Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 86: Should the Commissioner Have the Ability to Overturn a Trade?

Episode Date: November 20, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether MLB’s Commissioner should have the power to block a trade, as Bud Selig considered doing to the Marlins-Blue Jays blockbuster.

good morning and welcome to episode 86 of effectively wild the baseball prospectus daily podcast in new york new york i am ben lundberg and joining me uh fresh off a softball defeat is Sam Miller. My condolences on your loss. That's okay. But you did bring a topic and you, in the interest of full disclosure, did tell me about this topic ahead of time because you were worried that the softball would prevent sufficient research to talk about this topic. So I know what you're going to say, but no one else does. So why don't you say it? So we're going to talk about Commissioner Bud Selig's role in reviewing a trade

and whether we should be worried that he feels the need. Yeah. Go ahead. So, of course, Bud Selig, I believe, today officially gave the – is today Monday? Yeah. Yeah, so today when I'm recording this – officially gave the all-clear for the Blue Jays and the Marlins to swap teams. And what was it? Something like –

It's like six days after it was reported. Wow, only six days. Okay, so it took six days for baseball to decide that this trade was going to go through. Now, of course, they didn't overrule it. There is no new precedent set here or anything of the sort. There's nothing really even to be furious about. This is not – this is – they gave their blessing. That's all it was.

They gave their blessing. That's all it was. But I think that just the very act of taking this time to carefully review it, the idea that they need to carefully review it, already sets a precedent. It feels to me like Bud Selig sort of staked out a little bit more territory for his role in these trades. for his role in these trades and even if he did not uh... nix the trade he did kind of uh... allow the impression that he gets to nix the trade if he wants to and he said that you know the he talked to independent baseball people who who reassured him that the marlins uh... you know came out ok in this trade as though that is the issue uh... and you know maybe that is the issue maybe i don't

know that i i don't know that I want to say so early how I feel about this. But if you think that the commissioner should have less power, I think this is a bit troubling. Or maybe not troubling, but it's at least information. So the most recent precedent in major sports would be in the NBA a year ago precedent in major sports would be in the NBA a year ago when Daniel Stern canceled a trade that was pending between, I think, the Lakers and Charlotte. And that was different because at the time, the NBA, I didn't know so little about the NBA that I hope that Charlotte is still a team. I don't actually think Charlotte is still a team. Just knowing that it was a team at one point,

you may know more about basketball than I do. I'm going to, let's see. Yeah, okay. Rejects, trade, I don't know. We're reading from Wikipedia live. I'm trying. So, anyway, at the time, the nba as i understand it um was owned was in sort of an ownership transition and at the time was actually owned by the nba so uh the nba was the owner in that case

and so it was like the expos it was like the expos i think that the the problem is that the lakers as i talked to a couple of Lakers reporters actually tonight, and I guess the trouble is that the Lakers did not really realize that this was a possibility that it would be vetoed. They weren't given any guidance on what they could do to change it, to sort of correct any problems that there were and let the trade go on. any problems that there were and let the trade go on. And, uh, what ended up happening is that,

um, uh, that the Lakers who had been traded, uh, tentatively traded ended up coming back and it was a very awkward season where, uh, neither really felt like they were supposed to be there or were wanted. And it was all kind of weird and strange.

So that's kind of a precedent because it just happened. It's kind of not because they're at least, uh, Daniel Stern did have Daniel Stern. Daniel Stern was in Home Alone. David Stern. Wait, shoot. Which one was in Home Alone? I think David is the one we're going for here. Not sure. Anyway, so you also can now tell us about the precedent in baseball, yes? Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all – The Hornets. So the Hornets were in Charlotte at one point.

So it was between the Lakers and the Hornets. I have no idea where the Hornets are now. Okay. My basketball knowledge has doubled. So Bud Selig – New Orleans. Okay. New Orleans New Orleans

I would never have guessed that So Selig or any commissioner Or I guess in this case Selig Is required to approve any deal That involves more than One million in cash Going from one team to another So this is something that

I mean it's a process that would happen with any trade When that amount of money is involved We just wouldn't normally hear about it I guess usually it's a process that would happen with any trade when that amount of money is involved. We just wouldn't normally hear about it. I guess usually it's just more of a rubber stamp automatic thing. There's no question that the commissioner is going to try to overturn or block the trade. And so in this case, it was, I guess, kind of an open issue. I don't think anyone really expected it to be blocked or overturned, but it was more plausible that something out of the ordinary might happen just because of all the circumstances surrounding the Marlins and Jeffrey Loria and selling off the entire team in a short amount of time. But yes, because you did tell me about this topic in advance, I was able to actually bring some information to the podcast,

which almost suggests that maybe we should do research regularly for the podcast. But that's a dangerous idea. I would have looked up major NBA cities. So there's sort of some precedent for this. And I think the precedent kind of uh gives you an idea that maybe it's not a policy that you would want to see um i looked up and if you're uh if you're listening to this on tuesday then you can read this entire article which i am rerunning on baseball perspectives today but stephen goldman wrote a piece for BP in 2006,

and it was partially about this precedent for this. And it involved Bowie Kuhn, who is a commissioner. In this case, we're talking about around 30 years ago, a little more. And basically, let me just read some stuff from this. Ever since Charlie Finley, who was the owner of the A's, had tried to break up the A's on the eve of free agency by selling Vital Blue to the Yankees and Joe Rudy and Raleigh Fingers to the Red Sox, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had been obsessed with keeping cash out of baseball transactions. He had vetoed the Finley sales as not being in the best interest of baseball and later established an arbitrary ceiling of $400,000 in any deal. So when this would come up after that, in that case, it was kind of arguable that maybe it wasn't the best interest of baseball to stop a straight sell-off of an owner just trying to make the most of his roster before free agency kind of gutted it.

So that was how it originally came about, but then it kind of got out of control. And there's a case here where Kuhn vetoes a trade between the Yankees and Pirates that involved more than that amount of money. And the commissioner says no, believing that the minor leaguers were not worth $450,000. They tried to restructure the deal. Anyway, so this happens a couple of times. And then we have Kuhn had also informed clubs pursuing a trade for Rod Carew in 1978 that no cash should be involved just because it was Carew. Carew is a very special case. Carew is a great superstar of the game.

To make a deal for Carew involving a great deal of cash wouldn't be a good thing. I just didn't think there should be cash in the Carew deal. The Carew case stands on its own feet. The real issue for Kuhn was not how much money was being spent, but who was doing the spending. He felt that the big market clubs like the Yankees would reassert their formerly dynastic dominance if allowed to spend freely on player purchases. Perhaps Kuhn would have let the penurious Cal Griffith of the Twins buy players from the A's, but George Steinbrenner and Tom Yockey never. So I think this is the most important paragraph. This stance put Kuhn, a lawyer, in the odd position of player evaluation. As Red Smith wrote at the time,

Kuhn has given himself oversight authority in all player transactions. He decides whether a deal is good or bad for baseball and good or bad for the clubs involved, sets a value on the players concerned, and dictates the purchase price. He even claimed to know a prospect from a suspect. For example, the Yankees' purchase of Bruce Robinson from the A's was allowed to go through because Kuhn looked at Robinson's stats at Vancouver of the Pacific Coast League and decided that the Yankees would be getting their money's worth. He's a pretty good prospect, said Kuhn, who couldn't have been more wrong. So that reminded me of part

of Selig's statement from Monday when he said, since Tuesday, I have carefully reviewed the proposed transaction between the Miami Marlins and the Toronto Blue Jays. I asked our baseball operations department and our labor relations department to compare this proposed transactions with similar deals. I also consulted with experienced baseball operations executives to get their input regarding the talent involved in this transaction. And he decides that it is a fair deal or that the Marlins were getting sufficient talent in return that he could allow the trade to stand. But it seems to me like it would be a very dangerous thing for a commissioner to, I guess, to play this bigger role in trades regularly or to veto trades and that it would almost inevitably end up being kind of a capricious thing and an arbitrary

thing and itself not so good for baseball. And yet, I guess I can also see potential trades where maybe it would be bad for baseball to let it go through. I mean if it were the same trade but the Marlins were getting no prospects back and just money, I would expect that this trade probably wouldn't have been allowed to go through. And I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah, well, why? have been allowed to go through and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah, well, why? I mean, why the difference between money and prospects in the way that they treat these? I mean, money is competitiveness. I mean, that's what money is used for in baseball. I mean, I guess you could make the case that some owners in recent history have primarily been in the business of soaking their fan base, and that's when, you know, that's why the commissioners stepped in with the Dodgers. But, I mean, if you

assume that, I mean, it seems to me that if you assume that there is no collusion involved, that two teams are not actively partnering up to benefit one, you know, as some sort of sinister plot at the expense of the other. I mean, these are two businesses that are theoretically don't need a commissioner to force them to act rationally. They are act rationally by the very nature of what they're engaged in. And each team gets to kind of define what rationality is for them. to kind of define what rationality is for them. And for some teams, I mean, there's certainly no rule against being bad for a couple of years and sort of conserving a team's resources for a so-called window.

And I think that you could probably make the case that most trades are, you know, between a team that – two teams that simply have different timelines for competitiveness. And so, I don't know. It seems to me that the line that separates prospects going back and cash going back, which is essentially what the precedent in baseball is, is the idea is that Major League Baseball reviews when there's cash involved, and they generally don't review when it's prospects involved. That line is so gray. It's essentially that line is non-existent in reality and least rationally in the sense that he's going to invest that money in making the team better in the long run? What if it's very clear? And I'm not saying that this is the case with Loria. But what if there were an owner who made a trade and it was very clear that he was doing so just kind of to cash out or uh i mean i i guess you could say that in that sense he's just depreciating the franchise

and that no one would actually do that because if he just sold all his players for profit then whatever his stake in the team is would be worth a lot less and he wouldn't actually be making anything. Probably. Yeah, probably. But I think it is true that – I forget what's true. I mean theoretically. I forget what I was going to say. There's an owner who's just so rich that even baseball amounts of money mean nothing to him. And he's only interested in creating chaos or something.

He's like the joker of baseball owners or something. So he plots to buy a team and then decides, well, I want this other team to win and I'm going to give them all of my players for some money and I don't care what I get back and I'm not going to invest it in a team this may be a far-fetched scenario but if that were to happen that probably wouldn't be in the best interests of baseball so I guess you'd have to say whether it would be better for baseball to establish this precedent of the owner interfering or the commissioner interfering in these moves than it would be to allow that kind of harmful trade to go through. Yeah, I guess I think that maybe best interest is too high a standard. I think if there was an owner who presented an existential

crisis for the league in some way, that might be a bar that I would be comfortable putting on Selig's actions. But best interest could basically describe anything that he wanted. And it's kind of up to his own sense of place and responsibility to decide where he's going to draw that line. I do think, though, that what I was trying to get to earlier, but I blanked, is that I think that the fairly good counter argument here is that baseball is almost, I mean, the relationship between teams and the interaction between teams is so artificial. And this is no libertarian's fantasy. There are so many rules that kind of dictate how these teams interact with each other and with all the money going back and forth in revenue sharing.

And their books are so artificial that it isn't really, I don't think, the case that you can say, well, the market is going to take care of itself. The market will protect the sport. Because essentially, the market has been removed from the game. It is run with all these different pulleys and levers that the commissioner and the 30 teams already pull. So I think that you could probably make the case that as long as this is such a heavily regulated sport that, you know, maybe it is the case that a dictatorial commissioner could be in the best interest of the game. I don't know that I have ever seen a commissioner I would trust without power, but I don't know. I mean, I think

my impression that I get from hearing people talk about the NFL is that the dictatorial commissioner in the NFL has been a pretty good system and that a lot of, you know, a lot of kind of problems have become, have gotten under control because of it. There are issues to that as well with concussions and bounding gate and all these sorts of things as well. But my sense is that it's not necessarily the case that democracy is the best way to run a league. So if I liked the commissioner, I might be more open to it. I do think, though, that any time people want to give Bud Selig more power, it's odd because most people complain about Bud Selig. And yet it seems like when there is a problem that they want fixed, they're perfectly fine giving that power to Selig.

Yeah, I guess I'm just mostly uncomfortable with the idea of giving the commissioner that role as a talent evaluator. Yeah. That just seems as a talent evaluator. Yeah. That just seems like it would lead to problems. Because he's bad at it? Well, I mean, if there was a panel of judges, if there was a panel of seven ex-GMs and... Baseball prospectus, transaction analysis, writers. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you trusted the analysis i mean would would it be

better to have equal trades would would this be in the good in the best interest of the game to actually have uh equality and trading guaranteed uh well i don't think you could ever get that um no i wouldn't i and that's the the thing how far do you take it i know that people who play fantasy sports and i am no longer one of them but I know that people in leagues where there's a commissioner review or the owners as a group review trades, some people are vehemently opposed to ever having any kind of trade review, whereas others think it's a good safeguard to kind of protect against the fantasy owner whose team is out of it and he has nothing to play for and he just gives all his players away um i don't know whether you play fantasy sports or have any perspective on that but it's it's i guess a more much more simplified version of the same sort of situation um yeah. I think generally the, the, I've always thought that unless there's fraud going on, you let the trade go through and that it's sort of like better to let 10 guilty

men go free than wrongfully convict one innocent one. I just think that, you know, you, you, you allow for a lot of unequal trades because it's good to have the freedom to make mistakes and the freedom to do these trades. You never know what mistake is going to end up being good either. Billy Martin compared the 1976 decision against Charlie Finley to Watergate.

Well, I guess we've agreed that we will let Bud Selig slide this time, but we're keeping our eye on him. Yeah, do you think we'll see him cancel a trade in the next, you know, I was going to say in the next 10 years, but then I realized he's supposed to be retired, but then he probably won't be. Do you think we'll ever see him cancel a trade?

No, I don't think so. I guess if senility sets in, you never know what might happen. But no, I don't think so. I don't know that this is the closest he's ever come. I don't really remember in the past whether he's deliberated so publicly about allowing a trade but uh i don't know this seems like a set of circumstances that would have led to it if anything just because of the the merlin's loria aspect if if if if jean carlos stanton were traded uh for for you know i don't know cash or something like if they tried to sell Giancarlo Stanton,

do you think he'd step in? Yeah, I sort of think he would if it were a pure cash sell-off. I think that is what it would take to provoke him. Yeah, probably. All right, well, you're going to close us out. Yeah, so we will at least theoretically be back with a listener email show

our last show of the week tomorrow before thanksgiving so if you want us to have questions to answer send them to us at podcast at baseball prospectus.com and we look forward to seeing your questions and answering them then