6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

ESPN/Los Angeles reports that Rodney Fernandez, an employee at Kendry Morales' former representation, Hendricks Sports Management, is accused of swiped $300,000 from Morales' bank account. This leads me to ask: why on earth would he let them do that? It certainly explains why he would switch to Scott Boras, or anybody, really.

Morales is currently the only Angel not at spring training, due to difficulties with immigration paperwork issues.

Labels: angels, scams

Shocking; the ESPN/Dallas story doesn't go into details about this, but I expect he didn't report to spring training and refused to tell the team when he could appear in a Rangers uniform. The Dallas Morning News blog entry doesn't give much more information.

Labels: rangers, transactions

Which is why I pity Dylan Hernandez. Hat tip: Eric Stephen in the comments at MSTI. And yes, this is why I just about never spend any time at the Dodgers' Facebook page.

Labels: blogs, dodgers

Dodger Divorce has an interesting wrinkle in the McCourt divorce saga that other owners may not appreciate much. The McCourts are apparently avoiding income taxes by paying themselves out of loan distributions. There's nothing wrong or illegal about this, but what it does do is reduce the value of the franchise to a potential buyer because all those loans become due at the time of sale (or at least have to be renegotiated), with McCourt's accountant estimating a $113M tax hit at the time of sale. Or maybe I'm reading this wrong, and it's only a problem for the McCourts.

Update: Michael Hilzik proves that the Bill Plaschke disease is not confined to the sports desk. Not only is the Times' business columnist apparently unaware that "not paying taxes in 2010" is not the same as "not paying taxes on anything, ever", he manages this feat despite this being his beat. Must bloggers explain everything to every benighted Times columnist, or is there some limit to the ignorance that parades itself as populism over there? Frank is playing a game of high-stakes poker with the IRS and the next owner of the Dodgers, who will almost certainly have to pay a premium for the team to recover all this salary he's paying himself when it comes due at the time the team's sold.

Labels: dodgers, mccourts

About what you'd figure, with Hideki Matsui, Ervin Santana, and Fernando Rodney all turning red, Juan Rivera and Scott Kazmir yellow lights, and everybody else green. (Interpolate your own values if you think, as a lot of people I know do, that Carroll is a worrywart.) Of special interest are his comments about Rivera:

Scouts tell me that Rivera is Molina-level slow, and that seems to be the biggest effect of losing a couple years due to injury. He didn't have any apparent problems staying healthy in the outfield, but I'm a little curious how the Angels will spell him. Guerrero could play the outfield some and they had planned to play him more before his shoulder injury made that impossible. Reggie Willits is the fourth outfielder, but the flexibility that the Angels were built on in the last decade is gone now.

You noticed that, too? In my mind, it started to evaporate when they decided Chone Figgins needed to be an everyday third baseman; not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with that, but does anyone doubt at this point that he would have been a better option, offensively and defensively, than Gary Matthews, Jr. has proven? The decision to acquire Torii Hunter has certainly paid off, but the post-2006 Angels teams have progressively sacrificed a fair amount of flexibility, both due to a loss of utility players, and increasingly solidified lineups that have proven impermeable to change long after the player has shown himself incapable (coughVladcough), either through age, infirmity, or both.

Labels: angels, injuries

Really? Apparently Chris Antonetti will become the new GM, and current GM Mark Shapiro will be the new team President. Utterly missed me.

Three years ago or thereabouts, Antonetti was the subject of one of those quixotic fan draft attempts by U.S.S. Mariner to get him to replace Bill Bavasi. Bavasi's gone, and now the M's look to have a sharp GM in the persona of Jack Zduriencik.

Labels: front office, indians, mariners

If you've been reading Joshua Fisher's Dodger Divorce with any regularity, you probably already have a good idea of what's going on with the McCourt divorce saga. (I haven't been lately, with the caveat that up until last week, there wasn't a lot going on.) If you want the capsule version, I got an e-mail blast from Lawrence Delvingne at the Business Insider Law Review that provides a useful summary of the proceedings, that, to my knowledge, is both fair and factually accurate. Mainly, it's a slide show, but if you've been nodding off while waiting for the courts to come to life, it's a good place to start.

Labels: dodgers, mccourts

Sigh:

The Dodgers could seek to keep their player payroll below last year's level through 2018 while the average ticket price and club revenue could nearly double, according to confidential financial documents included in a court filing last week.

The documents, submitted by former Dodgers chief executive Jamie McCourt in divorce proceedings against owner Frank McCourt, offer a rare glimpse into the finances of a major league club.

The documents -- prepared by the McCourt management team in May to solicit Chinese investors for a partnership that could have included the Dodgers, a soccer club in Beijing and another in the English Premier League -- show that the Dodgers spent $128 million in player compensation for their 40-man roster in 2007, then spent $123 million in 2008.

They spent $132 million last season, according to figures from the commissioner's office, which included in its accounting deferred payments to Manny Ramirez and Andruw Jones.

The projections show the Dodgers planning to cut it to $107 million this year, with slight annual increases thereafter. In 2018, player compensation is estimated at $125 million.

1. And you thought Fox was bad. At least Fox had people who knew what baseball even was. Did McCourt think this was gonna be like Treasuries, where the owners would just let him run the team as a general partner?
2. Over a long period of time, this is not as bad as it sounds, because of the strong possibility of heightened inflation. A doubling of ticket prices might, in fact, even be conservative.

Joshua Fisher at Dodger Divorce notes that Jamie was spending $800,000 annually, some fraction (most?) of which came from the Dodgers; that's almost as much as Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw combined ($871,000).

Labels: biz, dodgers, mccourts

In yesterday's BPro "On The Beat" column by John Perrotto:

Jim Tracy will go to spring training with a team coming off a post-season berth for the second time in his eight-year managerial career. However, the 2010 Rockies will be a lot different than the 2005 Dodgers.

Former GM Paul DePodesta made major changes to the Dodgers after they won the NL West in 2004. The Dodgers fell to 71-91 in 2005 as just 18 of the 43 players who appeared in a game in 2004 remained in the organization. Tracy was fired at the end of the season and has never quite gotten over having his division-winning club dismantled.

"We had a 93-game winner in 2004 and I was really looking forward to coming back with a similar nucleus," Tracy told the Denver Post's Troy E. Renck. "We were young and athletic, just like the team I have now. I walked in the clubhouse that first day of spring training and was shaking hands with three-quarters of the guys because they were all new."

Tracy won't have that problem this time when the Rockies' full squad assembles in Tucson after winning the NL wild card last season. The Rockies return basically intact, with the most significant change being that catcher Yorvit Torrealba left for the Padres as a free agent, which means holdover Chris Iannetta will now see the bulk of the playing time behind the plate.

The biggest change of all is that Tracy is now the man in charge from the beginning of spring training. He was elevated from bench coach last May after the Rockies got off to an 18-28 start then fired manager Clint Hurdle. The Rockies went 74-42 under Tracy before losing to the Phillies in the National League Division Series.

"I am not going to ask the players to do anything in spring training that I won't ask of them in the season," Tracy said. "That's the key with all of our players. There won't be any kind of surprises. They will know what I expect of them."

Ah, this takes me way back... he doesn't come out and say it, but is he suggesting that his nucleus was getting older by Paul DePodesta's trading away Paul LoDuca and Guillermo Mota for Brad Penny?

Labels: dodgers, ex-dodgers, history

Thus keeping him away from the arbitration table.

Labels: angels, transactions

... this time on a minor league deal. No word on whether 'roids were indicated as a double secret requirement.

Labels: dodgers, ex-dodgers, hot stove, transactions

And you thought this was a cobweblog ...

• I started looking at BPro's mind-numbing five part series on their new pitching metric, SIERA (don't ask me what it stands for), which I suppose will replace PECOTA for pitchers. I must say, I'm as baffled as anyone, and while I imagine they were hoping the interregnum between the end of the real hot stove season and pitchers-and-catchers was a good time to launch such a thing, I confess it's just more alphabet soup to me.
• Kendry Morales is a Scott Boras client. Would it have been better if Boras sold Lackey to the Red Sox?
• Chien-Ming Wang is a National, thus ending any speculation that he might become a Dodger. Has there been a bigger drop for any single player in recent memory? I can't think of it...
• Frank Thomas retired, and Jay Jaffe has an appropriate sendoff.

  ...One can make a reasonable case that Thomas was the AL's best hitter of the Nineties. His .440 OBP was the circuit's best, his .573 SLG was just eight points behind that of Albert Belle and Ken Griffey Jr., and his EqA for the decade trailed only that of Barry Bonds ...

Labels: angels, dodgers, retirements

SRSLY?

Labels: dodgers, hot stove, transactions

Not that T.J. Simers or Bill Plaschke would notice. Is it possible that sensible sportswriting has come back to the Times? I'm not holding out a lot of hope for it, but stranger things have been seen in the skies.

Labels: dodgers, newspapers

Austin Knoblauch in The Fabulous Forum reports that briefly-a-Dodger Jim Thome has signed with the Minnesota Twins on a one-year, $1.5M deal.

Labels: ex-dodgers, hot stove, transactions, twins

I expect at this point we'll see some more stuff over the transom, and if I get it, I'll update this post if it happens today.

• The Giants signed Guillermo Mota to a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training. Hard to remember when he and Eric Gagne were the door-slammers in the Dodgers bullpen back in 2003.
• The Dodgers signed ex-Angel Ramon Ortiz to a minor-league deal plus an obligatory spring training invitation. As with Jeff Weaver, it's hard to imagine where he'll end up on the roster, or if he'll even make the 25-man this year. He certainly earned himself a nice footnote in Rockies history by retiring all three Padres he faced in game 163, one of the most exciting regular season games I've ever witnessed.
• Rotoworld reports the Mariners and Casey Kotchman have arrived at a salary agreement for a one-year deal, avoiding arbitration, in the amount of $3.5M.
• Update: The Angels announced their spring training non-roster invitee list, which includes such luminaries as Ryan Brasier, Tyler Chatwood, Hank Conger, and Ryan Mount.

Labels: angels, dodgers, ex-angels, ex-dodgers, giants, hot stove, mariners, spring training, transactions

With the fairly generically named Dodgers Blog. Angels blogging at the Times is pretty dead, it being Steve Bisheff hasn't posted anything since November, but who am I to complain... I've gone an entire week without writing lately. Sidebar mods coming presently.

Labels: blogs, newspapers

Tim Brown tweets that the Dodgers have re-signed Jeff Weaver to a minor league deal. It's hard to imagine that this was the best he could get, but his history is spotty.

Labels: dodgers, ex-angels, hot stove, transactions

I haven't been as on top of the Dodgers' minor league deals this year as I usually am, but this one is of special interest because it's an ex-Angel: Alfredo Amezaga has signed on a minor league deal with the Dodgers, to make $650k if he makes the team, plus bonuses to $800k.

Labels: dodgers, ex-angels, hot stove, transactions

Insert comment here about the general decline of awards.

Vin Scully also picked up the "Chick Hearn Award" from that same group. I imagine by now he has a storage unit somewhere in the Valley where he keeps most of them.

Labels: broadcasters, ex-angels, radio, tv

Via David Pinto, it looks like the Rangers sale is not as complete as previously advertised. Turns out that because Tom Hicks is in both old (as a majority owner, presumably) and new ownership groups, he's using this to squeeze his creditors and force them to take a haircut. "We will be better off in bankruptcy court," one source alleges his current creditors say, and a relatively small amount of money in this transaction — about $30M from Craig Calcaterra's reckoning — may derail the whole deal.

Labels: owners, rangers

The reality long after the rumor, which Jon assured me at the time was possibly overblown. Well, congratulations, for the second time in as many years, and the fifth home in eight years. How time does fly!

Labels: blogs, dodgers