Josh Hamilton released by Texas

brs3

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The title is misleading. It's not like he announced his retirement.

From the article:
"Hamilton has made it clear he wants to play next season and is willing to return to the Rangers on a Minor League contract.

"We plan to monitor Josh's progress as he continues his rehab process and is medically cleared this winter," general manager Jon Daniels said. "Given the rules in place, releasing him before the end of this month allows us to keep the door open to extending the relationship in the future."
 

ifmanis5

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Cafardo still wants the Sox to go all in on him even now to prove they are a big market team that goes after big ticket players.
 

Madmartigan

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So if Hamilton doesn't play again, by my count, that's $81 million that he, Fielder and A-Rod will collect next year without setting foot on the field. Gotta love those guaranteed contracts.
 

shaggydog2000

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So if Hamilton doesn't play again, by my count, that's $81 million that he, Fielder and A-Rod will collect next year without setting foot on the field. Gotta love those guaranteed contracts.
Please will someone save these billionaires with profitable franchises from giving out such long and lucrative contracts! If they make too many mistakes, they might take home only a bit of profit while their franchise values keep climbing! Woe is them. Dallas, New York, and LA franchises could never sustain losses like these long term, they just don't have the market for that.
 

Madmartigan

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Please will someone save these billionaires with profitable franchises from giving out such long and lucrative contracts! If they make too many mistakes, they might take home only a bit of profit while their franchise values keep climbing! Woe is them. Dallas, New York, and LA franchises could never sustain losses like these long term, they just don't have the market for that.
I'm not bemoaning the plight of the owners. I just think it's pretty remarkable that these guys are going to earn tens of millions without even suiting up. Further, there's an opportunity cost to paying out these contracts. Funds allocated for these guys are necessarily funds that will not be spent elsewhere improving these teams' rosters, so ultimately the fans might be getting screwed. Take Sandoval, for instance. He might never play another game for the Sox; meanwhile he's costing them 18m per year, limiting payroll flexibility and thus ownership's ability to acquire new players. All because of 100% guaranteed contracts. It's kind of a shitty system.
 

singaporesoxfan

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Owners weigh the risks when they bid for free agents. If the owners make bad assessments, that's on them. You don't like wasting money, don't sign lousy players.

And arguably, just as with opt-outs, a contract condition that is player-friendly such as guaranteeing salaries should mean that players take a discount compared to what they would have asked for if the contracts were not as player-friendly.
 

jon abbey

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No one should feel bad for any owners, but there's no question the system is a mess and hasn't caught up to the current baseball reality. Players make almost all of their money after the initial control expires, and in recent years more and more value comes from those early years, so the majority of post-arb contracts end up being not only not worth it, especially relatively to the players still under team control, but limiting personnel flexibility. Ideally this should change some in the next CBA, we'll see.
 

Papelbon's Poutine

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No one should feel bad for any owners, but there's no question the system is a mess and hasn't caught up to the current baseball reality. Players make almost all of their money after the initial control expires, and in recent years more and more value comes from those early years, so the majority of post-arb contracts end up being not only not worth it, especially relatively to the players still under team control, but limiting personnel flexibility. Ideally this should change some in the next CBA, we'll see.
I don't see how the system is a mess. I think the system works quite well.

It is what it has been and the only reason it seems out of whack now is that the scale has changed so dramatically. These mistakes are limiting flexibility less and less by the year for teams and stupid decisions are stupid decisions.

More and more we see pre arbitration guys locking up security well before they normally would have. Then after that they get a big money deal, if they shit the bed, well, they're getting compensated for their performance when they were underpaid.

I think players should get every dime they can. They're the product. If they can milk dollars out when projections and history say they will decline, good for them. If teams can't find a balance between making bad choices and investing money elsewhere, well, that's on them. And the changes in the CBA have made it much harder for teams to invest that money in other avenues to improve the team. Can't spend on the draft anymore. Can't spend internationally anymore. Where can they throw the money now? Rather see it paid to players even if they crap out than added to the ledger for the owners.

All that being said, some signings are worse than others and Hamilton is definitely at the top of that list.
 

jon abbey

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I agree that players should get pretty much every dime they can, I just think there needs to be a better overall correlation between performance and salary, and the sooner they figure out how to get that closer, the better for the game. This happened in the NFL in reverse, the very top draft picks got ridiculously big deals before playing a down and some were busts (of course), so they changed it in the CBA in 2011 so rookies got less and veterans got more:

"The then-St. Louis Rams drafted quarterback Sam Bradford in 2010 and he signed a six-year, $76 million contract. Since then, he has accomplished very little. In 2012, the Indianapolis Colts drafted Andrew Luck with the first overall pick. Luck signed a four-year, $22.5 million contract. That’s a difference of a little more than $7 million per year."

I'm not saying players overall should get less, they should get the same or more as a collective, but more of that pie should go to players in that first contract, the ones who are stars anyway. It balances out eventually for some, but not for all. What if Sonny Grey has a career-ending injury now? He put up 2 1/2 years of Cy Young-level performance and was paid about $500K per year. The system will never be perfect, but it can be made more equitable, as they did in the NFL.
 

Papelbon's Poutine

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But it's not analogous to the NFL because of the minor league system, the vastly different timetables to being a contributor and the hit rate on draftees. First round draft picks in the NFL are expected to contribute within a year or two. MLB you hope for three or four years down the road.

There's thousands of minor league ballplayers that will never sniff the majors and many of them got a decent to good to even millionaire level signing bonus. But that's how the game works. Very few players go college to pros and almost no one does it same year. NFL it's a much easier transition on the overall. And no one is coming from high school.

If Sonny Gray suffers a career ending injury, well, it sucks for him but of the four major sports which has the lowest probability of a career ending injury? Baseball. (Career altering is a different discussion). But the NFL doesn't have anything in place that protects that guy any better unless they're a first round pick. And the players get hosed down the road on non guaranteed contracts.

Reasonable minds can differ, but if the slant is looking out for the players I think it goes NBA -> MLB -> NFL -> NHL.
 

jon abbey

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Reasonable minds can differ, but if the slant is looking out for the players I think it goes NBA -> MLB -> NFL -> NHL.
I don't really follow hockey, but the other three are certainly right, and most of that is because of the different roster sizes (15/25/53). But that's beside the point, I only brought up the NFL example to show an example of a sport altering their CBA to fit a changing game.

Minor leagues are a different and much worse problem, we have a whole thread about that and honestly it's one of the worst things about baseball, the shitty wages that guys get paid. Some of them got big bonuses but plenty of others didn't.

But I'm not talking about that, that's a different discussion. I'm talking about how the major league part of the game is skewing younger and younger and more and more guys come up and are instantly in the top echelon of the sport, but aren't paid that way for 5-6 years after that. That is unhealthy for the game, I don't even see why anyone would argue otherwise except to be argumentative. :)

 

buzzard21

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They could add arbitration year(s) and even it out a bit that way, say make year 2-6 arb years. That would be pretty tough to get by the owners though, what do you think the players would be willing to give up for that change?
 

Boggs26

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The thing is, teams are making so much money that the players are basically able to negotiate a pension (the years of high pay but low worth) into the contract. It's basically the price of getting 3 or so prime years and without collusion, it seems some team will always be willing to pay for a few dud years in the end.
 

shaggydog2000

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If it's a bad deal to sign an aging free agent slugger to a big money long term contract, then why don't the teams just stop giving those players those contracts? No one is making them. The MLB is awash in new money from traditional and emerging revenue sources every year. And they're spending it. The NBA and NFL, even the English Premier League are doing the same thing. Not great players are getting very big money, because it's there to spend, and every team would like to be just a bit better. You can't say that they have to give out these deals. Just look at the NFL, they give almost no money to non-premier free agents that are old for their positions. Whether that is 28 for a running back or 33 for a QB. They get the veteran minimum, because they're basically rotting vegetables. And that has nothing to do with cut contracts or NFL GM's being that much smarter (think of how many stupid NFL GM's you can name, including anyone who ever worked for the new Browns).

And the teams giving out these particular contracts were major market big money teams. They gave them out because they knew they could eat them. This isn't Pittsburgh or KC being doomed to the basement of their division because they tied up 40% of their payroll in a single guy who got hurt. Those teams don't make those deals because they can't tolerate the risk. I think the Yankees can. And the Rangers and Angels. The Sox are winning their division this year with one top free agent out (Sandoval) and another under-performing the original expectations (Hanley). The Dodgers are paying dead money to a lot of guys too, right? They're still leading their division as well. Between Hamilton and Fielder, the Rangers paid 20 mil (once cash from other teams are added in) for roughly -2 WAR, and they're leading their division. Failures in free agency don't seem to be hurting teams all that much.
 

Dahabenzapple2

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The MAJOR reason the Red Sox are winning this year is that they have 3 All-Star level players (plus Sandy Leon and now Andrew Benintendi) making basically league minimum.

In fact, if Benintendi is as great as he looks, it looks like a whole all-star all-world outfield making a combined $$$1.7 MM!!!

As pointed out above by Jon, not a healthy or equitable system from any logical viewpoint. I'm truly struggling to see/understand how/why it is being argued otherwise.
 

jon abbey

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If it's a bad deal to sign an aging free agent slugger to a big money long term contract, then why don't the teams just stop giving those players those contracts? No one is making them.
Teams started to slow down last offseason (also you saw players accept the qualifying offer for the first time, some unexpectedly). Guys like Doug Fister and David Freese had to wait and take relatively small deals, even though both ended up as solid contributors this year. It will never stop entirely, free agency is still the only way to add major league ready talent without trading your own players, but more and more, teams are realizing that a large percentage of FA deals are not only not worth it, but are albatrosses from day 1. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.
 

shaggydog2000

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The MAJOR reason the Red Sox are winning this year is that they have 3 All-Star level players (plus Sandy Leon and now Andrew Benintendi) making basically league minimum.

In fact, if Benintendi is as great as he looks, it looks like a whole all-star all-world outfield making a combined $$$1.7 MM!!!

As pointed out above by Jon, not a healthy or equitable system from any logical viewpoint. I'm truly struggling to see/understand how/why it is being argued otherwise.
These are two separate issues. Teams are giving out free agent deals because they think they're worth it and not getting hurt too badly when they're wrong. You are arguing a completely different issue about how the collectively bargained wage process limits the money paid to the most productive young players. It's not like the Sox are paying Bogaerts, Betts, Benintendi, and JBJ less because they committed cash to Sandoval and Hanley. If they never signed those two free agents, those young players would still be getting the same amount of money. It's how the MLB wage system works. Maybe the free agent contracts would get smaller if you had to pay more money to high performing young players, but that unequal distribution is a different injustice than billionaires having to pay for their mistakes.
 

timlinin8th

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These are two separate issues. Teams are giving out free agent deals because they think they're worth it and not getting hurt too badly when they're wrong.
This isn't true at all. Philadelphia gave out a ton of big contracts to their impending FA thinking they would be "worth it" back when they were WS contenders. They got a lot of those wrong, and because they didn't have the prospect pipeline to fill the void when those FAs didn't perform, turned into a dead team. That is only one example off the top of my head. One could make that same case about the Yankees as well, the large contracts given to players like Teixeira, Ellsbury, etc have finally been coming home to roost.

You are arguing a completely different issue about how the collectively bargained wage process limits the money paid to the most productive young players. It's not like the Sox are paying Bogaerts, Betts, Benintendi, and JBJ less because they committed cash to Sandoval and Hanley. If they never signed those two free agents, those young players would still be getting the same amount of money. It's how the MLB wage system works.
Its hard to tell if they are paying less to those players because of Sandoval and Hanley because the system allows them to pay those players less. If it wasn't for a lot of the current dollars tied up in Sandoval and Hanley, would the Sox have potentially extended one of the B's by now? Obviously we can't have an answer to this because we aren't in the Sox FO, but you can't say with any definitive confidence that they woudn't have either. Also, how many young players have to sit back and wait for their shot (or don't end up getting a shot at all) because teams have so much invested in a high dollar FA that they don't call up a younger player? Those players end up making minor league dollars and not big league bucks.

Basically you're saying "well that is the system that is in place now so it is what it is" but it doesn't have to be. I am with jon on this one, I would prefer to see some system get bargained where younger more deserving players get a larger portion of the pie vs an unbalanced system where only players who have managed to make the FA service time make adequate cash.
 

HriniakPosterChild

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It didn't have to be this way. Back when the reserve clause was struck down, Charlie Finley wanted there to be lots and lots of free agents. If there are 22 FA catchers to choose from in the offseason, supply and demand will work to keep salaries down. If there are 1 or 2, salaries go through the roof. The other owners thought he was nuts and wanted to control their labor that they had developed in the MiLB system and fought for arbitration.

The MLBPA under Marvin Miller, after beating the drum that a free market should determine player salaries, would have been hard pressed to argue against Finley's maximized FA plan. But they didn't have to. Finley didn't have much in the way of allies among the owners, so the MLBPA got the benefit of supply and demand working to drive up a small number of FA salaries and of arbitration's bringing a decent fraction of those FA salaries to a large number of arb-eligible players.
 

HriniakPosterChild

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I would prefer to see some system get bargained where younger more deserving players get a larger portion of the pie vs an unbalanced system where only players who have managed to make the FA service time make adequate cash.
We already have that, sort of. Mike Trout didn't have to wait to become a FA to start making serious money. He signed a 6 years/$144.5m deal at age 22.
 

jon abbey

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I was thinking more about this, maybe there should be some kind of centralized bonus system where the top 15 or 20 pre-arb guys got bonuses directly from MLB. I'm sure there are problems with that, but it would make things more fair for the top pre-arb superstars, and not punish small-market teams by forcing them to pay a big salary before they're ready to decide whether they can afford it or not. Just a thought...
 

keninten

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I`ve always wondered how a pay scale based on some kind of stats would work. What if the 1st 3 years a players stats determined their pay. What if a player got paid for the number of HRs, WAR, OPS, OBP, Sacrifices etc. I imagine it would be pretty exhaustive work to figure out the system and what statistical categories to use but it may raise salaries on the low end of the scale. Giving out bigger free agent contracts would be tougher in that, a team wouldn`t know what it`s payroll may end up at the end of the year.

If players were granted free agency earlier than 6 years, determined by PA or IP during their 1st 3 years. This would have to take in account days on the DL which could limit their opportunities to play.

I`m not good at putting my thoughts in writing but I`d like to see a replies on this(I`m on here 3 or 4 times a day reading everyones elses thoughts).
 

jon abbey

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I think it's the right general idea, but it's impossible to implement because it would be so wildly disruptive for the lower budget teams. That's why I suggested what I did above, a similar idea but the money comes from a central fund and only goes to maybe the most 15 or 20 deserving. My idea has holes too, but I think it's closer at least.
 

Ale Xander

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Umm, poor girl?
I want to believe she sought him out, not the other way around. And that the mother or daughter made stuff up. What he is claimed to have said doesn't jive with what he allegedly did.
 
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mauidano

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Crazy story and we don't have all the facts. Divorce and teenage daughters can be complicated. That being said, this is a horrible thing to do to a child. There are two sides to every story and he'll get his chance. But damn.....he's a big dude and she's a kid. There has to be some sort of physical marks, bruises etc.
 

Soxfan in Fla

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Hoping for everyone involved the story is a fabrication. Not a good situation any way you look at it.
 

Sad Sam Jones

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Does he currently work for the Rangers in any capacity (aside from possibly collecting deferred salary)? I don't really get what compelled the Rangers to release an official statement.
 

BoSox Rule

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Never thought I’d see a thread from 3 years ago bumped so someone could hope that Josh Hamilton’s daughter was making up a story about her being abused by an alcoholic junkie but here we are.
 

Soxfan in Fla

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Never thought I’d see a thread from 3 years ago bumped so someone could hope that Josh Hamilton’s daughter was making up a story about her being abused by an alcoholic junkie but here we are.
For me personally, as a father of a teenage daughter who is having to deal with that daughter being mentally abused and even slightly physically by my ex wife I never want to see a child actually get physically abused. So yes, my hope his this is something contrived by ex wife and daughter because as much as that sucks, the thought of a teenage girl being beaten around like that completely sucks.
 

BoSox Rule

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Yea I’d prefer the girl not get beaten either. Just think it’s extremely weird people are praying the daughter is a liar that falsifies police reports and are sympathizing with Hamilton who has zero track record of deserving that.
 

BroodsSexton

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Yea I’d prefer the girl not get beaten either. Just think it’s extremely weird people are praying the daughter is a liar that falsifies police reports and are sympathizing with Hamilton who has zero track record of deserving that.
lol. I think this thread is done. I’ve seen much better, closed.
 

Average Reds

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Yea I’d prefer the girl not get beaten either. Just think it’s extremely weird people are praying the daughter is a liar that falsifies police reports and are sympathizing with Hamilton who has zero track record of deserving that.
The folks who expressed those thoughts did (IMO) an incredibly poor job of articulating what they were trying to say, which is that they hope the abuse didn't happen, because the alternative is far worse. There are no good options here. Just levels of horribleness.

Given the dynamics of dysfunctional families and contentious divorces, it's probably wise to allow facts to emerge before expressing opinions on what happened or even what we wish had happened. I'll admit that I don't get the reflexive desire to hope for the best for Josh Hamilton, as he lost the benefit of the doubt (and, quite frankly, the presumption of innocence) many years ago.