Balta1701

This one is actually kinda cute.

Having $30 million is trading Kimbrel. Under the old rules, they would have about $13 million available right now.

There were some worries with Hernandez that most of his peripherals were down in the first half other than his HR rate, so if he stopped hitting HR he would stop hitting entirely. Someone got that in the trade thread, unfortunately White Sox scouts did not. Clearly someone did need to be brought in, and a low cost guy who was adequate would have been fine. The right answer was Escobar, but for some reason the White Sox rejected him and probably paid a higher trade price for Hernandez. Again, whatever scouting decision that was…bad.

There was a book that came out 15 or so years ago that said Tetrahydrogestrinone had dinner with Griffey after the 98 home run chase and said that it wasn’t fair that Sosa and McGwire got all that attention for cheating so he was going to go “on the hard stuff”. Then in 99 his new bicep tore itself in half. People read that as saying he was clean beforehand because they follow the motive and timing, but if Tetrahydrogestrinone had just been on Stanozolol beforehand, that’s the one Palmeiro and Tejada used and it didn’t transform their bodies like the THG did. Maybe even he didn’t use it as regularly but only in certain training or recovery cycles.

If you believe the Mitchell report that Clemens got his first shot with Torotno, Clemens had a measly 80 rWAR, 3 Cy young’s, 2 more top 3 finishes, and an MVP beforehand. I’d vote for that today. That’s more WAR and same number of Cy Young’s and MVPs as Kershaw today. Maybe Heyman believes he started earlier and his whole career is contaminated, but I totally believe Tetrahydrogestrinone was on stuff early in his career and just switched to “the hard stuff” in 99 as it was quoted in one book.

I would imagine that is 100% true. I sure wouldn't have signed if I were him.

Oh I haven’t forgotten that at all. I also don’t know how they can come up with a RH, 2B, left handed balance, and starting pitching help without the luxury tax going up and him starting the season as a bench player or part time DH, unless they use him in a trade.

Yeah, but we will worry about that like next June. The fact that it's an election year will get some people involved, whether it will be enough to make something happen I have no good guesses about.

JMO - the endgame is for one side to break, for the season to be completely lost, or for a court to step in, as in 1994. Let's do some quick, somewhat painless math. The last time there was an NFL lockout we can roughly assume league revenues were $10 billion a year - about $500 million a week counting playoffs. The players said "Revenues are going up a ton, we think we should get a larger share, and a 3% boost would be fine" - that was the equivalent of $300 million a year. The owners responded "absolutely not here's a lockout for thee entire offseason!!!" Then, when the season got close, they said "wait, we're fighting over $300 million a year, but we're going to lose $500 million a week if we lose any games, this might not be smart", so they offered the players something like a 1% boost/$100 million a year, and it took about 15 minutes for that lockout to end. Got that? Ok, baseball's revenue in 2019 was about $10 billion a year, so let's use that number as a round number to make the math easy. If the players were getting 55% of the total revenue, that's $5.5 billion a year. They're at 40% the last few years, and dropping - which is $4 billion. The difference between the players revenue in 2000 and the players revenue right now is larger than $1.5 billion a year. If you take a more conservative 50/50 split, that's $1 billion a year. If the next CBA lasted 5 years again, the difference between a 50/50 split and a 40/60 split is $5 billion dollars total. That is more than an entire seasons' worth of earnings for the players. So here's the problem: getting back to a 50/50 split is worth more to the players than the entire 2022 season. Keeping a 60/40 split and having it get bigger is worth more to the owners than the entire 2022 season. Compared to the difference in the NFL, these numbers are enormous. There may be some goodwill and willingness to negotiate that happens in February and they find an amicable solution. But more likely IMO - the players will want to see if these new owners will hold out. The owners will have to pay rent and upkeep on facilities, minor league salaries and bonuses, and staff salaries even if there is no income coming in. The owners in 1994 would have endured that for years, Reinsdorf had apparently personally made sure of it. Will these? We don't know. Similarly, we saw notes yesterday saying that the players union has been saving up fees since 2016 knowing this fight was going to happen, meaning that the union has a war chest to keep their players from losing their homes. If the players get no revenue for the entire year, do they break and accept the current revenue breakdown? The owners may well test that. Finally, there are legal issues that come to the forefront when you are dealing with publicly financed stadiums and labor disputes. In 1994, Judge Sotomayor ruled that the owners were not negotiating in good faith under the requirements of the law and ordered the game to resume under a continuation of the previous agreement. Something like that is possible again this year. Congress also gets very angry when taxpayer funded stadiums sit idle, and Congress does have some powerful leverage also, but we won't be really figuring that out until next summer (which by the way happens to be an election year! So I'm sure Congresspeople will be totally reasonable about this!)

The basic and fundamental problem is shown on this page in the tweet SSHM shared. Over the past 20 years, baseball’s revenue has tripled. However, the earnings of the players have not tripled (Mike Trout’s deal compared to ARod - would have been $750 million, for an easy example). The owners, through a variety of means, have limited salary growth - the luxury tax limits high spending teams, revenue sharing means the Pirates and Marlins make a hefty profit if they spend nothing, and teams like the Astros and White Sox clear a fortune while they are rebuilding. The end result is a broken free agent market. When only 1 or 2 teams are trying to get better, Machado and Harper don’t get contract offers in December at all, and we wind up with these 3 month free agent sagas that are bad for fans but which push costs down. That is a symptom of the problem. Ownership will change a lot of things, but this is a HUGE win for them, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of extra dollars among the 30 owners per year. Under no circumstance will they give this up and allow things to rebalance without a fight. That is the fundamental issue and it’s why I mostly come down on the side of the players. It also negatively impacts the game, because it’s no fun watching a team win 55 games with a payroll lower than what Max Scherzer is making and it’s no fun watching a 3 month free agent sagas compared to the big signing surges we see in the NBA and NFL. However, the NBA and NFL run differently, and that shows why some blame goes to the players too. They have a defined share of the money going to the players, with a salary cap and floor set by the revenue coming in, and with an independent audit to verify it. The MLB players have specifically rejected this format, in part because it does limit the upper salaries, in part because 2 decades ago their share of revenue was growing and they didn’t want to shut down that gold mine, and in part because these 2 sides trust each other so little that they don’t believe the owners wouldn’t find a way to “Joel Osteen” some of their money into the wall of a bathroom to avoid an audit, which frankly some of them might. Had the players agreed to a true revenue split, the game would look very different, some of these problems wouldn’t exist, and this lockout might never have happened, so there is blame for the players as well.

How long is the average big league career and what are these guys set up to do afterwards? Their bodies aren’t as destroyed as NFL players, but if they came straight out of high school, never finished college, or were international signings, what are they going to do with the rest of their careers? We know that’s been a problem in the NFL to the point that the union does a whole bunch of education for their players about being ready for life after a 3 year career.

One hitter came to the white Sox and his offense vanished. One pitcher came to the White Sox and offense against him exploded. Which did the White Sox have, the happy fun ball for more offense or the dead ball for less offense? You can explain one of the two guys, not both. The other guy just sucked.

So Cesar got screwed up by White Sox balls being too easy to hit in the second half or Kimbrel got screwed up by balls that killed power?

I don’t think they were switching out balls from player to player.

Ooh I recognize one of those faces.

Then all of a sudden they spent a month right after the break leading the league in HR, then Eloy and others had a complete power outage. Personally, I’m thinking about all the walks in the playoffs.

Ouuuuuuch.

Clearly you’re spending time writing posts about it?

Quality Lockout Content.

Remember the last NFL Lockout? They had something like that about how angry the union was about all the things Gooddell was doing, and then as soon as they were about to start losing money by canceling games, they hammered out an agreement on the revenue split that was a compromise on that issue, and pretty quickly everything else fell into place? Same deal. The money parts are what counts. The DH, Expanded playoffs, new rules - those are a sideshow. You get an agreement on the money part and the rest will probably see some incremental improvement, but fixing the actually broken business side of the game is the major problem.

The other problem for sending them both of them would be the "luxury tax" if that's a thing - taking Cano's $40 million over 2 years and turning into $35 million or whatever in 1 year would create a massive single year tax bill and almost certainly push the Mets into the highest tier where they're getting all sorts of penalties.

There's lots of ways he could. If there was a CBA that added a minimum team payroll, a guy on a 1 year deal who had an excellent but short 2020 is the kind of guy you would pick up - he either helps you get to your minimum payroll and you let him go or he's tradeable at the deadline if he gets off to a good start. Alternatively, the White Sox's system is weak, but they certainly could do something like what Milwaukee did with the $17.5 million apparently remaining on Jackie Bradley Jr's contract, pair Burger and another prospect with him and ship him somewhere else.

And entertaining independent teams can still exist if they're profitable, they can certainly find players to attract, but they would have to pay their bills as well, including paying for the players.

I mean, what happens to minor leaguers is a problem also. It's not a problem that this CBA will solve, but it is a problem that should be solved. Not only is it inhumane, but it's bad for the team for the guys they want to develop to have to live like that. Furthermore, it's almost certainly a violation of federal labor laws.