10843
by TFIR
Well, this is about the minors:
Reassigned to … where? MLB clubs aren’t sure how to make cuts this spring
By Andrew Baggarly Mar 11, 2021 25
It is one of the greatest moments of dramatic tension in one of the greatest films ever made.
All right. That might be overselling it. But it was a good scene:
***
(Players in hallway, approaching clubhouse)
RICK VAUGHN: Final cut down day, right?
JAKE TAYLOR: ‘Fraid so.
VAUGHN: I don’t want to go in there.
TAYLOR: Look, whatever happens, just keep it to yourself until you get out of the clubhouse. You don’t want to celebrate in front of guys who just died.
(Taylor walks into clubhouse. Vaughn pauses in hallway with WILLIE MAYS HAYES)
HAYES: Yeah. But what if we’re one of the deceased?
***
It is the scene from “Major League” that depicts the waning days of spring training, when Cleveland manager Lou Brown puts together the roster that will open the season. The film’s writers and producers nailed many elements of major-league clubhouse life, including the anxious mind of a fringe, end-of-the-roster player as Opening Day approaches.
“C’mon Jake, it’s only your life,” says Taylor, before he whips open his metal locker door to reveal nothing more than sunglasses and a can of shaving cream.
Hayes approaches his locker with trepidation, flings it open and takes cover as if from an exploding mortar shell. When he finally opens his eyes, he swallows a yelp of joy, quietly walks out of the clubhouse, exits to the parking lot and does a celebratory dance in his sanitary socks.
Other players weren’t so lucky. Their lockers contained the dreaded red tag, signifying that they had been cut. (Vaughn stormed into Brown’s office after finding a tag in his locker and began to chew the manager out — until he realized that Roger Dorn had pulled a cruel prank on him. Calamity ensues.)
Granted, maybe we’re overselling the infallibility of those writers and producers, too. Major-league clubhouses don’t have metal lockers straight out of a high school P.E. class. And the “red tag” or some equivalent harbinger of doom hasn’t been a part of major-league spring training for a long, long, long, long time. You won’t find a current player or even a current coach who received bad news in such a brusque, impersonal way.
“But they did have it, I know that,” former Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. “Old-timers told me that’s how they found out. That’s the way it was done. Similar to high school, I guess: you looked on the board outside the gym and saw if you made the team or not.”
Former Angels manager and Dodgers catcher Mike Scioscia never saw a red tag during his many springs at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla. But he’s familiar with the black and white photos that used to line the hallways, depicting hundreds of faces of Class D players crowding into the frame.
“That might have been something that happened back in the ’50s when they had 700 guys in spring training,” Scioscia said. “I’ve heard stories about that. It never happened to me. That’s brutal. I would never want a system like that.”
These days, when it’s time to cut a player, a team uses a more humane approach: a discreet tap on the shoulder, a beckoning hand to the manager’s office and a closed-door meeting.
Younger players will receive a tidy evaluation and instruction on what skills to continue developing. A position coach or two will often join those meetings. For someone with major-league service time, or a six-year minor-league free agent whose dreams might be crushed, or a player with a sense of entitlement who is liable to let off a little steam, the GM or another representative from the front office will be there to answer questions or absorb the airing of grievances.
But cut day has featured one constant: Waves of players packing up a locker, removing the name plate, slinging a duffel bag over a shoulder and accepting banishment to minor-league camp or unemployment. Here one day, gone the next.
Until this spring.
Take this line from MLB’s transactions page for March 4: “Colorado Rockies assigned LHP Jack Wynkoop to Colorado Rockies.”
Such are the oddities when a team reassigns a player with no place to send him. Minor-league camps won’t open until April 1, after the major-league club departs to open the season — one of many COVID-19 protocols designed to reduce crowding and ease contact tracing as rosters remain in a quasi-bubble.
As a result, four weeks into spring, some teams haven’t optioned or reassigned any players in major-league camp. Giants manager Gabe Kapler said discussions are ongoing, but for now, there are no plans to cut players in early waves. Yankees manager Aaron Boone said he wasn’t sure how cuts will work, although the club is running a parallel spring camp with some pitchers off-site at the player development complex. White Sox manager Tony La Russa and his staff are discussing the topic this week, but are in general agreement that keeping everyone in big-league camp till the end of spring would be counterproductive.
Others have begun the process. The Rangers optioned two pitchers, Tyler Phillips and Joe Gatto, to Triple-A Round Rock on Sunday. The Orioles made their first cuts on Sunday, too. The Angels made their first cut of the spring Wednesday, optioning left-hander Hector Yan. The Rockies have been the most proactive, “reassigning” seven players from March 1-5. For now, anyway, they are paper moves. Here one day, here the next!
And you thought “optioned to the alternate site” sounded like something out of “The Twilight Zone.”
The absence of traditional cut-down days actually has been a logistical easement for managers and coaches this spring. Cutting players is a time-consuming process. Consider that teams are allowed as many as 75 players in camp and they’ll have to pare down to an active roster of 26 on Opening Day. That’s almost 50 closed-door meetings, 50 reassuring conversations, 50 sets of marching orders.
And that doesn’t count the time it takes to track down the players you want to cut.
“I can’t tell you how many times we couldn’t find guys,” Bochy said. “There were times we’d send (a coach) up to the batting cage or the trainer’s room, looking all over the place. Maybe you’d find them in the parking lot about to drive off. The players know when it’s cut day. You wondered sometimes if they caught word they were getting sent down.”
Or, to riff on another movie plot, “Cut Me If You Can.”
Players have every motivation to elude getting cut for another day. As long as they stay in major-league camp, they receive major-league meal allowances. For 2021, a player on a Cactus League team who doesn’t make his year-round home in the Phoenix metro area is entitled to a weekly allowance of $345.50, a supplemental weekly allowance of $61.50, a daily room allowance of $40 and a daily meal and tip allowance of $98.
Traditionally, meal money — envelopes filled with cash — is handed out on Tuesdays. It’s no coincidence that teams often make cuts on Mondays.
Both league and union sources confirm that nothing has changed in the Collective Bargaining Agreement this spring. So yes, a player “reassigned” all the way back to his locker will not receive major-league allowances for the rest of the spring. The Rockies pinched themselves a few pennies, then.
But there will be valid reasons for teams to reassign or option players in the coming days. One example: Players who are optioned on or before March 16 can continue to take part in exhibition games until the end of the spring. But if they haven’t been optioned by that date, and sustain a disabling injury in an exhibition, then teams would be forced to place them on the major-league injured list — and pay them major-league salary.
And, of course, players are still being designated for assignment when the club makes another roster move that necessitates creating space on the 40-man roster. Even some of those players boomeranged back into the clubhouse. The Giants designated right-hander Trevor Gott for assignment on Feb. 21. After he cleared waivers, they outrighted him to Triple-A Sacramento and then re-invited him to major-league spring training on March 6.
As La Russa said, though, there comes a point when it’s counterproductive to have close to 75 players occupying the same facility. Something happens when the lockers empty out toward the end of spring. The players who remain can begin to envision coming together as a team. They sometimes begin to form an identity. They enjoy the extra space, too.
(One spring in Scottsdale, Jeff Kent’s locker moved to the side of the Giants clubhouse where he was among the minor-league non-roster invitees. When reporters asked him about it, he said he wanted to be a mentor to the kids. Another clubhouse source reported a different reason: He knew those kids would be the first to be cut, and he wanted to spread out.)
With no split-squad exhibitions this spring and no minor-league camp scrimmages all month, teams are currently discussing the possibility of scheduling B games against each other — a practice that used to be commonplace in the spring. Although the Triple-A season isn’t expected to begin until May, teams will need to keep a depth of replacement starting pitchers and others at their alternate sites to help them cover injuries or roster needs.
“Teams will have to get creative with that many players,” Bochy said. “I don’t know why all the teams wouldn’t schedule B games. There are starters who need to get stretched out, pitchers who need work. I’d imagine that will crank up as you get deeper in camp.”
It’s those final days of camp when the toughest cuts must be made. Those are unavoidable, even without red tags or minor-league camps.
“There’s always those three to five really tough conversations that you have to have, and honestly, you hope to have,” said Scioscia, “because that means it’s a competitive team and it was a competitive spring.”
Scioscia and Bochy would use the same tact in those conversations: get the news out of the way first.
“Within the first 10 seconds in the room, you want to tell them what the decision is,” Scioscia said. “You don’t want to start a long oratory and then tell them that they didn’t make the team.”
“Be honest with them: that’s all you can do,” Bochy said. “If you start trying to sell it in a different way, trust me, they’ll sense that. Just be straight with them. Yeah, you’ll have a few who disagree with you. Everyone handles it differently. Some get emotional. Some get upset. Some thank you for the opportunity. You’ve got to be ready to react to everything. But you understand it’s what you’ve got to deal with. There’s a big difference between breaking with the club and going to Triple A.”
Unlike Scioscia, Bochy wasn’t an All-Star or a first-string catcher. He recalled the spring of 1984 with the Padres when he and his wife, Kim, had rented a condo in the city and were all prepared to break with the club. Then the team traded for third baseman Graig Nettles on Opening Day. Manager Dick Williams had to break the news to Bochy: the Padres couldn’t carry a third catcher.
“Devastating,” Bochy said. “I was crushed. I got upset about it. But that’s what you’re dealing with.”
The flipside are the end-of-spring meetings when managers get to break the good news to players. For Scioscia, it was telling a Double-A player claimed on waivers, future World Series MVP David Eckstein, that he realized his major-league dream. Bochy is fondest of those moments when he got to tell a career minor leaguer, or a prospect who hadn’t yet broken through, that they would get to stand on the chalk line on Opening Day.
Who could forget the scene in the Giants’ 2011 Showtime documentary series when Brandon Belt wiped teary eyes, and Bochy responded by gesturing to the minifridge in his office.
“Need a beer?” Bochy said. “Grab a beer.”
Now there’s a scene that could’ve come straight out of “Major League.”
"I've suffered a great many tragedies in my life....most of them never happened". Mark Twain