No angel.
Two and a half years ago, Josh Hamilton left. He said at his glitzy Disney presser in Anaheim, which starred the slugger and his wife, that the Rangers’ decision not to lock him up before he shopped around as a free agent was a “blessing in disguise” that led him to the Angels, and he added: “I’m so excited to hear an organization say we’re happy we got you, no matter what the risk is.”
No matter the risk.
Mm-hmm.
Last night’s loss wasn’t the worst of the young Rangers season, under any objective measure, but it still bothers me a lot this morning, and not just because it busted up the L-W-L-W-L-W-L sequence that teed the game up or because Ross Detwiler couldn’t make his team’s early offensive explosion stand up. There’s schadenfreude, and then there’s schadenfreude, and I wish a whole lot of failure on the Los Angeles organization now, more than I ever have.
I admit that that December 2012 press conference gave me a good amount of closure on what was an imperfect but extraordinary career in Texas for one of the two or three best baseball players I’ve ever watched play. The things he said — and the things Katie said — made it fairly easy to feel OK about his departure, even to a division rival.
But now I feel bad for the guy, who’s battling a sickness I’m not going to pretend to understand, and whose organization — the baseball team that gave him a quarter billion dollars to help them find the playoffs again, “no matter what the risk is” — is doing everything it can to blame him for its own badly miscalculated decision to assume that unmistakable risk.
After that introduction to the Los Angeles press, which was nationally televised, I wrote a little bit about that closure it gave me:
But when he said at his Hollywood premiere yesterday that it would have been easy and comfortable to stay in Texas, and that sometimes you just need to be taken out of your comfort zone so you can impact a whole lot of lives in a different place, well, yeah.
It was a blessing in disguise, he said on Saturday, that Texas didn’t jump out early in the winter to sign him (which his wife is “so glad” about).
I’m not sure I’m buying the disguise part. Maybe “time to move on” really was a post-Thanksgiving revelation, a “blessing” that came to him masquerading as not-enough-love. Maybe none of that occurred to him until the last few weeks.
He made $28.2 million in five years here. He’ll make $125 million in five years there. I’m not going to say those numbers will end up looking backwards in terms of the production he provides, but I’m sorta confident about which team will have gotten the better deal.
I won’t boo him when he comes to Arlington in April.
But I won’t stand up and cheer his return, either.
He’s just another Los Angeles Angel now.
Except he’s not even that anymore.
The Angels didn’t put a locker up for Hamilton in spring training, while he was in Houston rehabbing his shoulder and possibly dealing with another substance abuse relapse.
(We still don’t know who leaked the relapse story. According to Sports Illustrated, the players’ union “condemned anonymous leaks of Hamilton’s relapse, saying they were ‘cowardly’ and undermined the ‘integrity of our collectively bargained agreements and in some instances have been wholly inaccurate,’” but MLB Commissioner reportedly declined to investigate whether it was the Angels themselves who released the confidential information.)
They didn’t put a locker up for Hamilton this spring, and they haven’t put one up in Anaheim, either. They needed the space, of course. Plus they’ve apparently pulled all Hamilton merchandise from their stadium gift shop.
Classy.
The Angels reacted with nothing but indignation when it was announced last week that Hamilton wouldn’t be suspended by the league for his relapse. If he’d been a .305/.363/.549 hitter with the Angels, averaging 28 homers and 101 RBI a season with them like he did in Texas, they’d be celebrating the due process that kept him on the field and praising him for self-reporting his apparent slip.
But .255/.316/.426 with 16 and 62 looks a lot different, especially at more than four times the AAV, and instead the Angels said publicly that the ruling “defie[d] logic” and, asked if he would play another game for them over the three years that remain on the contract the club aggressively offered him, owner Arte Moreno (who reportedly hasn’t spoken to Hamilton in six months) responded, simply: “I will not say that.”
And that’s apparently because the Angels — who denied at the time of the December 2012 signing that Hamilton’s contract contained any language holding the club harmless in the event of a drug relapse — are now claiming that the contract did contain provisions along those lines after all and may try to enforce them . . . even though the players’ union points out that any such provisions, even if contractually bargained between team and player, are trumped by the CBA and unenforceable.
“We do have recourse,” Moreno told reporters late last week, adding — ironically — “when you make an agreement, you need to stand up.”
Bill Shaikin (Los Angeles Times), calling a “divorce [between the Angels and Hamilton] inevitable,” suggests that aside from the “nasty fight” that the Angels organization could pick with the union, the club could freeze the player out once his shoulder is sound by parking him on the bench. “Hamilton would get his full salary,” Shaikin points out, “but Moreno would make his displeasure clear with every lineup card in which the outfield was manned by three other guys. The union already is prepared for this possibility.”
Hamilton’s teammate Hector Santiago, a veteran lefthander who spent only 2014 with the 33-year-old outfielder, told Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register: “It’s weird for me. This is my ninth season and it’s the first time I’ve seen someone on the DL not in the clubhouse. I have no idea (why). That’s why it’s such a weird thing. When we go to Houston [this coming weekend,] is he allowed in our clubhouse? I feel like he’s part of the team, so why isn’t he here?”
Right.
There are reports that Hamilton “is not expected” to visit the visitors’ clubhouse when the Angels are in Houston, where Hamilton is still rehabbing and staying at a friend’s house. Manager Mike Scioscia told reporters “hopefully we’ll connect with him face-to-face” but “seemed to have no idea whether that would happen.” One Angels official told Mike DiGiovanna (Los Angeles Times) that Hamilton had “not yet made any overtures to [the] club about stopping by [the] clubhouse during [the] Astros series.”
I don’t know the answer to Santiago’s question of whether Hamilton is allowed in the Angels’ clubhouse, but would you stop by if you were him, given what the organization has said loudly and on the record? Would you make overtures? Would you feel welcome?
The Angels expressed their level of support of Hamilton and what he’s going through by not having enough space for a locker in the room that belongs to the players. They’ve made it so a fan in Anaheim can’t show his or her support by buying a new jersey or T-shirt with his name on it. They’ve taken his banner down from the main entrance at Angel Stadium.
C.J. Wilson (whose banner was also taken down, following a season that the Angels must have felt was unworthy of the money they decided to promise him) told the Los Angeles press that there’s tension in the room about the Hamilton situation, adding: “It doesn’t seem like any bridges are being built — it seems like a fairly contentious situation. . . . No one is talking to us about it. We’re supposed to stay out of the loop. But it’s fairly obvious what their intentions are.”
Wilson is the Angels’ player representative. He was voted into the position by his teammates.
While Angels players may want to see their struggling teammate in the clubhouse, there are obviously others in that organization not so hot on the idea, having taken every step possible to distance themselves from the player and expressing outrage that he wasn’t suspended (which would have relieved the club of some portion of the $83 million they’re still on the hook for).
If Los Angeles screwed up in its assessment of the risk and evaluation of the player and the determination of the contract it was willing to obligate itself to pay, then wear it. Don’t dump on the player and complain that you can’t abandon him financially as you have in every other sense. Assumption of risk.
It’s really disappointing if I’m an Angels fan, or an Angels player.
I’m guessing it’s disgusting and pathetic to a lot of the rest of us.
The level of support Los Angeles is showing sends a firm message not only to its young players, and to future free agent targets, but also to the fan base the club surely will expect loyalty from when the team hits its next dry spell, which may be a year or two away but can’t come soon enough for me.
I half-jokingly suggested on Facebook a couple days ago that if the Rangers happened to have shelves of Hamilton merchandise packed away in storage that they should box it all up and donate it to Los Angeles-area shelters. That will never happen, because the Rangers have too much decency to show another organization up.
Texas would never remove a player’s locker, or pull his merchandise or banner, regardless of what he was rehabbing from.
Aside from the good old competitiveness of wanting your team to win every time it takes the field — one of those things that makes sports great — I don’t think I’ve ever wanted so badly to see another team lose. And it’s because of something, sadly, that runs completely counter to the thing that may make sports greater than anything else, at least for me, and that’s the meaning and the power of team, a concept that should run not only horizontally, but vertically as well.