Cup of Coffee: December 9, 2021

How to solve the lockout in one easy column, how to screw up the minors even more than you already have, and how NOT to argue about the designated hitter.

Dec 09, 2021

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There may be a lockout afoot, but there’s still oh so much to talk about today.

Such as a company starting to gobble up minor league baseball clubs which, in my view, will inevitably make minor league baseball soulless and corporate and, perhaps, will leave it even worse off than it is now. Which is a reminder that you can have nice things, you can have unfettered capitalism, but you probably can’t have both.

I also assess Ken Rosenthal’s fairly massive “here’s how I’d solve the lockout” proposal, talk about how the Los Angeles Angels’ big plans to build a new stadium and develop the land around it in Anaheim was declared illegal yesterday, congratulate the newest Ford Frick Award winner even if he’s been dead for 43 years, ask if Anthony Rizzo is OK, provide a Yasiel Puig update, and remind you that while you can argue all you want about the designated hitter, you’re not allowed to make up facts about the designated hitter which are not true.

In Other Stuff I wish that we had a cool leader in this country like they have in Finland, even if it seems rather exhausting to be her, I remind you that you should not cross picket lines, even for things as tasty as Pop-Tarts, and I talk about the battle between my impulse to say “gee-whiz!” and my fear of disaster and dystopia whenever I read about some potentially world-changing technological breakthroughs.

But, hey, you know me. I see disaster and dystopia around every corner, so take all of that with a grain of salt.

The Daily Briefing

Endeavor begins gobbling up minor league clubs

The global sports and entertainment company Endeavor, which owns the UFC and talent agencies WME and IMG, has created a subsidiary called Diamond Baseball Holdings and has purchased nine minor league clubs:

Iowa Cubs (Cubs AAA);
Memphis Redbirds (Cardinals AAA);
Scranton/Wilkes Barre RailRiders (Yankees AAA);
Hudson Valley Renegades (Yankees High-A);
San Jose Giants (San Francisco Giants Low-A).
Gwinnett Stripers (Atlanta AAA);
Mississippi Braves (Atlanta AA);
Rome Braves (Atlanta High-A);
Augusta GreenJackets (Atlanta low-A)

That’s all of the Atlanta affiliates, by the way. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, too. As I noted a couple of months ago when this acquisition was first rumored, Endeavor aims to purchase as many as 40 of the 120 affiliated minor league clubs.

At the time the whole initiative was characterized as being inspired by the “opportunity” created by the elimination of a great many minor league teams, “new leadership” by MLB, which is likely to go crazy in an effort to squeeze more money out of the minor leagues it now controls, and the losses minor league clubs incurred in the pandemic, which made them ripe for acquisition. Basically, thanks to both Rob Manfred’s acts and the pandemic, minor league teams are distressed assets, and there is nothing the private equity class loves more than a good distressed asset.

As for what this means for the minor leagues: things will get sleeker. More professionalized. Marketing and promotions will become increasingly uniform and nationalized. The multi-headed sports/entertainment entity that is Endeavor will likely throw the word “synergy” around a lot, looking for crossover opportunities between the things it already owns and controls and minor league baseball. This is the card that is always played when there are big media/entertainment acquisitions, of course. Then, three years later you invariably hear about how the assets need to be spun off because those synergies didn’t materialize.

Either way, though, this sucks in my view. If it works out, a great many of the things which are enjoyable about minor league baseball — the quirkiness, the uniqueness, and the small business, baseball-first vibe of the enterprise — will be polished out of existence in favor of a uniform corporate identity and management style. If it doesn’t work out the teams will be unloaded in a few years worse off for the experience and, I suspect, either debt-laden or looted of much of that which makes them valuable, either literally or metaphorically speaking.

But hey, in the meantime at least the executives from the acquiring company will make a lot of money in bonuses and management fees and stuff.

Ken Rosenthal attempts to end the lockout

The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal took a stab — and a lengthy one at that — at resolving the many outstanding issues between the owners and the players in the current labor dispute. Basically, he played God with it and determined what would be the “best” solution to all of this. Which is weird given that the one thing that a proper labor dispute does not have is some putatively impartial wise man overseeing it all and declaring what is Just and Good — a negotiation is, by definition, a means of interested parties each attempting to get what’s best for them while giving up what they can deal with giving up — but hey, you gotta find your column ideas someplace when there’s nothing else going on.

The short version:

Rosenthal would raise the Competitive Balance Tax while decreasing the penalties teams face for going over it and, interestingly, throws out the idea of a “reverse luxury tax” on teams that spend under a certain payroll threshold, with additional penalties for teams that stay under that threshold two or three years in a row;
He’d keep the current revenue-sharing formula the same but require teams which receive revenue-sharing payments to spend on major-league payroll;
He’s keep free agency eligibility at six years of service time except for players who have at least five years of service time at age 30, he’d eliminate draft pick compensation for teams which sign free agents, and he’d create some sort of system to help low-revenue teams re-sign franchise-type players before they hit the open market;
He’d increase the percentage of players who qualify for Super Two arbitration eligibility and increase the minimum salary from $570,500 to at least $800,000;
He’d create a draft lottery which would give big advantages to low-revenue teams which actually won as a means of discouraging tanking; and
He’d expand the postseason to 14 teams in a way that is basically what MLB is proposing now

That’s a lot. Some of it is pretty good, some of it is not so good. Which is not surprising. Rosenthal is a lot of things, but a bomb-thrower is not one of them.

My quick takes:

Competitive Balance Tax: Yes, raising the CBT and reducing penalties for teams which exceed it is essential. The players reportedly asked for it to be raised from the current $210 million to $245 million in their last offer. The owners had one dumb offer which actually lowered it and, a bit more seriously — though not much more seriously — offered a multi-year plan to raise it to only $220 million.

Here I think Rosenthal knows what is necessary — and that the players are right about how the CBT functions like a salary cap now — but he never puts a number on where it should be, likely because he’s trying to appear even-handed. Points for that reverse luxury tax idea which would slam teams for not paying a certain level. If owners want a thing that’s not technically a salary cap but which serves as one, why can’t the players have something that is not technically a salary floor but which works like one? I don’t think, however, that the MLBPA has sought such a thing, likely because they don’t want to be in the business of formalizing caps and floors, towards which this plan would push the system even further.

Revenue Sharing: The big tweak here would be making teams spend revenue sharing bucks on actual payroll whereas now they just have to “improve the team” in some vague way. I think, from the players point of view, that’d only be a partial fix, assuming it wouldn’t be an easily-skirted requirement, which it probably would be. The big issue with revenue sharing is less the impact on any given club than the fact that it broadly discourages spending and winning by recipient clubs, as they can make budget and, indeed, profit, by simply existing while it broadly discourages success and willingness to spend on the part of the higher-revenue clubs who do not wish to pay as much as they do to other teams. The union wants revenue sharing slashed. MLB won’t even discuss it. Offering this tepid tweak doesn’t impress me and won’t impress anyone else.

Service Time: We talked about this at length earlier this week. Rosenthal doesn’t cover much new ground here but he does show his work regarding what kinds of players would be affected by the various year/age tweaks each side has reportedly proposed. It’s not a great number of players, frankly, but here the hope on the part of the players is that reducing how much service time it takes to get to free agency would change the overall incentives and decisions of teams regarding when to call guys up and stuff and that there’d be a snowball effect which would raise wages overall over time.

The one new thing Rosenthal does throw out there is that weird thing he floats regarding ways of helping small revenue teams keep free agents:

“Some club officials have discussed a concept in which such teams could identify certain players, perhaps only ones they signed and developed, as “franchise icons.” Then, using a form of subsidy from the league, they would gain the ability to offer the player fair market value before he became a free agent and/or match whatever he was offered on the open market. There would be no hometown discount; the offer could be based on an average salary equal to the average of the top five players at his position.”

He couches it as a non-binding thing, with the player in question being able to reject any offer his hometown team makes with the aid of these formulas and community chest dollars and what have you, but it smells a lot like the franchise tag stuff the NFL does and which players generally hate. I can’t imagine that the owners would agree to such a scheme if it didn’t give them more control over the player than they currently have — otherwise they’d just be subsidizing their competition for players in the free agency market, making players more expensive to sign — and any plan that gave owners more control would be seen by the players as ratcheting back, not improving free agency. Fun to talk about. Never gonna happen.

Arbitration/Minimum salary: We’re in total agreement on raising the minimum salary. I’d go farther than $800K, probably. I’d probably set it at a million bucks.

Draft Lottery: I dunno. Rosenthal’s ideas seem harmless enough. As I said when discussing this a week or two ago, though, I doubt they’d do much to discourage tanking because tanking in baseball is rarely if ever aimed at gaining a specific draft position given how there are rarely if ever one or two can’t-miss draftees who are the target of the tanking. Rather, it’s more about cutting payroll for its own sake while generally improving one’s overall number of picks to get a volume of cheap talent. Whether that means getting pick #1 or pick #5 is usually irrelevant. Stoping taking won’t come via any one change in the draft. It’ll come by encouraging winning and discouraging losing across a number of rules and areas of the game.

Expanded playoffs: Rosenthal basically says to do the owners’ plan of 14 teams with benefits to division winners and teams with the best record. My guess is that the players, actually, would be fine with that and view the matter of expanded playoffs to be less about the specific terms and more as a valuable thing for which they must give their assent and thus can extract something else of value. Which is to say that, when this is all said and done, I think we end up with a 14-team postseason. I hate it, but as I’ve said before, we already established that a postseason berth will, over time, become cheaper and cheaper. All we’re doing now is negotiating just how cheap it will be.

Like I said: there are some interesting ideas and conversation starters in Rosenthal’s column, but there’s nothing there that represents out-of-the-box thinking, the sort of which, if Rosenthal were made Grand Mediator of the CBA talks, would change the tenor of the negotiations all that much.

The owners want what they want. the players want what they want. They’re gonna have to dance a while before they get there and none of us on the outside are gonna be able to play King Solomon.

The City of Anaheim violated California law in selling Angels Stadium land to the team

A little over a year ago the City of Anaheim sold Angel Stadium and the roughly 150 acres around it to a company controlled by team owner Arte Moreno. He plans to either rebuild or remodel the stadium and build a big mixed-use development on the property.

All of that seemed to be going fine, but the sale was declared illegal yesterday by California’s state housing agency, the Department of Housing and Community Development.

Seems that the sale violated a law called the Surplus Land Act which requires that public land made available for sale should first be offered to affordable housing developers. The Angels and the city have made a bunch of claims about how much affordable housing their deal will create, but saying things like that to get yourself good press coverage is not the same thing as following the law that, you know, actually seeks to create affordable housing on what was once public land.

What all of this means: Anaheim must either redo the sale, complying with the state law, or it can go forward with the deal with Moreno but pay fines which would gobble up something like two-thirds of the proceeds of the sale. Moreover, the deal would have to be amended the to set aside 80% of the land for housing, 40% of which must be deemed affordable. This would TOTALLY screw up what are no doubt plans to put bars and restaurants and offices and movie theaters and headquarters for weird companies you’ve never heard of all over the place as opposed to, you know, apartments for poor and working people.

This declaration by the state has been a long time coming, apparently. Before yesterday, though, the parties were trying to negotiate a settlement. It appears as though the only offer out there was to let Arte Moreno do what he wants with the site and for Anaheim to find some other land elsewhere to sell to affordable housing developers as a make-good. Which sounds all fair and equitable until you realize that such plans have existed for decades and all they serve to do is to ghettoize poor and working people into undesirable areas out of sight, out of mind, and out of easy access to jobs, transportation corridors, and other services and amenities of the community. It’s exactly that sort of development which agencies like the Department of Housing and Community Development now seek to prevent because it’s, you know, bad.

Not that the housing authority’s action is going to necessarily create any new affordable housing. Indeed, as is often the case with bureaucracy, this could end up making things worse in some ways.

That’s because, even before the now nixed deal, the Angels already had, and still retain, veto rights over development on the stadium site as tenants for several years going forward. As such, undoing the current deal and starting over at the pre-2019 status quo would, actually, ensure that NO affordable housing — no anything at all — could be built on the site if the city were to do things the way the state wants them to. Like, it could still be a 60 year-old stadium and tons of parking lots and nothing else there for a decade or two if the status quo is maintained. That would certainly represent compliance with the law, but it wouldn’t serve the city, which wants to unload the land, the baseball team, which wants to develop the land, or those who want more affordable housing in Anaheim, who actually, you know, want more affordable housing built.

According to the L.A. Times, at least one Anaheim City Council member is suggesting just tearing up the Moreno deal and starting over. It’s an open question whether Moreno would be cool with that process and whether he’d be willing to stick it out in Anaheim should his current deal be unwound. Which could put us back where we were a few years ago, with the Angels contemplating a new home.

Is there enough room in Las Vegas for two teams?

Jack Graney wins the Ford Frick Award

One-time Cleveland ballplayer and long time radio man Jack Graney has won the Hall of Fame's Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting.

Graney was a pioneer in a few ways.

As an outfielder for Cleveland in 1914 he was the first player to bat against Babe Ruth in the bigs. He was also the first player to bat with a number on his uniform, doing so in 1916. He’d play for 14 years in the majors, all with Cleveland, helping them win the 1920 World Series and then retiring after the 1922 season. A few years later he became the first player to do something else: transition to the broadcast booth.

Beginning in 1933, and continuing for the next 22 seasons, Graney called Cleveland games on WHK, WGAR, WJW and WERE. He called the 1935 All-Star Game in Cleveland and the 1935 World Series between the Tigers and the Cubs. He died in 1978 at the age of 91.

Others on this year's ballot, which included the commentators from baseball's “broadcast beginnings,” included Pat Flanagan, Waite Hoyt, France Laux, Rosey Rowswell, Hal Totten, Ty Tyson and Bert Wilson. Next year the Frick Award candidates will rotate to more recent local broadcasters and the year after that voters will consider national voices.

Is Anthony Rizzo OK?

Here are two tweets from Anthony Rizzo in the last day or so:

Anthony Rizzo @ARizzo44

What’s up #crypto twitter. What’s your favorite NFT / cryptocurrency right now?

And:

Anthony Rizzo @ARizzo44

#NewProfilePic

That avatar looks like what a Steely Dan album cover might’ve looked like if they hadn’t broken up and were still putting out albums in the 1980s.

I dunno. It’s pretty stressful being a free agent. I imagine it’s even more stressful being a free agent during a lockout. But I would think that someone in Rizzo’s position would have a support system available to him that would intervene before he completely lost his mind like this.

Yasiel Puig may go to Korea

At this point he may as well go to Pluto as far as I am concerned, but if you are interested in tracking the former MLB star’s journey in the baseball wilderness, know that after spending this past season with Veracruz of the Mexican League, Puig is in talks with the Kiwoon Heroes of the KBO about a potential deal for next year.

Puig, who turned 31 on Tuesday, hit .312/.409/.517 with ten homers in 62 games down in Mexico in 2021 and is currently playing in the Dominican Winter League. That suggests that, at least in lower-level leagues, Puig is still a useful hitter. Given his considerable off-the-field issues — and how alienating he was to so many in the game even before those issues came to light — it seems pretty clear that he’ll remain in those lower-level leagues and won’t be on a major league roster again. Have fun in Mexico or Korea or wherever you can ply your trade, Yasiel.

And in case you were wondering why Kiwoon isn’t, apparently, put off by Puig’s off-the-field issues, know that this is the same team which signed noted abuser Addison Russell back in 2020, so they obviously don’t care about such things.

One more word on the designated hitter

As is always the case when someone brings up the DH, as I did yesterday when I shared that video of pitcher Rony García mounting a particularly feeble at-bat, the discussion in the comments turned into the typical fight between pro-DH and anti-DH people.

There’s no resolving that dispute, of course. It’s like people fighting over a favorite color or whether one’s sect of a particular religion is closer to God than another’s. More people have died on the DH/anti-DH hill than have died on 10,000 Little Bighorns and 10,000 Cemetery Ridges combined, except unlike those engagements, nothing important has ever been decided in a DH/anti-DH fight. As a famous computer once said, the only winning move is not to play. We may not ever agree on the DH, but we can like what we like and live and let live.

I will make one exception to that, however. I will not stand for people injecting straight misinformation into the DH Wars. And the two most common bits misinformation you hear when it comes to this stuff are (a) the assertion that the designated hitter is some “gimmick” from 1973 which stands as a blight on baseball’s history; and (b) the claim that pitchers only started truly sucking at hitting after the DH came on the scene.

Both of those claims are complete bunk. The DH is not some gimmick dreamed up by polyester-clad Me Generation thinkers during the Nixon administration and the institution of the DH was not the cause of poor pitcher hitting.

Rather, as Major League Baseball’s historian John Thorn wrote over five years ago, the DH was conceived of and considered nearly 100 years before its adoption. It was considered for the very same reasons it was ultimately adopted in 1973 and still exists today: pitchers of the 19th century, just like pitchers today, couldn’t hit a lick.

Thorn dates the idea of a DH to 1891, when Pirates owner W.C. Temple and executive J. Walter Spalding discussed the matter, as memorialized in an article in Sporting Life. The two men differed on how, exactly, to get around pitchers hitting, but they certainly agreed on the need to do so:

“Every patron of the game is conversant with the utter worthlessness of the average pitcher when he goes up to try and hit the ball. It is most invariably a trial, and an unsuccessful one at that. If fortune does favor him with a base hit it is ten to one that he is so winded in getting to first or second base on it that when he goes into the box it is a matter of very little difficulty to pound him all over creation.”

Spalding was in favor of simply skipping the pitcher. Temple was in favor of a substitute hitter we today call the DH. For various reasons it was not adopted then. But just because it took another 82 years to come online doesn’t mean it was a gimmick and doesn’t mean it was a solution in search of a problem. Indeed, it was one of the few examples of an innovation implemented in the 1970s that was long overdue and which has stood the test of time.

I do not suspect that this will make DH-haters change their views on the matter. But they most certainly will have to change the justification for their views. Because contrary to what they so often say, when it comes to the DH, tradition is not on their side.

Other Stuff

🎶My PM wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the tiiiiimmmmee🎶

Finland's Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, is 36 years old. Recently she went out clubbing in Helsinki until 4 AM, left her work phone at home and was therefore unreachable. The problem: she had gotten a text telling her she needed to quarantine because her foreign minister had tested positive for COVID but, of course, she couldn’t see it. Critics in Finland are now questioning her judgment for not isolating until testing negative.

I think there’s a bigger issue here: how in the hell does a 36 year-old stay out dancing until 4 AM?

Look, I realize I was old even when I was young, but almost everyone else I knew was mostly washed by 36 too. Like, even by age 30 people were already doing that thing where they secretly wished their friends would cancel on them because, while it seemed like a good idea at the time, there was no way anyone was staying out all night anymore. “Hey, maybe we just do a game night at Julie and Aaron’s place? See you at 7?”

An even bigger issue than all-night partying is how vivid a reminder this story serves at the failure of the American political system. We can’t seem to elect anyone in this country to any position of actual power who wasn’t alive when penicillin was first mass-produced but Finland is being run by someone who was too young to have a legal vodka tonic in her country when “Sk8er Boi” came out. As someone who has way more faith in the youths than the olds, I really think we should strive to be more like Finland.

Don’t cross the Kellogg picket line

Kellogg — maker of a lot of pretty mediocre cereal but buoyed by its status as the maker of delicious Pop-Tarts — said it is permanently replacing 1,400 striking union workers after they rejected a deal that would have provided small raises but far, far less than that which they are seeking. A large majority of the workers, who belong to the the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union and who have been on strike since October 5, voted down the offer.

How Kellogg plans to hire 1,400 workers when companies which aren’t asking people to cross a picket line can’t find sufficient staff is an open question, but I’m sure the people who believe that their box of Raisin Bran is superior to all of the other identical boxes of Raisin Bran made by other companies are experts on what is and what is not replaceable.

In the meantime, boycott all of those Kellogg’s cereals, suck it up and eat generic toaster pasties, and support striking workers who are seeking to be compensated and treated fairly by a company which has been raking in the dough on strong sales for some time now.

“Gee-Whiz!”

There was a story in the Washington Post yesterday about geoengineering — a process often referred to as “hacking the Earth” — as a means of counteracting climate change. Things like fertilizing the ocean to grow organisms which pull carbon out of the atmosphere or altering seawater so that it can better absorb greenhouse gases. There are a number of such ideas out there, some tested, some theoretical, and you come across stories like that one covering this sort of stuff a few times a year.

I’m pretty ambivalent about them. A lot of that ambivalence stems from the fact that, for various reasons, I’ve been conditioned since birth to have a pretty “gee-whiz!” impression of science. It’s not an unfair impression either.

For as many problems as I talk about in this newsletter — for as dire as my outlook on the world can seem at times — it’s also the case that I believe, broadly speaking, that we live in an amazing age. We may have jackasses who won’t take vaccines, but the development of vaccines and medicine over the past century and a half or so is absolutely astounding and has fundamentally altered the arc of human existence. We may have horrible people in positions of power at corporations which have grown too large and powerful for their own good but we also have developed staggering technologies which have had a tremendous positive impact on civilization. Indeed, whenever I feel ready to just check out of modern society, I think about how damn lucky I am to live in the age in which I live and that I don’t need to worry about all of the things people worried about in, say, 1837, 1348, or 59 B.C. and consider myself pretty fortunate.

But then I think about those horrible people in positions of power and the other jackasses hanging around. I think about how, while there are a lot of things lacking in the world today, one thing that isn’t lacking is hubris and greed and as each year goes on it becomes harder and harder for me to imagine true world-changing technologies like those suggested by proponents of geoengineering not being misused or inequitably deployed so that they either do more harm than good or, as is so often the case with technological advances, only do very selective good for certain, favored people.

I also think about how technological breakthroughs often have unintended consequences.

Here people often people think of catastrophic side effects, particularly when the environment is involved. Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine from “Cat’s Cradle” may be the most famous example, though there are oh so many examples in both science fiction and, at least potentially, in reality. But my love of Vonnegut and my penchant for pessimism notwithstanding, my sense is that the more common and more destructive side effects of technology are, in presentation, often far more mundane.

The automobile was world-changing but it allowed us to develop lifestyles which are profoundly unhealthy, personally, societally, and environmentally speaking. It’s hard to imagine a world without computers but it’s hard to ignore how dependent upon them we are and how isolated we have become by each and every one of us having one in our pocket at all times. If we do harness the oceans and the creatures within to ameliorate climate change, yes, it could conceivably create worldwide, Vonnegutian chaos. It could also simply make us all horribly complacent people who do even less to protect and preserve our environment now than we already do if that’s even possible. For us to believe, even more than we believe now, that our choices and actions don’t really matter because, hey, the scientists will engineer our way out of this.

Every time I read an article like that one from yesterday’s Post I go through this whole thing as an inner monologue or, if you’re unfortunate enough to be near me in a bar or having coffee or something, in a diatribe. It always starts with “gee-whiz!” and always ends with “but . . . humanity . . . ”

The ratio between those sentiments has tipped more and more in favor the latter as I have gotten older, but the gee-whiz is still there. I hope the gee-whiz never goes away, but I fear it one day might.