Please Disregard Our Generous Offer
Kudos to The Republic's Nick Piecoro and EVT's Scott Bordow for exposing questionable tactics surrounding Tony Clark's departure from the Diamondbacks.Clark readily admits his offer was fair - he's not complaining about the money - at least not for his part time services (somewhat complicated by Arizona's refusal to offer performance bonuses). He's annoyed because he thought he had an open offer, in the bank as it were, as he shopped himself around the majors. Boy, was he wrong. Busy dealmaker Josh Byrnes decided to withdraw the proposal, without telling Clark or his agent beforehand.
Honestly, I dont know what constitutes standard practice in baseball circles regarding the shelf life or sanctity of pending offers - but proposals from reputable companies almost always have expressed or implied "reply by" dates, specifically to avoid this kind of misunderstanding - and potential lawsuits.
Clark, a veteran of thirteen seasons with five different clubs, insists he was never given a "take it or leave it" date, and the GM has not rebutted this point in his public comments. Whatever one thinks of Clark as a player, he is hardly unfamiliar with contract etiquette,and we are told his integrity is unassailable. Too classy to ever come out and say so, he feels Josh Byrnes pulled the rug out from underneath him. That this thoughtful, almost fastidiously respectful man expressed "disappointment" over the way this went down speaks volumes.
This latest escapade also evokes Kendrick pulling the rug out from underneath Wally Backman. He shook Backman's hand and gave him the manager's jersey during a televised press conference. Then, after a reporter Googled unattractive details of Backman's personal life (details any competent firm would have quietly discovered on their own), Kendrick piously dumped his new hire amid the public uproar. They didnt buy Wally out, for unnecessarily magnifying his personal troubles. No partial settlement. No consideration. Nothing. At least not according to Backman. It was a so called "gentleman's" agreement and these are the gentlemen running the Diamondbacks.
Big credit to Piecoro and Bordow for calling out the front office here - the same front office they rely on for their stories. Beneath Nick's expose are comments from the reflexive army of Sedona Red lemmings, predictably slagging one of the most intelligent, upstanding players in the game.
Hadn't Backman lied about having been convicted of DUI? I think they had a right to back out of the deal if Backman wasn't honest about everything in the interview.
As for the Clark thing, it's kinds of insulting that the team is presenting an offer for a player that everyone likes and respects and he's taking that offer and looking for a better deal before signing it. It's kind of like telling a girlfriend, "If I don't find someone better in the next year or two, you're the one, so we're engaged---kind of." There was probably a miscommunication somewhere between Clark and Byrnes. Or maybe Byrnes just changed his mind. It's like the Mets did with Al Leiter when they had a brief hiccup in negotiations for a one-year deal and Omar Minaya rethought it and said that maybe Pedro for $12 million would have more cachet that Al (at the end of his career, 115 pitches by the fifth inning) Leiter. Then we hear about "disloyalty". The multiple millions the Mets paid Leiter for all those years made them disloyal when he could no longer do the job and they wanted to move along?
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Clark wasnt the only one keeping his options open here - the difference is that Byrnes made a prior commitment. In my view, the spurned girlfriend in your analogy is Clark, not Byrnes. Byrnes dropped any understanding he had with Clark the moment he found something more attractive - and not a moment before.
Judging by the nature and sequence of Byrnes' actions, it wasnt Clark's indecision that defined the club's flexibility so much as the GM's conscience - or lack of it.
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Paul, you're a Mets fan. You knew Backman. Everyone knew he was something of a wild card with "issues". The Dbacks may not have known the extent of his legal entanglements (they probably didnt), but they surely knew plenty about Wally's volatility, his temper, his instability - he was already their employee.
Nonetheless, the new suits paraded Backman around as the man who would be their primary conduit with media, fans and players - allegedly before performing even a rudimentary background check.
I agree in principle that employers should have recourse if an applicant lies (did Wally lie in his interview?), however the notion of recourse here seemed more a crisis management loophole for the Diamondbacks to mask their own incompetence with false piety and feigned surprise.
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