More info on the repercussions of the settlement for the MLB.tv lawsuit:
The Padres have signed Hideo Nomo as an assistant of baseball operations.
MLB.com is reporting that Jenrry Mejia (RP for the Mets) had tested positive for drugs again. As his third failed test, he has been banned for LIFE.
Has that ever happened to a player before?
ETA: specifically for drug use, I mean.
ETA2: read the article – it’s a first.
OK, this guy’s story is kind of ridiculous:
[ul]
[li]He goes on the DL[/li][li]He tests positive for PEDs while on the DL and gets an 80-game suspension[/li][li]He tests positive for PEDs while on the 80-game suspension and gets a 162-game suspension[/li][li]He tests positive for PEDs while on the 162-game suspension and gets a lifetime ban[/li][/ul]
Are any of those drugs addicting?
No. They’re steroids. Not addictive.
Note that these three positive drug tests came in less than a year. At this time last year, he was the team’s prospective closer.
He can apply for reinstatement in two years.
From the ESPN.com news story, http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/14768114/jenrry-mejia-new-york-mets-suspended-permanently-mlb-third-positive-ped-test
I’ve gotta say, I don’t care if it is only a WBC qualifier: I am happy as hell to be watching baseball on TV right now.
Pitchers and catchers report. All is well with the world.
The Marlins ban facial hair. Yet another year of missed expectations and stupid decisions.
No doubt inspired by new manager Don Mattingly’s sideburns experience.
Dodgers finalized their deal with another Yaisel from Cuba. Now Yasiel #1 has someone to talk to.
Any bets on the over/under on how many news articles swap the spellings? 
Not really “hot stove,” but off-season baseball news.
The Yankees are apparently giving their fans two middle fingers by eliminating secondary market print-at-home tickets. This move, according to a whole bunch of news stories that i’ve been reading about the issue, makes it much harder for people to use StubHub.
Secondary market tickets must now be in electronic form, and it seems that a PDF displayed on your smartphone (which you could do with StubHub) is not sufficient. You need to have an electronic ticket that has been sent to your phone from the Yankees, or from Ticketmaster.
The Yankees have claimed that this is about eliminating fraud in the secondary ticket market, but just about everyone seems to agree that it’s about screwing StubHub and pushing up the price of tickets on the secondary market. StubHub allows sellers to set whatever price they want for tickets, but Ticketmaster and the Yankees set a price floor, and won’t allow tickets to be sold below that level. The NY State Attorney General has recently said that he’s going to look into this practice as a restraint of trade.
The Yankees’ COO says that one reason for the change is to increase fairness for season ticket holders, who might get miffed at the idea that the seat next to theirs has been sold cheap on the secondary market:
I can sort of see where he’s coming from here, but this works both ways.
What about for high-demand games, like when the Red Sox come to town, and the season ticket holder gets to watch the game at regular prices, while the StubHub purchaser sitting next to him might have paid 20 or 50 or 100 bucks over sticker price for the ticket?
And all of this ignores the fact that, if prices for secondary market tickets are low, it’s because demand for seats is also relatively low. If the Yankees start winning again like they did in the late '90s and early 2000’s, i’ll bet that really cheap seats on StubHub will become far less common.
I think that the COO must have also pulled on his Marie Antoinette wig for this one:
LOL.
“OMG, i just don’t know HOW to watch a baseball game from these faaaaaaabulous seats! Someone help me, so i don’t embarrass myself!”
Edit: forgot the links.
http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/yankees/stubhub-yankees-lonn-trost-differ-on-team-s-new-ticketing-policy-1.11485934
I have purchased nice seats at lower prices a number of times through StubHub and its ilk, and I can guarantee you I would have skipped out on many of them if I couldn’t get them at a significantly reduced cost.
I suspect a lot of these supposedly-miffed season ticket holders are going to be a lot more miffed if they can’t unload the tickets they can’t use because they’re required to re-sell them at some minimum price. And as someone who has held partial season tickets for several years running, it’s very silly to me to think that I’m going to be upset that the guy sitting next to me at a game got a good deal. Because I know that I didn’t feel too badly at the sold-out games I attended where people paid significantly higher than I did for my seat.
This just sounds like utter BS to me.
I got one thing wrong in my previous post:
Secondary market tickets do not HAVE to be in electronic form. You can use StubHub IF the original buyer can physically transfer the original tickets to the new buyer.
The problem with this, as some of the stories point out, is that a lot of secondary market ticket purchases are made in the last day or two before a game, which would make it much more inconvenient to organize a physical transfer of a hard-copy ticket.
The last-minute nature of the secondary market makes the StubHub option of print-at-home or show-on-your-smartphone PDF tickets perfect.
And we all remember what a distraction that became.
ESPN is reporting that a 3-team trade is being discussed:
Toronto would send Michael Saunders to Anaheim, who would send a 2nd tier prospect to Cincinnati. The Blue Jays would also send a 2nd tier prospect to Cincinnati, and the Reds would ship Jay Bruce to Toronto.
As of the time that I post this, it seems like they’re waiting to get a clean physical on Saunders before the deal is completed.
That’s an awful deal for Toronto. Home runs aside, Bruce can’t hit for shit anymore. He’s been a negative WAR player the last two years. Oh, and he costs like $10 million more. I’d much prefer a platoon of Saunders and Pompey.
I’m seeing a report on TSN that the deal is off because a player (probably Saunders) failed his medical. That’s not exactly an ideal outcome, but it may be better than a useless player in LF.
If this is a reference to unwashed poorly dressed fans winding up in a “premium location” and embarrassing the suit-and-tie clad Yankee fans sipping their pinot noir, I can’t stop laughing.
Yankees management is just a bunch of cheap bastids. Same as ever.
My full expectation is that Saunders will be useless anyway, so it’s really only a matter of how long it’ll take them to figure that out and live with Pompey’s growing pains. There are no other real major league options.
The trade failing is excellent news simply in that it saves Toronto a pile of money. I cannot for the life of me understand why the team that wants to play it safe and go semi-cheap on everything would want Jay Bruce, who has been an absolute tire fire of a ballplayer these last two years and will make eight figures.