February 13, 2007 February 13, 2007
Posted by atlanticleaguenews in Uncategorized.trackback
BASA Out, Jodie In: Bridgewater, NJ – The Three-Time Atlantic League Champion Somerset Patriots have announced Brett Jodie as the new Director of Player Procurement for the team.
Jodie, who also serves as the Patriots’ Pitching Coach, will be responsible for all player transactions for the team. Jodie has Major League experience with the Yankees and San Diego Padres. He also has three seasons of Triple-A experience with the two organizations. Jodie joined the Patriots in 2003 as a pitcher and helped lead the team to its second championship in three years.
He finished the 2003 season with a 12-5 record, a 3.78 ERA, and 88 strikeouts in 135 innings pitched in 24 games started. Following the 2003 season, Jodie was signed by the Boston Red Sox organization and invited to spring training. He ended up missing the 2004 season due to an injury during a play at first during a spring training game. Jodie returned to the Patriots in 2005 and started ten games in the first half before deciding to rehab more from his previous injury. He rejoined the Patriots in 2006 as the team’s Pitching Coach.
“We are very excited to bring Brett on board as our Director of Player Procurement. He has excelled in all positions he has held with our team and this is a great opportunity for Brett’s career in the baseball industry,” said Patrick McVerry, President/ General Manager of the Somerset Patriots Baseball Club.
Jodie was selected by the Yankees in the sixth round of the 1998 draft. The 29 year old is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and resides in Lexington, SC.
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Jodie being named the new Director of Player Procurement for the Patriots ends a four-year relationship the team had with Adam Gladstone. Gladstone, now with Baseball And Sports Associates (BASA), will still compile rosters for four Atlantic League teams; Bridgeport, Camden, Lancaster and York
While he did put together two championship teams in that run from 2003-2006, things seemed to go downhill once the Patriots went under the BASA umbrella last season. The player procurement organization’s Lancaster Barnstormers went on to win the championship, but their other teams didn’t make the playoffs. Many felt that Somerset was the most ignored organization BASA had last year, and many players complained about the group both privately and publicly.
“How are you going to be competitive when you have one company running four teams?” second baseman George Sandel told Ryan Dunleavy of The Courier News last season. “Last year, when we had (former director of player procurement) Adam Gladstone working just for us, when we needed something, we got it.”
The split was inevitable and rumored for months, but only today has it become official.
I hope to speak to Jodie tomorrow about this exciting new jump in his career, but also hope to get a hold of Gladstone as well to get his thoughts on the end of his tenure with the Patriots.
More Hesseltine, Please: The Revolution strike again. INF Vic Gutierrez and P Charlie Hesseltine have agreed to contracts with the expansion York Revolution.
Gutierrez was an All-Star with Lehigh Valley in 2001 and again in 2002 with the Surf. He was in the Atlantic League as recently as 2005, hitting .307 for Camden.
Hesseltine went 3-2 with a 5.06 ERA with Atlantic City last season. Batters hit over .300 against him last season, but he is left-handed and could be a valuable commodity if he can improve his numbers.
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Gonzalez Looking Good In Puerto Rico: According to someone who saw former Long Island Ducks OF Juan Gonzalez play in Puerto Rico, the outfielder looks primed to make a return to the big leagues.
According to the source, Gonzalez had added a little extra weight since his Atlantic League days, where he was considerably skinnier than you might remember him being.
Steroid accusations surrounding the former AL MVP were rampant but, for what it’s worth, he denied those claims to atlanticleaguebaseball.com in July:
ALB: Whether it’s fair or unfair, your name has been associated with the steroids scandal…
Gonzalez: Since Canseco’s been talking about me…I never used steroids when I played this game. Canseco never gave it to me, steroids. I don’t know why he talked about my name in the steroids situation. I’m clean.
ALB: Well, with your name being associated with that, and you say it is unfair, do you feel like it’s going to affect your chances of getting picked up by an affiliated team?
Gonzalez: Not necessarily, because I’m clean.
Mike Ashmore, mashmore@patriotsbaseball.com
Atlantic League Baseball News 
Juan Gone….sigh. We hardly saw you play in the Atlantic League!
Mike,
How can the league really be taken seriously considering its association with Gladstone? It’s his own little fantasy league and he is drafting all the teams.
I guess we should be surprised though. Last year we learned that some of Barnstormers’ revenue helped operate their opponents through a little fancy acounting (there isn’t one set of books for each team). Oh well, the league will be done in 3-5 years. Affiliated ball is coming and there it is only bad stadium lease deals that will keep it from taking over in some of the hotter cities.
By the way, 5 other Indy Leagues continue to get FREE publicity (and legitimacy) by posting their transactions in the USA Today and other daily papers. For the love of Pete, why can’t the AL do this? If it wasn’t for you, Mike, this league would actually have do help itself.
Hmmm…I don’t even know how to really address this.
From a competitive standpoint, I don’t like BASA. From a financial standpoint, it makes a lot of sense.
Nothing I haven’t said on here before.
I appreciate that you like what Scott and I do in covering the league — but the transactions thing just isn’t a big deal in my eyes.
Are players signed to deals? Yes.
Are players signed to deals that have been made public yet? No.
Generally when the signings are announced, they’re sent along to the AP and appear in whatever paper chooses to pick up the transactions list.
Perhaps there are teams that don’t send their transactions in.
Same thing with teams and the way they choose to promote themselves.
Some have me on their press release lists, some don’t.
I’m going to get the news one way or another, just depends on how easy they want to make it for me.
No comments on the Ovaltine joke, by the way? Boo…
For the record, I think you’re both right. The league’s credibility DOES suffer from Gladstone running so many teams. He’s in charge of four of the seven and was trying to make it five. That obviously affects competition.
Not publicizing transactions compounds the problem. It makes you question how and when moves get made because the line between the franchises is so blurry in the first place. The general surliness of some of the league’s executives toward the media only makes matters worse. They often act like they don’t want to be bothered with legitimate questions.
Mike is right about it making financial sense. The owners are in this for one reason: to make money. They’re not concerned about the baseball operations and this is an easy way to handle them.
Outside of those directly involved, no one cares how the players end up on each team. So I guess it’s not a huge issue. It bothers me because I’m a reporter and gathering information is my job, but I realize I’m in an extreme minority.
Trying to think of the best way to say this without it biting me in the ass…
If you’re willing to admit that BASA running four teams is a problem, that’s fine. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
But that’s overlooking what’s probably a more substantial “problem” in that there are only a handful of different ownership groups in an eight-team league.
I think that’s kind of where the precedent is set for something like BASA…
But that’s assuming that’s a “problem.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t…
To me, arguing either point is kind of a waste – because everyone knows that neither situation is going to change any time soon.
About the transactions. The league and its teams are very bad in reporting transactions to The Associated Press. I see the entire file every night since I publish it in a newspaper and it is very rare to see any transactions from the Atlantic League or any team in the league. I’ll tell Frank Boulton and Michael Pfaff to get the word out to get their transactions to AP and see what happens.