Category: Soap Box

Back when baseball was just a game

Calvin Griffith

Baseball and baseball owners have changed over the years. When Calvin Griffith was the owner of the Minnesota Twins he truly ran his own team. Griffith was the owner, President, and General Manager. Today we have an owner, we have a President, a Head of Baseball Operation and a General Manager and too many other executives to count. The business of baseball in current times is truly a business with layer upon layer of management.

This off-season the free agent players got their butts kicked by the owners who have refused to pay longer term contracts and the big money deals of years gone by. The owners in essence have instituted a salary cap with their luxury tax and the players union stood by and said “what just happened”.

Continue reading Back when baseball was just a game

Another bad move at the U of M – Tracy Claeys fired

Minnesota acting head coach Tracy Claeys calls out to players during the fourth quarter against Nebraska in Minneapolis Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Ann Heisenfelt)

I have to rant this morning and it has nothing to do about baseball or the Minnesota Twins. It has to do with the Minnesota Gophers football team that I have followed since I was a kid living on a farm in the 1950’s. Back then we lived in a small farm-house and our only source of heat was the wood stove that sat in our living room. If you wanted to get up to warm house (we considered low 60’s warm) in the morning you had better get up during the night and put more wood on the fire. It takes a lot of wood to last through those long cold winters in Taylors Falls, Minnesota.

Which takes me back to my rant, I used to spend many a Fall Saturday afternoon listening to Minnesota Gopher football games as I chopped, split and piled the wood in the shed for the long winter ahead. I chopped a lot of wood growing up and listened to the Gophers win a lot of football games. I still remember how disappointed I was when the Gophers lost 17-7 to Washington in the Rose Bowl after the 1960 season. My biggest Gopher disappointment was probably their 14-9 loss to those hated Badgers and QB Ron VanderKelen in 1962 due to some questionable calls by the ref’s.

I have followed Minnesota golden Gopher football ever since….. now we have AD Mark Coyle firing coach Tracy Claeys. I have seen all that has gone with the program this year and the challenges that the team and coaching staff have endured on their way to a nine win season.

For the life of me I don’t see how Tracy Claeys can be blamed and fired after this season. Claeys is a good man who ran a good program and yet the University and Coyle see fit to fire him. On of the stated reasons was low season ticket sales and low attendance at the games, maybe the U of M should look at their own Marketing department for some answers. I guess I didn’t know that the head football coach was also responsible for attendance numbers. You think you saw low attendance numbers this past year? Wait and see what you get in 2017.

This firing is totally unfair and unjust to Tracy Claeys and his staff and the University of Minnesota leadership should be embarrassed to have something like this happen on their watch. I am not a Gopher season ticket holder but the U of M leadership team has chased off yet another Minnesota Gopher football fan.

I’m tired of this BS that the Minnesota Twins call professional baseball!

soap-boxTigers 8-game winning streak in Minnesota

The Tigers beat the Twins Thursday afternoon extending their winning streak in Minnesota to eight games. That matches the longest current road winning streak for any team against a particular opponent. The Yankees have won eight straight games at Atlanta (2009-present) and the Angels have won eight in a row in Colorado (2001-present).

It’s the longest road winning streak for the Tigers against the Twins since the team moved from Washington to Minnesota in 1961 and the longest against the franchise since they won 11 straight road games against the Senators from 1949 to 1950.

The two paragraphs above come from According to ELIAS. Way too much news like this coming out of Target Field, is there any good news at all? Hope has turned into despair in Twins Territory. Even for a long time Twins fan like myself it is difficult to watch the 2016 Minnesota Twins. I just can’t understand why this team keeps making the same mistakes over and over. Sending players to the minors has not worked, as a matter of fact a case could be made that the Twins keep their players in the minors too long. Players seem to be regress in the Twins system versus get better. Once these players reach Minnesota they seem to fall apart totally after a short stay.

So what do you do?

Continue reading I’m tired of this BS that the Minnesota Twins call professional baseball!

Opt-out clause is a black eye for baseball

soap-boxopt-out clause – a clause that permits signatories to a contract to opt out of particular provisions, or to terminate the contract early.

I make no bones about it, I abhor the opt-out clauses that are being given to major league players today. MLB players today make millions of dollars a year and still they ask for and get opt-out clauses in their contracts. What is up with that?

To my way of thinking it is simple out and out GREED on the part of players and their agents. An opt-out clause in a baseball contract makes it totally one sided in favor of the player. The plan probably was originated by an agent that realized that there was more money to be made by negotiating more contracts. The players today have no loyalty to their teams or their fans what so ever and their single focus is putting more money in their pockets. They claim that they are doing all they can for the team but that is all BS, or they wouldn’t bail out of a contract if it was advantageous to them.

The players and agents aren’t the only ones to blame here, today’s baseball team owners must be the stupidest in sports. Why would you pay out hundred’s of millions on a long term contract and take all the risk that entails and still give the player an opt-out?  If the players plays like crap then he stays in the contract and you have to pay him, but if he feels he is in position to make an even better deal for himself he bails and says thank you very much sucker.

Why would you do something like that? Because players and their agents demand long term contracts to and must be smarter than most baseball owners. How can players that sign long term deals with an opt-out clause stand up before a microphone as they try on their new uniform for the first time and say with a straight face how excited they are to join this new team that they have admired from afar and now get a chance to help take them to the promised land? Why don’t they just look into the camera and say, “I signed to play with this team because they agreed to pay me the most money this year but if team X offers me more in 2019, I am outta here”. Wouldn’t play well with the fans you say? Get real!

Back in the old days before free agency players were tied to their teams for life but then free agency and arbitration came along and now the players and their agents are in the drivers seat. The pendelum has swung too far the other way. Players used to take pay cuts when they had a bad season and got raises for good seasons. When was the last time you heard of a player getting a pay cut because he had a bad year?

How is an opt-out different from investing money in the stock market and being given your investment back if the stock you bought goes down in price, who does that? No one, we would all love to have that option but no one is dumb enough to give that to us. Baseball is a unique business I know, but I don’t understand for the life of me why owners put up with this. If the owners band together and put a stop to this silly practice I’m sure they would get sued for collusion so the only way to put a stop to it is to negotiate it out of existence. Surely we will see more of these opt-out deals in the near future but hopefully the owners will come to their senses and negotiate this out of existence in future league/player contracts at their first opportunity.

Owners need players and players need owners for the great game of baseball to flourish but it has to be a level playing surface for both sides, Opt-outs are totally unfair, it is embarrassing that baseball allows this to keep happening.

UPDATE – A different opinion of the opt-out clause can be seen here.