{"id":10422,"date":"2015-04-09T16:55:47","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T20:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10422"},"modified":"2015-04-09T16:55:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T20:55:47","slug":"mlb-organizations-behaving-good-and-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10422","title":{"rendered":"MLB Organizations behaving good … and bad."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hamilton's<\/a>

Hamilton’s team has hung him out to dry. Photo via theclassical.org<\/p><\/div>\n

Today is a tale of two organizations.\u00a0 I’d rather talk about that than the opening series loss to the pitiful Mets, featuring a 6 run meltdown from Stephen Strasburg<\/strong> today.<\/p>\n

1. Good.\u00a0 San Diego Padres<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

Read this piece this week on For the Win<\/a> (USA Today’s sports blog), linking to a story<\/a> by Steve Bisheff<\/strong> of the OC Register in SoCal.<\/p>\n

Worth a read.\u00a0 The Padres have re-signed a former minor league prospect every year since 1996 to a contract to give him a small stipend and access to health care after he had a debilitating heart attack on the field.<\/p>\n

Its nice to read stories like this.<\/p>\n

2. Bad.\u00a0 The Los Angeles Angels<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As has been well reported by now, Angels slugger and contract disaster Josh Hamilton<\/strong> had a drug relapse over the off-season and self-reported himself to the league.\u00a0 While negotiations were underway to determine what, if any, penalties were to be done, someone leaked pretty much all the details of the situation, drastically violating the confidentiality of the Joint Drug Agreement and hanging Hamilton out to dry.\u00a0 Which happens; there’s plenty of players who have been labeled “PED users” by virtue of leaked reports of supposedly sealed and\/or anonymous testing.\u00a0 It can be assumed but not proven that the leak came within the Angels organization, based on who reported it (team beat reporters) and who their sources generally are (team officials).<\/p>\n

Eventually it was determined that Hamilton would suffer no consequences<\/a>, to which the Angels president John Carpino <\/strong>was quoted, “It defies logic that Josh’s reported behavior is not a violation of his current program<\/em>.”\u00a0\u00a0 The GM Jerry Dipoto<\/strong> also issued a rather snippy press release<\/a>, going out of his way to degrade the player.<\/p>\n

Wow.\u00a0 Way to stick up for your player, guys.\u00a0 I agree with Craig Calcaterra<\/strong> whole heartedly here; this comment was petty, graceless, and completely unnecessary.\u00a0 And I also agree with his opinion (stated here<\/a>), that MLB’s subsequent decision not to investigate the leaks is just as abhorrent.\u00a0 Hamilton has a past; he has an addiction, just like millions of Americans.\u00a0 He struggles with it, and sometimes slips.\u00a0 So do we all.\u00a0 There’s probably\u00a0 not one person reading who wasn’t once “addicted” to something or another, or who had a bad habit they struggled to break, who cannot relate to his issues.\u00a0 Nicotine, Alcohol, high-fat foods, whatever.\u00a0 To show so little sympathy is kind of tough to swallow.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0 years, the union held out against drug testing, in large part because of *exactly* what has continually happened since.\u00a0 Constant leaks from people (either in the MLB or with teams) who have axes to grind and who give anonymous quotes to reporters, who then dutifully report salacious details with no provable accusations that end up destroying careers (see players such as David Ortiz, Jeff Bagwell<\/strong> and the “back-acned” Mike Piazza<\/strong> for more examples).\u00a0 This Hamilton example is just one more example.\u00a0 You can’t put the genie back in the bottle either.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is a tale of two organizations.\u00a0 I’d rather talk about that than the opening series loss to the pitiful Mets, featuring a 6 run meltdown from Stephen Strasburg today. 1. Good.\u00a0 San Diego Padres Read this piece this week on For the Win (USA Today’s sports blog), linking to a story by Steve Bisheff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[454,2756,576,376,238,636,38,2755],"class_list":["post-10422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonnatsbaseball","tag-craig-calcaterra","tag-david-orgiz","tag-jeff-bagwell","tag-jerry-dipoto","tag-josh-hamilton","tag-mike-piazza","tag-stephen-strasburg","tag-steve-bisheff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10422"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10433,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10422\/revisions\/10433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}