When Animals Attack!

So here’s the situation in a nutshell:

Baseball team has two utility players, neither of whom are particularly adept when batting or fielding. Still, both are Proven Veterans™ and were around when their team came out of nowhere to win a division title. So good feelings abounded. But both of them were slated for free agency this off-season, and next spring -- with the team’s every-day shortstop back in action -- there will be room for only one of them.

Player A’s agent made it crystal clear that he wanted to return to the club; Player B’s agent didn’t exercise a one-year, $1.1-million option and waited for the club to make an offer.

Boring, right? A couple of utility infielders, neither of whom are likely to play a meaningful role for a good team ever again?

Except Player A is John McDonald, Player B is Willie Bloomquist, Willie Bloomquist’s agent is Scott Boras, and Scott Boras might have just cost Player B a few million dollars.

Which gave us this delicious passage from Nick Piecoro’s account of the whole affair:

Boras says his side expressed “manifest intent to return” via the letter and the Chiamparino phone call and shouldn’t be expected to explicitly state “the price and the years.”

“Is it our duty to be in touch with them every hour on the hour so we know nobody else signed?” Boras said. “When you want someone, you go get them. We’re not the employer. They offer the contracts and pay the money. We don’t.

“It sounds to me like what happened is, they got upset when Willie opted out. They got emotional and they went out and signed a guy who hit .169.”

That’s just mean!

And not completely fair, either. John McDonald did hit .169 after joining the Diamondbacks in August, but before that he hit .250 for the Blue Jays. And it’s not like Willie Bloomquist is exactly Boog Powell out there.

Boras does have a point, though.

As lousy a hitter as Bloomie is, McDonald’s significantly worse. There are 381 players with at least 2,000 plate appearances in this century; McDonald is 380th on the list. Essentially, and I write this with all due respect, John McDonald should never be allowed to bat in a major-league game that’s not already been decided.

What McDonald can do, though, is field. Even at 37, he’s a good shortstop and a better second baseman. Meanwhile, Bloomquist is passable at both positions. He does play the outfield, which McDonald doesn’t. This would probably make Bloomquist highly attractive to Tony La Russa, but most managers just don’t have much use for guys who can (sort of) play six or seven positions.

The truth? Both McDonald and Bloomquist are a dime a dozen. There will be a dozen players in the Pacific Coast League next summer who can field like McDonald and hit and play six positions like Bloomquist. And they’ll do it for (roughly) a third the money.

You should read the whole piece, and decide for yourself if the Diamondbacks should have been a bit more patient. But I don’t really buy Boras’s claim that Arizona’s front office “got emotional” ... Would anybody really get all that emotional about Willie Bloomquist, or John McDonald? I think what’s more likely is that Kevin Towers just figured it really didn’t matter much which of them he signed, so he might as well take the first one who seemed to give a damn.