June 9th and the rebuiding Yankees are 3 games up in the AL East at .596. I’ll take it. Tanaka has generally sucked but the rest are playing better than expected though the bar was set too low on Severino & CC in general. But they’re playing better than I expected. Gardner & Hicks who I had little faith in are both on fire. The Yanks are doing really well with Headley being terrible (his throwing errors are as bad as Tanaka’s pitching and he has hardly hit most April.) and Carter generally being a dead spot in the line up.
Judge is better than hoped for and I hoped for a lot with this kid. The power is what I thought he could do but the average and OBP are so much better.
Looking forward to a DL & rehab stint for Tanaka and Chance Adams coming up in a few weeks to help the rotation. In the meantime Green or Cessa can fill in.
Hey question for the baseball sages of the SDMB: **When is the deadline for not starting the clock on prospects? **I think it is June 15th but I’m not sure.
The bullpen has been great and Chapman is close to returning now.
Greg Bird is in AAA now finishing his rehab. He’ll hopefully be back next week. Then Carter can be waived.
Bird hasn’t shown he can play at the major league level and stay healthy. He had a great spring training, but I think it would be foolish to unload Carter if and when Bird comes back.
Ellsbury’s best days are far behind him. He has no resale value.
This will be an interesting decision because as has been pointed out, there’s no evidence Greg Bird can play in the major leagues and not hurt himself. And he’s 6 for 60, which does not fill me with a great deal of confidence. Bird was last a good player for a short stint in 2015.
I was talking about service time clock. I thought their was a date where you effectively don’t start the clock.
Carter is terrible but no cost, if Bird really doesn’t work there are many options to replace him. In the time I’ve seen him though he is at least a good fielder and he should be able to hit as well as Carter, with the potential to hit far better.
Service time is based on the actual number of calendar days a player is on the 25-man roster (or the expanded post-September 1 roster) from Opening Day to the end of the year. It doesn’t matter what the date is you’re brought up. It also doesn’t matter if you actually play.
A full season of service is 172 service days though in fact a season is usually 183 days long; even if you’re with the team all the year the counter stops at 172.
As to Chris Carter, I’d have to agree that whether or not Greg Bird works out, releasing Carter really doesn’t cost the Yankees anything, just because I’m sure they could find someone at least as good lying around somewhere.
OK, we’re on the right track, I know I’m expressing myself terribly. There is a rule of thumb date, where if you call up a prospect it won’t count as a year of service and you can effectively control him for 7 seasons instead of 6. Or maybe I’m dead wrong, strong possibility.
Yep, this is a big part of what I was thinking of, but it sounds like we’re already well past that date anyway. So as soon as they feel Chance Adams is ready they can pull him up without penalty I guess.
The Bryant situation had nothing to do with a calendar DATE, and simply was the Cubs absolutely delaying Bryant’s service time clock from starting for as long as they possibly could. Service time s service time.
Are you sure about that? My eyes glaze over reading about rosters and service time, but this suggests there was a solid reason for delaying Bryant’s debut to a certain date:
ETA: This was in response to Rickjay. I don’t pretend to understand how the roster moves work, though.
The Yankees have gone completely bonkers lately. On this five game winning streak, they’ve outscored their opponents 55-9. Judge and Sanchez have started bashing at the same time. I don’t know what to think…cautious optimism? It’s pretty much the same roster as last season, turbo-charged. I worry most about the rotation, but as it stands, by ERA:
If Tanaka can get his shit sorted, this team could make a deep playoff run. Or all the over-achievers could regress and the team finishes third. I guess I’ll stop overthinking it and enjoy it while it lasts.
A deep run is a good hope but no sure thing, but I’m pretty sure this is at least a wild card team. The minor league depth is a big part of that. If starters fail or get hurt and Tanaka never returns to form, we still have many live arms in AAA & AA to help out. We have positional depth everywhere but Catcher and Romine is a solid catcher so at least on the Major League level we have good depth. The Bullpen is close to getting better and it is either the best of second best right now.
That was a fun series for the Yanks vs Baltimore. Crushing the #2 rivals is always good, a bonus that it followed beating the #1 rivals. The Yanks took over #1 run differential with the assault on O’s pitching. Judge & Sanchez look red hot. Judge is leading the AL in all Triple Crown stats and runs scored. As good as all of this is though; tonight Tanaka can throw a bucket of cold water on the Yanks.
But this was based on Kris Bryant’s contract status and age. I know the article isn’t especially well written so let me see if I can break it down.
A major league baseball team can employ players in 3 basic groups:
The 25-man roster of active players on the team right now.
The 40-man roster, which includes everyone on the 25-man roster, plus anyone on the 10-day disabled list, plus more players in the minor leagues. Only players who are on the 40-man roster can be included in the 25-man roster to play in the majors.
Everyone else.
As you know, most player employees of an MLB team are everyone else; that number will include most of the AAA team, almost all the AA team, and basically everyone south of AA.
In order to play in the major leagues, Bryant had to be added to the 40-man roster. But adding him to the 40-man roster and calling up would start his accumulating service days. So instead of calling him up in Setember of 2014 or earlier, despite his clearly mbeing the team’s best third baseman, they wanted until April 17, 2015, which juuuuust happened to be 171 days prior to the conclusion of the season, which means that at the end of the 2016 season he would have one day short of 2 years of service time - thus making him ineligible for arbitration for an extire extra year. Had he been called up on April 16, he would have been eligible for arbitration prior to the 2018 season. Now he has to wait until 2019. (The Cubs refuse to admit this is why they did that, in ordet to avoid a grievance, but they didn’t have any other reason.) Had Bryant been called up in 2014 for ten days, the date would have been April 27. It was entirely Bryant-dependent. In his case they’d held off on him entirely, so they could get the full 171 days out of him in 2015, but for another player it might be 160 days, or whatever. This game gets played a lot; Bryant is just the most prominent example, since he immediately because the best third baseman in the National League.
It’s worth briefly talking further about the “Everyone Else” group of players. If you’ve heard of the Rule 5 draft, that basically exists to prevent a team from stockpiling a ridiculous number of talented players in the Everyone Else pile. A player older than 23 (it’s a little more complicated than “older than 23” but that’s close enough) or 4 years beyond the year he was drafted, whichever is later, who isn’t on the 40-man roster can be plucked away in the Rule 5 draft, the kicker being that you have to keep the guy in the major leagues.
One could get into the rules around options and all that too. The thing about the roster rules is they’re designed to do two things:
A lot of the rules are meant to prevent abuse of the other roster rules to stop teams from taking advantage of rules in weird ways. For instance, there are rules about how often and who you can send to the minors and for how long specifically to prevent teams from effectively having 35-man teams. If you put no restrictions in minor league demotions, every team could activate a starting pitcher just for the game he starts, demote the guy for 4 days and call up a relief pitcher or utility player, and then reactivate the starter for his next start, ad infinitum. You’d see how stupid that would get. (You can do this in some baseball simulation games, like Baseball Mogul, to effectively never have a tired player on your team.)
The rules are further meant to ensure parity between teams - the Rule 5 draft being a clear example of this, as well as option rules. These rules mean a player who is truly an MLB calibre player but who’s on a team very deep at that position will not get buried, but will end up on another team’s MLB roster.
The rules are meant to reduce player salaries. The whole point to having to wait for 2-3 years for arbitration, and 6 years for free agency, is to reduce salaries. Mike Trout would probably have an extra $60 million in his bank account by now if he’d been a free agent from the get-go.
Thanks, that was a good explanation. On the one hand, the Cubs should be free to call up a player whenever they want, and on the other, their denials are borderline absurd. A decision on Bryant’s grievance is still pending, but it appears that the Cubs acted within the existing framework. It would be unfair to rule against them, imo.
Something (sort of) similar could have happened with Aroldis Chapman and the Yankees. Had his suspension in 2016 been longer by a certain number of days, the Yankees would have had Chapman under control for another year before free agency.