DrungoHazewood

I wonder how long until NBP or KBO relax the foreign player restrictions? They need to be careful, having a league to themselves does probably help with growing talent. Kids know that there's less of a chance of them being displaced by Renato Nunez type players from abroad. Related observation... I looked up Sadaharu Oh's numbers, and he hit 868 homers playing in 130-140 game schedules. If you extrapolate to reasonable playing time in 162-game schedules he ends up with just over 1000 homers, and 10 or 11 50-homer seasons. He had a 1.080 OPS in a 22-year career. Nine full seasons with a slugging percentage over .700. Yea, not 2000-era MLB talent levels in those leagues, but still impressive. In MLB history there have been about 36 player-seasons over .700 slugging.

Oh... (pun intended). They're not going to make NPB and KBO majors, that would be elevating the competition. People would start clamoring for an all-Major League Championship. Players might start wondering what it's like to shun lowball North American MLB contracts to go to the other Major Leagues. Ichiro would become the all time hit leader, leading to a Pete Rose tantrum. The Negro Leagues were safe to promote since they stopped being a thing well over a half century ago.

Strike while the iron is still... warm. Get those leagues in and Oh is the all time home run leader rather than Bonds. Oh is still alive, so if they follow a typical HOF timeline they'll make the NPB major nine months after he dies.

I don't want to be too harsh here, this does make some sense and I certainly understand why they're doing it. It just has to be put into context. And the context is that they've added the records of a league that's roughly equivalent to the NL or the AA of 1885. Baseball in the Negro Leagues and in the 19th century was awesome baseball, and it's good that this is shining some light on it.

Of course cumulative stats won't be impacted, the official schedules were 30, 50, 60 games. Someone would have had to play 30 or 40 years to get 3000 hits or 700 homers. In the Seamheads database Josh Gibson has 238 homers, or the same number as Ray Lankford. The year Gibson hit .441 (1943) he had 342 PAs. They can say all this now counts, fine. But you just have to do the same mental gymnastics that you'd do with Long Levi Meyerle's .492 average in 1871. Sure, he hit .492 and some people say that's "Major League" but it's clearly not the same thing.

That's a good question, I don't know. The schedules were all over the place. In '39 The Indy ABCs played 20 games, the Toledo Crawfords 16, and the Philadelphia Stars 50. What's qualifying for anything? Bill Hoskins hit .403 in 132 PAs... does he now count as hitting .400 in the majors? In '38 Buck Leonard hit .418... in 43 games. Jud Wilson hit well over .400 multiple times, .359 for his career, but never had 300 PAs in a season. At the age of 49 he went 21-for-58 (.362), but in 24 games. Actually, Jud Wilson's age 49 season highlights why it's problematic to call this a Major League. Wilson hit .365 at the age of 49. Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard were on the team hitting .350. But their third baseman hit .153 with a .391 OPS, and their 2B .192 with a .505. One guy threw 114 innings, nobody else threw 50. You basically can't throw them in the same pile as the post-1900 majors. The standards aren't on the same page.

I get the sentiment. There were a lot of MLB-caliber players, including any number of Hall of Famers and other stars. There are 35 Negro Leaguers in the Hall. It's nice to elevate their performances to a different level, even if it's symbolically. The Negro Leagues were probably on par with (or in some respects better than) the Majors of the 19th century. I'm 100% sure the NNL of 1930 would obliterate the 1884 Union Association, which is called a Major League. But... it's clear the Negro National League didn't have the same overall quality of play, or facilities or resources or record keeping or a dozen other attributes of the Majors at the same time. The stats on bb-ref are all over the place, short seasons, incomplete numbers. We all wish they did directly compare, but they don't. So MLB is classifying a parallel league as a Major that could probably be better categorized as an independent minor league. And if the Negro Leagues are Major Leagues, then why not the Japanese Leagues of at least the last 30-40 years? Or the KBO today? If you went through a checklist of all of the attributes of a Major League the NPB will check at least as many boxes as pre-WWII Negro Leagues. So I get why they did it, to give some recognition to players who got a really bad deal in their time. And it's a very nice gesture. But they're doing so by elevating a league that probably wasn't much, if at all, better than the International League or the Pacific Coast League of the same era.

He can catch, in the same way Floyd Rayford could catch. So if both Severino and Sisco test positive for COVID 20 minutes before the game you can still play. I guess that's something.

Stewart's 70th percentile season is probably Schwarber's 40th, but yea.

I don't see the appeal of a defensively limited 28-year-old with a career slash line of .230/.336/.480. The Orioles have access to any number of players fitting that general mold for the MLB minimum. I mean, I guess if you could get him for $1m but he's still taking playing time from similar players already here. And Chris Shaw turned 27 in October, he's not a long term anything besides maybe down-ballot International League All Star candidate.

It was less risky to name the team after a popular player back when everyone was signed to an infinite year contract at whatever the team wanted to pay.

I'm envisioning dozens of anesthetized hobbits wrapped in spider webs, hanging from the various inside passageways of whatever they're calling Jacobs Field nowadays. And a giant spider terrorizing the fans, jumping out from dark passages, stealing their children. Give-away promotions of tarantulas in little cages every time the attendance surpasses the 1899 total of 6,088. Big celebration every year when they get to their 21st win.

During CBA negotiations years ago teams argued that they should have some return on their investment in young players by maintaining control over players during the early years of their careers. The owners were also reluctant to pay high salaries to players who had not established that they were good major league players. The model they agreed upon was that players were bound to the team they debuted with for approximately six years, with minimal salaries the first three and salaries decided by arbitration the next three. With most players in their late 20s or early 30s before reaching those six years of service, free agency has always been buying into a declining market. But it's one of the only markets, so a disproportionate share of money flows to free agents. There's nothing stopping the MLBPA and the MLB owners from negotiating a different deal, but there will be other market imbalances in whatever model is likely to be implemented. Or, fans may not like the alternative, which is young players making the bulk of the money and often seeing smaller market teams trading up-and-coming stars that they can't afford to pay market rates. In a playing-value-based system Manny Machado would have been worth $30-40M or more a year from age 21 or 22. You would probably see teams like the Rays and maybe Orioles trading for older players wiling to play at a discount. And teams will always try to lock up good players for a long time. If you have all the money in the world, why wouldn't you sign Mike Trout to a 10-year deal? When you do that there's always a risk that he suffers a catastrophic decline and the deal looks bad. If a player signs a 5/50 deal and starts playing like Hank Aaron the team isn't going to offer to renegotiate a contract at a HOF level of compensation.

Top of whose rotation? When a GM gives 15 interviews a month some words are going to come out of his mouth that probably don't need to be taken literally.

Is this really a Sports Guy trade thread if we haven't gotten 3-4 other teams involved?

As disappointing as it is to lose Frederick, I was about equally dismayed by the news that the St. Paul Saints are now the Twins' AAA affiliate. The Saints were the best known of the teams in the early 1990s independent league revival. Owned by Mike Veeck and Bill Murray, they took pride in thumbing their noses at big-money Major League Baseball and they pioneered all the crazy antics and promotions all minor league teams do today. I will always fondly remember the time I went to a game there in 1995, with a buddy of mine who passed away earlier this year. Now they're just another random AAA team, fully sold out to the Majors, stocked full of anonymous relievers who'll get shuttled up and down six times a month, and utility infielders hoping someone on the Twins turns an ankle. It's a sad day.

That sucks. Expected, but it sucks. In a perfect world this contraction would be an opening for real competitive, maybe even higher level independent leagues. But I think that ship sailed a long time ago. Way before I was born. At best some of the dropped teams will join leagues like the Atlantic League, made up mostly of A- and AA-caliber talent in their late 20s. Or this Draft League... I guess.

I got 78. Totally blanked on the circa 2000 teams with Surhoff and Raffy. Forgot Hoiles and Reynolds. Completely missed that Goose Goslin was ever a Brown. I bet not 0.1% of O's fans would get Jeff Heath or Chet Laabs.

He was certainly one of the innovators. The 1948 Dodgers are listed as having over 20 minor league teams including two in AAA and two in AA. Although I hesitate to call it innovation. It benefited some Major League teams, especially early adopters. But it helped relegate teams like the Senators and Browns to near-permanent also-ran status, since they didn't or couldn't afford sprawling systems with hundreds of players. The '47 Senators had six affiliates, three in Class D, none above AA. And it destroyed the notion of minor leagues fighting for fans and dollars and trophies, turning them into fake teams with fake pennant races and players who stick around for three months if you're lucky. Maybe I don't like Branch Rickey so much anymore.

Thus the reason for ever-smaller stadiums. Artificial scarcity encourages buying of (expensive) season tickets before the seats are all gone. You don't get as many people in the stands for big games, but that's okay. You just charge twice as much per ticket. It's an open question whether or not this helps kill the interest of families and kids and the next generation of fans.

What is the benefit to each team? If the Tigers are saving money by trading Cabrera for Davis, wouldn't that cost the O's money in taking on his contract? So what's in it for the Orioles? The Orioles would have to add in players or prospects with Davis to get teams to take on his contract for nothing in return. Here's the kind of deal I could see working: Davis and Mountcastle for a PTBNL. The other team would basically be paying the remainder of Davis' contract for the next five years of Ryan Mountcastle. I guess that would make sense if the Orioles really are in exceptionally dire financial straits. Otherwise why not just take Mountcastle's production at reduced rates, and keep paying Davis?

I need to dig into this a little. As you note, they have farm system rankings going back to 1871. But affiliated minor league teams weren't a thing until at least the 1910s and what we think of as a modern affiliated minor league system didn't really exist until the 1930s. Before then teams had informal (or maybe sometimes more formal) agreements with independent minor league teams to loan out prospects so they'd get playing time. But if the minor league Orioles had Lefty Grove, the A's got to call him up only when Connie Mack out-bid everyone else for him and paid Jack Dunn $100k, and that only after Dunn decided he was better off selling Grove than keeping him and winning 110 games a year. By the Baseball Gauge the 1880 Troy Trojans had a massively great farm system. The 1880 Troy Trojans had trouble paying the 23 players who played for them that year, they certainly didn't have other teams working for them.

In 1985 MLB drew 46M fans at just over $6 a ticket, meaning ticket revenues of about $276M. TV revenues passed $500M that year, that was about tripled from 1980. Don't know how much concessions, parking, merchandising, radio made them. But it was probably in the early-to-mid 80s when TV revenues passed ticket revenues, and somewhere in the same time frame where TV became more than half of overall revenues. And I don't have team-by-team breakdowns. I assume the Yanks were pulling in many multiples of what the O's got from Channel 2 and the beginnings of HTS.

Here (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-major-league-baseball/ ) is an interesting article. (Strangely linking seems to be broken for the moment...) A few cool notes: 1. In 1913 Western Union paid each team $17,000 for the rights to broadcast games via telegraph 2. The World Series movie rights in 1910 were sold for $500, and in 1911 for $3500. 3. The Yanks TV rights were sold for $75k in 1946. That year they drew 2.2M fans at an average ticket price of $1.25, so they had ticket revenues of about $2.75M. Total game day revenues might have been $4-5M? 4. In 1964 total MLB television revenues were $21M, or a little over $1M per team. The highest-paid Orioles in 1964 were Aparicio and Brooks at $35k.

Do you remember NFL blackouts, where if ticket sales were below some percentage of capacity the game wouldn't be on (local?) TV? Clearly teams as late as the 70s and 80s made a lot more from ticket sales than TV.