Balta1701

Looking at the offers, I think if you went in the middle of the 2 on the luxury tax line, minimum salary, and the bonus pool, and kept super-2 contracts existing, that’s an offer the union would probably take. But if the owners are saying “this is our final offer”, the union isn’t going to negotiate against themselves to see if the owners will budge. They apparently dropped their ask on the bonus pool by $5 million on Tuesday and got nothing in return, so why would they drop their ask by 10x that?

So at what point do we drop the name Willie Harris in the context of bad faith interviews to satisfy a rule built to improve minority hiring?

Wouldn’t be surprising at all compared to college coach salaries, and it’s exactly what Gruden got.

There was zero reason they couldn't have made the offer they made mid-January in late November instead, in reply to the Players' original offer which they detailed in November. We might well still be in a lockout (which is again optional to the owners), but then we could have been doing this griping in early December rather than in February. They chose to have this negotiation happen under the threat of loss of games.

Boras listed every team that talked to him about Semien in an article for ESPN. The White Sox never even put in a call to indicate interest. They made 0 efforts on Semien.

The union has also asked for about a 20% increase in the minimum salary that would affect the journeymen directly at a cost of about $1-$2 million per team. The owners oppose it, and have offered about a 2% increase.

Because the owners refused to make any complete proposal until the lockout had already gone on for 43 days.

how long did it take people to get playoff refunds last october? Weeks?

Actually, the players didn't propose that pool at first. The owners offered $10 million (and elimination of super-2 contracts), the players countered with $105, and the players dropped that to $100.

That still doesn't tell me if there was any real movement by the owners.

So the Cowboys in the East, all 4 teams in the west, no one obviously great in the south, if COVID toe goes to Denver that would leave a very weak NFC on paper.

This will actually be the key one. The owners delayed things until the pressure was on and have yet to make any movement towards the players, which would be required for a deal to happen. The players showed they were willing to negotiate with their last offer by dropping the part about earlier free agency that the owners targeted as the worst thing in the players’ original offer. Now it’s time to see if the owners want the season to happen or not, and the pressure is on due to their 43 day delay.

Ok, so you’re not giving the team the benefit of the doubt. What does that mean? You won’t be watching them this year? You’re not buying tickets? You’re going to not comment on the Bears in this thread? I have no idea if they got it right or wrong, and understand it might be year 2 or 3 before you can really tell. If they’re a 5 win team in year 3 at least it will be time for a new coach, and the GM could be on shaky ground. What more is there to say?

The bad news - from the owners' proposal, that would basically leave them ineligible for any of the draft pick rewards for bringing up a top prospect to start the year.

Apparently some very fine people shot the previous memorial marking his birthplace last year, so it was upgraded with some MLB money.

While nothing is impossible, Tampa Bay doesn’t have a ton of cap space right now and apparently Brady retiring doesn’t clear much because the money they put off into future years comes due as dead cap space this year now. So it’s at least tough for them.

This ESPN piece on that subject from a few months ago seems excellent. Even some of the Supreme Court Justices have suggested that this is a matter that should be collectively bargained. However, it’s a case where all the power is in the hands of the owners and they can intimidate their employees to prevent them from speaking up or organizing - someone who has spent 10 years trying to be a baseball player through high school, college, and a lower level or two, who gets cut and casually labeled a “trouble maker” in a few whispers could easily have their career ended. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32172108/can-union-fix-minor-leaguers-say-poverty-level-pay-poor-housing-driving-mental-health-crisis

I’ve read some people say that the show would have been better if it was just done chronologically, and I have to agree with that. I actually liked the long backstory bit in episode 2, but even though it was interesting it felt like it was interrupting the other plot.

You literally just wrote that demanding more from those franchises was equal to taxing away all profits from a dry cleaner.

So you are ok with the Pirates and Rockies and Marlins just not caring? It’s ok if they win 65 games a year forever? No downside to The league if they don’t develop fans over time? As long as they’re profitable I shouldn’t dare judge them because profitability is the highest morality? Because that’s what you’re arguing with this malarkey.

Bullplop. Those teams are extremely profitable and well run teams with low payroll are regularly competitive. None of them are filing bankruptcy, even despite actual and significant losses due to COVID. Furthermore, the Royals won a World Series recently. Cleveland and Tampa Bay made World Series appearances. They don’t want to compete, they want to take home a big paycheck for the owners.

The last two weeks saw far more movement than I expected if the season was going to be canceled.

The owners proposal on/about January 15 included their first attempt at realistic core economics proposals. It included things like making arbitration worse for players, but it was a legitimate proposal including all the core economic details. The players responded in a professional way last Monday - by giving a core economics proposal that they would accept, which included the major concession of dropping the request for shorter paths to free agency which the owners held up as the players' most unreasonable request. This is legitimate progress on the core economic issues. They are far closer than they were in early January, where the players had made a full and detailed proposal and the owners had only given piecemeal ideas back in November. Again, they could stall today. It's the owners' turn to counter things, and their next proposal could be to repeat their last proposal giving no ground or they could wait another 43 days before offering it. But it is wrong to say that they haven't talked about the core economic issues.

We are absolutely closer than we were 3 weeks ago, let alone November. When the owners made what was basically their first non-ludicrous proposal, the MLBPA came back with a much closer to a compromise offer than I thought they would. There has been progress. Whether it stalls or not I won't guess, but progress was made. If you want to be pissed at the owners waiting 43 days to make an offer they could have made in November, that would be totally fair.