Need to know what's going on around the baseball world? I've got you covered with the latest news from this week and the developments around the game. MAC gets rid of postseason baseballIn the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been plenty of questions about how college sports will come out of this. They're sure to be hit hard, especially if the college football season is canceled. The Mid-American Conference is getting ahead of the possible economic affects, although in a controversial way. Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher told WTOL on Wednesday that the MAC would do away with postseason tournaments for eight sports, including baseball. "The pandemic and resulting financial issues play into that," Steinbrecher told WTOL. "As the financial situation changes, it will give us a chance to re-evaluate." Teams in the MAC will no longer play a tournament to determine the conference champion. Instead, the team with the best record at the end of the season will be the champion and receive the conference's automatic bids to NCAA tournaments. We could see many more moves like this over the coming weeks as COVID-19 continues to affect sports, but only time will tell what other changes we will see. Players criticize MLB's return planMLB owners voted on a plan to get the 2020 season under way and have begun negotiations with the Players Association. Those negotiations might be difficult though, as two prominent players have criticized the plan. Nationals reliever Sean Doolittle expressed his concerns in a Twitter thread, outlining the safety concerns that are still prevalent with the coronavirus. Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer also voiced his opposition, although he was more concerned with the revenue-sharing aspect of the plan. The fact that two players with as much influence as Doolittle and Bauer are speaking out shows that there's a long road ahead to get back to playing baseball. Whatever it takes, both sides should be willing to work it out to get at least part of the 2020 season played. CPL team cancels 2020 seasonThe Florence Redwolves of the Coastal Plain League have announced that they will not be able to play their 2020 season. The CPL made the announcement in a tweet on Wednesday. "The Redwolves were concerned because the high incidence of COVID-19 cases in their local area would make protecting their players and fans difficult and felt that playing at the field at Francis Marion University would be inappropriate since the university has announced that it will be closed for the summer term," the league said. The Redwolves play their home games in Florence, S.C. The Coastal Plain League is still planning on playing its 2020 season, beginning with a July 1 Opening Day. CPBL allows more fans at gamesThe Chinese Professional Baseball League became the first league in the world to allow fans at games last week. Starting on May 8, the league allowed 1,000 fans at each game.
Now they're prepared to increase that to 2,000 fans per game, according to a statement from the league this morning. The increase will begin with tomorrow's games, and stadiums will also start selling food during the games.
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I admittedly haven't watched as much KBO baseball as I should be. In the absence of Major League Baseball, the KBO has filled a void for a lot of people. Discussions about the league make up probably half of my Twitter feed at the moment as more and more people tune in to foreign baseball to get their fix.
But recently I've seen a few tweets regarding the possibility of juiced balls in the KBO.
We of course saw a similar controversy in MLB last year, with a new record for most total home runs in a season.
The possibility of juiced balls presents a couple of issues. It makes it harder to judge a player's success if there are variations in the ball from year to year. It also affects pitchers who wouldn't be giving up as many home runs as they are with the juiced baseballs. Of course, if the baseballs have changed league-wide, it's not as much of a problem as issues like steroids and PEDs. Everyone in the league is still on a level playing field, even if there is more offense than there would usually be. For now this is just speculation, and with such a small sample size of games played so far, it's hard to know for sure if anything has changed in the baseballs. We'll have to wait until more of the season has played out to see if there's really been a change. It seems like we're getting closer to a 2020 MLB season, but there are still some hurdles in the way. A lot of news came out yesterday, so I'll try to update you on everything you need to know here MLB owners vote on proposal for 2020 seasonMLB owners had a conference call yesterday and approved a proposal for how to play the 2020 season. The details of said proposal have been reported on extensively by multiple outlets, including The Athletic. Basically, teams will play an 82-game season, playing at their home stadiums. They will play teams in their division as well as teams in the same division in the other league. For example, the Braves, an NL East team, will play other NL East teams as well as teams from the AL East. Due to this, there could also be a universal DH. The season will begin in early July and the postseason will be expanded to 14 teams instead of 10. But, there's likely to be a pay disputeWe might not get to the point where the owners and the players union can agree on anything due to a looming pay dispute. The owners want to implement a revenue-sharing agreement that would give players 50% of the season's revenue. Players are upset because there was already an agreement in place. Owners are arguing that the loss of ticket sales will hurt revenue drastically. Players fire back that TV deals should bring in enough revenue. It's an ugly battle and it could get worse. This could ultimately be the issues which prevents us from having a 2020 season, even after its deemed safe to do so. NL teams need to find DHs, fastThe implementation of a universal DH will come as a shock to NL teams who weren't expecting that development this soon. For teams that weren't prepared for needing a DH, it puts them at a competitive disadvantage. There are very few players still on the market, and any player on an NL team's roster is there at least partially for their defensive abilities. It will be interesting to see how this one shakes out. 2021 World Baseball Classic canceledESPN's Enrique Rojas reported yesterday that the 2021 World Baseball Classic would be canceled. News came out later in the afternoon that the event would be moved to 2023.
Regardless, it's a loss for the baseball community. Without baseball in the Olympics in the past decade, the WBC has filled in as the sport's main international competition, and it has provided some great moments, notably when the U.S. won for the first time in 2017. We'll miss the WBC next year, but hopefully by that time we'll at least have a normal MLB season to look forward to. Multiple sources, including The Athletic, have been reporting on a pay dispute looming between MLB owners and the MLB Players Association. The dispute stems from the fact that the two sides reached a pay agreement in March, but the owners now indicate that they want to change the details of that agreement.
The owners and the union agreed in March on multiple terms regarding payers' play, among them was the fact that players would be paid on a pro-rated basis if any part of the 2020 season is played. Now, USA Today's Bob Nightengale reports that the owners are going to vote today on a revenue-sharing proposal that would allocate 48% of revenue to the players union. Understandably, the players probably won't be too fond of this idea since they already had an agreement in place. Owners are arguing that if games are played without fans in attendance, they will losing too much money to pay players their pro-rated salaries. It's been pointed out though that teams make money other ways than just ticket sales. TV deals make up a big portion of the revenue that owners bring in, plus many teams own new real estate developments around their ballparks, bringing in additional revenue. Owners do not make all of their books public, making it near impossible for the union to know just how much money teams are bringing in and how much should be paid to the players. Add to all of this that NBC Sports reports that a "war" is coming in this pay dispute, and the 2020 season seems to be in a bad place. Even if the league can come to a decision about when and where to play the season, a pay dispute could derail all of those plans very quickly.
Happy Mother's Day! I hope all of you are able to spend some time with your family and celebrate your mothers on this day.
Mother's Day is one of many days that MLB celebrates on the field each year. Teams wear pink apparel, players use pink bats and gloves, and there are celebrations all across the league every year. Last year, the San Diego Padres decided to celebrate by changing up their Twitter handle. In the spirit of Mother's Day, the Padres changed their username on the social media site to @Madres. Being a large, verified account, the Padres worked out a deal with Twitter that allowed them to change to their new handle while keeping their usual handle secure. Somehow, though, their username slipped through the cracks and someone got a hold of it, changing their own username to @Padres.
This naturally led to some confusion and multiple fans thinking they were tweeting at the Padres while actually sending messages to Ricky Padilla.
Padilla not only got a great story and plenty of attention out of the Twitter mix-up, he ended up getting tickets to a game.
So now you know, all you need to do to get free tickets is wait for a team to change their Twitter handle, and steal it. Who knew?
The Athletic posed a question on social media on Wednesday that has stuck with me for a while now. They made a simple post, asking their followers "If your team could have one do-over in franchise history, what would it be?" I've been pondering that question for a while now trying to come up with an answer. I could look at it from the perspective of a Virginia Tech fan, in which it would obviously be winning the 1999 National Championship over Florida State. But seeing as this is a baseball blog, I'll try to answer it from a Braves fan's viewpoint. There are some obvious ones that come to mind: the 2012 Wild Card game in which the infield fly rule was called on a ball that was very clearly not an infield fly. Yeah, that game still haunts a lot of Braves fans. Of course, I could also go with last year's postseason in which the Braves gave up 10 runs in the first inning of Game 5 of the NLDS, all but sealing the series defeat with eight innings still to play. But to answer this question, I'm going to go with an event that happened before I was even born - the 1991 World Series. I've written about this series before, because it was a wild seven games. Three of the games went into extra innings and five games were decided by just one run, making it an exciting series I'm sure. The Braves were the team of the 90s, winning a division title every year except for 1990 and 1994 (which was shortened due to a strike, so it doesn't really count). They won five National League pennants during the decade as well. Despite all that winning, the team only captured one World Series championship. That's right. The Braves appeared in five World Series in the span of 10 years, but managed to only win one. That's almost on par with the Buffalo Bills for choking when it matters. Out of the four World Series losses which I could choose to do over, I'm going with 1991 because of how close it was. The Twins won the series four games to three, and as I said, five of the games were decided by one run. The Braves very easily could have won it at any time. Of the other World Series losses they suffered during the 90s, one was a four-game sweep and the other were 4-2 defeats. The 1991 series was the only one in which the Braves were really competitive. The series started out with back-to-back Twins victories in Minnesota. The Twins won game one 5-2, but game two was close with a final score of 3-2. If the Braves had just played a little better in that game, they could have taken the series back to Atlanta tied at one game apiece. But they came home down two games to none. Their luck changed over the next three games, though, as they won each of them and took a 3-2 series lead back to Minneapolis . Just one more win and they would be World Series champions! That one win proved very difficult to achieve. Game six went into extra innings tied 3-3. The Braves went three up, three down in the top of the 10th, but they got their leadoff an aboard in the 11th. Keith Mitchell was sent out to pinch run for Sid Bream, led off the inning with a single. The momentum didn't carry over, though, as Mitchell was caught stealing for the first out before Brian Hunter and Greg Olson each hit pop flies to end the inning. The Twins scored on a home run by Kirby Puckett in the bottom of the 11th to send the series to game seven. The series' final game proved just as tight, going into extra innings tied 0-0. Once again, the Braves couldn't get anything going in the 10th, with Jack Morris retiring the batters in order. Gene Larkin got to play the hero for the Twins in the bottom of the 10th, hitting a walk-off single that scored Dan Gladden and gave the Twins the series victory. If the Braves had just scored one run in the first nine innings of the game, they would have won the game and been World Series champions. Instead their offense stalled, and they had to settle for runners-up for the first of four times that decade. For a team that has as much history and has been around as long as the Braves have, they should have more to show for it. Three championships since the World Series started being played in 1903 is not very impressive. If the Braves had managed to win the 1991 World Series, it could have set the tone for the rest of the decade. They could have dominated even more than they did. Those five pennants might have resulted in more than one championship. But we can only wonder what would have been had the offense decided to show up in those final two games.
Basketball fans have had a lot to look forward to recently even without live sports happening. ESPN's highly-anticipated Michael Jordan documentary - "The Last Dance" - was released two months early due to the lack of sports in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The documentary has lit up the basketball world, setting ratings records for ESPN and becoming the main topic of conversation among basketball fans on Twitter. As someone who is not much of a basketball fan, I haven't been tuning in, but in seeing all of the talk, I can't help but be a little jealous and wish that there was something like this for baseball. Well, us baseball fans are getting something from ESPN this summer. The network announced recently that it will debut a documentary on Jun 14 detailing the 1998 home run chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. The 30 for 30 presentation will be one of three films to premier in the weeks following the final episodes of "The Last Dance." "Just as ESPN Films moved “The Last Dance” earlier to fill the void that live sports left, ESPN Films’ Peabody and Academy Award-winning 30 for 30 series is premiering three new documentaries, two of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, that will air on Sundays in May and June," ESPN announced in a statement. "Following the airing of final episodes of the record-breaking documentary series “The Last Dance,” ESPN will air 30 for 30s “LANCE,” “Be Water,” and “Long Gone Summer,” which was an official selection to the Tribeca Film Festival. The films will be made available on ESPN+ immediately after their respective premieres, along with the rest of the 30 for 30 library." The film boasts in-depth interviews with both McGwire and Sosa, and ESPN says it will take viewers "through every twist and turn of the sluggers' historic chase of Roger Maris's iconic record of 61 home runs in a single season." This documentary sounds like it's going to be very entertaining, providing insight into what the 1998 season was like for both players and what it means all these years later. But that's not all we'll get. ESPN also recently announced that an E:60 feature will be premiering on May 29 telling the story of late Hall of Fame pitcher Roy Halladay. E:60 released the trailer for the film on Twitter, and it looks like it will be quite the ride.
Halladay, who threw a perfect game on May 29, 2010, died in a plane crash in 2017. The film features interviews with his wife and seems as if it will detail his personal struggle that few knew about during his lifetime.
"Imperfect: The Roy Halladay Story" is sure to be an emotional watch, but it will no doubt be a production that every baseball fan should tune in to. While we will have to wait a little longer for live baseball to come back, each of these documentaries should provide plenty of entertainment and hold us over for the time being. Now, if we were to ever get a "The Last Dance"-style documentary on a baseball team, who would be in it? Sports Illustrated seems to think the Core Four Yankees would be the right choice. What do you think? The 2020 MLB draft will be just five rounds and will begin on June 10, according to a report from The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich.
Rumors have been swirling ever since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the sports world, but it seems as if sources have confirmed to Rosenthal and Drellich that the MLB draft will indeed be limited to just five rounds, which will be the shortest in the league's history. The MLB draft usually takes 40 rounds to complete. Once the draft is over, teams are free to sign undrafted players with a maximum signing bonus of $20,000. The Athletic reports that the league made a proposal to the MLB Players Association which would include a 10-round draft, but that proposal "came with trade-offs the Players Association determined were too restrictive," according to Rosenthal and Drellich. The shortened draft comes as a cost-savings measure for the league, although its sure to get some backlash from fans and players alike. As pointed out on Twitter by The Athletic's Jayson Stark, more than 1,000 players who would have been drafted in a normal year will not get that chance this season. Of course, as mentioned, teams can sign players after the draft, but those signing bonuses will be limited to $20,000. Signing bonuses in rounds 6-10 usually range anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000.
Yesterday I wrote a post about Eleven Sports discontinuing live broadcasts of the Chinese Professional Baseball League in the United States. English-speaking baseball fans had grown accustomed to the free live streams, but were now being asked to pay $2.49 per game to watch them on a service called LIVENow.
Many fans complained about the newly-implemented paywall, and Eleven Sports did something that corporations rarely do - they listened. The sports broadcasting organization announced this morning on Twitter that they would continue streaming the games in the United States for free on LIVENow.
"Dear US baseball fans," the statement from Eleven Sports reads. "We hear you loud and clear. We appreciate that this is a special time for everyone and so we've asked our partners at LIVENow to deliver you LIVE coverage of our upcoming CPBL games for FREE."
Eleven Sports will continue to broadcast CPBL games for free to the rest of the world, but for those of us here in the United States who have started following Taiwanese baseball, LIVENow will be our platform going forward. This development is great for everyone, as fans were threatening to stop watching when the paywall was put into place. Now fans can continue to watch the CPBL and the league will still get exposure all across the world. One of the great things about Minor League Baseball is the promotional events that go along with it. The teams know that they have to get creative in convincing fans to come to games, and one the fans are in, they have to keep them entertained the whole night. I've been to some pretty interesting and unique promotional nights, and there are others that I wish I had witnessed in person. But we'll start with the ones I was actually in the stands for. Tennessee Smokies 50 cent Hot DogsI went to visit some friends in Knoxville during the summer of 2018. One day while we were there, we went hiking in the Smoky Mountains, and managed to work up quite an appetite. Hungry, tired and sweaty, we decided to go to a Tennessee Smokies game before heading home. Luckily for us, that night's game just so happened to feature 50 cent hot dogs. I don't recall exactly how many I ate (see picture above), but it was far more than I would have eaten had they been regular price, which is the sign of a successful promotion. Pulaski Yankees Agriculture NightIt might not seem uncommon for a team in Southwest Virginia to have an agriculture night, but what set the Pulaski Yankees apart on the evening of Aug. 22, 2018 was the raffling off of a live cow. I attended this game with some friends of mine from Virginia Tech. We drove 40 minutes down to Pulaski on that Wednesday night for our chance to win a cow, and to see the Yankees play the Princeton Rays. Fans could buy $10 raffle tickets which gave them the chance to win a live cow. The winner could then choose to receive the cow alive, or after processing. We didn't know what we would do had we won; we didn't have a pasture near our apartment and we certainly didn't have enough space in our freezer, but alas, we didn't have to worry about that because our ticket was not the winner. Tennessee Smokies Free Beer NightI've seen the Smokies advertise this promotion for a few seasons now, but I have yet to make it to one of these games. Here's how it works: buy a promotional Smokies mason jar and you can get it filled with beer - for free- from first pitch until the opposing team scores their first run. The Smokies ran this promotion twice in 2019. In both games, the opposing team scored their first run in the top of the second inning, giving fans just one inning to get their free beer. I hope they were quick enough. Gwinnett Stripers Beat the FridgeAnother promotion that I haven't seen in person, but is entertaining nonetheless. The Stripers' parent club, the Atlanta Braves, have a contest each game in which a fan races against The Freeze. The Stripers decided to put their own spin on it, having fans race against The Fridge, a large, slow man dressed in a silver suit. The Fridge gets a large head start, but he's pretty slow, so it seems as if the fans will have no problem overtaking him. I won't give any spoilers, watch for yourself: Honorable Mention: 4th of July FireworksPretty much every MiLB team does this, but you can't beat it. Baseball, America's birthday and explosives - what more do you need on a summer night?
Have you seen any promotions more exciting than these? Let us know in the comments below! |
AuthorMatthew Atkins, Journalist and Baseball fan. Archives
March 2023
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