[Coach]

Originally Posted by alnorth

In other news, the Ruben Tejada case could get interesting. He is probably going to file a grievance against the Mets, and I think he should probably win. Or at least, the Mets should lose for being stupid.

In baseball 172 days = 1 year of MLB service time. Ruben Tejada missed getting his 3rd year by 1 day. Normally its no big deal because when you draw a line, then someone's got to be on the wrong side of the line and also its sort of unofficially accepted that you can play games with service time to get another year from a prospect because you can always claim that he wasn't ready yet and needed more time in the minors and gee, what do ya know, 10 days after he missed his year, now we think he's ready, etc. Many teams do that, including the Royals.

However, no one clearly and blatantly keeps a player from getting a year as much as the Mets did with Ruben Tejada. In late October, the Mets said as soon as the minor league playoffs were done, they'd probably call up Tejada. Playoffs end, and a ton of players get called up but not Tejada. Someone apparently looked up his service time and looked up a calendar because after most of his teammates were called up, 3 days after his AAA team was done playing, the Mets finally called him up at the exact time needed to make sure he'd fall 1 day short of getting his 3rd year.

There is no rational explanation or excuse for it except the obvious one. It'll be interesting to see what happens. He'll probably be awarded an extra day of service time by the arbitrator, and start out next season at 3 years.

And the Mets should file a grievance against him for being a crappy player. Perhaps they didn't want to promote him because of the fact that he probably sucks?