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.
The MLBPA seems to be fervent believers in trickle down economics. If they take care of the 1% it will trickle down to the 25th guy on the bench. I mean, it's worked so well for the US workers....
Kinda has in baseball, though, hasn't it? At the same time that they (purportedly) have focused on Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, the average salaries and minimum salaries have also gone through the roof.
For 2021, mean salary was $4.17M, while median was $1.1M (which is very close to where I would set league minimum, not median). Roofs come in different heights, but not my idea of through the roof.
Minimum's have done better, largely because they were awful at the onset of free agency. But minimums are collectively bargained and thus have little to do with free agency. Anyway, here they are, adjusted for inflation (from B-R):
1970 = $86K
1980 = $101K
1990 = $212K
2000 = $321K
2010 = $507K
today = $571K
My search skills easily found averages, but I couldn't find median salaries except for 2021. The mean is skewed towards extreme outliers, so take from that what you will.
I think they view the top FAs as setting the bar for everyone else. Every new big free agent signing sets a new record of some kind -- AAV; total value; most ever for a position etc.
The big market teams are typically the teams who are the most aggressive in free agent spending. Letting them have more money to spend allows them to be more aggressive in bidding for big free agents, which raises the bar for the highest contract values. This trickles down to other free agents classes and extensions.
I dont know if this theory is sound -- it's just what I think is going on.
Which is why the NBA is such a contrast. The cap on maximum contracts (which are still very large) means that mid-level free agents get paid rather well. And that cap means that teams like Milwaukee can retain their superstars if they choose to stay.
The NBA is a little different though, because after your first three or four big contracts, you only have 9 guys left on the roster to sign. MLB rosters now have 26 players on them, and teams rightly have a hard time justifying spending $10M per year on the 21st guy on the roster, or whatever.
We bloggers and the columnists and other writers who inspired us spent years lamenting the fact that teams spent ridiculous amounts of money on declining free agents. The intent of those original complaints, though, was that the team would not waste money on mediocre or bad players so it could afford to spend it on good ones, that the teams we loved might be more consistently competitive.
Now that Moneyball has taken over and the owners have all pretty much figured out how foolish it can be to buy into a declining market - except in very rare cases - we're instead stuck complaining that they're not spending good money on free agents. None of us imagined that if they figured out this calculus, they would just line their own pockets with the surplus instead of using it to field a better team. Talk about unintended consequences.
NBA teams are not spending $10M per year on the last man. The league median salary is $3.8M (for half the games), and the league minimum scales from $925K to $2.6M based on years of experience. Double the rosters to increase the proportion of minimum salaries (NBA roster sizes are 15 active), and the distribution of salaries is still far more equitable at the bottom than MLB.
He's also really unassuming. I had the occasion to see him at an event honoring his then-SO Cindy Sherman, and he introduced himself to my boss with "hi, I'm David." Granted that might to some degree be a function of his location on the spectrum, but it just felt genuine.
Mrs. Bombo and I rewatch Stop Making Sense about every other month. She's 62 and can still out-dance like when we saw it at the Uptown theater 35 years ago. On the other hand, my Big Suit is now just my suit.
Here's an idea to stop free agents moving...because we do lose something when a big name moves.
Idea: when a free agent is offered a contract by another team, the player can only provisionally accept. If he provisionally accepts, his old team is given the opportunity to offer a contract which is identical except that all the pay figures are multiplied by 95%. If the old team does that, then the other team's offer is also multiplied by 95%. Then the player chooses. But if the old team doesn't make a counter offer then the provisional acceptance is confirmed, as it stood, at 100%.
Apart from everything else, it would clarify excuses like "we made a great offer but he just wanted to leave" or "we wanted him to stay but he never even came back to us with a proposal".
At the end of the day, I’m always going to be uncomfortable with a player eligible for free agency not being able to choose where they work. I get the idea that their labor is cheaper for a few years as a kind of return on investment from the big league club. But that should be relatively short and once they’ve repaid that, as determined by the current CBA, they should have no restrictions on where they work.
Baseball as entertainment would lose a lot of value if the richest teams could simply buy every player after their first five / six years and the poorer franchises couldn't compete except as a fluke. Similarly, the entertainment value goes down if there is no continuity on the teams and players bouncing around too frequently. Because of that, I don't mind some friction on players' ability to change teams as free agents.
Right now, I think that there is too much friction causing salaries to actually retract as revenue goes up. But some friction on player movement is appropriate.
No. I mean a franchise that, because of location and history, has a lower attendance, merchandise sale, and television contract. A poorer *franchise* not a poorer *owner.* I think that demanding that an owner subsidize team revenue is misinformed.
I’ll disagree with you, as Craig has pointed out, we don’t really know what any of these teams make or lose, it’s all smoke and mirrors. In my opinion, if you’re worth $2 billion, you pay and don’t look for the ‘richer’ teams to subsidize. If you can’t (or won’t) then sell to someone who will, there is never a problem finders buyers.
There are some clubs that have their finances made public via their SEC filings. I invite you to look, for example, at the Liberty Media 10Q and 10K. It is "smoke and mirrors" only if one takes Manfred's statements alone and doesn't look further.
But let's say that all clubs are profitable - or would be profitable if you back out payments to ownership - in most years. There has to be a limit on that. That is, a team is profitable at the current salary levels. Would they still be at 110%, 150%, 200%, 500%? At some amount they stop being profitable by definition.
Your argument is that they have an obligation to dig into ownership's pocket to cover that loss. I think that argument inevitably leads to the conclusion that the wealthy must provide our entertainment to us at a loss. I dislike that argument for many, many reasons.
"[W]e do lose something when a big name moves." Who is "we"? Only the team that lost the player, and its fans. On the other hand, regular baseball fans get excited, the new team's fans get really excited, and the fans of the old team's rivals get pretty excited. Also, the "big name," who is a person, makes a lot more money and gets to choose where he works. So he gains, as do his friends and family,
Disagree. It is good for me as a fan of the Braves when the Nationals have Zimmerman for years and years or the Mets have Wright for a generation. I want the opposition to be more than just the name on the front of the uniform but the person and personality within it.
I'll second that. I'm not opposed to the dreaded "franchise tag" being a thing in MLB in theory. In theory. The devil is in the details of course and I'm not knowledgable enough to propose how it would actually work. Give me a day or two and I'll get something to Scherzer and Bruce Meyer. I've got them on speed dial.
The NHL has a distinction between restricted and unrestricted free agents, based on age and service time. Free agent signing are limited only by market forces. But RFA signings, well in theory any team can "offer sheet" an RFA. In case of an offer sheet, the player's original team can match the offer, including term, salary, signing bonuses, etc.; it's all or nothing. If the team matches, the player stays where he was; if not, the player moves to the team making the offer sheet. Note that I said "in theory"; in practice, teams are unwilling to poach players, and original teams generally match. Offer sheets, when they're made, are generally structured with poison pills for the original team, or with extreme pettiness. (A few years ago, the Montréal Canadiens offer sheeted a Carolina Hurricanes player, and the Canes matched, but this year the Canes offer-sheeted a Canadien's player whose development had been totally mishandled by the Canadiens, and the Canadiens didn't match. The signing bonus in that second offer was based on the first player's uniform number.)
As for whether we actually *do* lose something when a big name player moves, we lose no more when that movement is via free agency, i.e., (mostly the player's choice) than we do when the movement is via trade (the owner's choice). If you want to limit movement via free agency without limiting movement via trade, well, that's a choice, I suppose, but not one I would make.
Oh, I think it's just as bad when long-established players leave via trades. Maybe even worse if it's midseason. I thought it was a great shame when the Cubs traded all those players in the middle of 2021.
There's a lot to be said for the world football system whereby every player has a no-trade clause from the beginning of their career. The whole system of trading baseball players without their consent is massively disruptive to players' lives, for little overall gain anywhere.
As a compromise, how about saying that a baseball team has to pay a player to trade them without consent? Maybe specify the amount in the CBA?
Pre pandemic, I went to a craptonne of Gwinnett games and probably would have been to more than a handful last year but for a couple of surgeries for my wife and I. I'm having a hard time seeing how the Endeavor transaction risks making that somehow more corporate. The parent club owned the AAA franchise, as well as the AA and one of the A teams that were part of the announcement yesterday. Do I think that Endeavor's corporate management will somehow be more soulless than Liberty Media?
Before moving the the Atlanta suburbs two decades ago, I was a season ticket holder for the Montgomery Biscuits. I haven't followed that team at all since moving away, but at least back then, the owners also owned the Lansing Lugnuts and IIRC two other teams with similarly weird monikers. (Best name for a minor league club comes not from baseball, but hockey ... just south of Atlanta we used to have the Macon Whoopee team.) We are multiple generations removed from having small local business people owning the minor league clubs and running them like junior versions of Bill (or Mike) Veeck.
Yeah, the Braves farm system has all been under the same umbrella for a long time. When I worked for Richmond 20 years ago I was technically an employee of AOL/Time Warner.
But there’s a HUGE difference between a parent company owning 3-5 teams and a major conglomerate owning 40 (which is a third of all teams).
Looks like a mixed bag. San Jose and Scranton are owned (primarily) by their parent clubs. Iowa and Memphis independent. And surprisingly Hudson Valley is owned by the group that includes Bill Murray (which also owns a couple other teams, including St Paul) - it makes absolutely no sense that they’d be part of this mess.
Pretty sure that someone drove a bus full of money to the door for all these teams. Probably more than any are worth, meaning our new corporate overlords are leveraged to the hilt.
Regarding tech fixes for climate, I encourage more active hostility in place of ambivalence. More significant than the likely unintended consequences, none of the ideas are ready, scalable, or feasible enough to implement in sufficient quantities to at all move the needle on climate before it's far too late.
Due to the above, these ideas fundamentally serve the function of preserving the status quo. They tell us we don't need to actively change much because tech will passively, vaguely "save us" somehow. I made a Charlie Brown kicking football meme about this years ago.
There is no climate technology that is ready, cheap, or environmentally sustainability enough (think destructively mining minerals for EV batteries) to scale to planet-saving levels. And that doesn't even factor in climate justice either, which is somehow never mentioned in these tech discussions.
The only thing that can save most life on earth is the thing that is never really considered in popular discourse: a massive reduction in energy consumption.
So much of technology is framed as a way for the wealthy or wealth-adjacent to not be at all inconvenienced while the vast number of poor and powerless are left to burn in wildfires, drown in rising seas, or both.
Even many who agree with climate change complain when gas prices go up. It was striking to see Biden going to Scotland advocating the fight against climate change, then the next thing you know he is saying we need to use the strategic oil reserve to keep gas prices down.
It seems an easy first step would make gas cost about $10 a gallon, which would result in us burning a lot less of it.
In Biden's defense though, he has to think about the political suicide high gas prices would be. Which just goes to show even those of us that talk a good game about reducing fossil fuel usage aren't really willing to follow through when there is a cost to it.
Yep. And having a car and driving is for many people and in many places a necessity. I'd love to be able to avoid car payments and the insurance and just the annoyance that comes with a vehicle, but my current hometown has really no public transportation to speak of and I don't have time to walk or bike to work, I need to get groceries, and my veterinarian is a 30 minute drive away.
Even when I did live someplace with public transportation I had to build in a lot of extra time for slowness, delays, making connections, and of course be on the alert for gropers. The only reason I kept taking it was because at the time I couldn't afford a personal vehicle and I was fortunate that my employer at the time was really close to a station as was my apartment. What a cluster.
No individual can be blamed for choosing car over public transit given our current system. The people to be blamed are the civic leaders, capitalists, and billionaires like the Kochs who systematically thwart any attempt to democratize transportation. The Kochs literally go around from city to city spending millions to abort light rail and other projects. Happened here in NC a few years ago.
Elon Musk and his cult is a huge part of the problem too. He has reinvented very small, inefficient, expensive, energy-intensive trains in his mythical Hyperloops, and is currently blowing tens of millions of dollars on developing this ludicrous system when a fraction of the money could just make a world class subway and high-speed rail system.
Imagine being a candidate running for office on a campaign platform of "everybody must massively reduce energy consumption!" To quote Kent Brockman: "I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy doesn't work."
Because everyone knows that one thing we should definitely prioritize above the extinction of most life on earth is electoral viability.
If more of our leaders simply started telling the truth instead of politically triangulating for good PR, we'd be a lot better off. Openly discussing the need for reduction of energy and consumption is the moral and just thing to do... especially when it comes to Global North v. Global South.
My meta-argument for the DH, its nice to have unimportant things to argue passionately about. Maybe now that we can argue about shifts and openers, its not longer needed. My entertainment argument for the DH is its the closest thing we have in sports to seeing what it looks like when you let a regular person go up against major league talent. The world is a better place because we got to see Bartolo Colon bat.
Fun fact I was reminded of on the bird app yesterday, with with Jack Graney winning the BBHoF’s award for broadcasters.
The Canadian BBHoF has an award recognizing Canadian media members for their contribution to baseball in Canada, last won by Dan Shulman in 2020. It’s named the Jack Graney Award (Graney also being Canadian).
I will likely always root for the Angels, but I also root for Arte Moreno’s Trump-loving face to be stymied at every turn as he attempts to extract absurd value from the city of Anaheim to enrich himself.
I almost never go down those aisles. I forget whether it's in "In Defense of Food" or another Michael Pollan book but there's a line about how you should only ever shop in the outer aisles of a grocery store. The fruits, veggies, meats and dairy products are all on the outer aisles. Once you start going down aisle four and five, it's all processed crap.
I hate how substack doesn't save your long-ass comment when you accidentally click away. It's a QoL thing that I feel incredibly spoiled complaining about, but it's super common, which makes me wonder how hard it is to implement.
Anyway, too long, not writing again, here's the bullet points:
I hate how my interests as a fan increasingly look nothing like the interests of ownership.
Second wild card spot is great for all involved (except fans of the teams in the one-game playoff in the short term). I was super wrong about it.
Further playoff expansion could (will?) be a tragedy of the commons situation. I can't tell you the last time I watched an NBA 1 seed bump off an 8 seed. It's just so inconsequential. And the playoff chase doesn't really feel like it has stakes. You've got teams fighting to see who gets eliminated in the first round.
This newsletter has done a great job at highlighting the movement away from the ball club being the primary source of revenue. Thanks for that, and I'm happy to see it getting more mainstream (Jeff Passan was complaining about it a couple weeks ago. Great stuff).
Capitalism is awesome (I know, hot take here) because it does a good job at aligning everyone's interests.
Capitalism has gotten a lot less awesome because there's been a "cult of business" that believes those are the only interests that matter, which, no. This has manifested in both government actions that decouple business interests from workers' interests and the public good, and a drop-off in voluntary alignment, which was never guaranteed, but was nice while it lasted. But because of above, we're not able to implement some compensating controls to increase that alignment, because the mixed economy that drove America's success is Literally Socialism, and needs to be stopped (unless CEOs pander to Democrats, in which case the entire industry needs to be re-educated on their responsibility to only serve True Patriots)
You hit the nail on the head about expanded post-season. In MLB, winning the division is the regular season goal. You can easily expand the post-season without devaluing the regular season and the importance of winning the division much. Add however many wild card teams you want, but have the wild cards play against each other and whittle them down to one "wild card" winner. Then have the NLDS and NLCS with the three division winners and the wild card winner.
Agreed. I liked the high stakes of a winner-take-all wild card game. And that the Dodgers and Giants were both fighting to the end to try to avoid that situation. I'd be happy if the AL and NL win leaders didn't play until the Pennant series.
I hate the winner-take-all wild card game, but I especially hate it when the 2nd best regular season team in all of baseball gets stuck there by virtue of being in the same division as the best regular season team.
It contradicts the idea of playoff expansion and making what is a highly random postseason even more random so it’ll never happen, but I believe in baseball every round should be a best of seven.
I hate playoff expansion in every sport because it just provides cover for cheap and/or bad ownership groups because teams that are mediocre at best have a shot at getting in and theoretically have a shot at winning the whole thing, so it gives them less incentive to try to actually build a great team.
Given the choice I would reseed, but I think reseeding is less important than getting rid of the coin-flip game, period. I don’t like the idea of two 85-win wild card teams having advancement come down to a single game, but it’s particularly glaring when one of the participants is the 2nd winningest team in all of baseball that year.
In my rant about playoff expansion I didn’t mean to imply that I’d favor a return to the pre-Wild Card era. I think the current system of 10 teams is okay in terms of numbers, but ideally every series would be a real best of 7. Which I realize poses scheduling problems. But even a best of 3 is better than a single game.
(Since expansion is inevitable, one idea I’ve had to make it less offensive is to go all the way to 8 teams in each league, with the catch that every series is a best of 7 and the 1 seed gets spotted a 3-0 lead over the 8, the 2 seed gets spotted a 2-0 lead over the 7, and the 3 seed gets spotted a 1-0 lead over the 6. That way, MLB gets the expansion they want but there is a real incentive to win the division or at least be one of the top 2 wild cards).
I wonder what possessed the union negotiators to accept an agreement that just barely addressed the concerns of the rank and file. Sounds to me like they need new negotiators. Anyway, two months ago I emailed the union and they were not calling for boycott then. I am sure that is going to change, but so far there is nothing on their website saying as much.
And I am happy to say that my wife is now a member of an union in her new job.
I was sort of impressed that Rosenthal was at least trying to find a middle ground since he's often just a voice for the owners. I think that to a very large degree, even such mouthpieces know that things are out of whack. Which isn't to say that I expect more pro-union coverage from most sites.
I don't agree with Craig on much: but that the owners are greedy and screwing the players is one of them. I do want to briefly say one thing about revenue sharing: I think if MLB is going to have a monopoly, and it's going to have one, they should act like they're one business. The Yankees would not exist, or be as profitable, if they did not have the small market teams (and vice versa). So some form of revenue sharing makes sense.
That being said the small revenue clubs are clearly abusing it. The Rays, Brewers and Guardians are clearly at least TRYING to win and build a club, but the Pirates, Reds and Marlins are clearly not trying at all. Something must be done to prevent those teams from pocketing millions on an annual basis.
There is nothing that would make me happier to see relegation in American sports. Both professional and college. Next season I want to see Nebraska get relegated to the MAC while Northern Illinois joins the Big 10.
I realize there's no tanking for draft picks in college sports, but I think it would be a lot more fun.
I'd take issue with including the Reds in that "clearly not trying" list. They've been running payrolls that are squarely within the middle of the road. Last year, for instance, their payroll was between the White Sox and Blue Jays. The Reds payrolls have been 16th, 16th, and 18th over the past 3 seasons, so that's squarely in the middle.
The trades of Barnhart and Miley were definitely irritating and blatantly cheap, but the Reds have at least made an effort recently. Admittedly, the deals for Moustakas and Castellanos were debatable in terms of whether or not they were smart business, but both of those deals are something that the Pirates wouldn't be caught dead doing.
I'd put the Reds more in the "trying but not very good at developing talent" level than the "bad faith grifter" level like the Pirates.
Agreed. I know the players are hesitant to start talking salary floor, but it's gotta happen for revenue sharing to actually improve the product. The Marlins have been chronic abusers since the time of Loria.
"(b) the claim that pitchers only started truly sucking at hitting after the DH came on the scene."
I missed the great DH debate of 12/8, so maybe this was brought up already, but I've never understood this stance that pitchers would be better hitters if they simply practiced more. Pitching and hitting are two wildly different skill sets that have nothing to do with each other. They'll say, oh, but they were able to hit in high school. Yes, of course. Lots of people can hit high school pitching but still, somehow, can't hit major league pitching.
How many active pitchers today do we think could have made it professionally if they couldn't pitch? And why don't we expect the reverse? Anthony Rizzo struck out Freddie Freeman, so he's got the foundation. Do we think if he just focused more on pitching, he'd be a serviceable major league arm? These two skill sets are not interchangeable.
I think the "practice more" more argument fails at hitting and pitching because the two are specialized functions that occur continouously throughout the game. Most fielding is not high stakes...a high percentage of fielding plays are routine, and for any given position, relatively rare. Batting is done three or four times a game in a situation where the batter has less than no time to commit to his act and the best at it succeed about one time in three.
Conversely, while pitching is a higher percentage of success play, it is done continually throughout a game, say approximately 140 to 160 times a game. As a result batting and pitching are SPECIALTIES in a way even playing short or even catching isn't (though catching comes damn close).
It's just disingenuous to suggest otherwise, and as Our Host has suggested, pitchers sucking at batting, and position players sucking at hitting is an evergreen problem, with mutants like Ohtani being the exception that proves the rule.
I think the practice more argument has some merit as far as bunting goes. Yeah, it's not an easy thing to do. But many pitchers look like every bunting attempt is their first one.
A few years ago my son was competing in the PanAm Maccabee games, and as a result we were in Santiago for New Year's Eve. I was... 52 I think? ... and we were up all night partying with the crazy athletes/parents-of-athletes middle-aged-people-like-us. It was a great night, but the next day I was pretty much catatonic. Couldn't plan on running a country the next day, that's for sure!
The MLBPA seems to be fervent believers in trickle down economics. If they take care of the 1% it will trickle down to the 25th guy on the bench. I mean, it's worked so well for the US workers....
Exactly right. Compare to the NBA union, where the players are far more liberal.
I figure a lot of MLBers are in the union out of just barely enlightened self-interest and otherwise want nothing to do with such things.
Kinda has in baseball, though, hasn't it? At the same time that they (purportedly) have focused on Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, the average salaries and minimum salaries have also gone through the roof.
For 2021, mean salary was $4.17M, while median was $1.1M (which is very close to where I would set league minimum, not median). Roofs come in different heights, but not my idea of through the roof.
Minimum's have done better, largely because they were awful at the onset of free agency. But minimums are collectively bargained and thus have little to do with free agency. Anyway, here they are, adjusted for inflation (from B-R):
1970 = $86K
1980 = $101K
1990 = $212K
2000 = $321K
2010 = $507K
today = $571K
My search skills easily found averages, but I couldn't find median salaries except for 2021. The mean is skewed towards extreme outliers, so take from that what you will.
MLBPA is what happens when Republicans unionize. They fight for their internal 1%.
I think they view the top FAs as setting the bar for everyone else. Every new big free agent signing sets a new record of some kind -- AAV; total value; most ever for a position etc.
The big market teams are typically the teams who are the most aggressive in free agent spending. Letting them have more money to spend allows them to be more aggressive in bidding for big free agents, which raises the bar for the highest contract values. This trickles down to other free agents classes and extensions.
I dont know if this theory is sound -- it's just what I think is going on.
They definitely think that, but the marginal free agents have trouble signing, and if you wash out before free agency you're relatively fucked.
Which is why the NBA is such a contrast. The cap on maximum contracts (which are still very large) means that mid-level free agents get paid rather well. And that cap means that teams like Milwaukee can retain their superstars if they choose to stay.
The NBA is a little different though, because after your first three or four big contracts, you only have 9 guys left on the roster to sign. MLB rosters now have 26 players on them, and teams rightly have a hard time justifying spending $10M per year on the 21st guy on the roster, or whatever.
We bloggers and the columnists and other writers who inspired us spent years lamenting the fact that teams spent ridiculous amounts of money on declining free agents. The intent of those original complaints, though, was that the team would not waste money on mediocre or bad players so it could afford to spend it on good ones, that the teams we loved might be more consistently competitive.
Now that Moneyball has taken over and the owners have all pretty much figured out how foolish it can be to buy into a declining market - except in very rare cases - we're instead stuck complaining that they're not spending good money on free agents. None of us imagined that if they figured out this calculus, they would just line their own pockets with the surplus instead of using it to field a better team. Talk about unintended consequences.
NBA teams are not spending $10M per year on the last man. The league median salary is $3.8M (for half the games), and the league minimum scales from $925K to $2.6M based on years of experience. Double the rosters to increase the proportion of minimum salaries (NBA roster sizes are 15 active), and the distribution of salaries is still far more equitable at the bottom than MLB.
Excellent choice of song to finish on. David Byrne is a personal favourite artist, both with Talking Heads and solo stuff.
He's also really unassuming. I had the occasion to see him at an event honoring his then-SO Cindy Sherman, and he introduced himself to my boss with "hi, I'm David." Granted that might to some degree be a function of his location on the spectrum, but it just felt genuine.
Mrs. Bombo and I rewatch Stop Making Sense about every other month. She's 62 and can still out-dance like when we saw it at the Uptown theater 35 years ago. On the other hand, my Big Suit is now just my suit.
If Ruly Carpenter hadn't gone fishing one August afternoon in 1980 (or if cell phones were a thing then) the NL might've had the DH starting in 1982:
https://www.sportscasting.com/a-fishing-trip-cost-the-national-league-the-designated-hitter-rule/
Here's an idea to stop free agents moving...because we do lose something when a big name moves.
Idea: when a free agent is offered a contract by another team, the player can only provisionally accept. If he provisionally accepts, his old team is given the opportunity to offer a contract which is identical except that all the pay figures are multiplied by 95%. If the old team does that, then the other team's offer is also multiplied by 95%. Then the player chooses. But if the old team doesn't make a counter offer then the provisional acceptance is confirmed, as it stood, at 100%.
Apart from everything else, it would clarify excuses like "we made a great offer but he just wanted to leave" or "we wanted him to stay but he never even came back to us with a proposal".
So the player takes a mandatory 5% haircut? Why?
At the end of the day, I’m always going to be uncomfortable with a player eligible for free agency not being able to choose where they work. I get the idea that their labor is cheaper for a few years as a kind of return on investment from the big league club. But that should be relatively short and once they’ve repaid that, as determined by the current CBA, they should have no restrictions on where they work.
I wouldn't go quite that far, but close to it.
Baseball as entertainment would lose a lot of value if the richest teams could simply buy every player after their first five / six years and the poorer franchises couldn't compete except as a fluke. Similarly, the entertainment value goes down if there is no continuity on the teams and players bouncing around too frequently. Because of that, I don't mind some friction on players' ability to change teams as free agents.
Right now, I think that there is too much friction causing salaries to actually retract as revenue goes up. But some friction on player movement is appropriate.
By poorer franchises you mean an owner who is worth say $2 billion as opposed to Steve Cohen who is worth $15 billion, right ?
No. I mean a franchise that, because of location and history, has a lower attendance, merchandise sale, and television contract. A poorer *franchise* not a poorer *owner.* I think that demanding that an owner subsidize team revenue is misinformed.
I’ll disagree with you, as Craig has pointed out, we don’t really know what any of these teams make or lose, it’s all smoke and mirrors. In my opinion, if you’re worth $2 billion, you pay and don’t look for the ‘richer’ teams to subsidize. If you can’t (or won’t) then sell to someone who will, there is never a problem finders buyers.
You are conflating different topics.
There are some clubs that have their finances made public via their SEC filings. I invite you to look, for example, at the Liberty Media 10Q and 10K. It is "smoke and mirrors" only if one takes Manfred's statements alone and doesn't look further.
But let's say that all clubs are profitable - or would be profitable if you back out payments to ownership - in most years. There has to be a limit on that. That is, a team is profitable at the current salary levels. Would they still be at 110%, 150%, 200%, 500%? At some amount they stop being profitable by definition.
Your argument is that they have an obligation to dig into ownership's pocket to cover that loss. I think that argument inevitably leads to the conclusion that the wealthy must provide our entertainment to us at a loss. I dislike that argument for many, many reasons.
"[W]e do lose something when a big name moves." Who is "we"? Only the team that lost the player, and its fans. On the other hand, regular baseball fans get excited, the new team's fans get really excited, and the fans of the old team's rivals get pretty excited. Also, the "big name," who is a person, makes a lot more money and gets to choose where he works. So he gains, as do his friends and family,
Disagree. It is good for me as a fan of the Braves when the Nationals have Zimmerman for years and years or the Mets have Wright for a generation. I want the opposition to be more than just the name on the front of the uniform but the person and personality within it.
I'll second that. I'm not opposed to the dreaded "franchise tag" being a thing in MLB in theory. In theory. The devil is in the details of course and I'm not knowledgable enough to propose how it would actually work. Give me a day or two and I'll get something to Scherzer and Bruce Meyer. I've got them on speed dial.
The NHL has a distinction between restricted and unrestricted free agents, based on age and service time. Free agent signing are limited only by market forces. But RFA signings, well in theory any team can "offer sheet" an RFA. In case of an offer sheet, the player's original team can match the offer, including term, salary, signing bonuses, etc.; it's all or nothing. If the team matches, the player stays where he was; if not, the player moves to the team making the offer sheet. Note that I said "in theory"; in practice, teams are unwilling to poach players, and original teams generally match. Offer sheets, when they're made, are generally structured with poison pills for the original team, or with extreme pettiness. (A few years ago, the Montréal Canadiens offer sheeted a Carolina Hurricanes player, and the Canes matched, but this year the Canes offer-sheeted a Canadien's player whose development had been totally mishandled by the Canadiens, and the Canadiens didn't match. The signing bonus in that second offer was based on the first player's uniform number.)
As for whether we actually *do* lose something when a big name player moves, we lose no more when that movement is via free agency, i.e., (mostly the player's choice) than we do when the movement is via trade (the owner's choice). If you want to limit movement via free agency without limiting movement via trade, well, that's a choice, I suppose, but not one I would make.
Contrary to the implication, I did NOT suggest that movement via trade is just fine while movement via free agency isn't.
The nesting's a bit confusing. I don't *think* I was replying to you, rather to Pete Rodriguez.
Gotcha! Thanks for clarifying and sorry for any implication otherwise.
Oh, I think it's just as bad when long-established players leave via trades. Maybe even worse if it's midseason. I thought it was a great shame when the Cubs traded all those players in the middle of 2021.
There's a lot to be said for the world football system whereby every player has a no-trade clause from the beginning of their career. The whole system of trading baseball players without their consent is massively disruptive to players' lives, for little overall gain anywhere.
As a compromise, how about saying that a baseball team has to pay a player to trade them without consent? Maybe specify the amount in the CBA?
Pre pandemic, I went to a craptonne of Gwinnett games and probably would have been to more than a handful last year but for a couple of surgeries for my wife and I. I'm having a hard time seeing how the Endeavor transaction risks making that somehow more corporate. The parent club owned the AAA franchise, as well as the AA and one of the A teams that were part of the announcement yesterday. Do I think that Endeavor's corporate management will somehow be more soulless than Liberty Media?
Before moving the the Atlanta suburbs two decades ago, I was a season ticket holder for the Montgomery Biscuits. I haven't followed that team at all since moving away, but at least back then, the owners also owned the Lansing Lugnuts and IIRC two other teams with similarly weird monikers. (Best name for a minor league club comes not from baseball, but hockey ... just south of Atlanta we used to have the Macon Whoopee team.) We are multiple generations removed from having small local business people owning the minor league clubs and running them like junior versions of Bill (or Mike) Veeck.
Yeah, the Braves farm system has all been under the same umbrella for a long time. When I worked for Richmond 20 years ago I was technically an employee of AOL/Time Warner.
But there’s a HUGE difference between a parent company owning 3-5 teams and a major conglomerate owning 40 (which is a third of all teams).
Looks like a mixed bag. San Jose and Scranton are owned (primarily) by their parent clubs. Iowa and Memphis independent. And surprisingly Hudson Valley is owned by the group that includes Bill Murray (which also owns a couple other teams, including St Paul) - it makes absolutely no sense that they’d be part of this mess.
Same
Pretty sure that someone drove a bus full of money to the door for all these teams. Probably more than any are worth, meaning our new corporate overlords are leveraged to the hilt.
Nitpick: not _all_ the Braves' MiLB were owned by Liberty. One of the A ball clubs (Augusta, I think) was not.
Regarding tech fixes for climate, I encourage more active hostility in place of ambivalence. More significant than the likely unintended consequences, none of the ideas are ready, scalable, or feasible enough to implement in sufficient quantities to at all move the needle on climate before it's far too late.
Due to the above, these ideas fundamentally serve the function of preserving the status quo. They tell us we don't need to actively change much because tech will passively, vaguely "save us" somehow. I made a Charlie Brown kicking football meme about this years ago.
There is no climate technology that is ready, cheap, or environmentally sustainability enough (think destructively mining minerals for EV batteries) to scale to planet-saving levels. And that doesn't even factor in climate justice either, which is somehow never mentioned in these tech discussions.
The only thing that can save most life on earth is the thing that is never really considered in popular discourse: a massive reduction in energy consumption.
Thank you for mentioning climate justice.
So much of technology is framed as a way for the wealthy or wealth-adjacent to not be at all inconvenienced while the vast number of poor and powerless are left to burn in wildfires, drown in rising seas, or both.
It's depressing to see climate change denialists complaining about gas prices going up right now.
Even many who agree with climate change complain when gas prices go up. It was striking to see Biden going to Scotland advocating the fight against climate change, then the next thing you know he is saying we need to use the strategic oil reserve to keep gas prices down.
It seems an easy first step would make gas cost about $10 a gallon, which would result in us burning a lot less of it.
In Biden's defense though, he has to think about the political suicide high gas prices would be. Which just goes to show even those of us that talk a good game about reducing fossil fuel usage aren't really willing to follow through when there is a cost to it.
Yep. And having a car and driving is for many people and in many places a necessity. I'd love to be able to avoid car payments and the insurance and just the annoyance that comes with a vehicle, but my current hometown has really no public transportation to speak of and I don't have time to walk or bike to work, I need to get groceries, and my veterinarian is a 30 minute drive away.
Even when I did live someplace with public transportation I had to build in a lot of extra time for slowness, delays, making connections, and of course be on the alert for gropers. The only reason I kept taking it was because at the time I couldn't afford a personal vehicle and I was fortunate that my employer at the time was really close to a station as was my apartment. What a cluster.
No individual can be blamed for choosing car over public transit given our current system. The people to be blamed are the civic leaders, capitalists, and billionaires like the Kochs who systematically thwart any attempt to democratize transportation. The Kochs literally go around from city to city spending millions to abort light rail and other projects. Happened here in NC a few years ago.
Elon Musk and his cult is a huge part of the problem too. He has reinvented very small, inefficient, expensive, energy-intensive trains in his mythical Hyperloops, and is currently blowing tens of millions of dollars on developing this ludicrous system when a fraction of the money could just make a world class subway and high-speed rail system.
Imagine being a candidate running for office on a campaign platform of "everybody must massively reduce energy consumption!" To quote Kent Brockman: "I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy doesn't work."
Because everyone knows that one thing we should definitely prioritize above the extinction of most life on earth is electoral viability.
If more of our leaders simply started telling the truth instead of politically triangulating for good PR, we'd be a lot better off. Openly discussing the need for reduction of energy and consumption is the moral and just thing to do... especially when it comes to Global North v. Global South.
My meta-argument for the DH, its nice to have unimportant things to argue passionately about. Maybe now that we can argue about shifts and openers, its not longer needed. My entertainment argument for the DH is its the closest thing we have in sports to seeing what it looks like when you let a regular person go up against major league talent. The world is a better place because we got to see Bartolo Colon bat.
Under that argument, we should also mandate that a position player has to pitch one inning per game.
Teams losing large do that now. And they still make the poor sucker BAT when it's his turn. Oh, the injustice. :)
We already had that on the other side. George Plimpton did it for us 60 years ago.
Even more so because we got to see Bartolo Colon hit a home run (and experience Gary Cohen's call of that home run).
It was no cheapie, either. It landed several rows back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcD4ou5idzU
Fun fact I was reminded of on the bird app yesterday, with with Jack Graney winning the BBHoF’s award for broadcasters.
The Canadian BBHoF has an award recognizing Canadian media members for their contribution to baseball in Canada, last won by Dan Shulman in 2020. It’s named the Jack Graney Award (Graney also being Canadian).
I will likely always root for the Angels, but I also root for Arte Moreno’s Trump-loving face to be stymied at every turn as he attempts to extract absurd value from the city of Anaheim to enrich himself.
Thank goodness my ‘Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch’ is made by General Mills. It’s a fantastically delicious cereal if you haven’t already partaken.
do it anyway. just do it. we are.
My Exxon boycott is decades old, affected them not at all, and continues.
If you look to enough decimal places on Exxon profit statements, your impact on Exxon is undeniable. Take that big oil!
I almost never go down those aisles. I forget whether it's in "In Defense of Food" or another Michael Pollan book but there's a line about how you should only ever shop in the outer aisles of a grocery store. The fruits, veggies, meats and dairy products are all on the outer aisles. Once you start going down aisle four and five, it's all processed crap.
Dont sleep on the CTC Churros either. Tremendous cereal.
Fantastic as well, I was just putting the Sugar Cookie because it’s that time of year.
Feeling pretty boring here with my Aldi brand Cheerios and Frosted Flakes.
I hate how substack doesn't save your long-ass comment when you accidentally click away. It's a QoL thing that I feel incredibly spoiled complaining about, but it's super common, which makes me wonder how hard it is to implement.
Anyway, too long, not writing again, here's the bullet points:
I hate how my interests as a fan increasingly look nothing like the interests of ownership.
Second wild card spot is great for all involved (except fans of the teams in the one-game playoff in the short term). I was super wrong about it.
Further playoff expansion could (will?) be a tragedy of the commons situation. I can't tell you the last time I watched an NBA 1 seed bump off an 8 seed. It's just so inconsequential. And the playoff chase doesn't really feel like it has stakes. You've got teams fighting to see who gets eliminated in the first round.
This newsletter has done a great job at highlighting the movement away from the ball club being the primary source of revenue. Thanks for that, and I'm happy to see it getting more mainstream (Jeff Passan was complaining about it a couple weeks ago. Great stuff).
Capitalism is awesome (I know, hot take here) because it does a good job at aligning everyone's interests.
Capitalism has gotten a lot less awesome because there's been a "cult of business" that believes those are the only interests that matter, which, no. This has manifested in both government actions that decouple business interests from workers' interests and the public good, and a drop-off in voluntary alignment, which was never guaranteed, but was nice while it lasted. But because of above, we're not able to implement some compensating controls to increase that alignment, because the mixed economy that drove America's success is Literally Socialism, and needs to be stopped (unless CEOs pander to Democrats, in which case the entire industry needs to be re-educated on their responsibility to only serve True Patriots)
You hit the nail on the head about expanded post-season. In MLB, winning the division is the regular season goal. You can easily expand the post-season without devaluing the regular season and the importance of winning the division much. Add however many wild card teams you want, but have the wild cards play against each other and whittle them down to one "wild card" winner. Then have the NLDS and NLCS with the three division winners and the wild card winner.
Agreed. I liked the high stakes of a winner-take-all wild card game. And that the Dodgers and Giants were both fighting to the end to try to avoid that situation. I'd be happy if the AL and NL win leaders didn't play until the Pennant series.
I hate the winner-take-all wild card game, but I especially hate it when the 2nd best regular season team in all of baseball gets stuck there by virtue of being in the same division as the best regular season team.
It contradicts the idea of playoff expansion and making what is a highly random postseason even more random so it’ll never happen, but I believe in baseball every round should be a best of seven.
I hate playoff expansion in every sport because it just provides cover for cheap and/or bad ownership groups because teams that are mediocre at best have a shot at getting in and theoretically have a shot at winning the whole thing, so it gives them less incentive to try to actually build a great team.
So you would rather seed based on record? Because the "traditional" pre-wild card era would have had the Dodgers completely miss the playoffs.
Given the choice I would reseed, but I think reseeding is less important than getting rid of the coin-flip game, period. I don’t like the idea of two 85-win wild card teams having advancement come down to a single game, but it’s particularly glaring when one of the participants is the 2nd winningest team in all of baseball that year.
In my rant about playoff expansion I didn’t mean to imply that I’d favor a return to the pre-Wild Card era. I think the current system of 10 teams is okay in terms of numbers, but ideally every series would be a real best of 7. Which I realize poses scheduling problems. But even a best of 3 is better than a single game.
(Since expansion is inevitable, one idea I’ve had to make it less offensive is to go all the way to 8 teams in each league, with the catch that every series is a best of 7 and the 1 seed gets spotted a 3-0 lead over the 8, the 2 seed gets spotted a 2-0 lead over the 7, and the 3 seed gets spotted a 1-0 lead over the 6. That way, MLB gets the expansion they want but there is a real incentive to win the division or at least be one of the top 2 wild cards).
I wonder what possessed the union negotiators to accept an agreement that just barely addressed the concerns of the rank and file. Sounds to me like they need new negotiators. Anyway, two months ago I emailed the union and they were not calling for boycott then. I am sure that is going to change, but so far there is nothing on their website saying as much.
And I am happy to say that my wife is now a member of an union in her new job.
I was sort of impressed that Rosenthal was at least trying to find a middle ground since he's often just a voice for the owners. I think that to a very large degree, even such mouthpieces know that things are out of whack. Which isn't to say that I expect more pro-union coverage from most sites.
Don't leave me stranded here...I can't get used to this lifestyle!
I don't agree with Craig on much: but that the owners are greedy and screwing the players is one of them. I do want to briefly say one thing about revenue sharing: I think if MLB is going to have a monopoly, and it's going to have one, they should act like they're one business. The Yankees would not exist, or be as profitable, if they did not have the small market teams (and vice versa). So some form of revenue sharing makes sense.
That being said the small revenue clubs are clearly abusing it. The Rays, Brewers and Guardians are clearly at least TRYING to win and build a club, but the Pirates, Reds and Marlins are clearly not trying at all. Something must be done to prevent those teams from pocketing millions on an annual basis.
There is nothing that would make me happier to see relegation in American sports. Both professional and college. Next season I want to see Nebraska get relegated to the MAC while Northern Illinois joins the Big 10.
I realize there's no tanking for draft picks in college sports, but I think it would be a lot more fun.
I'd take issue with including the Reds in that "clearly not trying" list. They've been running payrolls that are squarely within the middle of the road. Last year, for instance, their payroll was between the White Sox and Blue Jays. The Reds payrolls have been 16th, 16th, and 18th over the past 3 seasons, so that's squarely in the middle.
The trades of Barnhart and Miley were definitely irritating and blatantly cheap, but the Reds have at least made an effort recently. Admittedly, the deals for Moustakas and Castellanos were debatable in terms of whether or not they were smart business, but both of those deals are something that the Pirates wouldn't be caught dead doing.
I'd put the Reds more in the "trying but not very good at developing talent" level than the "bad faith grifter" level like the Pirates.
Agreed. I know the players are hesitant to start talking salary floor, but it's gotta happen for revenue sharing to actually improve the product. The Marlins have been chronic abusers since the time of Loria.
"(b) the claim that pitchers only started truly sucking at hitting after the DH came on the scene."
I missed the great DH debate of 12/8, so maybe this was brought up already, but I've never understood this stance that pitchers would be better hitters if they simply practiced more. Pitching and hitting are two wildly different skill sets that have nothing to do with each other. They'll say, oh, but they were able to hit in high school. Yes, of course. Lots of people can hit high school pitching but still, somehow, can't hit major league pitching.
How many active pitchers today do we think could have made it professionally if they couldn't pitch? And why don't we expect the reverse? Anthony Rizzo struck out Freddie Freeman, so he's got the foundation. Do we think if he just focused more on pitching, he'd be a serviceable major league arm? These two skill sets are not interchangeable.
I think the "practice more" more argument fails at hitting and pitching because the two are specialized functions that occur continouously throughout the game. Most fielding is not high stakes...a high percentage of fielding plays are routine, and for any given position, relatively rare. Batting is done three or four times a game in a situation where the batter has less than no time to commit to his act and the best at it succeed about one time in three.
Conversely, while pitching is a higher percentage of success play, it is done continually throughout a game, say approximately 140 to 160 times a game. As a result batting and pitching are SPECIALTIES in a way even playing short or even catching isn't (though catching comes damn close).
It's just disingenuous to suggest otherwise, and as Our Host has suggested, pitchers sucking at batting, and position players sucking at hitting is an evergreen problem, with mutants like Ohtani being the exception that proves the rule.
That should be postion players sucking at PITCHING. Damn lack of an edit feature.
Although at a typical one time in four or less success rate, ALL players suck at hitting in a larger sense.
Hey, that comment is Brooks Kieschnick erasure!
I think the practice more argument has some merit as far as bunting goes. Yeah, it's not an easy thing to do. But many pitchers look like every bunting attempt is their first one.
I am in my early 40's and I could no sooner stay out partying until 4:00 am than I could grow wings and fly to Mars.
A few years ago my son was competing in the PanAm Maccabee games, and as a result we were in Santiago for New Year's Eve. I was... 52 I think? ... and we were up all night partying with the crazy athletes/parents-of-athletes middle-aged-people-like-us. It was a great night, but the next day I was pretty much catatonic. Couldn't plan on running a country the next day, that's for sure!