caulfield12

Nuclear power plant hit....on fire. Fortunately, not a direct missile hit, but still worrisome. No increase in radiation levels, yet. This particular plant houses 6/15 nuclear reactors in the entire country. Zapor.............is the abbreviated named of the city. Guess we could call it south east-central Ukraine, in terms of location....not too far from those two breakaway regions in the southeast of the country. What next?

Commensurate? Otherwise, strong post.

Terrible for Crochet and Kopech. Should help Grandal and Keuchel, as well as Hendriks. Also protects Abreu from typical aches and pains. Eloy, due to less opportunities to get injured....

It's simply a matter of denying large numbers of part-time employees their benefits, leading to oftentimes single mothers working multiple jobs instead of being there for children after school and/or massive taxpayer funded government subsidies for Medicaid, WIC, AFDC, food stamps, etc. Not overextended. Deliberately adopting this hyper profitable business model until someone stops them...which is unlikely with all their PAC contributions to local and regional politicians. Now they're expanding into senior care since so many greeters can't afford to retire, needing work part time to supplement Social Security. Btw, his model is largely a failure in China, where volume and efficiency loses to even lower labor costs for local competitors...with with most workers paid roughly $2-3 USD/hour.

"If somehow that's not enough, consider the other, more-prominent leverage point left for the players: rebates paid out to the regional sports networks that carry local broadcasts for games not played. Depending on the team, avoiding rebates necessitates between 138 and 150 games broadcast. It provides the basis for a widely shared view among players: that because of the rebate threshold and low April attendance, teams are perfectly fine missing the first month of the season.If somehow that's not enough, consider the other, more-prominent leverage point left for the players: rebates paid out to the regional sports networks that carry local broadcasts for games not played. Depending on the team, avoiding rebates necessitates between 138 and 150 games broadcast. It provides the basis for a widely shared view among players: that because of the rebate threshold and low April attendance, teams are perfectly fine missing the first month of the season." Passan/ESPN

Right. There used to be a few (mostly lower level or short season) teams owned by the major league affiliates, but roughly 90-95% were independent organizations who signed renewable affiliation agreements with MLB teams.

Let's start illustrating with a personal anecdote. It was 2019 Opening Day in Cincinnati. Before the Reds hosted the Pirates, Manfred had a press conference. He had a bit of an opening statement, and talked about the annual parade held for the great fans in the city of the first professional team. Then he said -- sort of tongue-in-cheek, though given everything we've seen from Manfred, I think it's pretty clear this was his earnest request -- it was OK to open things up for "some positive questions." Mine wasn't positive. I wondered how, at the time, a system that was paying Tyler Flowers more than eight times more than Ronald Acuña, Jr. was going to be fair for the younger players moving forward -- especially when Dallas Keuchel, who won the Cy Young in 2015 while making the league minimum, remained unsigned into the season in his first foray into free agency. Manfred was visibly upset. "The system in place is a principle tenant that the MLBPA has voted for since my first negotiation which was 1989 and they wanted a seniority-based system," he said. "That's what they bargained for and that's what they have. It's just not more complicated than that." https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/how-rob-manfreds-ineffective-reign-as-mlb-commissioner-led-to-baseballs-disastrous-outcome/

For most of the history of the minor leagues, the individual franchises were individually operated based on preexisting agreements with MLB teams...and that salary compensation (for players) was completely divorced from the profitability of said franchise.

The problem is there's only a 25-30% correlation between minor league performance and making it to the majors. Think of all the players 2-3 years too old for their leagues, or all the veteran journeymen in AA/AAA who produce well but have a significantly diminished likelihood of ever making it to the majors. Pitchers, in particular, are assessed on a million other aspects in the minors that will never be captured with a counting stat like fWAR. How do you measure potential? How do you put a value at performance being more highly rewarded than production in the minors? There's just a handful of scouts in baseball (maybe they worked for the A's in the Moneyball Era) that would agree with this proposition.

Maybe while we're at it you and Parkman can figure out a fair and equitable way to define "teacher performance," as the best teachers would surely trade that for the historical tenure/seniority system.

Isn't that also equally the case for professional golfers, especially on the PGA/LPGA?

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/071415/how-nba-makes-money.asp The NBA is kicking MLB's butt in merchandising (this is one area they're catching up at least), international (50% due to China/Yao Ming, arguably, but roughly 1/4th the players are foreign nationals, which trails MLB but is much more of an asset for expanding the NBA into new markets), t.v. contracts, marketing superstars to a global level, etc. What does MLB do better than the NBA? Statistical analysis? Sabes, in the words of Greg775? Streaming/Advanced Media? Even the World Baseball Classic excitement from 10-15 years ago has pretty much worn off. Pretty sure MLB is still drawing in more revenue than the NBA, but the NBA franchise values average out higher now...and one would think they would overtake MLB in the next 5-10 years or so.

Congrats. Your vendetta dates all the way back to the Russian invasion of Georgia after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Nice bookends. Just goes to reinforce that the power of negative customer feedback is 10X more impactful than positive experiences. In all seriousness, I won't miss spring training, but will really start to get bored around the 2nd or 3rd week of April after the Masters and Final 4 are over and the weather's starting to turn increasingly nice. Following the minor leagues would be fine (see 2008 and 2016-17) if the White Sox weren't the worst farm system in baseball, but there's Colas, Vera and Cespedes at least.

It's going to be a huge test of ESG investing for the rest of world if Russia pushes oil to $150 gallon...as well as Germany with LNG. That said, Putin would be cutting off his nose to spite his face if they stopped selling energy to the majority of the developed world. And China won't volunteer to pay higher prices, one would hope. Or India, for that matter.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33397392/mlb-lockout-only-reinforces-certain-ugliness-game

Kemp? LaStella?

Or the generation who knows ‘Lil Kim the rapper…a bit confusing. Kimbrel? Those of us laying in the weeds for months are going to have to quickly catch up again.

Why can’t they just have an upward adjustment in the CBT of something like a 3-3.5% increase each year (accounting for extraordinarily high inflation this cycle)…even 2.5% would be better.

Along with Leury, Eaton and Yonder Alonso....Darin Erstad might even be in play.

Well, that's seemingly a HUGE breakthrough compromise, albeit the most logical and hopefully things can move quickly from there... Would be interesting to see a breakdown of how much revenue teams derive from April, if you strip away Opening Day...which would obviously still occur in late April or early May regardless. I wouldn't mind 154 or even 140-144 games per season but anything lower than that feels like too big of a change, perhaps starting seasons between April 15th-20th and also delaying the beginning of Spring Training to provide a longer off-season break.

What did you do with Jimmy Hoffa?

"If you went and got the next 1,200 best players in the world, the product would suffer greatly. If you handed MLB teams over to any 30 competent businesspeople, the sport would not suffer. Actually, it might improve. It doesn't take a billionaire to leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues. The Yankees are not the Yankees if Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra don't win. Without the best players, they aren't in the World Series, and without championships, they're little more than an organization in a big market whose laundry features pinstripes. One would think, then, that a league would recognize that its profits exist because of Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Mike Trout, Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, Ronald Acuña Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and others -- and would see players' concerns about the state of the game not as trivial or excessive or outrageous, but vital." Jeff Passan/ESPN

Here all along I believed Russia was more a combination of Orthodox and atheism/agnosticism... Fox will have viewers that Russia was actually there in the 80's and 90's supporting Billy Graham (the father NOTHING like the son), Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

See Napoleon/Hitler's ill-fated attempts in the winter/mud.