Baseballhead:
Hail to the Chief

Michael Cox

Oh, geez! Don't sneak up on me like that. Now I've got coffee up my nose. I guess you must be here for Baseballhead, where we could give a crap whether Chandler and Monica get married or not, because Johnny Lydon has his own show. We're now taking bets on which episode he'll walk out, calling the production crew "wankers."

Anyway, this past week marks a new era in Major League Baseball, and not just because the owners moved one step closer to amalgamating the AL and NL into one big league, featuring 50 Mets-Yankees contests per season. No, we're talking about an era of unprecedented powers for the Commissioner of Baseball, and coincidentally, it just happens to coincide with the first commissioner who's also an owner. Go figure.

King Bud now has several new abilities, just as the post-spider-bite Peter Parker could suddenly climb walls, lift ten times his own weight and fear that girlfriends will eat him after sex. Let's look at the ramifications:

The ability to mandate enhanced revenue sharing. Sure, that's easy to say now, but we'll see what happens when Uncle Bud tries to pry those C-notes (that's hundred-dollar bills, for our international readers) from Peter Angelos' wallet. No, the mega-media-market boys won't let their windfall profits blow away to Minneapolis or Montreal unless there are plenty of loopholes to enable their rich clubs to stay rich.

The easiest idea would be to put all of the visitors' shares of local TV income into a pot, and dole it out to the welfare recipients. It would be the easiest money to get at, because if the Yanks or Dodgers were to oppose such a move, the other clubs could simply lock the visitors' broadcast booths until the big boys capitulated. In fact, the smaller clubs were considering just that a few years ago as a way to force revenue sharing.

You can bet, however, that the Steinbrenners and Murdochs out there are going to demand that their grounds crew can wear giant holographic Gap logos and Pets.com sock puppets.

And although much has made of the supposed "competitive balance" in the NFL and NBA due to revenue sharing, remember two things: 1) Owners have sabotaged revenue sharing in both leagues, and 2) Nobody cares about the NBA now that Jordan's gone.

The ability to block trades. If, say, the Padres try to jump-start their stalled ballpark plans by sending Trevor Hoffman and Tony Gwynn to Baltimore for Mike Bordick and a couple of buckets of balls, Bud can put a hand in the air and like magic... er, the O's will be forced to throw in Al Reyes.

This could ultimately do more harm than good, as even teams who have undergone "salary dumps," like the Padres and Marlins, have picked up enough young talent to really potentially do well in the future. In nixing a deal simply because one side is giving up a major star, Selig could actually be harming that team. In fact, the teams that have harmed themselves the worst by dumping players have been those who waited until they had to deal them, or lose them to free agency (see: Montreal, Minnesota).

And besides, the current Basic Agreement has a built-in deterrent against dumping a player in the middle of a long-term deal: that player can opt for free agency at the end of the season, if he chooses.

I just don't see this being a good power to put in Bud Selig's hands.

The right to fine teams up to two meeeeelion dollars. Okay -- where this one is concerned, it's about time. A few hundred grand weren't about to faze the Tribune Co. or Peter "Who Wants to be a Tobacco Litigation Millionaire" Angelos. Note the relative lack of battle that the Dodgers put up over the Adrian Beltre fiasco. Of course, Beltre himself is worth millions to them, so him they fought for.

The right to control teams' Internet presence. So, you mean Bud Selig and his gang can do with team websites exactly what they did with majorleaguebaseball.com?

Oh, goody.

There's not an example of a greater lack of foresight, or greater ineptitude, than MLB's own website, especially when compared to the sites of its component teams. First, nobody at MLB, Inc. seemed to think this Internet thing was going to fly five or six years ago, so they didn't bother to try and grab mlb.com or baseball.com, or at least buy them from their owners while they were still cheap. Now they have an unwieldy 23-character URL (27 if you count "www.").

Then, the "Official Site of Major League Baseball" was an unnavigable mess, with player stats that didn't include much more than batting averages and ERAs and articles that were older than my dirty laundry. Recently they gave up altogether and "partnered" with Sportsline (meaning: if you replace "majorleaguebaseball.com" with "sportsline.com" in most pages' URLs, the new page is exactly the same). And for what it's worth, it's still an unnavigable mess.

At least the NBA's cookie-cutter team sites had an ambitious plan (not to mention Disney's Go.com) behind them, even if that plan suffered greatly in its execution. MLB has never been sure just what it needs a website for.

Now Selig wants to work this same magic with the Astros', Mariners' and Yankees' heretofore-successful homesteads.

Actually, it's more likely he wants to control the money those sites bring in, somehow thinking that the Phillies must need some profit-sharing cash so they can afford to have David Bowie design their site, too. Soon, small-market teams will be demanding taxpayer-funded T3 backbone connections so they can compete.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Item: Hideo Nomo signs a one-year, $1.25M deal with the Tigers, not six months after turning down a three-year, $9M contract in Milwaukee. Now, given the choice I wouldn't play in Milwaukee either, but even at the time it was about as sweet a deal as Nomo could have expected.

However, Nomo has shown a pattern of either stubborn, ego-driven choices or bad, bad advice. The Cubs, who have been known to be quite liberal with the ol' pocketbook, wanted Nomo to make a couple more starts in Iowa City before calling him up, but the Tornado said no. Then the Brewers took a chance, trotted him out there every fifth day (not that they had many other options), saw him improve and offered a decent multi-year deal, and he instructed them to deal with his interpreter, Mr. Hand.

At the very least Nomo will be paired again with manager Phil Garner, who was running the show in Milwaukee and whom Nomo seems to feel comfortable with. It may be that Nomo rejected the Brewer deal after he saw the writing on the wall for Garner, but I think that would credit Nomo with foresight he hadn't shown previously.

Unfortunately, after switching leagues he still can't compare career tips with Montreal's Hideki "There Are No Pitching Terms That Rhyme With 'Round Mound'" Irabu.

about the author

Michael Cox was once known as the "Round Mound in a Pink Gown," but that was a long time ago, and everybody makes mistakes, OK? Try not to ask about the time he shaved "Joe Carter #1" in his head at mc@strikethree.com.