The earth. It is scorched. It is salted. Bridges were built upon it specifically so that they could be burnt. There is no going back. The Angels have made it very clear, they’ve had enough of Josh Hamilton and his days as an Angel are done. Arte Moreno hasn’t said exactly that, but he may as well have when he emerged from hiding to address the Hamilton situation himself rather than continue to operate John Carpino’s marionette strings.
Moreno pointedly declined to say that Hamilton would play another game for the Angels.
“I will not say that,” Moreno said before the Angels’ home opener, a 4-2 loss to the Kansas City Royals.
Sometimes it really is the words that aren’t said that mean the most. Arte won’t say that Hamilton will play for the Angels again because he isn’t going to play for the Angels again. He probably didn’t announce it specifically as it appears there will be some legal wrangling coming because Arte is going after Hamilton’s contract.
However, on Friday, Moreno said the team indeed had included such language and had it approved by Hamilton, the league and the union. Moreno also said the contracts of other Angels players had similar provisions.
“We have a contract with Hamilton and that contract has specific language, that he signed and that was approved, that said he could not drink or use drugs,” Moreno said.
Moreno is going to get his money. Or at least he is going to try to get his money due to this alleged clause. But don’t worry, Arte says it isn’t about the money.
“It was not about money,” Moreno said. “Nothing about money.”
Right, sure. You just want to terminate his contract or force a settlement because it is the right and moral thing to do. The fact that the team might recoup as much as $83 million is just a happy coincidence.
Or maybe it is principal of the matter. It isn’t about the money, it is about Josh breaking a rule. We all know that the team considers it to defy logic to let a rulebreaker go unpunished if he breaks a rule. That goes for someone who broke a rule that didn’t actually hurt the team. That goes for someone who came forward on his own to admit his mistake, which, again, didn’t actually hurt the team. The goes for someone who broke a rule not because he is a brazen scofflaw who consistently flaunts the rules, but rather because he has a crippling addiction problem, which the team obviously was aware of otherwise they wouldn’t have (allegedly) inserted that clause into his contract.
So, if it isn’t about the money. It is about punishing a player that broke the rules because someone’s got to be punished. There is no nuance in any of this. It is black or white. It is right and wrong.
In other words, the Angels are being jerks. A disappointing player did a disappointing thing which made the front office look bad because this relapse was always the big fear when signing that big contract. With Hamilton already struggling mightily on the field, for him to do something to embarrass the team off the field was too much. Moreno wanting to wash his hands of Hamilton isn’t because Arte has a zero policy stance on cocaine use. It is because Hamilton keeps doing things to remind everyone of what a huge mistake Moreno made by signing him.
Some have theorized that maybe there is more to the story here, that maybe Josh has done other things that we don’t know about to irk the franchise. There is some sense to that theory except for the part where everything about Hamilton’s slip up has already been leaked to the media, so why hasn’t anything else? If he was fighting them on treatment for his shoulder, we’d know about it by now. If he was feuding with Scioscia or teammates, we’d know about it by now. If he had other relapses that the team helped cover up, we’d know it by now. No, there isn’t anything else going on here other than the Angels wanting to punish Hamilton for their mistake of signing him in the first place.
Or maybe it really is about the money. If it wasn’t, Moreno wouldn’t have gone public with that curious statement about the language in the contract that protects the Angels. Language, by the way, that nobody thought existed until now because it is strictly against the CBA to put such language into a contract. In fact, the MLBPA quickly jumped into the fray yesterday to make the fact abundantly clear.
“The MLBPA emphatically denies … Arte Moreno’s assertions … that the Angels had requested and received the approval of the union to insert language into Josh Hamilton’s contract that would supersede the provisions of the Joint Drug Agreement and/or the Basic Agreement,” the MLBPA said in a statement.
“To the contrary, the collectively bargained provisions of the JDA and the Basic Agreement supersede all other player contract provisions and explicitly prevent Clubs from exactly the type of action Mr. Moreno alluded to.”
That seems like a pretty significant legal challenge for the Angels to take on. With $83 million on the line though, who could blame them. After all, it isn’t about the money, right?
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