The Sunday Ramble
The Cactus League is underway!
Welcome to the first Ramble of the Cactus League. Baseball was on my radio on Friday and it sounded amazing.
Thank you for your support this week as I've moved publishing platforms to the new home on Ghost. Things seem to be going well enough. I haven't broken any code or anything, so that's a success.
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Craig Brown
Knuckleballs should be outlawed in spring training. Seriously, save that action for the regular season. San Diego’s Matt Waldron floated that knuckler to get weak contact for the most part while facing the first seven batters of the Royals lineup on Saturday. Meanwhile, Royals starter Ryan Bergert was semi-efficient in his first outing, working around a single and a walk to record three outs on 12 pitches. A couple of his four-seamers were way elevated as was his slider.
He added another 10 or so pitches in the bullpen after he exited to get his work in. He seemed satisfied with his outing:
“The first (start) always feels like the biggest hump to get over. But glad to get out there, get the first one and put up a zero. Felt really good. Happy with it."
For the most part, weak contact…No swing and miss today, but that will come."
The Royals dropped the game 10-3 with the Padres doing their initial damage against Ben Kudrna, roughing him up for four runs on six hits and a couple of walks in 1.2 innings of work. Jonathan Heasley, in a return engagement with the Royals, also had a tough time, allowing two runs on three hits—including a home run—in his frame.
Statcast has finally (finally!) arrived in Surprise. As I followed along with Friday’s game, a 7-3 victory over the Texas Rangers, something really jumped out from the Savant game page:
Do you want to know how often Kolek topped 96 mph last year? Of course you do! Twice. He topped 96 mph twice. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. He hit 96 mph twice in 2025.
So Friday's outing was impressive as Kolek’s velocity was up across the board. His average four-seamer in the first inning was clocked at 96 mph. His average last season was 94 mph. His changeup was coming in hotter as well, at almost 90 mph with a lot more spin as well.
It’s early days so I’m not sure if the gun in Surprise needs a little TLC to get calibrated correctly or what, but now we have something to watch for when Kolek is back out on the mound. This could be an interesting twist as the Royals put together their rotation for the regular season.
Even as the spring slate got underway this week, the Royals are still making roster moves. They signed catcher Elias Díaz to a minor league contract.
Díaz, an All-Star as recently as 2023, is an 11-year veteran with stops in Pittsburgh, Colorado and San Diego. He shared the catching duties with the Padres last year with Martín Maldonado until they acquired Freddy Fermin from the Royals at the deadline. He's a career .247/.300/.383 hitter with an 80 OPS+. Díaz is generally considered a solid defender with a solid arm and an generally strong pop time. He's good at blocking pitches in the dirt and has worked hard to improve his framing.
I wonder how the Royals will move forward with their 26-man roster. It's possible they'll decide to carry three catchers as they manage the workload of Salvador Perez as he rotates between catcher, first base and designated hitter. Luke Maile, with the club last season, signed back with the team late in the offseason, but he was removed from the roster as he's dealing with a personal issue. Díaz provides some additional major league depth if the Royals need it.
Were you paying attention to the trainwreck that was the leadership of Tony Clark at the MLB Players Association this week? Perhaps the best way to understand the dysfunction is at it’s origin. A few months ago, we learned that Players Way, a youth baseball company owned by the MLBPA, was under federal investigation due to a whistleblower complaint.
From Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Passan last October:
The complaint accused MLBPA executive director Tony Clark of self-dealing, misuse of resources and abuse of power at the union. It also alleged nepotism in his dealings with Players Way, which he helped launch with lofty aspirations to transform youth baseball across America. At the time of the complaint, the MLBPA denied all the allegations as "entirely without merit."
Nepotism you say?
Here’s Passan and Van Natta earlier this week:
Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark resigned Tuesday after an internal investigation revealed an inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law, who was hired by the union in 2023, sources told ESPN.
That's some kind of lede.
Clark, who played for six different teams over 15 seasons, was the first former player to take the reigns of the MLBPA. He became the head in 2013, after Michael Weiner passed away from a brain tumor. Weiner was an incredibly skilled and respected attorney. Whatever Clark’s qualifications, his tenure as the chief of the MLBPA has been unremarkable as the union has pretty much been the loser in a couple of collective bargaining agreements, failing to gain any substantial concessions from ownership. The first CBA that Clark negotiated saw minimum salaries barely move while the base threshold of the competitive balance tax likewise held relatively steady.
The new chief of the MLBPA is Clark’s former deputy, Bruce Meyer. Meyer, known for an style described as “abrasive,” survived a coup attempt just over a year and a half ago.
The move by players came amid an offseason that has seen a billion-dollar decrease in spending by major league teams and the extended free agency of World Series standout Jordan Montgomery and reigning National League Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell, the latter of whom agreed to a two-year, $62 million contract with the San Francisco Giants on Monday.
Meyer is seen as an ally of agent Scott Boras and was the chief negotiator of the most recent CBA. While the rising tide is supposed to lift all boats, that wasn’t the case a couple of years ago an the players clearly wanted to make someone pay. Meyer survived as Clark, as president of the union at the time, was the only person who could dismiss Meyer.
Now Meyer was named interim head of the union in a unanimous vote.
While the timing is bad with the current CBA expiring on December 1, having Clark and the baggage that he carries out of the way for the upcoming negotiations, is a net positive. Meyer was brought in because Clark's negotiations for that first CBA was such a disappointment from the player side. Meyer’s elevation to executive director means that the status quo is holding. For now.
As a certain level of chaos surrounds the MLBPA, the owners decided this was a good moment to flex.
MLB owners have “funded a war chest” of about $75M per team to provide some “financial protection should games be lost to a work stoppage” after the CBA expires in December, according to Heyman & Sherman of the N.Y. POST…. Negotiations are “expected to begin after the regular season opens at the end of March.” MLB’s plans are “still preliminary,” but sources said that ownership is “willing to discuss significantly raising the minimum wage ($780,000 in 2026) and lowering the service time needed to reach arbitration and free agency as bargaining chips if it can get a cap in exchange” (~N.Y. POST, 2/19~).
The easiest way to boil all this down is the owners want a salary cap. The players view this as a non-starter. While it’s a good thing negotiations are set to open next month, I expect there to be little movement until after the postseason. That’s just how these things work. And barring a miracle, I do think there will be a lockout come December 1. I read somewhere that Rob Manfred doesn't want a lost season to be his legacy as he moves toward retirement. I disagree because I think Manfred is a worm who doesn't give a damn about the game. In fact, I think that Manfred would like nothing more than to break the union. I think he’s willing to sacrifice quite a bit—including regular season games—to get it done. His only concern will be ownership once the revenues cease and the war chest runs dry.
The current company line is the owners are "as united as they've never been before." That's easy to say right now, because none of them are losing money because of lost games. Once things get tight, things will get fun. Posnanski said it best:
They’ve never been united before; they’ll never be united again. These billionaires with entirely different motivations and incentives cannot possibly be united because they are all used to getting their way, and they all want different things. You think John Fisher wants the same thing as Steve Cohen? You think Hal Steinbrenner is on the same page as Bruce Sherman?
Sigh. We're going to get a full season of all of this off the field nonsense. My advice is to enjoy every moment you can at the ballpark this summer.
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