SONS SHINE

               

It’s an old saw that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but it still cuts plenty of wood. For proof one needn’t look farther than the Arizona Fall League, the baseball exercise that concludes in the Phoenix area on Saturday.

                The AFL is the circuit I write about every year at this time, the minor-league finishing school with a six-week, 35-game schedule to which the 30 Major League clubs send seven of their better young prospects, usually class A or AA players between the ages of 19 and 23.  The young men play at six of the fine spring training ballparks hereabouts, mostly day games. They seem happy to be here, and with many evenings off, and being close to the fleshpots of downtown Scottsdale, who can blame them?

                It’s a good scene for spectators, too. Admission is cheap ($8 for adults, $6 for seniors), you can park right in front of the ballparks, and with an average per-game attendance of about 600 you can sit wherever you want. If you raise your voice a bit you can share your opinions with the umps, players, managers and your fellow fans.

                It’s a milieu that brings out the scout in many, including me. You may recall from past blogs that I picked  Nolan Arenado, Kris Bryant and Francisco Lindor for stardom of their AFL showings, and while it didn’t take an expert to finger those obviously talented guys you might remember me writing about David Bote, the unheralded Chicago Cubs’ chattel who scrapped his way onto the team’s Major League roster and played a key utility role with it last season.

                Applewise, you’ll recognize the names of several of this season’s AFL standouts because their fathers were Majors League standouts. One is VLADIMIR GUERRERO JR., whose dad was inducted into the game’s Hall of Fame last summer. Young Vlad, just 19 years old, came to the AFL highly touted, having thumped minor league pitching for a .331 batting average in three seasons and walking more often than he struck out, a signal achievement in this whiff-soaked baseball era. He didn’t disappoint, batting close to .500 for the first half of the campaign and still topping .350 despite a late-season slump.

                Vlad Jr. is a stocky kid, standing 6-foot-1 and weighing more than his listed 200 pounds. Weight may be a problem for him as he ages. His fielding also has been questioned, but he made a couple of nice plays at third base while I was watching. The Toronto Blue Jays, to whom he belongs, were criticized for not bringing him up last season, and they surely will in the next one.

                Another sure-fire prospect is 21-year-old TYLER NEVIN, the son of Phil Nevin, a long-time Major League player and coach. Tyler was leading the AFL in hitting at .420 as this week began and had a lot more walks (14) than strikeouts (4).  Although the 38^th player chosen in the 2015 amateur draft (by the Colorado Rockies), he wasn’t highly touted coming to the AFL, partly because of his injury history, but he’s done everything right here, both at the plate and at first base. In one game I saw he had two hits and a walk in four times at bat, stole a base, scored two runs and batted in two.  At 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds he looks the big leaguer, and he’ll be one by 2020 if not sooner.

                A third rising son is DAULTON VARSHO, whose dad Gary was a journeyman player with several teams over eight Major League seasons (1988-95). In addition to having a big-league last name he likewise has a first, having been named for the ex-Philadelphia Philly great Darren Daulton, one of his dad’s former teammates. Like Daulton, young Varsho, age 22, is a catcher, and an unusual one. He’s small for the position, his listed 5-foot-10 and 190 pounds being an overstatement, but fast, with stolen-base base ability, and  is athletic to boot. He’s from little Chili, Wisconsin, population about 200, and has spent parts of just two seasons in the minors. Catchers typically take longer to develop than other players, so he’s probably a few seasons away from the bigs, but he promises to give his Arizona Diamondbacks parent team some help at a position where it always needs it.

                A bunch of other players also showed well. Cuban-born LUIS ROBERT, 21, one of the Chicago White Sox’s young hopes, is a built-for-speed outfielder who has come on strong at the plate after a slow start, joining the league’s top-10 in hitting (at .361) at this week’s start. BUDDY REED, of the San Diego Padres’ chain, also an outfielder, is a similarly set-up kid who had three hits and a steal in one game I saw. LUCIUS FOX, 21, from the Bahamas and the Tampa Bay Rays, plays a smooth shortstop and hits heavier than his slender frame. COLE TUCKER, a Pittsburgh Pirates property, also looked good at short.

                The top prospect from my team, the Cubs, is NICO HOERNER, their first-round choice in the 2018 draft out of Stanford U. He played only 14 games in the minors last season because of injuries but still impressed here, batting over .300 most of the season. He looks to be the sort of player who does everything well but nothing superlatively. He’s a shortstop, a position at which his big team is well stocked, so he might have trouble finding a place, but he’ll play somewhere, sometime.

                It’s hard to get a line on pitchers here because they play only every fourth game or so, and then for just a few innings, but I did see a couple of likely ones. JORDAN YAMAMOTO, 22, an Hawaiian in the Florida Marlins’ system, pitched five scoreless innings while I watched. He has a curve ball that’s unusually well developed for someone his age. JON DUPLANTIER, the Diamondbacks’ top pitching prospect, has strikeout stuff, although he had good and bad innings in my presence. 

                And as always the AFL was a good time, providing me with many entertaining afternoons. Team rosters contained a Daz (Cameron, ex-MLBer Mike’s son) and a Jazz (Chisholm), a Skye Bolt (an Oakland A’s prospect) and a Kieboom, a shortstop first-named Carter. I saw a runner tag up and go from first base to second on a pop foul to the catcher and an infielder lose a ground ball in the sun (OK, it was a high bouncer).  Eleven months is too long to wait for next season.

IF THE SHOE FITS...

                Do you recognize the names James Gatto, Merl Code Jr. and Christian Dawkins? Probably not, I’d guess, even though they were found guilty of wire fraud a couple of weeks ago in the biggest trial in recent memory involving college-sports corruption.

                Truth is, though, that their anonymity is the point of this piece. Gatto and Code were low-to-mid-level minions of Adidas, the shoe company, and Dawkins was a wanna be sports agent. They were middlemen in the federal-government-exposed plot to use Adidas money to bribe college-basketball recruits to attend schools whose teams use the company’s gear.

                Allegations in the case involved such hoops giants as the U’s of Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina State and Louisville, but except for four hapless assistant coaches, who are supposed to go on trial early next year, no other coaches or other university officials were named in the case, nor were any top execs of Adidas or anyone connected with the NCAA, under whose auspices the collegiate sports-entertainment enterprise proceeds. Assistant coaches almost always take the fall in such matters; it’s part of their jobs and, probably, their job descriptions. The only head coach to be bounced as a result of the revelations was Louisville’s Rick Pitino, and he’d already accumulated a lengthy rap sheet.   

When the initial indictments were announced in September, 2017, people close to the case hinted that those were just the tip of an iceberg and that more and bigger charges would follow, possibly involving schools connected with Adidas rivals Nike and Under Armour. More than a year has passed but the smelly old iceberg remains submerged.

More head-scratching still is the theory prosecutors used to justify their actions; namely, that the victims in the case were the universities, the entities that stood to benefit most from the defendants’ schemes.  Said Robert Khuzami, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where the trial was held, “The defendants not only deceived universities into issuing scholarships under false pretenses, they deprived the universities of their economic rights and tarnished an ideal which makes college sports a beloved tradition by so many fans all over the world.” A larger load of manure rarely has been delivered in a single sentence.

 It’s no news that our universities can get their way at every governmental level in this land; just about every public official holds a diploma from one or more of them and their loyalty— especially to their sports teams— is de rigueur in matters political. That’s why the NCAA cartel has avoided the Congressional regulation and oversight it richly deserves. That its clout extends to our courts likewise should be unsurprising; judges and lawyers also love their alma maters.

  The prosecutions, however, did provide peeks into two of the seamier aspects of big-time college sports, one of which is the black market that exists in the recruiting of prime collegiate prospects. It’s widely assumed that money changes hands before some recruits sign up with good old Enormous U., but the amounts revealed in testimony and documents related to the case still were enough to startle. Brian Bowen Sr., whose son Brian Jr. was a highly prized 2016 basketball prospect, said in court that a coach from Arizona offered his family $50,000 to enroll their son, a Creighton assistant offered $100,000 plus a good-paying job for him, and one from Oklahoma State offered $150,000 in cash, $8,000 for a car and additional money to help buy a house.

 Young Bowen eventually signed with Louisville for an under-the-table $100,000 to his dad. He dropped out there after the scandal broke and transferred to South Carolina. He never played at either school and now plays professionally in Australia.

Names of nearly a dozen other players surfaced in the trial as possible bribe recipients, including those of Deandre Ayton, who was the No. 1 choice in the 2018 NBA draft after a year at Arizona, and Zion Williamson, Duke’s new hotshot freshman, but there’s little doubt that the number of players receiving payouts go well beyond those. Many top basketball (and football) prospects around the country know each other from the camps and all-star games they attend, and are in contact via texts and tweets. If Prospect A gets a dollar offer it stands to reason that he’ll clue in his buddy, Prospect B, who then will be expecting the same, or better. And why not?

Also edifying was the attention the trial focused on the links between the Big Three shoe companies and basketball from the schoolboy through the universities levels. The companies sponsor AAU kids’ teams everywhere and seek to ensnare the better prospects from there through their college days and into the pros, where the big endorsement payoffs lie for both .

Shoe money at the college level began flowing in the 1970s, with the coaches as conduits. Those ties remain, and just about every big-time college coach counts considerable shoe dinero in his compensation package. Lately, though, it’s gone far beyond that, as witnessed by the 15-year, $280 million deal Under Armour recently struck with UCLA, the $191 million, 14-year pact Adidas concluded with Kansas, and the $174 million, 15-year arrangement Nike has with Michigan. The NCAA has made noises about limiting shoe-company involvement in college-sports programs, but with sums like those involved it ain’t gonna happen, no way.

One of the amusing parts of the New York trial was testimony that described some U’s as “Adidas schools” and others as similarly bound to Nike and Under Armour. Given the size of their investments, the companies well could seek naming rights, as in, say, the Adidas University of Kansas or the University of Under Armour in Los Angeles. At the least those would have a ring of truth.