Leaderboard

I agree. I think the debate is in defining keeping it healthy. If we just are looking at the financial health we should line up with the owners and profits. There aren't too many businesses that failed while turning a profit. The owners "winning" keeps the game going without any threats. But I think for most fans healthy also means every market having a chance to win once in a while. Healthy means a team being able to draft and hang onto a talented player and watch them develop into a superstar while playing at least a season or two for them before leaving. Healthy to me is all the employees earning a livable wage (I'm looking at you MiLB). Based on the growth in value for most MLB teams and the profits that most report, there is room to make the non owners "healthier" while not risking the long term financial health of teams and the game itself.

5 weeks later...

Yes.

Literally everyone knows this. As long as there is a lockout, no one cares because there is no reason to care. Heck I already spent the money I was going to spring training and getting tickets for next year with. It's hard to care when there is no reason to do so. Thanks Manfred.

It always changes to whatever we don't have. When Soxtalk started, it was people would give up everything for a title. Then we got it, and it turned into we need multiple playoff appearances. Now we did that, and it is on to the next thing.

But in the end it doesn't even matter

You smooth talker. I agree as usual.

Well, some would argue any crashes in-between...

Jimmy back to being funny

And like NASCAR, the best parts are the 1st lap and the last one

Still a young pup. Lot's of WS championships in your future.

What a great idea. This should settle the work stoppage for sure. Just make all players independent contractors and pay all players what they were worth each and every season. If I am an owner I jump on that.

Add Brian Flores to the HC list. I think he's on top of my wish list.

IMO, the number one priority for the Bears is the development of Fields at QB. Jim Harbaugh, despite having some of the top QB recruits in the nation since 2015, has failed to develop a good QB at Michigan. My choices for HC would be any one of Greg Roman, Kellen Moore and Byron Leftwich. Roman not only transformed the Ravens offense (in mid season no less) to Lamar Jackson's skill set, but also did the same with the 49ers and Kaepernick years earlier. Moore is a coach's son who was calling his own plays at age 16 in H.S. He's helped develop Prescott and make Dallas a top notch offense. Reminds me of Sean McVay. Leftwich has been Arians' right hand man for a while. If his offensive/QB philosophy is the same - I'm assuming it is - then he'll be a solid HC. Also, I would see what it would take to nab Jarod Mayo from the Pats staff to be the DC. Give him an Assistant HC/DC title and offer him more money and maybe he comes? The combo of these two would cost less than just Harbaugh alone and would put us on a better path IMO.

Leftwich now too. Also enjoyed this. Basically no rhyme or reason to hiring, but as I said the college coaches bias is overblown. All coaches are terrible, we just remember college coaches more because they are novel and usually dominated their previous level: https://github.com/mnhardy-da/NFL-Head-Coach-Study/blob/main/2022 NFL Head Coaching Study v2.ipynb

I think they shoud get a bigger cut of pie, but I am all for luxury tax. I do think changes have to be made to maximize teams trying to compete.

But if they are good and put up a 5 WAR season, you will have to pay them $40 million.

Most owners would still be rich and do whatever they want if the value of their teams went to zero. If they never collected another paycheck from playing baseball, a ton of players would be in trouble. Owners have the upper hand, and usually do in most labor disputes.

I will say re: Harbaugh I don't know if it's as much wanting absolute say in personnel like Gruden or making sure he doesn't get stabbed in the back like he was with Baalke.

This - I have always said Bears ownership is so hands off it has to be an almost ideal role for a gig. They also have committed funding in recent years so you have budget and freedom. You build a sustainable winner - and you literally are king of Chicago.

There's NOTHING in the record amount of job openings mismatched with job seekers for any position under $15/hour or even $20/hr in the US that would suggest this is being reflected by what's actually happening on the ground. And back to baseball...the equivalent of those earning under $15-20 in the MLB economy, anything outside of the first, second and occasional high bonus/lower round June draft picks, Pacific Rim players, Latin Americans under age 18, and all the players in their first 3 seasons don't generally enjoy much protection. Mike Trout in his second and third seasons in baseball recorded 10.1 and 10.2 fWAR seasons. He was pretty clearly one of the best players in the game already, but made less than $2 million combined his first three years. By Balta calculations, that would make him worth roughly $160 million to the Angels, not even including marketing/promotional aspects. What other industry can you think in the entire world that limits the very best performer to the baseball equivalent of minimum wage? If Mike Trout had a career-ending injury after his first three seasons, he would have had just $3.2 million (pretax, including his signing bonus) to his name. (That's a mere pittance compared to the CEO of Binance already being worth $96 BILLION when almost nobody in the world was even familiar with Bitcoin and Ethereum a decade ago when Trout was a rookie, let alone Doge Coin and Shiba Inu.) So does somebody who just happened to be in the right place at the right time (pretty sure the story involves a poker game) deserve that much more than Mike Trout, who was already the best player in the game in years 2 and 3 in his contract but wasn't rewarded for that performance until Spring Training of 2014 ($144.5 million/6 years).

There are industries like airlines where people work all over the world and have a different person they report to every week. You are just a number and a bargaining unit is necessary to offer some degree of representation. The vast number of us work in environments where our own contributions can be evaluated by bosses who have supervised our efforts for many years in some cases. If you want to be treated as just another person who performs such and such type of work...by all means...join the union. As most of you know, many businesses today allow you to join a union or not. Pressure is applied to the employee by union reps but ultimately the employee decides what he is comfortable with. Baseball has vast numbers of rules brought about by the players union fighting for things such as arbitration and free agency and I would admit that those advances came about by negotiating together as a group and fighting together for those improvements. Almost all of us have the benefits we have for some hard-fought battles between unions and employers. Most employers today pay the going wage for the type of work required...along with benefits, etc. in order to attract the caliber of employee they want. In many but not all situations...unions have largely outlived their usefulness IMO. Now...back to baseball.

Then you would clearly prefer your wife worked in Asia, where as soon as she turned 35 or 40 working (anywhere) in the airline industry...she would have been out of a job. And without unions, who is protecting those over age 50 or especially 55+ workers in the United States who are making up the biggest percentage of workers (mostly involuntarily, some due to Covid and preexisting co-morbidities? Now you can quote Ayn Rand back to me, supply and demand forces, equilibrium, survival of the fittest, but the fact of the matter is that America would only work well for the Top 10-15% of society and the rest would totally be screwed over in the labor relations picture you're painting. Now this might even work from a capitalistic perspective, but eventually you're going to run out of emerging markets to sell to if we continue to gut the middle class...not to mention we're now bordering on becoming a "failed democracy" because so many members of that middle class don't believe they have any where left to turn. As a former member of a teacher's union, I would have been more than happy to give up tenure (after 2-3 years of teaching) if they would have made it possible for teachers to somehow be compensated based on year to year performance, but how are they going to measure or quantify that...the worst teacher in the school could get the biggest raise if it was simply dependent on working with the top classes in any given school. So then if you look at percentage of improvement or whatever, well, that's even more complicated because the students already performing well will have a ceiling there. Beyond that, effectiveness of teaching based on a state standardized test score is increasingly challenged as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Just continuing to raise salaries based on years of service ends up with many older teachers simply clocking in and out until they max out their pensions (let's say at 60% of last five salaries), but then if you're going to take away union protections, are you going to be willing to raise salaries by 25-50%? Most Americans believe teachers are already fairly compensated, and get "too much" vacation time, for example...or don't believe the media narrative of teachers spending 5-10% of their salaries on student needs being unmet by their building budgets.

So your irrefutable source on “most employees” is your own personal work experience, that, while valid, is minuscule in the grand scope of labor negotiations. You being staunchly anti-labor doesn’t make your claims true.

In an era of the crashing of workforce participation like none other in modern America, which has literally come to be known as The Great Resignation, this is an interesting take.

Buckle up buckaroos 2021 turned out to be wildly on the dot

Hahahaha holy shit. Please point to a verifiable corroborated source of information that backs up this claim.

This is just blatantly wrong. If you look at national polls, there's an overwhelming sentiment of workers being underpaid and overworked. Employers demand a monopoly on their employees time. That's why we need unions.

I suppose its possible I could, but given the state of labor relations in this country and how far out of balance it has gotten in favor of employers everywhere I doubt I will see such a case any time soon.

We published the group of catchers today. It's a weak spot in the system but I've heard good things about Adam Hackenberg and Baseball America will rank him in their top 30 when the handbook is released.

He has the tools to stay there but if they do decide to move him off the dirt it's not a death sentence for him because the bat will play on an OF corner.