You’ll hear it a million times this year, whether sitting at your local sports bar, in the seating bowl at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, or on the sports yak stations:
DEY SHOULD JUST SEND DAT BUM DOWN, HON!
Sometimes, when a guy is struggling, you can send him to the minors. Sometimes though, you can’t. Part of the business of baseball is that contracts include a certain number of “minor league options,” or times that a player can be sent down to the minor leagues without having to pass through waivers first.
One common misconception is that a player uses up an option every time they get sent down. If that were the case, Dan Duquette and Buck Showalter would have exhausted Kevin Gausman’s options over the span of about a month last year.
It’s one option per YEAR. Once an option is used on a player, they can be sent down as many times that season as the organization wants (again, much to Kevin’s chagrin) without using up another option. So if a player has say, three options remaining, and gets sent to the minors in April, then again in June, then again in August, they still have two options remaining when Spring Training starts next year.
So, with that in mind, here are the Orioles with less than five years of service time who are out of options as 2015 begins:
Brad Brach
Zach Britton
David Lough
Brian Matusz
Jimmy Paredes
Travis Snider
Chris Tillman
Now, veteran players (those with 5+ years of service time) are in a slightly different boat. Veterans have the right to decline a minor-league assignment, or to opt out of it at any time. When they do that, they must be placed on waivers, and other teams can claim them. So, assigning a vet to the minors is a dicey proposition, even if they didn’t use up all their options early on in their career.
That’s why you hear the term “Designated for Assignment” or “DFA” thrown around. Veterans must be designated for assignment, at which point the team has 10 days to trade, release, or place the player on waivers. If they choose to place them on waivers, AND they clear, THEN they can be placed in the minor leagues.
But they can still opt out and force their release at any time.
This becomes problematic when a guy is signed for a lot of money for several more years. As pertains to the Orioles, a guy like say, hmmmmm, oh how about Ubaldo Jimenez?
Jimenez would seem to be out of options, having used them all up when he was with the Colorado Rockies. Even if he has one left though, he is still a veteran. So, he cannot be simply “sent down.” Additionally, remember that baseball contracts, unlike football contracts, are fully guaranteed.
So, say Ubaldo does have an option left, and the Orioles try to use it to send him to Norfolk. If he were to force his release, the the O’s would still be on the hook for the remaining three years and ~$40 million of his contract; they’d be paying him to either sit at home or work for somebody else.
Basically, the only way veteran player can end up in the minors without being DFA’d is to go on a rehab assignment following an injury. So, last year, Jimenez apparently stepped in a hole in the OPACY parking lot, hurt his leg, and was placed on the 15-day DL. After that, he went on a rehab assignment. However, the O’s couldn’t keep him there indefinitely, so they brought him up and stuck him in the bullpen.
(According to this article, rehab assignments can last up to 30 days for pitchers, 20 days for position players.)
This is why Dan and Buck place such value on the players they acquire having minor league options remaining – it gives them the most possible flexibility in a sport where player contracts are, by design, quite inflexible. It’s why they kept guys like Josh Stinson and Evan Meek around last year. It’s why Brach may not be quite as valuable in their eyes as he was a year ago. It’s why Paredes will have a hard time cracking the 25-man roster this year, despite his strong spring.
And, it’s why things are rarely so simple as “SEND DAT BUM DOWN, HON!”
Thanks to the fine gentlemen at Bird’s Eye View for helping sort through this murky issue.
