Blame It On Rijo

Just leave Michael Caine out of it. The axe has finally, officially fallen on Nats Special Assistant to the GM Jose Rijo, Washington's man in the Dominican and the linchpin of the Smiley "Carlos Daniel Paul Reubens von Hauptmann Alvarez Lugo" Gonzalez fiasco. Also gone is Rijo's aide-de-camp Jose Baez, day-to-day manager of Rijo's Dominican Baseball Academy and Home for Overaged Boys.

Taking their place is Fernando "Un" Ravelo, current GM of the Tigres del Licey baseball club in the DR. Potential GM-in-waiting Mike Rizzo is on the island firing Rijo and scouting new homes for the Nationals' scaled-down Dominican operations. Nationals Farm Authority has a more, ummm, authoritative take on the repercussions of these moves, but if Brian's generally on board, it's all fine by me.

Was Rijo a big enough target to buy Trader Jim a little more time? I don't know, and you don't know, but what worries me is the that Stan Kasten and the Lerners may not even know yet. Indecision and in-fighting are such attractive qualities in an ownership group.

Your 2009 Washington Nationals: Desperately hoping the team improves enough to distract from the off-field donkey show already in progress!

News That Isn't New

Whatever Jim Bowden's myriad shortcomings, the man must be able to sell sports magazines. Once again he's headlining an SI.com article on bonus-skimming in the Dominican Republic, even though the article itself is mostly about Jorge Oquendo, an MLB scout who worked for Bowden and David Wilder, the first MLB exec to be fired as a result of the bonus-skimming probe. According to Sports Illustrated, Oquendo is the "link" between Bowden and Wilder by virtue of having worked for both men at different times.

That's fine, as far as it goes, but it does very little to support the headline of the article. Beyond that, there's very little about Bowden that wasn't in Melissa Segura's July 2008 piece on this same topic. If SI can recycle it's reporting, I see no reason why I can't recycle my response:

This is not a defense of Jim Bowden or Jose Rijo. If they, or anyone else, skimmed so much as a dollar of this kid's money, they deserve whatever terrible deserts they get. This is a critique of sloppy journalism, which is even less forgivable when the issues involved are hardly matters of life and death. Anonymous sources and insufficient context make for bad reporting. Bad reporting forces me into the position of having to defend Jim Bowden. And I hate defending Jim Bowden.

As usual, Ryan gets to the point in the most entertaining way possible.

Sigh.

And it was shaping up to be such a nice spring too. Now no matter what happens, who plays well, who gets hurt, who earns a job or gets traded, THIS is the story of the spring for the Nats. It's not just Lugo/Gonzalez's reverse-Benjamin Button routine. It's Rijo and the buscones, Bowden and the Feds, Kasten and the Lerners and who knew what when. It's sordid and seedy and almost certainly criminal, but it's also more than a little sad.

This implicates the whole scouting staff from Bowden and Rijo on down. Kasten and the Lerners get dragged in if it turns out that any of this mess is the reason why the Nats have been less involved in the international market over the last few years. It casts doubt on the only tangible evidence of that international presence, the two DSL championship clubs the Nats have fielded. For a team that preaches building from within and doing things the right way, it hurts twice as bad.

Several other shoes have yet to drop, and we may never know the full extent of the corruption, complicity and incompetence. It's irrelevent to me whether JimBo or Rijo or some scout or a few folks in the MLB front office get fired. The damage to the organization has been done, and a public reputation flogging won't undo anything. Frankly, I'm not sure Jim Bowden has any reputation left to lose.

It's Spring Training and I don't want to hear about this $#!%. Is this what it feels like to be a Yankees fan at this time of year?

UPDATE: Hell hath no fury like a Stan Kasten scorned. If the team knew about these rumors by the winter of 2006-07, why bring the "kid" to the GCL? No doubt we haven't heard the last of this.

The Best Shortstop $1.4M Can Buy?

According to SI.com, the FBI/MLB investigation into Jim Bowden and Jose Rijo is centered on the 2006 signing of then 16-year old Dominican shortstop Esmailyn "Smiley" Gonzalez, and the attending $1.4M signing bonus. Another raft of unnamed sources suggest that Bowden and/or Rijo and others may have skimmed some of the signing bonus money to line their own pockets.

Former Nats WaPo beat writer Barry Svrluga did a must-read series on baseball in the Dominican Republic in late 2006. He described a system where major league teams are held captive by sometimes unscrupulous coach/agents known as buscones. The buscones are the conduit through which talented young Dominican ballplayers reach the minor leagues. In return they collect up to 50% of the players' signing bonuses and kickbacks to coaches, agents and academy directors, if not commonplace, are hardly shocking. The Gonzalez signing was Washington's first major foray into this marketplace and a highly publicized feather in the cap of the front office.

Even given the widely acknowledged quasi-corruption in the Dominican play acquisition system, the theory outlined in the SI piece suffers from at least one serious problem: Esmailyn Gonzalez and his parents say that he received every dime he was owed under the contract. From the article:

[Gonzalez] says he received the entire sum he signed for. He also tells SI.com that he paid his buscon, Basilio Vizcaino, and his agent, Rob Plummer, their due percentages and that he has not been cheated out of any money. "Gracias a Dios [Thanks be to God], that didn't happen to me. The people I trusted didn't cheat me."[...] Gonzalez's mother, Ana Mercedes Marte, says she received the full amount of the bonus in Dominican pesos and remembers people stopping by their house to collect their money for their role in coaching her son.

There are certainly ways to spin the above quotes. The Gonzalez family is relatively poor and uneducated. Would they even notice the absence of part of the bonus money, considering the acknowledged payouts and the conversion from US dollars to Dominican pesos? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, when the subject of the article flatly contradicts the premise of the article, that's hardly building from a rock-solid journalistic or legal foundation.

I have a few other quibbles with the piece. The author suggests that the Nats overpaid for Smiley, and justified that excess by overhyping him as a 5-tool player. In support the article quotes an anonymous executive from another club, who says Gonzalez "doesn't run all that well, [and] has an average arm." A player evaluation dispute? Stop the presses! And did the Nats overpay? Sure they did, and they all but said so at the time. The Gonzalez signing was about sending a message to the buscones as much as it was about acquiring the next great Dominican shortstop. A little context and historical perspective would go a long way.

For example: The overpaid, overhyped Esmailyn Gonzalez had a league average OPS in 33 games with the Gulf Coast League Nationals as a 17 year old last season. In 15 GCL games this season he's hitting 397/462/552, out OPSing the league by more than 300 points. And he's 8-11 in stolen bases on his young career.

Finally, the article recounts a meeting at "the exclusive Capital Grille steakhouse in Washington, D.C.". I've been to the Capital Grille and if I've been there, it ain't terribly exclusive.

This is not a defense of Jim Bowden or Jose Rijo. If they, or anyone else, skimmed so much as a dollar of this kid's money, they deserve whatever terrible deserts they get. This is a critique of sloppy journalism, which is even less forgivable when the issues involved are hardly matters of life and death. Anonymous sources and insufficient context make for bad reporting. Bad reporting forces me into the position of having to defend Jim Bowden. And I hate defending Jim Bowden.

I Hate Defending Jim Bowden

I am not a Jim Bowden fan. I firmly believe that the few things he does well are outweighed by the many, many things he does poorly. Yet I find myself sometimes defending Jim Bowden only because so many of his detractors refuse to settle for highlighting his reasonably damning record, and launch into fits of hyperbole that border on the invocation of Godwin's Law.

I hate defending Jim Bowden, but I also hate anonymous sources in sports journalism. ESPN is reporting that Bowden and Assistant GM Jose Rijo are being investigated by the FBI and MLB for activities connected with the signing of international free agents. The only sourced quotes in the entire piece come from Jim Bowden. I freely admit that there are issues and circumstances where granting anonymity to sources sheds light on issues of national concern and advances public discourse. I just happen to believe that ESPN doesn't cover those issues, even on the front page.

If Jim Bowden is involved in a kickback scheme with scouts, agents and international players then he's an awful person and deserves to be fired. But that really has nothing to do with any other aspect of his job. The gap between being a pompous, irritating, generally bad GM and being a felon is larger than the gap between being an amateur sports blogger and a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist. If Bowden were to be mixed-up in criminal activity then he should be axed immediately, even if he was a Billy Beane-like dealmaker and all-around swell feller.

Modified from M. Layton/Getty Images

In the meantime, until someone is willing to put a name and an accusation together in the public record let's all please step back from the precipice and ease up on the hyperventilating. The truth will out soon enough. In the meantime, brother can you spare a first baseman?

UPDATE: Pretty strong denial from JimBo and JoRijo. Doesn't sound like there's going to any gray area here when things shake out.