Balta1701

People tried to do something like this back in 1994. This is an election year, so politicians are going to jump at getting in on this if the league gives them a chance. This one should Have been obvious to Manfred on December 1.

Apparently the MLB pension plan dates back to the late 1940s and would qualify as extremely generous. It only takes a little over a month in the bigs to qualify and full benefits are like $7500 a month, scaled by how long you were in the league. Everyone who had 10 years of service after 1970 qualifies for full benefits, and people with shorter stints just earn less. https://sabr.org/research/article/a-home-run-by-any-measure-the-baseball-players-pension-plan/

Doesn’t baseball have a big pension fund paid for by the all star game? Was there a time when players didn’t qualify?

Mumbles something angry about a person who insisted the players would cave…

Bah, do we have any evidence that either side can actually keep things quiet if they’re not all locked in a room together?

Not any time soon you don’t.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2015/9/14/18538649/the-white-sox-were-scared-off-of-starling-marte-because-of-gun-incident

Isn't that exactly the setup that is failing right now?

This would have been illegal.

There was? Didn't the lockout begin at the exact second the CBA expired, so the first legal second that a labor impasse could have begun?

See, this is a particularly biased take against the union. We have no idea and literally no way to suspect how they would have responded if they received an offer like this one in February. My guess is the exact opposite - I think if they get this offer in February, there's some haggling for a couple weeks, there's time to actually work through details of the international draft, but everyone knows that they're right there and they get it done by the first deadline. The final numbers on things like the CBT seemed obvious to me and within a few million dollars that's exactly where they are right now. But then, that's my guess from watching these proceedings - that the players were trying to basically get to right here on the CBT and other issues. But what we do know is that the owners actually waited, didn't offer a workable deal by their first deadline, gave numbers that everyone knew were low, and now we're stuck watching people who were up until 2:00 am last night trying to figure out legal text in the space of a few hours to reshape a set of hundred million dollar deals. No one can do that.

As I said earlier - I don't know how it is physically possible to manage a negotiation with this many moving parts in this compressed timespan. So why couldn't the owners present the offer from yesterday last week or last month? It was abundantly clear by mid-February where some of these numbers were going to come down, and the current discussions are right in the range you'd have gotten to if there had been significant movement in February. What spurred negotiations this time was a significant move on the part of the owners away from their "final offer" last week.

So far in this negotiation, about 3/4 of the total time has been the players waiting on the owners for a response/new proposal, and I can't think of an "under pressure" time where it was the owners waiting on the players for more than a couple days. There was a point in late February where I wanted the players to make a more aggressive offer than they did, and we got stuck with incremental offers from both sides for about 2 weeks, but other than that, the delays have been massively one-sided so far.

I think the amount of pressure that the owners put on both sides thanks to the "long delay with no talking" followed by "workable agreement that appeared on March 8" would probably drive almost any of us batty if we had to deal with it.

Well at least one of the things you said is blatantly false, because at the time of the trade his FIP was 1.10, his xFIP was 1.99, and his ERA was 0.49, and 1.99 - 0.49 >> 0.40. None of that changes how dramatically his 2021 first half stands out in his career numbers either.

At the time of the trade, Craig Kimbrel had a .203 batting average on balls in play and a 3.8% HR/FB rate. Both of those numbers would have been the lowest of his career, which should have been an enormous red flag to anyone who looked past the ERA line. Even more glaring, his ground ball rate jumped starting in 2016 when he went to Boston - he used to be a much more effective ground ball pitcher, so his average BABIP went up starting when he moved to Boston - his BABIP with the Cubs in the first half of 2021 was extremely low, lowest of his career, despite the fact that his ground ball rate was still low and his fly ball rate was still high. It is possible to apply statistics to his numbers. There is an obvious change in his GB rate starting in 2016, so if we take his BABIP since then, a .203 BABIP compared to his .260 normal mark is 2 standard deviations away. This means that approximately his first half was at the 90-95th percentile of what he might do, meaning that the odds of him doing that performance were something like 1/10 to 1/20 based on luck. Similarly, his HR/FB rate was so low that it appears to be at the 99th percentile of his performance - he would have a 1/100 chance of repeating that performance in the second half. Without even considering the White Sox's defense or catching situations, Craig Kimbrel's stats in the first half screamed "one of the luckiest players in baseball in the first half". Interestingly, Cesar Hernandez's HR rate screamed the same thing for him.

At the very least, for something like “an international draft”, this is novel enough that the union should have had text weeks ago. That’s the kind of thing that is likely to need refinement for both sides to agree.

I’m pretty sure San Diego already traded Adam Frazier to Seattle.

Has anyone seen anywhere if they were still keeping 7 inning games in double headers?

Except for the part where they didn’t read any of his stats beyond his ERA. And the part where he was awful and they still picked up an option making him the second highest paid reliever in there league this year.

Here’s 75 new pages of text describing the international draft rules. The deadline is 6 hours from now. If you want to name a counter proposal we need the text in 47 minutes. Why are you swearing?

This was one driving me nuts last night. A number of these things would ideally require weeks to get the exact details down and several back-and-forth passes. It’s generally acceptable to both but you don’t want to accidentally sign off on something whose implications you don’t understand. Manfred wants them doing these talks under a deadline so that maybe that exact scenario happens. No wonder no one trusts him.z

From that picture I’m assuming that this fight will take place out back in about 20 minutes.

No one is reporting yet on what happened to The union proposals for smaller revenue sharing fractions.

Ooh I like that, that hammers tanking for picks. Detroit would have been hit by that. White Sox would have been hit by that.