Billy Eppler has not been fired as general manager of the Mets, because he actually resigned October 5th.
But he won’t be involved in baseball this year: Rob Manfred placed him on the ineligible list through the end of the 2024 baseball season.
Sadly, it’s just a year, not “permanently ineligible“, which is my favorite form of ineligible.
Prithee, good sir, you may ask. Why the suspension?
…he directed the team to fabricate injuries to create open roster spots…
Manfred said in a statement that Eppler directed “the deliberate fabrication of injuries; and the associated submission of documentation for the purposes of securing multiple improper injured list placements during the 2022 and 2023 seasons.”
The scheme involved fabricating injuries for up to a dozen players, sources told ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. Sources also said that an anonymous letter from within the organization tipped off MLB.
At least he is not Pete Rose, probably the most competitive person who ever played the game. That he betted on baseball games, while knowing that it was illegal is reason enough to permanently ban him from, well pretty much the Hall of Fame?
One has to wonder if they will vote him in after he is dead, just as a sort of stab in the heart to his fans. I certainly do not condone the things he did. A question that comes to mind is, why is the record for most homeruns in a season not still 61? * or not, I don’t think that Roger Maris was even in the same league as those who used “performance enhancing drugs”.
If I had chosen to use steroids in high school, since I had several offers of football scholarships from smaller colleges, I have to wonder if I could have gone to a larger college, with greater possibilities. Heck, I even batted .400 in my senior year of baseball. I bet drugs could have made me even better. Of course, my gonads might have shrunk but apparently that was a price that many, many men have paid. Lyle Alzado comes to mind.
That a GM would manipulate the system by cheating is unheard of. Oh, unless you look at how they screw the minor league players by keeping them from getting ahead by how many games they play at the major league level. Among many other things.
I guess that my love of baseball started to fade when they started to make changes to allow for both more scoring and stolen bases, and for shorter games by having a “Pitch Clock”. The one thing that baseball always had going for it was that there was no clock, and you could relax and just watch the game play out the way it was meant to be. The DH rule? I always hated that too. Now the National League is using it. I wonder how long it will be until we see a 50 year old DH playing? Or maybe like they did for Babe Ruth, have a ghost runner for Aaron Judge when he gets too old to run the bases.
Rant over, have a great weekend.