Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 375: Peter Angelos and the Orioles’ Fearsome Physicals

Episode Date: January 30, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Jack Moore about the history of Orioles physicals and Peter Angelos’ time with the team.

Good morning and welcome to episode 375 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller, and today we are joined by Jack Moore of Classical and Sports on Earth and every other site on the internet where people have written about sports. And we're going to talk to him about the Orioles a little bit, who have been, I feel like, a feel good story for most of the last couple years. And you're doing your best to throw some cold water on the feel-good story and make us all feel bad about the Orioles again. You've written a couple times recently about Peter Angelos at Getting Blanked.

And there hasn't been too much to talk about with the Orioles this winter because they haven't really done much. They haven't made many moves. And so we've ended up talking a lot about their stringent physicals. And you've written a bit about their history of tough physicals and voiding contracts. It is not just Grant Balfour. So take us through the history of the Orioles and physicals. Yeah, this definitely isn't a new thing. So it goes back to the late 90s when they signed Xavier Hernandez to a two and a half million dollar contract. And apparently they added him to the roster before they did the physical or before they did their tough physical or whatever,

because they later discovered that he had a torn rotator cuff. And that pretty much ended his career. They voided the – the Orioles attempted to void the contract, and they did manage to save $750,000 after a settlement. Hernandez, his career ended after that. The next one was in 2000. You have Aaron Sealy signed with the Orioles to a four-year, $29 million deal. And again, they did the same thing like they did with Balfour.

Physical happened. They dropped their offer. I believe they dropped their offer for Balfour. They had him signed to a two-year, $15 million dollar deal they dropped it to something like one year six million what they did with sealy is they dropped it from four years and 29 million to two years and 15 million which he said no ended up going to seattle and signing this signing the same deal and uh are you gonna say something there no go ahead okay uh next was jeremy bernitz in 2006 they had a two-year 12 million dollar deal with him uh they backed out again uh but this time

this time it turned out to be right the first time sealy went on to be very good with uh with seattle he was he had a ERA plus in two years there, five wins above replacement. That's pretty well worth 15 million even then, I would say. For Nitz, not so much. He had an 81 OPS plus for Pittsburgh in 2006, that same year that the Orioles backed out of the deal and was then done, he retired.

And there's a well so so the idea of of being strict with your physicals in in principle at least makes some sense that you would want to be as thorough as you possibly can be and that if anything comes to light in the midst of that you you would want to avoid a deal rather than then commit to pay millions of dollars to someone you think might get hurt. But you think there's more of a nefarious aspect to this than just pure caution? Right. Well, the question is, is there actually a medical reason to cut the guy beyond? I imagine with any major league player who's made it to free agency, so they've already played six years in the majors,

you're probably talking with most guys another three, four years in the minors. Ten years of professional baseball, wear and tear on a body, you're going to have something on a physical that you could say, hmm, that's not looking too good. And that's pretty much what they said was the case with Grant Balfour when they talked to other uh other team physicians they talked to the Reds and they talked to the the Rays who ended up signing him and and they were like yeah uh we we did his physical after his first surgery

this nothing looks off here this looks like exactly what you would expect for a pitcher who is 36 years old who just who had a major arm surgery but this is there's no reason here that i would say we should kill this deal there's nothing you shouldn't have already known here basically and the same thing is uh this is kind of what frank ren told the new york times in 2006 that's how peter plays general manager he uses medical reasons to kill or change a deal if he doesn't like it so uh i guess my question would be then why doesn't he kill the deal before it's even signed is it i mean if he if he doesn't like the deal why why even let the g GM go through with it and then try to meddle after it's done? Yeah, that's a great question.

Maybe these guys, you know, the hot stove can go pretty fast. Maybe, you know, Andy McPhail is coming to an agreement with these guys while, you know, winter meetings are going on or something. And so they come to the agreement and and then Angelos hears about it, and he's like, oh, I didn't want to sign this guy, or something to that effect. And it results in it's just not a good look if you're a free agent. You reach an agreement with the team. You're locked up for the next five days.

A week later, they come out and say, oh, no deal. Three guys signed while you were waiting waiting one guy was in your position and then your markets gone and not only and and and they've stuck a stink to you yes right yep yeah which I guess you you know when we talked about this a little bit with the Marlins when salt Lamarck you sign with them butlins when Saltolamakia signed with them. But when there's a team that seems to be doing players wrong, it sort of surprises me that players keep signing with that team. It feels like this is a strong union.

These guys are fairly united against ownership when it comes to business practices. when it comes to business practices, it seems like there would be a stronger kind of push by players to just not reward the owner that does this. So do you think that there are signs out there that the Orioles have a harder time signing guys than they should because of this? time signing guys than they should because of this or is it just the fact that when it comes down to it every player's their own uh their own product and is just trying to get as much as he can and kind of forgets the lessons of the past i mean i'm sure at some point it's it's the latter like at some point if peter angeles is willing to pay you a certain number of millions, you're going to take that, of course. But yeah, we saw with their GM search before they got Dan Duquette, when they had people like Tony LaCava, who was an assistant GM in Toronto, decided to return to that job instead of becoming the GM in Baltimore.

And Toronto was at the time one of these up-and-coming, exciting front offices or whatever. But still, who's going to – how many people are going to turn down a GM job when the option is returning to an assistant GM job where it doesn't – I mean, it certainly didn't seem like he was going to depose Alex Anthopoulos anytime soon. And he wasn't the only one. Yeah, I was going to ask you about

that because it was i mean i don't want to say that they couldn't give that job away but they they certainly had a hard time attracting really any of the the top candidates baseball since 2002 right all right uh and so the the speculation at the time was that no one wanted to work for for Angelus um and I just uh sports or Wikipedia told me about a Sports Illustrated article from from 2009 where SI tried to rank the the worst and the best owners. And at the time, Jeffrey Luria was fourth worst, whereas I think today probably he would be the consensus worst, not only because of his actions, but because the Marlins are not competitive at the moment, whereas the Orioles at least have been for the last couple of years. But at the time, when they did this at least have been for the last couple years uh but at the time when

they when they did this ranking angelus was the worst uh because he had taken control of a team that had a had a strong roster and had a new ballpark and uh were competitive for a few years and then supposedly be just became a a repetitive, a repetitive, you know, habitual meddler firing people, uh, and, and having a team that didn't spend as much as it had at one time and wasn't as competitive. Um, and you, you talked about the, the Davy Johnson story as well in your, in your latest post, which I guess guess is a another example of this meddling sort of behavior yeah i thought this was real interesting i somehow came managed to come up at twins a twins fest event which should give you uh some idea of how widespread peter angelos's

meddling can get so scott erickson was in town for this event, the Twins Daily Winter Meltdown. And Scott Erickson's – the discussion turned to managers because the host asked about managers that Erickson had played with outside of his Twins career. And he says, Davey Johnson was a great manager with the Orioles. I think he was the only manager of the year to get fired for being manager of the year. That was the way it was with the Orioles. We won the first game of the season. We're in first place every day the whole year long, and he got fired.

And the host says, that's Peter Angelos, right? And Erickson, without skipping a beat, this was – I was really excited to hear what he had to say because I had just written both of these pieces and here was something talking just about this. Like, Oh, what's he going to say? Is he, I kind of expected he was going to diffuse it because that's kind of what the good employee does. But no, he says that is. And it's funny because Davey was the last one to the field every day.

We had a veteran team. He'd fill out the lineup the night before, go golfing all day and show up for batting practice. That's like what Torrey did in New York. You don't have to do a whole lot when you've got teams like that. And, you know, Erickson, from all accounts, Erickson and his teammates loved Davey Johnson, and then Angelo aspires him for being manager of the year. So if you had to do your own ranking of worst owners right now, would you put him near the top of the list? Is Luria still clearly at the bottom or at the top?

Do we even have enough information to make that judgment? Or are we sort of reading into things that we may not know the full story of? I guess there's a few different ways you could do this ranking right you could say i mean i don't know if peter angelos is necessarily as much of you can be there's some bad people in baseball i would i would say owners like in terms of running businesses that are really uh you know it's especially greedy and stuff like that and angelos he he made his money a little cleaner in most of them but in terms of like who prevents their team from winning the most

yeah it's either him or loria and gloria's team has won two world series since angelos took over so um i like that tom hicks was number two on this list yes the year the year before he went to the world series um do you guys just out of curiosity i mean the way that uh angelo's goes about this and you know i think that the wren quote that you that you cite is particularly important because it really shows that this is like uh he's not just doing due diligence the perception even within the club is that he's sort of um you know uh abusing protocol more or less but it take away the bad motives the orioles if the orioles simply had a more stringent physical uh process for free agents than other teams. And it led to guys being weeded

out for whatever reason. And, you know, they were sort of more upfront about it and they didn't, you know, quite tarnish players as loudly. Would you have any issue with that? I mean, that seems like a potential place where a team could maybe stand out but on the other hand like as you note there's real long-term consequences to word getting out that one team doesn't like another guy's uh physicals so like i guess i'm just saying this is somewhat slightly off topic but uh has he sort of also maybe stumbled on like kind of a smart tactic here? Well, in terms of talking just purely competitively, there's an interesting balance that takes place, right? Because, yeah, you have to make these decisions as to guys who will get hurt,

but that might end up driving people away either in terms of they won't want to go there in the first place or you just won't be taking these good guys that are injury prone but sometimes those guys manage to stay healthy over a four-year deal so i think it's hard to say whether it's a you know even just purely competitively speaking if it's a smart play yeah like i'm kind of reminded of when the angels signed albert pools and there were still like, you know, there have always been these rumors about his age. And so there were questions right after about whether they kind of did their due diligence on his age and whether they checked.

And they're like, no, we didn't look at it at all. And you sort of got the sense that it would have been perceived by Albert to be disrespectful if they had, and it would have hurt their chances. And so to some degree, there's like maybe a little bit of a way where the players are able to hold owners and teams hostage from looking too closely. If you're criticized, and that's not the entire story with Angelos, clearly as you've shown, but if you're criticized for looking too closely at a guy's medicals, and if players criticize you for it, then they, in a weird way, keep you from necessarily getting as much useful information as you should.

I don't know. Well, yeah, I mean, it's a human game. Like, they're signing the human element cliche, right? It's just a part of what it is. It's not like they're signing robots or, you know, rows on a simulation spreadsheet. Can you go back to the Sidney Ponson story? And I guess the Denny Nagel story is sort of the same story. its own story and I guess that the Denny Nagel story is sort of the same story yeah so there's a couple incidents in which owners tried to get out of the whole guaranteed contract thing and

the first one was uh was Denny Nagel with the Rockies he was charged for soliciting a sex act in Colorado and uh the Rockies tried to cut him under the sportsmanship clause in the contract, which is really vague and says that a player can have his contract terminated should he fail, refuse, or neglect to conform his personal conduct to the standards of good citizenship and sportsmanship, which sounds like it's something from the first national agreement in 1879. And there's no way that would be – I've been reading about the antitrust and the contract law that goes on with this stuff. Not strictly enforceable from what I've read. And that's pretty much what's happened here.

Denny Nagel settled, got $16 million of the $19.5 million. And the Orioles and Ponson had the same thing. The Orioles tried to cut him after a second DUI in, I believe, a calendar year. And, you know, the Orioles tried to do the same thing. And, again, there was a settlement. They didn't disclose the dollar amount here, but I would imagine it was somewhere close to most of it, just like with Nagel. Because you can't get around the guaranteed contract. It's very specific in the contract language, and this is something the union is going to fight tooth and nail to keep.

So sort of the same question then. Should we mind if a team attempts to get out of a deal like this for off-field reasons? Because obviously if Sidney Ponsone had been the best pitcher in baseball at the time or Denny Nagel had been an ace, the team probably would have let it slide and not tried to push the envelope and tried to apply this clause. But because it's Sidney Ponson and you don't want to pay him to pitch for

you, you might take this opportunity to try to get out of the contract. Is that something that we should care about? Should we, should we move an owner down our mental list of owner rankings because of that? Or should we just say that he's in a way uh looking out for the team even if it's you know even if his primary motivation is is self-interest yeah i think it's extraordinarily cynical to pull that move because as you say there's there is no way when uh so giovanni gaiardo for the brewers had a dui a couple years ago there's no way he was getting cut he was the best pitcher

on the team or the second best pitcher on the team depending on when they traded for granky i can't remember but either way it's just not i mean i can understand not getting terribly angry about it right like i i don't expect people to feel bad for? Like, I don't expect people to feel bad for Ponceau, and I don't expect people to feel bad for Nagel, but this is just, I think the owners, and I think the history would bear this out, have really tried to kill the guaranteed contract whenever they can, and at any kind of opening like this,

it may seem like it's just about you know sydney ponstone and the duis i i'm never quite convinced that's all it's about uh and yet uh despite having a meddlesome owner uh the orioles have have been somewhat successful over the last few years, which I guess makes me wonder how much damage a meddlesome owner can do. And maybe it depends on the meddlesome owner. Maybe there are owners who meddle in ways that don't really hurt the team so much. Maybe it just depends on how bad the owner's instincts are.

But perhaps we should be crediting Dan Duquette with an even better job over the last few years of making the Orioles competitive in that he has had to deal with these conditions that seemingly no other GM candidates at the time that he was hired wanted to work under. Yeah, maybe. I'm tempted to say that, you know, it was Andy McPhail that built the farm system that produced guys like Manny Machado. He made the trades for Adam Jones and Chris Davis. I think when you go back and drafted Matt Wieters, I believe. I think when you go back and you look at most of the impact players on the Orioles teams

over the last two years, I don't, I don't think you can really say they were Dukat's guys. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote something similar in the, in the annual this year, but I, the, I guess the greatest sin for an owner is probably not spending. An owner can get away with a lot of things with a fan base if he's willing to put money into the payroll, which at times Angelos has been willing to do that, but hasn't been lately and doesn't seem to be now at a time when you can at least make the case that the Orioles

need to spend. And they've been connected to some free agents lately, some pitchers. But for the most part, it's been quiet. And maybe in part, that's why there's sort of renewed attention on what Angelos is actually doing, because he is kind of violating the cardinal rule of ownership, at least as far as fans are concerned, which is not pouring money back into the team. Yeah, I mean, I would not be happy to be an Orioles fan. They had some pretty great history from about the mid-60s through the mid-90s into the late 90s with Cal Ripken, and they haven't done anything over the last 15 years except for

the 2012 run. And I really think that a franchise in that market with that history, with that fan base, I think it's definitely reasonable to ask for more. Well, we wish the best of luck to any free agents who may sign with the Orioles and undergo physicals with them. Thanks for coming on and summarizing the situation for us, Jack. You can find Jack Moore's work at Sports on Earth and the Score and the Classical and also in the Baseball Prospectus Annual this year.

He wrote for a few chapters and on Twitter at jh underscore Moore. So thanks for coming on, Jack. Thanks for having me, Ben. And we will be back tomorrow with the email show, so please send us some emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Ben started to sort of like breathe heavily or something, and you said, I'm sorry, were you going to say something? And Ben said no.

I thought that was the entire podcast of the last 374 episodes in a microcosm. Well, good, good. I'm glad I can be representative. Yeah, good work. You caught on quickly. Thanks.