The early hook for Stephen Strasburg wasn't the only big event for the Washington Nationals on Saturday night, as it turns out.  During the middle of the ninth inning, Washington Nationals center fielder Nyjer Morgan (apparently; the incident seems not to have been caught on camera) threw a baseball into the crowd, hitting one of the paying customers.

While it's not known whether Morgan had anyone in particular in mind or, if so, whether the attendee he hit was his intended target, Major League Baseball announced moments ago that he's been issued a seven-day suspension for the action.  The announcement was made by Bob Watson, MLB's vice president of on-field operations.

If you're wondering why you still see Morgan's name in the Wednesday evening lineup, it's not an accident:  he's decided to file an appeal, as permitted by MLB rules.  Thus, Morgan's suspension, according to the MLB announcement, "will be held in abeyance until the process is complete."

And should you be itching to hear Morgan's side of the story, we are right there with you.  No word yet, though, on when the appeal will be heard.

      

This Hutch has forever wanted to nod wistfully when baseball pundits celebrate the "human factor" that would, they say, be erased from baseball if instant replay were ever brought to the game (further than it already is, now that it has a toehold).

Wanting is not the same as doing.  Our would-be nostalgia is overshadowed by our disgust at the absurdity of the core argument -- for the "human factor" seems only to be celebrated when the umpires get it wrong.

Should baseball install modern technology to help the umpires do their jobs better?  Oh, my, no, cry the purists.  That'd remove the "human factor."

Rubbish.  When Major League Baseball itself practically admits the current system isn't working -- to the point where the chief of an umpire crew is grilled at a press conference -- it's time to do something to improve it.  That something is video review, somewhat imprecisely termed "instant replay."

The reflexive argument against replay is that it would slow down the game.  (Look how long it takes now to review a disputed home run call.)

Fine.  As a politician might say, you don't end it, you mend it, in this case adapting the challenge rule from the NFL.  Here's how it could work.

Suppose a baserunner hustles home and, in the view of the home-plate umpire, just eludes the tag of the catcher and is thus called safe.

Now suppose further that the opposing manager disagrees.  At present, the manager's lone option is to climb out of the dugout and bellyache at the umpire for a while.  Rarely does this avail anything other than the occasional ejection of the manager.

Suppose, instead, that the manager simply tosses his cap out in front of the dugout:  challenge.  The play promptly goes to review.

If, upon review, the baserunner is judged to have been out, rather than safe as first called, then the decision is corrected, an out is added to the board, and the game moves along.

If, on the other hand, the original decision is allowed to stand -- that the baserunner was safe -- then the opposing team, which issued the challenge, is charged with an out.  In this case, when the challenging team comes to bat, they'll start their half of the inning with one out against them.

Turn it around and suppose the baserunner had been called out in the first place, and the baserunner's team's manager issues the challenge.  If the decision gets reversed, then the situation gets put right and the baserunner's team gets a tally added to its score.  If the decision stands, then the baserunner's team is charged with an additional out for the failed challenge.

Since there are only twenty-seven outs in a regulation game, the challenge would, it seems to us, be judiciously exercised most of the time.  Even if injudiciously exercised, the additional outs charged as a result of unwise challenges would be a self-correcting mechanism that would speed up the game, not slow it down.

More to the point, a significant portion of the "human factor" would be translated from the umpires to the field managers, where it belongs.  It seems a lot more fair to us that teams could lose games because of poorly chosen challenges than that they should because of poor umpiring.

We don't expect Major League Baseball even to consider whether this argument makes any sense.  But we maintain that the present imperfect system, which reduces most disputes to a shouting match, has long outlived its usefulness or entertainment value -- and that it's time for baseball officiating to move somehow into the 21st century.

      

Over at SI.com, Jon Heyman offers a less-than-joyous opinion of the state of the Stephen Strasburg negotiations:

Nationals executives are expected to travel to California soon to meet with the Stephen Strasburg camp. The vibe thus far is negative for a deal. One competing exec said, "The Nationals absolutely have to sign him."

The negative vibe is no news; Strasburg's agent, Scott Boras, has been pistol-whipping the Nats -- and, by extension, all of Major League Baseball -- with his salary demands and his threats to whisk Strasburg off to Japan if they don't get what they want.

And, of course, the Nationals don't absolutely have to do a damned thing except field some semblance of a team 162 times a year.  We expect that they would like that team to be more than a semblance, and that they envision Strasburg as a long-term part of that team.

But if they put $20 million on the table and Strasburg walks away from it, the sun will rise the next morning.

      

As we've been suspecting might happen soon, and probably will happen more than once, a National Hockey League team has gone broke.

The Phoenix Coyotes, coached and partially owned (at least until yesterday) by NHL Hall of Fame forward Wayne Gretzky, look to be headed to Gretzky's native southern Ontario. Notwithstanding NHL Commissioner deputy commissioner Bill Daly's lip service to the team's Arizona fans, there is zero chance that the league -- having seized the team from principal owner Jerry Moyes subsequent to its recent bankruptcy filing -- will fail to move the team to a more attractive venue for attendance and revenues if it deems it necessary.

Although it would seem somehow appropriate for the team to return to Winnipeg, which boasts a shiny new arena, it sounds like Ontario-based BlackBerry mogul Jim Balsillie enjoys the advantage, with -- at least to hear him tell it -- a $200+ million offer in hand.

If you wonder why NHL teams like the Capitals are boosting their marketing and customer-care efforts, consider that Moyes has not been alone in suffering financial hardship from his hockey operations. And we would be astounded if Caps owner Ted Leonsis has ever earned a cent of profit.

Not that Leonsis isn't trying. If you have dealt with the ticket-sales operations of both the Caps and the Nationals, you have no doubt been astounded by the Caps' solicitousness vis-a-vis the relative offhandedness of the Nats. This is an understandable situation: Major League Baseball operators, enjoying (thus far) streams of media revenue that the NHL hasn't been able to exploit, can afford for the moment to remain relatively aloof from their customers.

How long will the moment last? It might be for a while.

As your grandparents could vouch, Pennsylvania Railroad paid dividends every quarter for over a century. That was an achievement that the haughty Pennsy was able to boast as recently as 1967, even as ridership had been in a two-decade tailspin.

The perpetual money machine turned out presently to fall somewhat short in longevity, merging in 1968, going broke in 1970 and disappearing completely from the scene in 1976.

Can't happen to MLB, of course, and certainly not here.

      

A few months ago this Hutch began to reflect on whether baseball could remain sheltered from the currents that have been roiling other industries.

Recent events portend a murky near-term future, at least for a couple of teams. If the ability to coax communities to pony up dollars for shiny new ball parks is any indicator of team viability, then the A's and Marlins are up against it.

Bill Madden discussed the current difficulties a week ago Saturday in the New York Daily News and offered his solution:

. . . Baseball has run out of places to move struggling franchises and, especially in this economy, who in their right mind would buy either the A's or Marlins with their bleak stadium situations? . . . [B]aseball can't afford to keep dumping revenue-sharing money into hopeless franchises. Like just about every other industry in this country right now, baseball is going to have to take stock of its situation and downsize. There are too many teams in baseball anyway and it makes no sense to continue operating them in places that can't or won't support them.

Washingtonians, whose city had two franchises ripped out from under it in the 20th century, shiver when they read words like that. And they will probably be reading more, such as this idle speculation at Fanhouse:

You'd think the Nationals would be a candidate [for contraction], but they just spent a ton of money to build a new ballpark, as have the Brewers, Padres and Pirates in recent memory. I can't see baseball justifying the contraction of the Royals, but they'd have to be on the short list.

Existential angst time for the Nats?  Not for a long while yet, we'd say, and certainly not in isolation.  While unforeseen catastrophe could cause baseball to crater along with a lot of other things, words like those in Fanhouse haven't yet accelerated a drumbeat for contraction -- a possibility that in fact is summarily dismissed by Rob Neyer at ESPN.

One factor to take into account is this past winter's marked shift in the degree to which high-talent players can drive the salary market.  The anxiety reportedly experienced by Manny Ramirez, as reported by Ken Davidoff in Newsday this weekend, may be extreme, but it's surely far from unique -- and if Dodgers owner Frank McCourt or GM Ned Colletti were also chewing their nails, they weren't letting on.  (By the way, scan down that Newsday item for an interesting anecdote about a 1980s encounter between two future general managers.)

We can't help but be mindful of the Nats' abysmal record in 2008, the off-field drama in the offseason just past, and the hurdles awaiting them in 2009.  But after witnessing how swiftly, and apparently well, they've executed their recent management transition and the urgent overhaul of their Dominican operations, we'd count this franchise in for the long haul.

      

Chico Harlan, the Post's Nationals beat writer, put up a good item on Nationals Journal Saturday morning: "Top Ten Questions for Spring Training."

He's right about Ryan Zimmerman's status being Question Number One. Even with all the news that's been floating around the rest of the baseball world, we expect this issue to garner increasing focus unless and until the Nats FO and Zim's agents Casey Close and Brodie Van Wagenen come to terms. Considering the breathtaking 3-year, $54 million deal that Close just got the Phillies to sign for Ryan Howard, we put the chances of Zimmerman's arb years getting bought out -- no matter how ardently the FO professes its Zim-love -- at approximately nil.

So it looks as if it will be impossible to avoid an arbitration hearing to determine whether Zimmerman will pull down the $3.9 million he wants or the $2.75 million the Nats are offering. The hell of it is that even the higher figure is not only barely a quarter of what Howard will collect this season, but probably represents less than half of Zim's marginal value (of which FJB provides an interesting discussion in the context of Nats pitchers) to his club, at least from what this Hutch calculates based on Baseball Prospectus' estimates ($) of Zimmerman's expected performance. Even at that, Zim rates to get the lower salary figure, whether because of the current economic climate (but doesn't Howard live in the same economy?) or the fact that owners historically win more arb cases than players do.

Whoever wins, it will be a Pyrrhic victory, tempered only by the hopeful notion that any money saved on a Zimmerman contract can be applied to Stephen Strasburg's signing bonus.

A question that Harlan alludes to, but does not take up directly, is this: What part of the barrel does redundant outfielder Wily Mo Pena not have the Nats FO over?

What Harlan actually brings up as Question Number Four is, "Does Jim Bowden make any trades? He's got a surplus in the outfield. . . ." Meanwhile, over at the Examiner, Brian McNally weighs in on the matter and asserts that Pena "should start the season at [triple-A] Syracuse."

He should indeed, but as a veteran with six-plus years of major league service time, he would first have to agree not to be exposed to waivers. (At least that's how we read Rob Neyer's interpretation of the MLB transaction rules. If there's an angle we're missing, we'd love to know about it.)

And should he already have had three optional assignments to the minors from various clubs' 40-man rosters, he might be unable to avoid waivers anyhow. (We now believe that not to be the case, but are having a ridiculously tough time nailing down the information.) In any event, if Pena were snapped up off the waiver wire, the Nats FO would get nothing in return unless they were able to work a quick trade with whatever team claims him -- which we see as a distinct improbability in this market.

The good news, such as it is, for the Nats FO is that Pena, based on current projections, is hugely overpaid even at $2 million.  Any team willing to take on that obligation would at least be doing the Nats the favor of freeing up more dimes for the Strasburg piggy bank.

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To no one's particular surprise in this dismal free-agent market, the Boston Red Sox, led by Wunderkind general manager Theo Epstein, have come out the victor in a staring contest with veteran catcher Jason Varitek (a Scott Boras client, no less).

It might seem at times that the Sawx are nearly invincible in bending the rest of the baseball world to their iron will.  Recall, however, that -- admittedly, absent the services of Manny Ramirez -- they were unable last October to vanquish the once-lowly Rays, who marched smartly through Boston to parlay their AL East championship into a league pennant and World Series appearance.  (Which is an example in whose footsteps the Nationals would love to follow.)

As another reminder that not everybody dances to Theo's tune, witness this year-end nugget of gossip from Peter Gammons:

Ten days after the GM meetings, Epstein called Marlins GM Larry Beinfest and asked him if he were interested in trading Hanley Ramirez for a package including [Jacoby] Ellsbury and Clay Buchholz. No, replied Beinfest. End of discussion. The entire conversation, says one club official, lasted all of 20 seconds, a week before Thanksgiving.

So much for promise:  Buchholz and Ellsbury were considered a year ago to be the two top prospects in the entire Sawx system, and earned creditable appearances with the big club in 2007.  Neither, however, lived up to his billing in 2008.

Ramirez was also a top Boston prospect at one time, but after a middling 2005 season at double-A Portland, Maine, was shipped to the rebuilding Marlins as part of a seven-player transaction.  The next time he popped up on a lot of people's radar was when he edged out the Nats' Ryan Zimmerman for National League Rookie of the Year in 2006.

Boston, for their part, got full value in the 2005 deal, picking up the players who would respectively become their ALCS MVP and World Series MVP in 2007.

It's interesting that Beinfest turned down Epstein's most recent proposal, which presumably would have got the tight-fisted Fish out from under Ramirez' current six-year, $70-million contract while giving them at least two promising guys who now earn the league minimum.

If Epstein couldn't sell a deal like this to the Marlins, we wonder if he could sell it to anybody.  Not, given his past success with the tactic, that we blame him for trying.

Help us Bring Hondo Home! Sign the petition and join the Facebook cause.

      

Here is the fractured Hutch translation, with plentiful recourse to Web language engines, of the above-headed news from the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting:

Cuban ballplayers Yadel Marti and Yasser Gomez could soon realize their dreams of playing in the Major Leagues after fleeing Cuba.

According to a telephone interview released by Channel 41 in Miami, Marti and Gomez are in New York.

Marti, 29, led the Cuban team in the first World Baseball Classic in 2006. Gomez, 28, is a fast outfielder and powerful hitter who was the Cuban league's 1997 Rookie of the Year.

The players commented that they are getting ready to join a gym to prepare themselves for professional baseball.

Gomez and Marti did not state how they arrived in New York, but indicated that they will soon be in contact with Jaime Torres, the Dominican native [agent] who represents such Cuban major leaguers as Alexei Ramirez and Dayan Viciedo of the Chicago White Sox and Yuniesky Betancourt of the Seattle Mariners.

We hope Marti and Gomez enjoy a long and happy stay in the U.S. We also hope the Nats front office is busy getting in touch with Jaime Torres.

Update: The Cuban government has little to say on the matter other than to note that Marti "arrived in New York after deserting the island" in a World Baseball Classic story purportedly from Agence France-Presse. (We haven't yet found this AFP link outside the Cuban websphere, although Google does turn up an AFP report on the players' departure from Cuba in December.)

Help us Bring Hondo Home! Sign the petition and join the Facebook cause.

      

One-time superagent Jeff Moorad, who hit the spotlight by negotiating the contract that erstwhile Tribe star Manny Ramirez signed with the Sawx in 2000, is getting his 2009 off to a busy start out West.

The man who took over the D-Backs from iconic Phoenix sports entrepreneur and Diamondbacks founding CEO Jerry Colangelo in 2004 has just stepped down from the Snakes' leadership and says he has reached an agreement in principle to buy the San Diego Padres:

Moorad said Friday he heads a small but significant group of investors that has an exclusive right to complete the specifics of negotiations with Padres owner John Moores. . . .

Moorad said he has a long friendship with Moores and his wife, Becky, whose divorce precipitated the Padres' potential sale.

What's liable to be the effect on the Padres on and off the field?

The San Diego club was fortuitously thrust into a rebuilding stance by the Mooreses' expensive divorce. While that distraction will go away as the Mooreses exit the ownership, the Padres should complete the work on making the club younger and better.  They're a good bit of the way along; only seven members of the 40-man squad are over 30.

Also fortuitously, division rivals San Francisco and Los Angeles are apparently prepared to bid themselves silly over Ramirez.  That would set back the start of the Giants' own needed rebuilding, and would hasten the onset of the Dodgers', either of which events would advantage the Padres. 

As for the Friars executive suite itself, it's too early to know what this will mean for the futures of executive vice president / general manager Kevin Towers or San Diego executive VP (and former Dodgers GM) Paul DePodesta.  Buster Olney's blog offers an interesting analysis of their situations as well as those of others within the Padres organization.

We would imagine that Towers -- perhaps best known to Nationals fans for his pointed remarks about the negotiating prowess of Nats GM Jim Bowden -- will remain a force in MLB leadership, either in San Diego or elsewhere.

And if DePodesta should suddenly hanker after another GM posting, we know of one team that could use his services.

Help us Bring Hondo Home! Sign the petition and join the Facebook cause.

      

We might be forgiven for having forgotten, but as Major League Baseball prepared a decade ago to lurch into the 21st century, the state of its financial health was a topic of much contention.

That had been the case at least since the 1994-95 work stoppage, although the juicing of balls and players coincided with a marked attendance bump in 1998.  Just a few years later, though, the Lords of the Game were pressing for the contraction of two teams from MLB before the 2002 season, supposedly to preserve the sport's economic viability.  Had that threat been carried out, it would have been the first such reduction in big-league baseball since 1900.

It could be argued, and was, that the owners' position was an attempt to gain leverage on the eve of negotiations for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. In any event, despite much wailing and hand-wringing over the better part of two years, baseball contraction didn't come to pass that time.

And seems still to be off the table. For now, anyhow.

Now flip the calendar pages to November 2008. Despite a generational -- perhaps epochal -- downturn in the North American and global economy, MLB doesn't seem to be acting as if it expects to suffer much of a hit.  (Except in south Florida, where the new Marlins stadium is being put off for yet another year -- which team president David Samson claims has nothing to do with the economy.)

Has baseball found some magical way to defy laws of economic gravity?  As SI's Jon Heyman points out, some owners may be holding off on big-bucks contracts in hopes that the free-agent market will find a more affordable level.  Even so, MLB's largely media-driven revenue model does give it a bit of a cushion, presumably easing some of the pressure to flog ticket sales or diddle prices.

Not all sports enjoy such an advantage.  Take hockey, for instance, which would seem to be in all sorts of trouble. That's understandable: as Eric Duhatschek discusses in his analysis in the Globe and Mail, the NHL depends much more upon gate receipts than do other major sports. If you're a big-league hockey owner and you're not selling those three-figure seats on the glass, good luck trying to make it up from TV and radio revenues.

With anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen NHL teams -- depending on whom you ask -- in financial binds of one kind or another, Duhatschek suggests contraction as one way to right hockey's financial ship.  (Don't look for an orderly NHL contraction any time soon, though.  Remember, this was the league that didn't just wipe out its playoffs, but shut down for an entire season, over labor-management issues.)

So is MLB under less of a cloud than the NHL?  At the moment, perhaps so.  But even if media bucks can feed the baseball machine for a while, the economy isn't liable to turn around overnight.

Maybe that should give pause to owners, players, and fans of all major-league sports. It certainly does to one of the NHL executives interviewed for Duhatschek's article:

The biggest concern is for 2010-11, says Detroit [Red Wings hockey club] general manager Ken Holland, who needs to sign four prominent unrestricted free agents next summer. The feeling is, we're living (with our heads) in the sand if we think the entire economic system in Canada and the United States can be on a major, major downturn and pro sports is going to hum along, business as usual. Somebody's dreaming if they think that, right?

Right, Mr. Holland, at least from the point of view of this Hutch. Readers, what say you?