Next CBA should give commissioner the power to take away draft picks
The Boston Red Sox possess what is probably the best offensive team in baseball. In mid-July, however, they had good reason to wonder if that would be enough. Their pitching was sub-par and they were locked in a tight pennant race with no assurance of success.
The obvious move was to attempt to find more pitching. Since they had one of the richest farm systems in the game, they figured they could peddle some of their young talent to a noncontender in exchange for a proven pitcher. But that wasn’t quite as easy as it seemed. The best pitchers belonged to contending teams who weren’t going to give them up. The non-contenders could dangle only middle- and back-of-the-rotation guys. The Bosox were going to have to take a mediocre talent or make no trade at all.
They settled on Drew Pomeranz, a left-hander who had an 8-7 record with the San Diego Padres. The cost was high since the Padres demanded Anderson Espinoza, an 18-year-old pitcher rated by Baseball America as the 19thbest prospect in the country. Red Sox general manager Mike Hazen probably gritted his teeth when agreed to the deal, but he desperately needed another pitcher — or at least thought he did.
He probably did more than grit is teeth after Pomeranz donned a Boston uniform. He lasted only three-plus innings his first time out and was the losing pitcher in each of the next two starts. An MRI showed Pomeranz wasn’t physically sound. The Red Sox asked Commissioner Rob Manfred to investigate whether or not the Padres had deceived them.
Meanwhile, the Miami Marlins were discovering that Colin Rea, a pitcher they had just acquired from the Padres, would require Tommy John surgery. The White Sox found that James Shields, still another pitcher, wasn’t quite as healthy as the Padres had claimed when he was dealt.
Manfred ordered Rea returned to the Padres and then launched a serious investigation into what was going on in San Diego. What he discovered was quite disturbing.
Every team maintains very extensive and detailed medical records on each player. Any treatment or medication the player receives is noted. These files are normally private, but when a trade is proposed the other team in the deal is permitted to review the player’s medical history and the teams that traded with the Padres had done just that. What they didn’t know was that they were reading incomplete documents.
In spring training Padres general manager A.J. Preller had ordered his medical personnel to maintain two files on every player — a thorough one for internal use only. A sanitized version would be made available to other teams if the situation arose.
Manfred said this practice was deplorable and suspended Preller for 30 days. Yes, 30. Preller isn’t allowed to do anything a general manager would normally do between mid-September and midOctober. Of course, general managers normally don’t do much at all between midSeptember and mid-October. So Preller won’t be permitted to do anything during a time period when he probably wouldn’t do anything anyway. After that he will have served his sentence and will start again with a clean slate.
The Red Sox, in particular, were furious. Espinoza belonged to the Padres and they had nothing to show for it but a back-ofthe-rotation pitcher with a sore arm. They thought more compensation should be forthcoming, but none was. They thought the punishment should be harsher but Manfred stuck with his sentence.
Perhaps a fair adjudication would have been for Manfred to strip the Padres of their first three draft picks and give one to the Red Sox, one to the Marlins and one to the White Sox. But he couldn’t have done something like that even if he wanted to.
The draft is conducted under rules determined during the collective bargaining process with the Players Association. The commissioner has no authority to alter it and draft picks are not his to reassign or cancel. He couldn’t use draft picks as punishment when the St. Louis Cardinals hacked into the Houston Astros’ computer system. He couldn’t use them as punishment when the Red Sox used a clumsy group system to try to get around individual limitations in the Caribbean.
Perhaps that’s something that ought to be reviewed during the next set of negotiations. Giving the commissioner a little flexibility might not be a bad thing.
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