While negotiations between Major League Baseball and the MLBPA are running in place, they're still running. There were some discussions today. There will be more tomorrow. Because it's difficult to know just how seriously the league is taking this, it feels a little pointless to itemize the day's details. They're here if you want 'em.
If you want baseball, the White Sox had some to offer by opening remote access to their minor league minicamp at Camelback Ranch. As discussed in our Charlotte Knights rosterbation, members of the 40-man roster are prohibited from participating regardless of their likely season-opening assignments, but that still leaves 60 players to get a start on their seasons.
Chris Getz provided an overview of the organization to reporters, and mentioned one potential benefit of the lockout up top: more hands on deck to work with the younger players. As long as it's not echoing replacement-player pressures of work stoppages past, perhaps an overlooked prospect has an opportunity to make an impression that wouldn't be available in a normal camp.
In other news:
*Norge Vera and Jared Kelley should be expected to throw 70-85 innings, or the kind of workloads that Matthew Thompson and Andrew Dalquist accrued in 2021.
*Oscar Colás is expected to arrive in Arizona next week, after which Getz just wants him to get acclimated to the system.
*Getz maintained the White Sox's firm stance in mandating the COVID-19 booster.
“We’ve been very consistent on this,” Getz added. “We made a decision as an organization that this was something that we felt was best for the organization [and] for the health and safety of our staff and our players. And also just to be productive and not have distractions and miss time and based on certainly the restrictions that are in place, just to be able to go out there and focus on playing baseball.”
James Fegan said that not every prospect supports the mandate, whether for logistical reasons (short notice) or personal stances, and there's one known retirement connected to it (low-A first baseman A.J. Gill). Still, the White Sox's minicamp attendance is what you want to see, with every healthy top prospect accounted for, and there'll be a better sense of any holdouts once the full minor league camp opens in earnest on March 7.
If you missed our Prospect Week coverage, you can catch up with the posts below...
... as well as our podcasts with Jim Callis and Keith Law.
Spare Parts
The original plan for the split season of 1981 put the first-half and second-half winners into the postseason, and if that team happened to be the same team, then the team with the second-best overall record would get the nod. That created the possibility that, under very specific circumstances, a team could only make the postseason by throwing games. Tony La Russa spotted that flaw, and it was one of the earlier signs of his acumen for working the system.
Manager La Russa, just 36 years old and in his third season as the White Sox manager, was on board with the concept of throwing games. In an interview with Chicago Tribune writer Robert Markus in the August 14 issue, he said he’d tell his players to lose on purpose, even though “to play a series where you don’t play to win would go against everything in my brain and body.”
La Russa acknowledged that the scenario he proposed was against baseball’s rules. “However, I believe our club and our fans have earned a certain amount of selfishness,” he said. “It’s clear to me that nobody is going to take care of us except ourselves. The league and the commissioner have not proven to me that they are concerned with the White Sox franchise to any great extent."
James Fegan asks around about the automated ball and strike system coming to Triple-A, and while it sounds like they're putting it in Triple-A to provide minor leagues a transition to its eventual usage in the big leagues, it still seems like catchers are going to be caught in between, with no feedback for their technique. It should surprise nobody that Tyler Flowers likes that framing is a major component for a catcher's contributions, as that's how he derived most of his value.
Jared Diamond explores why the idea to use Wins Above Replacement to reward players is so unpopular among those who run the sites that produce the stat. It should provide validation for a concept that's faced serious headwinds from traditionalists, but part of the reason traditionalists object is because the formulation continues to evolve. The sabermetricians would rather not have somebody underrewarded because they hadn't yet figured out how to account for a new development -- improvement in defensive metrics, increased reliance on relievers, more shifting, emphasis on versatility, etc.
Mike Petriello, who got his start at a blog called Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness, uses the 30th anniversary of "Homer at the Bat" to wonder how many games the various permutations of Springfield's softball team would win. Despite the head start, it takes a bench full of average, Kirk McCaskill and Joe Orsulak types to actually make them the force that Mr. Burns envisioned.
Speaking of longtime blogosphere fixtures, Mike Oz was one. He was known for his video series in which he opened baseball card packs with various MLB luminaries for Big League Stew. Yahoo Sports ended up laying him off at the start of 2021, and a month after that, his sister was killed in a hit-and-run accident, but he found his way out of grief by throwing himself into an entirely separate community.
This is a great story about what a curling club in Canada's Northwest Territories does for the mental health of its members. While Albany didn't match Inuvik in terms of desolation or extreme temperatures, having curling from October through March certainly made the long winters shorter.
