minor league umpires.
• Angels star Shohei Ohtani will be on the cover of MLB: The Show 22. He’s the first Asian athlete to be on the cover of a North American sports video game.
• Ohtani said that while he was honored by the selection, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to being famous. (The Athletic sub. req.) He also said that he has not yet had contract extension talks with the Angels.
• Despite my distaste for the topic, I guess we can discuss the Hall of Fame for a while. Jay Jaffe thinks the next few years of voting will be much less contentious than the past few years have been. He also projects who he thinks will be enshrined each year.
• Doug Glanville explains why he thinks that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and other PED-users should not get into the Hall.
• Bob Nightengale thinks that Fred McGriff belongs in Cooperstown, in large part because McGriff didn’t take PEDs. We can make the joke that if Nightengale doesn’t think that McGriff took steroids that means he probably did, but he’s making that assumption and taking McGriff’s word for it that he didn’t juice. To be clear, I don’t believe that McGriff did and I have no evidence that he did. But what I am saying is that we just never know with these things, so saying a player should get in because they were clean is an iffy proposition.
• Matt Snyder believes voting for the Hall of Fame should be tweaked, but not radically altered. He’s not in favor of giving the players a vote, for example.
• ESPN.com is doing a countdown of their picks for the greatest 100 players of all-time. Here’s their list of players 100 through 51 and some who they feel got “snubbed.” Ernie Banks is 51, Cap Anson is 76 and Ryne Sandberg is 91 among players who are mainly associated with the Cubs. Fergie Jenkins is among the “snubs.”
• The vandalized plaque memorializing the birthplace of Jackie Robinson from Cairo, Georgia will be relocated to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.
• R.J. Anderson lists the top prospect for each MLB team.
• Alex Chamberlain tries to help you understand Vertical Approach Angle, which is the hot new thing in pitching analytics.
• Vinnie Duber tells fans what to expect out of White Sox outfielder Eloy Jimenez this upcoming season.
• Tim Britton projects what a contract extension for Mets outfielder Brandon Nimmo might look like.
• MLB.com has updates on the Caribbean Series, which may be the best baseball we’ll see for a while.
• In their quest to never mention an active player, mlb.com’s Manny Randhawa remembers when the Giants signed Olympic hero Jim Thorpe.
• And finally, with all the talk of name changes in professional sports and the extensive research that teams put into them, Frederic Frommer writes about how the Cincinnati Reds became the “Redlegs.” The team just announced it out of the blue one day, just before the start of the 1953 season. The name did not stick, obviously. Maybe they needed to do more market research first.

Let’s end the lockout and play ball.