Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 339: Alex Rodriguez, Bud Selig, and Hard-Boiled Baseball

Episode Date: December 2, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the latest details of the exquisitely seamy A-Rod story.

We didn't exactly believe your story, Mrs. Shaughnessy. We believed your $200. You mean that... I mean you paid us more than if you'd been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it all right. Good morning, and welcome to episode 339 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. I hope your weekend was wonderful, Ben. It was, thank you. I did not ask if it was wonderful. Now you know for sure.

So I want to talk about Alex Rodriguez's piece in New York Magazine. But first I wanted to ask you, did you see the Denver Post piece on the Rockies finances? I was just looking at that right before we started. I saw an excerpt from it and I opened the article to read the rest, but have not yet read the entire article. Oh, good. Don't look at it. I want to ask you to guess a couple of things. Okay. So they actually have a line-by-line accounting of where they spend their money. They have $170 million in revenue. I saw the percent devoted to payroll. Yes, exactly.

So half goes to payroll. So that leaves, in this case, it leaves $88 million. And so I just wanted to get your sense of what you thought they spent on a couple of things. So how much do you think they spend on minor league player development? Well, I remember a recent Russell Carlton article where he said that teams spend $20 million on average on... I thought he said... I thought it was minor league development, so I guess I'll guess that.

Well, it is $10 million, although there's $12 million for draft bonuses and international signings, so it's conceivable that Russell was saying that, although then that would mean... Yeah, although then that would mean, yeah, but then that would mean that the Rockies are, are average,

which, uh, they're below average for revenue, et cetera. So you might expect them to be, but I don't know. I don't know how much, how much can you spend on minor league player development really beyond,

you know, what you have to pay. It's not like there's, it's not like there's big salary minor leaguers that some rich teams have or anything like that. So, all right, so $10 million for that. Let's see. Scouting, how much do they spend on scouting,

on their scouting department? I guess I'll guess like half of what they spend on player development, maybe. So you're guessing $10 million, even though we know that it... I'm guessing five because you told me ten. I wasn't sure if you were a self-correcting machine or not. So it is $4.3 million on scouting. They have a $4.3 million scouting budget. Okay.

And finally, umpires. How much do you think the Rockies spend on umpires? So I don't even know how umpires are paid. No. Do all 30 teams pay? Do they split it? Presumably. Gosh, all right uh so what are there like 70 umpires or something like that something like uh i'll i'll guess there's 70 just as an approximation there might

be might be more if you count some of the part-time ones. So I don't know, 70, and I'll guess that umpires make 200,000? I should not have asked you this. 200,000 that they spend. So no, no, so. Oh, gosh, Ben, come on. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. So like 500, gosh. Ben, come on. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. So, like $500,000. They spend $1.5 million on umpires,

which if you exclude spring training, which, you know, that's an expense. There's umpires for that. And you exclude the postseason, which the Rockies are never in. That means that, on average, the home team is spending, you know, just about twenty thousand dollars a game on umpires which it includes a lot of things i mean there's the salary and there's pension and everything but also the umpire has to the umpires all have to travel so presumably

that's part of the umpire cost so there's four guys flying around and living in hotels and getting a per diem and probably a pretty good per diem. But still, $20,000 per game, maybe less, maybe $15,000. $15,000. When you watch a baseball game, a car has been spent on your umpires. Every single game. And there's 15 games a day constantly. And they're spending 15 grand every day on umpires. That's not useful information, but now it's something you know. Yeah, it's surprising. I'd never really considered that. People talk about the cost of replacing umpires with various technological means, but apparently it would be a lot less than actually paying umpires,

although I think it would be difficult to dispense with them altogether, so you'd probably end up paying for both. But wow, that's interesting. That's a lot. Here's, so I wonder why there, I guess, I don't know, I guess it's a matter of, you know, potentially a conflict of interest or something would arise, but you wonder maybe why they don't just have an umpiring crew for each city that doesn't travel. And whatever team comes in to face the home crowd, they get the same umpires. I guess the home team would have such a relationship with the umpire that the objectivity would be questioned over time.

But also, I think people like the home team having an advantage. It's more fun when the home team wins. So I don't actually know that I have a problem with that. Yeah, I probably do. I think I would also. All right, so did you read the A-Rod piece in New York? Nope. Oh, Ben, you're a lucky man.

You are luckier than me because you get to read it now and i never get to read it again for the first time wow i look forward to it i really i took it easy over this little break we had well it just came out like it came out hours ago or minutes ago it came out not long ago uh so it's by steve fishman who is not a sports writer which um i always think it's a good if you're going to dive deep on a big story in your magazine, I would not hire my sports guy to do it, just because there's too many. Not for A-Rod. I mean, that's barely a sports story. What do you mean?

Well, if it were a real sports story, I think you get something from having someone who works in sports all the time, but A-Rod is almost, the sports is almost irrelevant in his story. Yeah, okay, fine. You haven't read the piece. Why are you sharing your opinion? I don't know, I'm sorry. I'll hang up now. This piece is incredible, and I wanted to bring it up to talk about just because it continues. I mean, we talked about the A-Rod stuff in July or whenever it broke and we were sort of unsure about how it was going to play because there was this sense early on that MLB had

gotten their hands dirty on some of this stuff and it could go either way. dirty on some of this stuff and um it could go either way it could be seen as a thing that you know validates uh uh you know their their position that the drugs are a scourge and need to be taken you know uh with with uh you know any weapon that they can use or it can just make them look like they're down in the muck with a rod andod and they lose the moral high ground or whatever. So this story, among other things, it details the path that the Biogenesis notebook took from Biogenesis to Major League Baseball. And I didn't know a lot of this stuff. There's probably some stuff that maybe had come out and maybe I had heard but I had forgotten about or what. But there's also, I think, probably a lot of stuff that is not. Anyway, the point is that there was basically a little bit of a – there was a grudge.

There was bad blood over a loan with this guy who sort of vaguely was connected to Biogenesis. He got the whole thing rolling and then it it became this big kind of classic Miami story where there are all sorts of people running in different directions trying to get paid. There's bank robbers. There are guys hiding in their cars with a loaded gun because they think that there's been a hit taken out on their life. There are shady ex-cops.

There are so many lawyers, and there's a ton of money. And so the thing that is most shocking to me about this— There's some romance. Wasn't someone sleeping with someone also? Yes. Okay, so Mullen, who is, I believe, MLB's lead investigator, former cop, I think, I'm going to scan this before we finish to make sure I didn't say that right, but Mullen slept with one potential witness, according to the witness, and Alex Rodriguez's attorneys later paid $105,000 for text messages between Mullen and the witness. And this is just sort of a classic

this is maybe the best detail in the whole thing i mean this is like everything you would want in the story summed up in one relationship and in one dollar figure because everybody who's got anything they can sell is trying to sell it and jack the price up um and so yeah so the person who i presumably the the witness uh sold the text messages for 105 000 and so we don't actually know like like this could be a lot of different things it could be that he slept with the witness in the way that like sometimes cia agents uh you know uh like uh undercover and they like like maybe he was trying to get information and he was trying to build this bond with her.

Or maybe he's just sort of like a dude who sleeps with people he shouldn't. And then we don't know her either. Maybe she's in the whole... Maybe the whole time she's thinking, I wonder what I can get for these text messages. Or maybe she's a secret agent. Who

knows? These are all classic tropes of spy fiction. So Mullen is the head of his investigations unit, a former New York City cop who had a team of a dozen investigators working for him, along with local private detectives. Oh my gosh, imagine the local private detectives don't even come up in this story, but they're Miami private detectives. Think of how many spinoff shows there are here. So as I alluded to, though, the money is the incredible thing. Every dollar figure in this story will blow you away. thing i don't know how much okay here here's another one how much is what the rockies spend on umpiring how much does how much does bud how much does bud ceiling make a year do you think oh uh i'm almost positive that i've heard this and it was a big number um gosh like 30 million or something 22 according to this which is crazy because this whole time, like so much of this, this, uh, so much of what gives this, um, this investigation oxygen is the fact that it's A-Rod and he makes

so much money and you know, the, the, uh, you know, the league to some degree, I mean, one of the owners in the league has a huge financial incentive to get him suspended. And, uh, the fact that he makes this much money is like this huge turning point in the tragedy that is a rod's career where everybody turned on him and here here's bud ceiling making just about as much the whole time uh uh so i'm gonna just i'm gonna scroll through some of the dollar figures um alex rodriguez gave 25 000 to bosh so that bosh could get a lawyer which looked suspicious to mlb um uh mlb uh uh offered 125 000 to one guy who had stolen the notebooks and he rejected it uh let's see uh uh oh this is a good one

this is a very good one when the guy who actually gave the notebook well he gave a flash drive with the notebook to MLB for $125,000 this is a guy who seems to have stolen it it's hard to tell who stole what

he arranged for $125,000 in cash. And when he, when he met with them in a diner, he had a friend film the meeting on an iPhone and he later sold that film, that video to a rod for $200,000. So he got more for the video than he got for the notebook, which is kind of amazing. When Bosch finally agreed to play ball, play ball, that's a baseball term.

When he finally agreed to play ball with Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball said, well, we can't pay you. That would be, you know, we obviously couldn't do that. So instead they, you know, as everybody knows, they dropped their lawsuit against him and his brother. But Bosch also had concerns about his safety. I'm reading now. And Manfred said MLB would pay for a security detail for a year. How much do you think a security detail for a year costs, Ben? Like $500,000? $800,000. year cost ben um like five hundred thousand eight hundred thousand dollars they're paying

eight hundred thousand dollars for this guy's security uh they also agreed to pay his legal fees ben how much do you think his lawyers have earned in a three-month period. More than the security detail? More than a million dollars, yeah. Wow. Okay, yeah, that's the answer. The answer is more than a million dollars. Don't keep guessing.

So then here's a story of how more stuff got stolen. This guy who originally sold the documents to MLB, it's a very complicated story, but the original source of those documents apparently had more stuff. tanning salon uh the apparently allegedly uh suspiciously somehow uh somebody broke into his uh the trunk of his car pried it open stole four boxes of documents along with a laptop and a handgun a week later the guy who had lured him to the tanning salon uh took uh had all of the stuff from the car though he wouldn't say how he He called MLB's investigator, who flew down. They had another meeting at the diner, this time for $25,000, and MLB claimed not to know the documents were stolen, but the Boca Police report of the break-in says that an investigator working for MLB

had called about the incident before the payment. Oh, my gosh. It's so good, Ben. It's so good. Yeah, we have to do a treatment of this. It sounds like a great script. It sounds like The Counselor, maybe. Have you seen The Counselor?

No, but it sounds like The Counselor. I haven't seen it either. I'd like to. I've heard it's pretty good. I've heard it's the worst ever and pretty good. Oh, interesting. I heard Only God For heard it's the worst ever and pretty good. Oh, interesting. I heard only God forgives is the worst ever.

That seems to be what everybody is currently saying is the worst ever. So does anyone come out of this article looking worse than anyone else, or does everyone just look awful? I mean, gosh, the thing about it, Ben, is that I think you can make the case, and I sort of made this case back in the summer, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. But I think you can make the case that the dirtier MLB gets, the better it looks for Bud. Basically, he's saying we're not naive anymore.

We're not going to pretend that guys are going to follow the rules. We know that this is a dirty, dirty industry. Everything's underground. They will do anything to cheat. It's notable that all 14 players on this list never failed a drug test. So if you're Major League Baseball and you're saying we've got to clean things up, the worse it gets, the more it justifies you getting dirty. I mean, this is almost like,

uh, I don't know. It's almost like, uh, I don't know. I'm not going to get into anything political or anything foreign affairs. You know where I'm going though. The, uh, it seems as though, um, you can make the case that MLB is showing that they can play, um, just as dirty as anybody else. And that that's the only way you're ever going to stop this or at least not stop it necessarily but the only way to create enough pressure that it's not a slam dunk to do it. So I don't know that there's anything that MLB could do

short of kidnapping a child that wouldn't in my narrative, in my premise, play to their advantage. Yeah. Did you see the annual drug test report that was released a couple days ago? I did. So there were over 5,000 drug tests, over 4,000 urine samples, and there were eight positive tests, and all of them were for stimulants, seven of which were for Adderall. So no one tested positive for steroids or any non-stimulant performance-enhancing drug, and then there were the 13 non-analytical positives the the biogenesis people so so yeah i mean they say rod left out of that is it 13 plus plus a rod is i don't know i don't

think they had names um but so so they had almost twice as many non-test positives as they had test positives and and we did talk about that, how people were saying, well, they have this program now, so they should just let the program do its thing and not go beyond the drug test and try to dig up dirt on anyone. But they kind of have to if they're really serious about policing it it because clearly people are finding ways to beat the drug test somehow. And if they are really serious and not just, you know, going through the motions and looking through the other way, then looking the other way, then they kind of have to get down and dirty like this to be serious about it and catch people. Yeah. I mean, that's something that Americans generally like and that

plays well until you start convicting innocent people. And so they have to make sure that this doesn't catch an innocent person. If it turns out that, in fact, there was no code and that all of A-Rod's texts to Bosh were really about food and gummy candies, then it's going to look pretty bad for Major League Baseball. It all works until you execute an innocent man. It doesn't seem like anybody thinks that's necessarily the case here. And Major League Baseball picked a really good guy to to try this tactic on because uh even if a rod's innocent he's got you know he's got a positive in his past nobody's crying for him um and so you know to some degree they probably feel like they're bulletproof in

this case and maybe they are nobody's going to take a rod side really although generally no one's going to take but ceiling side either i mean it's not as though bud is going to take A-Rod's side, really. Although, generally, no one's going to take Bud Selig's side, either. I mean, it's not as though Bud is going to be beloved in any way. But, you know, this is going to be the sort of thing that his legacy is, you know, 50 years from now, is probably still in doubt.

And this probably works pretty well for him. And in fact, if he has the reputation of taking on mobsters and bank robbers, nobody's going to remember the tactics. Nobody's going to remember who slept with whom. Probably. Probably. Now, if they go too far and there's a congressional investigation or something like that, or if they lost their antitrust exemption or something over this, then that would sting him. But right now, it seems like he's playing this pretty well from his end,

especially if he gets the suspension that he's going for. My favorite detail, not my favorite detail, I have a million favorite details, but one detail I liked was that the guy who sold the documents, the flash drive to MLB, when he got the, okay, so when he starts trying to sell his, quote, he began by making a market. He called A-Rod's camp, which wasn't interested, nor was the handler of Ryan Braun, another player linked to Biogenesis. He even called the Baseball Hall of Fame, figuring he could sell the documents as memorabilia. And you kind of wonder why didn't the Baseball Hall of Fame totally should have bought that. I mean, if the Baseball Hall of Fame really wants to grapple with steroids

in a way that is going to get us past this weird standoff in the Hall of Fame, it seems like that would have been the perfect thing to do to start with and to say we truly are a museum. We truly are not just a place where we build up hagiographies of flawed people. We're a museum. We tell the truth. And if they had had this, I don't know. It seems like it would have been a good idea but

did he call any media outlets does it say it does not say although he does try to sell uh stuff to the new york magazine writer while he is being interviewed of course did he try to sell the video of their interview? I don't know. So anyway, great piece. Everybody should read it and blanket allegedly over everything because I'm not sure what I might have accidentally misread or repeated. So allegedly, pretty sure everybody's innocent. But it's fun stuff, fun stuff, good stuff for baseball. Actually, I will say, the whole thing is really, when you go one level deeper, it makes you just think how pathetic and fleeting life is.

These guys are totally ruining themselves for something that doesn't actually matter. And nobody's happy at the end of it. They all could have been happy if they'd just been satisfied with with you know what they had but nope everybody's got to get more and now here we are everybody's awful everybody's robbing banks and it's awful sounds like a raymond chandler story or something i this is my i look forward to reading it's my favorite my favorite thing since since a rod's last interview i guess i really enjoyed that one, too. Went on WFAN and the best part was how he tried to get New York's sentiment on his side by

pitting New York against Bud Selig and being like, he won't come to testify at my hearing because he hates New York, which was great because Major League Baseball's offices are in New York. Bud Selig's in New York all the time, but he won't come because he hates New York. And so it was like a WWE-style promo, which I think baseball should have more of. And it came down to whether people are more likely to sympathize with a rod or bud selig and judging from the reaction to that interview it's probably pretty close yeah um yeah i had something i was gonna say but i forgot what it was okay

all right are we done uh yeah I want to go reread this. Oh, I remember what I was going to say. I remember what I was going to say. It's not good. Now the timing's all off. It's not good. Well, you know how you did the thing on the unfiltered on Hall of... It's not the Hall of Fame. It's not the Hall of...

You know, the Hall of Blank. It's not the Hall of Blank. Well, I was going to say that over the next week, you could probably do a... It sounds like a blank story and just fill in authors because i think everybody's going to be saying it sounds like we've got cormac mccarthy down and and raymond chandler already yeah and elmore leonard is the the most uh the most popular one and there will be you know carl hyacinth and i forget who marchman had one and yeah lots of there's gonna be lots of these all right i'll keep track uh james elroy is what tim marchman

said okay all right uh so we'll be back tomorrow with some other uplifting story about baseball