Balta1701

What's the benefits part? I've never heard that every team just has an extra $15 million tacked on for that tax? Can you elaborate?

Ah. thanks folks. I still have them closer to $180 million, not $200 million. They were at $200 million ish until they cleared $20 million in the Reds trade?

What does CBT mean?

In 2004, the White Sox had attendance of 1.9 million. It skyrocketed in 2005, and it didn't fall back to 2.0-1.9 million until 2011/2012. That's the same 6 year period we're talking about in both cases.

I think that both of your scenarios are likely to be followed by years of losing, and I think that the team with a title and a trophy has had more fun and built more fan interest.

If the GM is the 2nd in command and he just puts up with an environment that is as toxic as the one you describe rather than either fixing it or leaving, then the GM is complicit in my eyes.

The GM doesn't get to pick their own scouting director?

Very much disagree with the concept. Look at the teams not named the Dodgers or Yankees - what happens if they win for 5 or 6 straight years? Their system gets tapped out completely because they need to trade away their minor league talent to keep winning 90 games. The key players who helped them build those teams start getting expensive to the point that you have to pick 1 or 2 to keep, and the rest you trade away. Those teams get a choice - gradually get worse and worse every year, or suddenly hit a cliff. The Cubs, the team that laughs at native americans, the Royals, the Giants, the Rangers, the Tigers. They had multi year runs of 90+ wins but eventually the money runs out and the supply of players doesn't keep up with demand. The Astros have survived 5 years, but this year Cole and Verlander hit free agency and that's going to be a tough batch to hold onto or replace. Then Springer does the next year. Then Correa does the next year.

I think the sides have developed different priorities. What they're seeing right now is that the owners share of revenue is going up and the players share is going down, that's much more recent, the owners would rather shrink the whole pie than give back a portion of their slice, and the players would rather shrink the whole pie than continue having their slice get cut smaller.

#2.

The Dodgers taking on Carl Crawford to get Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, they took on over $250 million in that deal.

Please learn that Cole Hamels and Jason Hammel are 2 different people on 2 different teams.

A short time ago a tsunami crashed into Indonesia along the Sunda straits, killing several dozen known victims so far. As of right now what triggered the tsunami is unknown - possibly some sort of offshore landslide, possibly something triggered by Anak Krakatau volcano, but really the current trigger is unknown. This video is absolutely incredible - this is a performance of a band called “seventeen” which was struck by the tsunami wave. Unfortunately, 99% of the United States Geological Survey is currently furloughed, so in this part of the world no one who might be able to collect and interpret data on this topic is legally allowed to show up to answer questions.

Then he isn't going to the Dodgers. You don't get drafted out of high school with Scott Boras as your agent, win an MVP award in your early 20s, and keep Boras as your agent the entire time to give the highest spending team in baseball a discount of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bryce Harper should not get his ask down. He hasn't kept Scott Boras as his agent for the first 7 years of his pro career to "Get his ask down for the Dodgers".

But we also want to be careful with him as we don't want to push his innings load too far. If he takes time to adapt to AAA and doesn't come out and immediately dominate, we might want to be cautious and leave him down through the end of the season.

If we're a winning team or nearly so in a few years, we might or might not still have needs at those positions, we might or might not have revenue and ticket sale growth, but the one thing we KNOW we will have is more payroll commitments because Moncada, Giolito, Lopez will be in arb year 2, Rodon will be a free agent, Eloy and Kopech and anyone else called up the next couple months will be in arb year 1, and we won't be a winning team by then unless those guys have led us to be a winning team and earned good salaries. That's going to make it much tougher to sign a guy like that than it is today.

Still waitin'.

Then Rick Hahn needs to be 100% perfect with his player selection and development, and we absolutely can't afford anything like last year's debacles. And health no longer can be an excuse.

What are we going to use that money on that is going to help this roster more than one of these 2 guys? Haven't we seen already how rotten the mid-range of the free agent market is? Did people look at the deal Corbin got and really think "Gosh I wish we'd done that"? To me, if you want to avoid mortaging the future...stay out of that range in the market, that's where you get hurt the most.

The injuries (gotta go plural here). Not only losing a full year of development time for a guy who needed it, but that damage is going to hamper him physically for a while, maybe permanently. Reminds me of Jared Mitchell in a way - he was showing promise and having a really good spring training, then he utterly destroyed his leg, even when he came back the next year he never recovered fully, and when you combined that with the lost development time he was never able to recover. Burger might recover, but that's such a long road back that I'll be seriously and pleasantly surprised if he ever looks like a legit big leaguer in our organization.

Well, if we'd traded Burger for some rentals...I'm not sure I'd be that livid right now. I might be kinda happy to get anything.

So did Rick Hahn.

You could have been nice and told me which rule I was using incorrectly? I'd be interested to know. I've literally read that section of the CBA twice today and the tweet by Passan shows an even higher total luxury tax number for the Dodgers than the conservative one I came up with so what did I miss?

With a Scott Boras negotiation? Even if the White Sox have a 10/$400 offer and no one comes close to that, he'd probably sit there and wait - either he'd hope that someone else might enter the game or he'd hope that the White Sox would bid against themselves a little bit to make sure the deal got done. There's been no reason to believe that any of the current suitors for Harper would drop out or that the market would dry up, even if Machado signed - which we know he wasn't going to do while touring sites.