Baseball league dissolves Scorpions agreement

The Golden Baseball League announced on Wednesday that it had dissolved its affiliation agreement with the U.S. subsidiary of Golden Gloves Professional Baseball, the company that had been handling baseball operations for the Yuma Scorpions.

League CEO Dave Kaval said GGPB did not meet its financial obligations with the team, business partners, vendors and service companies in the Yuma area. Players had not been paid since early June and claimed they had not been receiving meal money, a claim denied repeatedly GGPB President Ricky Smith.

Smith did not answer repeated calls to his cell phone, and his voice mailbox was full. Kaval said he has also been unable to get a hold of Smith.

Kaval said the league — which owns the team but had an arrangement with Golden Gloves to run the baseball side — will now be responsible for all aspects of the Scorpions, including making sure the current players are paid.

As for the money GGPB owes former players and previous business contacts, Kaval said he's not sure when they're going to get paid, but that it's the league's number one priority.

“We're rolling back all the different layers of the onion to figure out what happened,” Kaval said. “On an ongoing business, we're taking control. But for the prior stuff, we're still trying to get a hold of (Smith). He owes everybody money.”

“I don't really know how it's going to work out,” he said. “The last correspondence we had with Golden Glove said they were going to make this thing whole. We're not sure if that's going to happen. Is there any funds there? The key thing we wanted to do was to make sure on a go-forward basis that it just ended and he was no longer involved. That he could no longer make decisions. That's the first step, and that's what we did (Wednesday).”

Kaval said he's going to have to contact Smith to work out the logistics of sorting everything out.

“Now we have to look back and say, ‘Are you going to transfer the money to these guys? Are they going to get paid? And if you're not, that's huge damages to our company,'” Kaval said. “We might go to these guys (former players and associates) and say ‘Look, let's get together and file a lawsuit against (Smith).' Or maybe he does make good on the payment, or we're going to have to send him some demand letters or something like that to get things going. But obviously we want to try to make sure the team continues to play and is paid on an ongoing basis. We just don't know what the extent of the issue is in the past.”

Smith said that the problem with payment to players stemmed with getting the money out of Venezuela, where GGPB is based. Kaval said that even as recently as Tuesday, Smith assured the league and players that the financial situation was about to be resolved.

Kaval said he hoped getting the money wired internationally was the issue.

“I hope dearly it was a financing problem, but I'm concerned it was fraud and misrepresentation,” Kaval said. “A lot of people probably share that view with me.”

Peter Young will stay on as the team's vice president and general manager. Young was responsible for four trades at the All-Star break, each trading away an individual player in return for cash or future considerations. Kaval said if the league had been in control of the team earlier, those trades would not have been made.

“It's kind of sad how that went down because Ricky received some kind of monetary compensation for some of those deals, and he still didn't pay guys and took money from a lot of different sources and still didn't fulfill his obligations,” Kaval said. “That's terrible. I have a terrible feeling in my stomach just thinking about it. And now all of us are left holding the bag. We're all owed tremendous amounts of money from this guy and we have to go pick up the pieces. That's not what this is supposed to be.”

League commissioner Kevin Outcalt said he was glad those players were in more stable circumstances. Still, Young said those trades — which included dealing All-Star pitcher Daryl Arreola and right fielder Timmy Rodriguez — were difficult to make.

“Your looking at two All-Stars, one who is now 8-1 (as a pitcher), and one who was not only a great baseball palyer but a great person and was adopted by the community,” Young said. “There's nothing I could do about that; that's something that happened when it wasn't my responsibility to make those decisions. As somebody who likes baseball, it hurts me to see those two guys in different uniforms.”

The team is playing in Canada where, entering Wednesday, they had lost four straight and five of six.

“It's really a tragic situation,” Kaval said. “We're going to do everything in our power to make sure these guys get paid. We need to figure out first of all if Ricky is going to have the sense of mind to dig down and make the payment. We know he can't make four payments because he couldn't make half ones. But that's the focus now through the weekend. When Monday comes we can try to determine ... what other options we have.”

“It's opening up a can of worms — and there's a lot of worms in there,” Kaval said. “It's figuring out who's owed, and who's owed what. He did make some payments, so it's hard to figure out what happened and recreating it all, it's not easy. It's kind of a (messed) up situation.”