Atlanta Braves get hit bad… Coppy gets the worst

Of all the ‘messages’ delivered on Tuesday, MLB’s harshest one was saved for John Coppolella.  And for good reasons.

The Atlanta Braves are going to be hurt for a long time… and we’ll have more on today’s events shortly.  But John Coppolella is now ejected from the sport that was his chosen profession… and short of court action, that’s not going to change.

There’s a fair question about this, though:  why the full ban from baseball?  Several people have been puzzled on that point:

Cause and Effect

There’s multiple reasons this happened, and they probably boiled down to this triple crown of bad management:

• Breaking rules signing players
• Breaking rules drafting players
• Treating people badly

The last one is going to get you hated by everyone working for you, but it won’t usually bring out the ban hammer.  The first two?  That was essentially the cause leading up to today’s events, though Coppolella seems to have over-achieved in all of them.

Alleged sins

• Tampering with players on other teams that were not free agents.
• Circumventing international signing rules in multiple years
• Offering impermissible benefits* to a US draftee in exchange for a lower signing bonus
• Reports of unilaterally changing contract language to signees to keep them ‘stashed’ at AAA
• Chaotic and reportedly hostile Front Office work environment

* – MLB’s investigation suggests these incentive were never delivered, which possibly kept a 3rd round draft pick loss from growing to a 1st rounder, as the draft pool rules would have dictated.  That finding is… surprising, but perhaps the result of MLB ‘throwing us a bone’, as it were.

Taken together, this represents a willingness to break the rules, a complete disregard of those rules, and a pattern of willful misconduct.

MLB really had no choice but to impose this death penalty on him, as he was clearly seen as the ringleader – the centerpiece of this egregious case of misconduct.

Greed went way too far.

It Could Have Been Done Right

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In fact, if you read Commissioner Manfred’s statement today, you’d learn that had the Braves opted to relinquish perhaps just 1 extra international player in the 2015-16 J2 signing cycle, they might have been able to keep many – if not most – of the players cut loose today.

Their finding was that Atlanta’s actions then should have placed them in the penalty box a year earlier.  In such a scenario, all of the high-priced signees in the 2016-17 cycle should therefore have been unavailable to them.

Thus, the $25-30 million spent on those players’ bonuses are now lost – with no recourse.

Next: At least we got new lids

Coppolella wanted to ‘win’ the competition for players badly.  Too badly.  That has now cost him his career and the Atlanta Braves have been set back multiple years Internationally.

You don’t have to spare any tears for the guilty, but it’s easy to feel for all those around him that he hurt.