Atlanta Braves Clippings Tuesday, May 26, 2020 Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Atlanta Braves Clippings Tuesday, May 26, 2020 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Six former Braves weigh in on issues around starting season By Tim Tucker, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Six former Braves players will participate in a televised discussion of issues surrounding a possible start of the pandemic-delayed MLB season. Tom Glavine, Jeff Francoeur, Brian Jordan, Paul Byrd, Peter Moylan and Nick Green will be featured on “The Return of Baseball: A Fox Sports Roundtable,” an hour-long show that will air Saturday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Fox Sports Southeast. The discussion, covering player safety, collective bargaining and other topics, will be moderated by Braves broadcasters Chip Caray, Kelly Crull and Jerome Jurenovich. The six former players also have roles on Braves telecasts, including pregame and postgame shows, but it remains unclear when games will begin. Negotiations are ongoing between MLB and the players’ union about a possible start of the season in early July if financial, logistical and health concerns can be worked out. In advance video clips of Saturday’s show provided by FSSE, Francoeur said he’s “hoping eventually there’s (so) much money involved from TV deals and other stuff, hopefully postseason money, that they can come to some sort of agreement.” Francoeur added: “Thirty million Americans are out of work, and they don’t want to hear a bunch of millionaires and billionaires griping at each other about money.” Glavine said there is “an equal amount of pressure” on both sides to reach a deal on the economics of starting the season. “If we don’t have baseball, baseball is going to lose, and it’s going to lose more than it did after the strike in 1994,” Glavine said. “If this thing falls apart because of economics, I think that what happened after the strike in 1994, with people swearing off the game, it’s going to be even more so this time if it happened again.” Glavine also said he “would not be the least bit surprised” if some players with preexisting medical conditions “opt out” of playing this season. “And if it’s the case, then I think their teammates need to be supportive of them,” he said. The Athletic Griffey a Pirate? Chipper a Tiger? The MLB draft rule that changed history By Stephen J. Nesbitt What if I told you that, if not for a now-defunct MLB draft rule, Ken Griffey Jr. would be wearing a Pirates cap on his Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown? And that Alex Rodriguez never would have been a Mariner, either? And that Chipper Jones would’ve gone to Detroit, not Atlanta? “Heck yeah,” Jones, the Hall of Fame third baseman, said when presented with this hypothetical earlier this week. “I play what-if games all the time.” If Major League Baseball operated its draft back then the way it does today, all of that might be true. The Pirates, by virtue of having baseball’s worst record in 1986, would have held the rights to the first pick in 1987 and selected Griffey — the kid born in Donora, Pa. He’d start between Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla in one of the great outfields the game has ever known. Griffey may have been the missing link. Maybe the Pirates would have won a World Series in 1990, 1991 or 1992. The Tigers, MLB’s worst team in 1989, would have had a chance to draft Jones at No. 1 in 1990. He’d break into the big leagues and round out a Tigers infield that already included Cecil Fielder, Lou Whittaker and Alan Trammell. “Always enjoyed my time in Detroit,” Jones remarked. “I’m sure we would have done pretty well. I’m not saying I would’ve played all 19 years with (the Tigers) like I did Atlanta, but … it would have been cool to think about being teammates with the Scherzers and Verlanders and Miggys and Brandon Inges. “I would have loved to play at old Tiger Stadium. I never got the chance.” Just like Rodriguez never called Dodger Stadium home. That’s because the top pick in 1993 didn’t go to the dead-last Dodgers. So, when Rodriguez batted .358 as a rookie in 1996, it did nothing to keep Los Angeles from another NLDS sweep. That lineup had Mike Piazza and Raul Mondesi, but no A-Rod. Of course, none of those hypotheticals happened. The Pirates lost three consecutive NLCS, lost Bonds, and continued losing for two decades. The Tigers fell apart. And the Dodgers didn’t escape the NLDS until 2008. All of that is due in part to a small yet significant draft rule retired 15 years ago. It stipulated that the No. 1 pick alternate each year between leagues. The NL drafted first in even years; the AL was first in odd years. Take Griffey’s draft, for example. The NL had drafted first in 1986 — Pittsburgh took Jeff King — and the top pick ping-ponged back to the AL in 1987. The lucky losers? The Mariners, despite having a better record than the Pirates. This rule, alternating draft order by league, lived for 41 years. It shaped the course of baseball history, and then it quietly went away. “I did not know about that rule,” Jones said, then laughed. “Not until now.” “I’ve been trying like crazy to track this down,” Allan Simpson, the man who wrote the book on the draft, said the other day. “I couldn’t find anything.” After sifting through newspaper archives and two years of Baseball America editions, Simpson simply couldn’t put a finger on why this specific draft rule was eliminated. “For the life of me, I can’t remember exactly what triggered it.” But Simpson could whittle down to when the rule changed. It was 2004. The agenda for the owners’ meetings in Scottsdale, Ariz., was packed. Over two days, commissioner Bud Selig and club owners needed to discuss Frank McCourt’s proposed $430 million purchase of the Dodgers; set a timeline for finding the Expos’ new home; levy mandatory suspensions for players who falsified their identities; consider Pete Rose’s request to lift his lifetime ban; formulate plans for a baseball World Cup; weigh the merits of beginning a baseball-only TV network; and debate whether to hold a worldwide draft. Afterward, an Associated Press story summarized the progress (or lack) on those fronts. The final paragraphs, cut from any newspaper tight on space, announced in almost throwaway fashion that the owners had voted to ditch the alternating-leagues draft rule. Beginning in 2005, draft order would be determined by winning percentage alone, regardless of league. Few fans noticed the change. The rule died as it had lived: an easily forgotten curiosity. In hindsight, however, its ripple effects are evident. More often than not, the original draft-order rule resulted in the team with the worst record in the majors not drafting first, because it wasn’t their league’s turn. In fact, in 25 of the 41 drafts under that system, the worst team picked second. This impacted not only Griffey, Jones and Rodriguez but also Darryl Strawberry, Josh Hamilton, Adrián González, Joe Mauer and many other No. 1 picks. Times the worst team picked second To make sense of the rule change requires going back to a different time and place. The 2004 owners’ meetings came on the heels of the Tigers inflicting one of the most atrocious seasons in baseball history, losing 119 games. Yet it was an even year, and by rule the NL drafted first. So, the 98-loss Padres, with the third-worst record in the majors, leapfrogged to the first pick. (The Padres would massively misfire on their selection. But more on that later.) “By that point,” Simpson said, “I’m sure (the owners) probably thought, Boy, this doesn’t make sense. This whole draft is designed to reward the team with the worst record, and it’s effectively not doing that. I think the time had come.” In baseball, the chasm between the top pick and the rest can revive or ruin a franchise. In the drafts when the worst team picked second, the total career WAR for the No. 1 pick outpaced the No. 2 pick, 747.8 to 320.2, an average of 29.9 to 12.8. For decades, the AL and NL had operated entirely separately. They were fierce rivals with their own league offices, umpires and rules regarding the DH. The two sides met in the All-Star Game and the World Series. That was it. It felt fair to both parties that the No. 1 pick would bounce back and forth. But they went even farther: Each pick in the draft alternated — odds to one league, evens to the other. But interleague play began in 1997. The AL and NL offices merged in 2000. Today, leagues have the same rules — except for the DH, so far — and the same umpires. So why did this outdated draft-order rule exist through 2005? “This will sound funny,” MLB.com’s Jim Callis said, “but so much of the draft was, ‘Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.’ I think that was a big part of it.” How much did the draft-order rule matter? Let’s have a closer look. The very first pick: Rick Monday From the start, there was disagreement between baseball’s worst team and the team that drafted first. The Mets finished at the bottom of the 1964 standings but could only watch as the Kansas City Athletics selected Monday, the college baseball player of the year, No.