MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - 05.24.09 -  I was editing the terrific piece on Friday about the passing of Nick Adenhart (See: "The Guy Everyone Wanted to Be Around," SZ, 05.24.09), when it occurred to me that while we can see great tragedy when we mourn the dead, we are not not nearly as kind about the tragedies of the living, or concerned about how they live.

A couple of years back, we honored Mike Coolbaugh, the player-turned-recent-coach who was struck down on the field by a freak line drive accident. The accident was a heartbreaking and sad. What happened afterward was the tragedy.

Mike's death was a shock, to be sure. The tragedy in his life, though, was that a career minor leaguer with a few moments in the majors, who had played in professional baseball most of his adult life for many MLB organizations, was left without the benefits afforded to major league players because he missed enough service time "up" to be a part of the union which fought to protect major leaguers from leaving their families destitute when the rare occupational hazards of the game took them.

Minor Leaguers are still not covered by the PA for contracts or pensions. Mike left behind a pregnant wife and two, now three children. Fundraisers were held for the family, and baseball, as it slowly does, recognized that something needed to be made right in a system where one of their own fell through the gaping holes in the safety net.

The minor league baseball system depends on the youth of its players. They are expected to exhaust their talents long before their bodies give out on them. They are expected to quietly shuffle off into another career, glad that they could play the game that they love, for money, a little longer.

We honor the dead because they were struck down in their prime, and something in our collective consciousness bugs us into feeling that promise terminated as what we know as "tragedy."

Yet we are not so concerned about the living dead. The players who sit in-waiting. Waiting for a big dollar player to be traded. Waiting for a hole in the depth chart somewhere else. Waiting. MLB fans who are brainwashed into the belief that those who take the field are somehow imbued with god-like powers should see the large platoon of players sitting throughout the International League and Pacific Coast League awaiting their moment.

They might get lucky, and keep their head in the game enough to play at a level that gets them traded. More often than not though, they live with the depression of being stuck, and, sooner or later, it will start eating at their heads, and their numbers.

The problem starts at signing bonuses, which compel teams to recoup their investments in even the most mediocre players because they put a bet down on the wrong guy. It is perpetuated by a player promotion system that is broken, corrupt, and bloated with greed.

Once a player achieves "protected" status, they become one of the Untouchables. Good week or bad week, good year or bad year, they have little fear of being replaced, at least until the end of the season, because they are paid so much that to send them back to the minors, or cut them altogether would be a form of financial suicide for the team which pays their salaries.

To all who believe in the Gospel of MLB, think for a brief moment on how much mediocrity hangs around MLB, and what might happen if competition was not just between teams, but really returned to the internal operations of the ballclubs themselves. Would baseball not be measurably better for it? Consider what 2009 already shows.

273 Jobs That Should Be Up for Grabs

Of the roughly 496 pitchers identified as currently active in major league baseball for the 2009 season, 201 of them, or 40.5% have an ERA over 5.00 to the date of this writing. 5.00 is the beginning of the red zone where a minor leaguer should be able to come up and compete for that job. 40 have ERAs over 6.00; 74 have records over 8.00!

To be fair we already removed the cups of coffee and the DL-ers, with 10 or fewer innings pitched.

That leaves 120 pitchers this year whose weak work should be subject to challenge by the minor league pitching staffs. Many, who are entry level major leaguers, will be challenged, but the veterans whose play is weak will not be touched.

Josh Beckett, Mike Hampton, Juan Rincon, A.J. Burnett, Fausto Carmona, Jon Lester, Brad Penny, Carl Pavano, Randy Johnson, Sydney Ponson, Chan-Ho Park, and Scott Kazmir all are in the red zone in the early going of this season.

Are these bad pitchers? Hardly. Some are having a bad week, month or year.

If, though, there is someone else in the organization who can play better, why should the club not benefit? If these veterans can step it up and keep the younger guys out of their rotation spots, or bullpen slots, more power to them. Otherwise they should work out their issues in Greenville, not Atlanta. T

Likewise on the field, there are a lot of position players who do not produce.

There are 519 position players to date this season that have more than ten plate appearances. Elminating batters who are pitchers in the National League, you have 117 players who are batting under .220. Fourteen of them are batting under .100! Weed out several for injuries and limited time if platooning at a position, and you still end up with 100 position players whose jobs should be in play.

Higher-dollar players on the pathetic plate production rolls include: Angel Berroa, Brian Giles, Darnell McDonald, Milton Bradley, Jason Giambi, Ian Stewart, Garrett Atkins, Ronny Cedeno, Chad Tracy, B.J. Upton, Carlos Guillen, Chris Davis, Bobby Crosby, and Mark Ellis.

There are guys with pitiful averages like Lastings Milledge and Dioner Navarro, who got paid big dollars in signing bonuses and have yet to live up to a day of what they are earning.

MLB-wide, 27% of the players on the 40 man roster should have their jobs actively challenged by minor leaguers. 18% to 20% of them should spend time down in the minors to work on their issues and let better bats fill in. Players with big-dollar contracts need to be unprotected.

One Roster for All Players in MLB & MiLB

The 40 Man Roster is archaic. Everyone who has a contract from an MLB club should be on one roster. This would also end the two drug testing systems that create ample room to cheat.

Every last player in professional, MLB or MLB-affiliated baseball should be a member of the Players Association. It is doable.

Those who are actively playing in the major leagues play at one pay and benefits tier, and those who play in the minors get compensated and get benefits according to how high up in the system they play.

Your job is only as secure as your ability to produce. If your ERA rises too high, or in the case of the position players, your batting average sinks too low, you may be playing in pinstripes, but the name on the door will say Scranton, not New York.

Nick Adenhart got his shot because the Angels were sacked with pitching injuries. Injury is the only real showcase entry into MLB after the season starts. Virtually nobody is sent down

Nick had a great outing that indicated that he was probably ready for prime-time pitching.

What, though, exactly were the Angels going to do with him if he continued to shine that way, and guys like Escobar get healthy?

At best, they would push down some other low-salary pitcher with a contract that allows them to realistically be sent down, even if Escobar or Santana or whomever came back to really suck wind for the remainder of the season.

At worst, they would return Adenhart to Salt Lake, as they do many players, to sit and wait for their moment to become the overpaid, the protected.

Contracts need to be reworked to allow for such movement. Play for pay. If you can produce, then you are worth whatever was negotiated for you as a major league rate. If you underperform, you go to the minor leagues and get compensated at another negotiated rate.

Players have always feared that owners would use such flexibility to punish, warehouse, and otherwise misuse the system to their economic benefit. Properly done, though, with the owners and PA negotiating this new system, particularly in these days of established salary arbitration systems that were not in place in the pre-free agency days, that should not pose much of a problem. It has worked in hockey. There is no reason to expect that it would not in baseball.

Taking Care of Our Own

The players in Minor League Baseball who entertain 41 million Americans are still exploited. This needs to stop.

The Mike Coolbaughs of the world should not have to have their families be out there doing fundraisers to make sure that the family is taken care of. Coolbaugh and others put in exceptional service to professional baseball, and they should have some safety net for the years that they played in front of hundreds of thousands of fans and kept themselves in reserve for major league service at the highest levels of the minors.

There should have been more opportunity for Mike, and for others in Triple-A to effectively challenge the veterans at MLB clubs. What you make should not be the determining factor in a major league slot, as it is now. How well you play should be the bottom line.

This is particularly true as both Bud Light and the cronies, er, owners are trying to bring excitement back to the game without the juice. A more competitive system that challenges players internally is exciting for fans to watch and good for the game of baseball.

Everyone plays harder, and, whether its Pittsburgh or Peoria, more fans turn out to see players on their way up, players resolving career crises, and players on their way down.

My condolences go to the departed, but my sympathies lie more with the living who end up stuck at Triple-A in a baseball system so horribly broken.

My shiny two.