Saving Detroit: It’s over

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In a deal that went down to the final moments of Thursday night’s waiver/postseason trade deadline, the Detroit Tigers have traded franchise starting pitcher Justin Verlander to the Houston Astros in exchange for three prospects. Early reports indicate that the Astros will be taking on a substantial portion– but not the entirety– of Verlander’s remaining contract.

Verlander has spent the entirety of his thirteen-year major-league career with the Tigers, who chose him with the second overall pick out of Old Dominion in the 2004 amateur draft. In 2006, Verlander’s first full season in the big leagues, he earned American League rookie of the year honors as the team advanced to the World Series just three years after losing 119 games in 2003. That season kicked off the latest golden era for this historic franchise (“the Verlander Era,” I think we now can safely call it), a run that realistically ended in 2016; practically ended with the death of former owner Mike Ilitch in February of this year; and officially ended tonight. Verlander was a six-time All Star with the Tigers, winning both the AL Cy Young and MVP awards in 2011 (and he was robbed of the former award last year) and winning memorable postseason duels with the Yankees and A’s, among others.

Verlander has been the consistent face, leader, and spokesman of this Tigers team, and he was the author of many of its greatest hits. (Speaking of hits, Verlander earned his first major-league RBI last night in Colorado during what proved to be his final appearance in a Detroit uniform.) With respect to Miguel Cabrera, who came to Detroit in 2008 after winning a championship with the Florida Marlins, no player has been more closely associated with this team over the past decade-plus than Verlander.

That 2006 season also marked my return as a fan to baseball and the Tigers, so it’s as difficult as can be for me to envision Verlander playing for another team, even if he’ll still be in orange and, undoubtedly, dominating in the postseason. I will be watching, though, thankful for everything he did to help the team I for whatever reason care about and hopeful that he finds what he wants in Houston.

We now awake to a very new morning on Woodward Avenue and hope that the Tigers’ management and ownership pursue the rebuilding process with the same tenacity and persistent demand for excellence Verlander modeled for everyone in his days wearing the old English D.

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Previously
Upton There – 8/31
A bad time for a bad season – 8/29
Jordan Zimmermann takes tennis lessons – 8/20
Tigers Notes, 8/8/17 – 8/8
Decoding the Upton Myth – 8/2
Even the umpires just wanna go home – 7/21
Yo, a J.D. Martinez trade comp – 7/19
Martinez trade triggers premature referendum on Avila – 7/19
Michael Fulmer has righted the ship – 6/27
Tigers in Retrograde – 6/19
Fixing Justin Upton – 5/31
Soft in the Middle Now – 5/30
Reliever Relief, Part 2 – 5/11
Reliever Relief – 5/8

Related

ALDLAND’s full Justin Verlander archive

Saving Detroit: Upton There

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Today is the last day MLB teams can trade players the receiving team would like to use in the postseason. In what I am regarding as a surprise move, the Tigers have sent another outfielder to the Angels, who now are acquiring Justin Upton in exchange for Grayson Long. (Last fall, Detroit sent Cameron Maybin to Anaheim, and, probably not coincidentally, Maybin now is on his way to Houston.) Neil Weinberg has the early report on Long:

The Tigers got 23-year-old Grayson Long, a starter currently having a strong year in AA. He only threw 65 innings across three levels last year due to injury, but he does have the appearance of an innings eater if you buy into the archetype scouting. Based on the public scouting views and one source I spoke with this afternoon, Long’s fastball is solid in the low 90s but his secondary stuff is a bit questionable with opinions ranging from fringe to flashes of above average. He has a change and slider but it’s not clear they will play at the major league level to the point at which he could be a successful starter. That might lead him to a bullpen role, but he has pitched well so far in the minors and I’m a big believer in letting a player keep going until the performance tells you to stop. There’s definitely potential for something really exciting but even the floor seems perfectly fine given the cost.

Upton’s contract had a player opt-out provision effective as of the end of this season. I’ve expressed skepticism about the idea that Upton would exercise that option. Weinberg, on the other hand, called the “odds that Upton opts out . . . quite high.”

It appears the Tigers came to the same conclusion, because the only way this trade makes sense is if Detroit was treating Upton as if he was on an expiring contract just like J.D. Martinez and Alex Avila and needed to get something for him now before he leaves in the offseason.

After watching Upton play here in Atlanta with his older brother as members of the Braves, I have been tracking his time– a bad dip with a fierce, late recovery in 2016, followed by a very solid 2017– in Detroit on this site with some care, and I will watch how the market responds to what I now agree will be his likely free agency this offseason. While he may not get a raise, he’s likely to wind up with a team with greater playoff odds than those of the Tigers or Angels, who, against many of those same odds, remain in the American League wild card hunt. Most of all, I’m happy to see Upton have such a strong rebound. Detroit’s fans didn’t deserve him anyway.

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Previously
A bad time for a bad season – 8/29
Jordan Zimmermann takes tennis lessons – 8/20
Tigers Notes, 8/8/17 – 8/8
Decoding the Upton Myth – 8/2
Even the umpires just wanna go home – 7/21
Yo, a J.D. Martinez trade comp – 7/19
Martinez trade triggers premature referendum on Avila – 7/19
Michael Fulmer has righted the ship – 6/27
Tigers in Retrograde – 6/19
Fixing Justin Upton – 5/31
Soft in the Middle Now – 5/30
Reliever Relief, Part 2 – 5/11
Reliever Relief – 5/8

Related
Catching Fire: It Don’t Come Easy
Catching Fire: Checking in on Justin Upton
Catching Fire: Night of a thousand feet of home runs
Catching Fire: Heading for the exit velocity

ALDLAND’s full Justin Upton archive

Saving Detroit: A bad time for a bad season

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For the Detroit Tigers, dark clouds have been looming on the horizon for long enough that a down season like the one they’re having now (57-73, .438) has not come as a complete surprise. That this was, in some sense, foreseeable– even if not entirely avoidable– doesn’t necessarily make it more palatable.

It’s no mystery that one of the Tigers’ most significant structural issues is the fact that they have a lot of their payroll resources tied up in a few large, long-term contracts with older players who are past their respective primes. As I observed at the beginning of last season, though, 2018 represents an important break point in the team’s present financial structure. There are two reasons for that: 1) some of those large contracts come off the Tigers’ books in 2018, and 2) the team’s current television deal with Fox Sports Detroit expires. It’s that second part that holds real financial potential:

Baseball might not grip the nation the way it once did and the way football now does, but the sport is extremely popular on a local level, making teams’ local broadcast rights as valuable as ever. The increasing price of these contracts means that the only thing better than a rich television contract is a new television contract. New television contracts are the things of which dreams are made– assuming you dream of signing a Zack-Greinke-caliber player or two.

Thus, the good news for Detroit: right about the time things could start to get ugly, payroll-wise, the team will be signing a new TV deal. Their current agreement, with Fox Sports Detroit, expires in 2018. As this Crain’s Detroit Business article highlights, the team has a few options, including negotiating an extension with FSD. It also could attempt to negotiate an ownership stake in whichever broadcast network it partners with going forward, something roughly half of the MLB clubs have done.

Team ownership and management may be seeing dollar signs after watching their rivals receive massive broadcast deals worth a billion dollars or more. Here is a portion of a FanGraphs table from 2016 showing the value of all of the MLB team television contracts signed since the Tigers executed their current TV contract in 2009:

mlb tv contracts

Of those teams for which the contract value is known, only Cleveland, Minnesota, and Colorado have reached television deals paying them less than a billion dollars, and all of the MLB television contracts signed since 2014 have been for at least $1 billion. Tigers leadership undoubtedly will be pointing to all of those recent deals in the negotiations with FSD (or another potential broadcast partner).

The bad timing of the team’s on-field struggles comes into play here too, though. After a decade of top-tier competitiveness, the 2017 Tigers won’t even sniff the wild-card chase, and everybody knows it. That probably explains why no team saw a larger relative drop in television ratings this season:

In terms of actual ratings, this isn’t the catastrophe it might appear to be, as the Tigers had been performing well, ratings-wise, in recent years. The eve of broadcast contract negotiations obviously isn’t the best time for a big dip in performance and ratings, however. One wonders whether, in light of the importance of these contracts, the team should have worked on a new TV deal a few years ago or should have instead triggered the inevitable rebuild a few years earlier in order to be able to make a more credible presentation of an upward-trending team in 2018.

Of course, it takes two to reach a meeting of the minds, so it’s possible the Tigers tried to get a jump on this during the winning days but weren’t able to make any headway with FSD at that time. It also is possible that these year-to-year fluctuations matter less than we outsiders think. Regardless, as we look toward the next era of Detroit Tigers baseball, the team’s new television contract will play as much of a role in shaping that next era as any current or future player contract.

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Previously
Jordan Zimmermann takes tennis lessons – 8/20
Tigers Notes, 8/8/17 – 8/8
Decoding the Upton Myth – 8/2
Even the umpires just wanna go home – 7/21
Yo, a J.D. Martinez trade comp – 7/19
Martinez trade triggers premature referendum on Avila – 7/19
Michael Fulmer has righted the ship – 6/27
Tigers in Retrograde – 6/19
Fixing Justin Upton – 5/31
Soft in the Middle Now – 5/30
Reliever Relief, Part 2 – 5/11
Reliever Relief – 5/8

Related
Statements both obvious and only slightly less obvious about the Detroit Tigers’ finances

Dr. Doolittle knows the cure for baseball’s current ills, to the extent baseball currently is possessed of or by ills

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doolittle.png

While MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred continues his increasingly tone-deaf and ineffective campaign to draw more fans to baseball by changing the game rather than changing the way people can follow the game, the real solution is becoming more and more obvious to everyone else. I’m not writing this post because new Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle is the latest player to publicly agree with me; I’m writing it because he’s right:

We were talking about pace of game changes this spring — a similar effort in terms of changing rules to improve fan interaction with the game — but Nationals closer Sean Doolittle thought we were veering off course. “We’re talking about pretty drastic changes to shave five minutes from a game. Are you seeing a bunch of 20-year-olds lining up for season tickets?”

The lefty thought we should consider how the game is packaged and how people could better interact with the game. “Marketing? We’re not that good at it. Let’s see if we can use some of our personalities to drive traffic and energize the game. Blackout rules. Millennials don’t pay for cable. Allow more gifs and videos on social media. Statcast could help if you use it right — showcasing how athletic some of these guys are.”

He’s speaking to the point I (and others, of course) have been making about baseball for as long as I can remember, and I have a very short memory. From April, when I thought MLBAM cut me off from my MLB.tv subscription:

Baseball is a fine game, and to the extent people will like it, they probably will do so for what it is. I’m not opposed to all measures designed, for example, to reduce the time between pitches (or the time spent on commercial breaks). Rather than changing the game he wants people to watch, though, Manfred ought to change the way people can watch the game, obviously by making it easier for them to do so. That approach would allow him to demonstrate more confidence in the quality of the sport he oversees. Instead, his approach has made the national conversation around baseball into one about how boring it currently is. Probably not the best notion for the league’s commissioner to be pushing, especially because no amount of reform is going to be able to radically remake baseball into some sort of rapid, flowing game like hockey or basketball and still have it be recognizable as “baseball.” He’s painted himself into a public-relations corner, and the sooner he switches from emphasizing perceived negatives to emphasizing positives, such as (hypothetical) proposals to make the game even easier to watch and interact with, the better.

From March, when Manfred made the most significant change to the sport in nearly 140 years:

It’s difficult to know whether fans should be insulted or merely disappointed with Manfred. It also is unclear who should be pleased by [his elimination of the four-pitch intentional walk]. What is clear is that Manfred will not shy away from making fundamental changes to the game in pursuit of a poorly defined goal. That means that we should expect that his past proposals, including a pitch clock and a ban on defensive shifts, absolutely are on the table going forward. As for changes that actually might help draw a younger audience to the sport, like removing local broadcast blackouts on streaming devices or decreasing the cost of attending games? Don’t hold your breath.

This should be an easy one, Commissioner. If you won’t listen to me, at least listen to your players.

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Previously
Pace of Play Isn’t Going Away
Rob Manfred’s Use Your Illusion Tour
MLB in retrograde

ESPN reassigns football broadcaster to protect him from memes

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In what has to be the dumbest sports story ever, ESPN has reassigned college football broadcaster Robert Lee, who was supposed to work Virginia’s September 2 season-opener against William & Mary, “for safety reasons.” Was ESPN concerned that Lee, who shares a first and last name– but, one assumes, little else– with the Confederate general, would be subject to physical danger while broadcasting in Charlottesville, recently the site of a deadly racial demonstration? No. This decision is all about protecting Lee from danger of a different sort. From an ESPN statement: “This wasn’t about offending anyone. It was about the reasonable possibility that because of his name he would be subjected to memes and jokes and who knows what else.”

Indeed, who does know what else? After this, I really can’t imagine there’s anything left.

Saving Detroit: Jordan Zimmermann takes tennis lessons

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Following an injury-curtailed 2016, 2017 has been anything but the bounceback for which Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Jordan Zimmermann hoped. Little is trending in the right direction or going well for him in the second year of his five-year contract with the Tigers.

According to a recent report, the neck injury that caused Zimmermann to miss time in 2016 is continuing to cause mechanical problems for the pitcher in 2017. One of the consequences is a decreased ability to locate his pitches, and, while he apparently believes the needed adjustments are too significant for an in-season fix, during his most recent start, it sounds like he’d had enough:

He resorted to a quick fix Friday night, so rudimentary it seems almost silly. He wasn’t hitting his spots against the Los Angeles Dodgers’ imposing lineup — he couldn’t get the ball in to lefties, or away against righties — so he tried something he has never done before. In the fifth inning, he moved from the third-base side of the rubber, where he has pitched his entire career, to the first-base side of the rubber.

After giving up six runs over the first four innings, he figured had to try something, anything. He moved a mere five or six inches,

“Basically, I’m on the third base side and I’m missing middle. So if I move over to the middle of the rubber, I’m moving myself over five or six inches, it’s allowing me to get inside for lefties and away to righties,” Zimmermann explained.

It felt strange, but there was some marginal improvement.

Zimmermann said when he threw a fastball in, up and in, it stayed more true. It didn’t run back at all. He struck out Adrian Gonzalez in the fifth inning with three curveballs.

“It feels like I almost had to throw it in our dugout to get to the other side of the plate,” Zimmermann said. “But it went where I wanted it to, so that was the good thing.”

The difference in release points was enough to show up on these Brooks Baseball plots, which show Zimmermann’s 2017 release points excluding his last start followed by the two distinct release points he used in Friday’s game:

zimmermann

I’m highlighting this not because I think it’s any sort of meaningful solution– Zimmermann thinks it helped, and it’s hard to find sufficiently granular data to evaluate in-game strategic shifts like this (his overall zone rate on Friday night actually was slightly lower than his full-season average)– but because it shows how desperate Zimmerman is for any measure of improvement, even a false one. He undoubtedly will work on this in the offseason, but, for now, he’s just like any ordinary person who doesn’t have the time or resources for a proper adjustment and looks for something easy to keep the game going. I recognized the move immediately because it’s what I do when I play tennis. Among many faults in my game is an inability to control the depth of my serves, which usually land well deep of the service box. Some lessons with a professional probably could help identify and correct the problem in my service motion. I have so few opportunities to play, though, that I want to spend them with family and friends, not in a training session with a stranger. That’s why, if I bomb the first serve deep, I just take a couple steps backward and try it again.

Of course, Zimmermann’s more than an amateur who’s given up on his dreamshallucinations of making it as a competitive tennis player, so it will be interesting to see what real changes and adjustments we see from him in 2018, as well as how he positions himself on the mound in his remaining starts this season.

Minutiae, trivia, and the undead rumors of a Justin Verlander trade: welcome to the last six weeks of the Detroit Tigers’ 2017 season.

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Previously
Tigers Notes, 8/8/17 – 8/8
Decoding the Upton Myth – 8/2
Even the umpires just wanna go home – 7/21
Yo, a J.D. Martinez trade comp – 7/19
Martinez trade triggers premature referendum on Avila – 7/19
Michael Fulmer has righted the ship – 6/27
Tigers in Retrograde – 6/19
Fixing Justin Upton – 5/31
Soft in the Middle Now – 5/30
Reliever Relief, Part 2 – 5/11
Reliever Relief – 5/8

Related
Getting to know Jordan Zimmermann in context

Sports Law Roundup – 8/18/2017

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aslr

I used to write the sports technology roundup at TechGraphs, an internet website that died, and now I am writing the sports law roundup at ALDLAND, an internet website.

Here is a top sports-related legal story from the past week:

  • Golf suit suit: On Monday, Augusta National Golf Club filed suit against an online auction memorabilia company in an attempt to halt sales of three of the club’s famous green jackets. According to the club, the jackets, which it issues to club members and winners of the Masters tournament, remain club property and may not leave the premises, with only one exception: the Masters winner may take his jacket off club grounds during the first year following presentment. The site claims to have for sale the 1966 Masters champion jacket issued to Byron Nelson, as well as member jackets belonging to John R. Butler, Jr. and George King. This list of club members USA Today published in 2002 names Butler and identifies him as a resident of Texas affiliated with J.R. Butler and Co., which appears to be an oil and gas consulting company. King’s name does not appear on the 2002 list, and reports on this lawsuit indicate that he was a member of the club only “briefly.” The auction site describes King as “an early Augusta National member from Wisconsin, never returned to Augusta National after” World War II. The auction company claims to have previously sold three other Masters champion jackets, including one belonging to the tournament’s first champion, Horton Smith, for almost $700,000 in 2013. There is no indication that the club sued the auction company in connection with any of its prior sales. Yesterday, a judge granted the club’s motion for a preliminary injunction halting the auction of the jackets, which the club alleges constituted stolen property.

Sports court is in recess.

Saving Detroit: Tigers Notes, 8/8/17

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detroit tigers notes

While trades– including a trade of Justin Verlander– technically remain a possibility at this point in the year, it looks like the Detroit Tigers will content themselves with playing out the final two months of this season with their current crew and an eye toward the future. For this site, that probably means that the pages of this season’s Tigers diary will be a little emptier than they might be if the team were more aggressive in the trade market or competing for a playoff berth. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting items to track, though. Here are a few:

    • Justin Upton: As highlighted here last week, Upton’s been trimming his bugaboo strikeout rate, but he’s continuing to strike out in bad situations. Since that post, he’s appeared in six games and added four two-out strikeouts to his total, pushing him into a tie for eleventh on the MLB-wide list (minimum 100 two-out plate appearances) in 2017. With 3.6 fWAR, Upton continues to be the team’s best position player by a comfortable margin, as well as its best overall player. In that post last week, I speculated that Upton is unlikely to opt out of his contract this offseason due, in part, to a weak market for corner outfielders with his profile. Over at The Athletic’s new Detroit vertical, Neil Weinberg is more optimistic about Upton’s open-market prospects, calling the “odds that Upton opts out . . . quite high.”
    • Miguel Cabrera: I’ve been working up a full post on Cabrera’s tough season, which has a good chance to be the worst of his career. (For a forward-looking analysis, my career comparison between Cabrera and Albert Pujols is here.) Besides the obvious drop in production, one thing that jumps out is his batting average on balls in play, which, at .296, is below .300 for the first time ever (career .345 BABIP). Last month, Weinberg did the logical thing and dove into Cabrera’s swing profile and batted-ball data tabulated by StatCast. The problem, from our perspective, is that there isn’t a ton there. Cabrera continues to rank high (currently number one, minimum 200 at bats, by a large margin) on the xwOBA-wOBA chart, an indication that he’s making good contact despite poor results. From watching games this season, it seems like Cabrera turns away from inside (but not that inside) pitches more often than in years past, which makes me wonder if he simply isn’t seeing pitches as well. (Weinberg noticed that he’s swinging less often than usual at inside pitches.)
      When observing the decline of a great player, it can be fun to take a break from the dissection to remember his youth, which the remarkable achievements of Mike Trout and Bryce Harper gave us occasion to do today:

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Sports Law Roundup – 8/4/2017

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aslr

I used to write the sports technology roundup at TechGraphs, an internet website that died, and now I am writing the sports law roundup at ALDLAND, an internet website.

Here are the top sports-related legal stories from the past week:

  • NBA fan assault: After declining a plea offer in June, Charles Oakley, a former member of the New York Knicks who was arrested and charged with assault after an argument with Knicks owner James Dolan during a game at Madison Square Garden, accepted a similar offer today. While Oakley’s earlier decision appeared designed to force Dolan to provide public testimony at a trial, Oakley, through his lawyer, now says that he “will be pursuing all civil remedies against Mr. Dolan based on this incident.” Pursuant to the terms of today’s agreement, prosecutors will drop the criminal charges against Oakley if Oakley stays out of MSG for one year and otherwise avoids criminal trouble for six months.
  • ESPN parody: The parody sports website NOTSportsCenter.com, which appears to exist today mostly as a Twitter account, defeated a challenge by ESPN that sought the transfer of the NOTSportsCenter.com web domain to ESPN because, ESPN complained, the parody website was confusingly similar to ESPN’s registered “SportsCenter” trademark and operated in bad faith. The arbitration panel found that the owner of the NOTSportsCenter.com domain, Will Applebee, was not using the domain in bad faith, was not attempting to disrupt ESPN’s business, and does not keep people from visiting ESPN’s website. Finally, the arbitrators noted that ESPN’s “delay in taking action against [Applebee] nullifies its arguments,” finding the Worldwide Leader’s decision to wait six years to challenge the domain registration to be a material piece of evidence. Attorneys from Greenberg Traurig, an international law firm with more than two dozen offices around the world, represented ESPN. Applebee represented himself.
  • Daily fantasy sports: On Wednesday, Delaware and Maine became the latest states to legalize daily fantasy sports. The Maine law prohibits DFS contests based on collegiate athletics. Legislative action in other states suggests that Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California could be next in line, while Massachusetts appears to be moving in the other direction.

Sports court is in recess.

Sonny Gray and the Collective Bargaining Agreement (via Ken Arneson)

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After the A’s traded Sonny Gray on Monday, I saw a lot of people declaring that the A’s are just doing the same old thing for the same old cheapskate reasons blah blah blah. That’s an easy thing to think if you’re just looking at the surface of things, but if you dig deeper and study it, you find it’s a bit more complex than that. … Read More

(via Ken Arneson)