DrungoHazewood

Please provide a list of the mid-career All Star players who signed with good teams to sit the bench behind better All Stars.

I'm no draft expert, but I guess. With the caveat that Zobrist would be a fantastically good outcome for Martin. You can find scouting reports from draft day that call Ryan Flaherty the new Wally Joyner.

I like the idea of trading draft picks. I also like the idea of directly buying and selling players. But with the draft picks you need to be careful. Teams might sell out the future for immediate gain. What do you think Dan Duquette would have done with tradeable draft picks and an owner that basically wouldn't let him invest in development? The Orioles might not have a pick in the top five rounds until 2028. 88-year-old Mike Ilitch in Detroit might have done the same thing. Or an owner looking to sell and jacking up short-term revenues and value.

All I want is multiple leagues about on par with MLB, and I don't really care where they live. Lots of things that are wrong with the game could be fixed, or at least changed, with suitable application of competition. In soccer it's that way, and nobody bats an eye when Ronaldo leaves England to go to Spain, and then leaves Spain to go to Italy. Teams and leagues can't be complacent because there's competition everywhere. Anyone can sign anyone, anyone can get relegated, and whole leagues can lose or gain stature in the world. You have to be on your game all the time, there's no coasting for years and years. Baseball would be far better off if they were terrified that Mike Trout was going to sign with the Seibu Lions, or that the KBO's brand of baseball is more exciting.

I find it funny that their mascot is a rich, aristocratic, white plantation owner and nobody ever says anything about it. I know teams have some weird mascots, but that's just what the heck. And then they start singing Auld Lang Syne after a touchdown and everything goes into the Twilight Zone.

What happened to assuming that they're all a bunch of self-entitled jerks whose only concern was more money?

No, it's a very closed and controlled market. It's a market where teams and players are forced to pretend that 30-year-old declining free agents are worth 10 times what a good 22-year-old prospect is, even if there are only three teams that want the 30-year-old and everyone wants the 22-year-old. The marketplace would be much better off if the NPB and KBO each had about a $billion to spend on players. Then we'd start to see what a free market in baseball players really looks like.

Does a point of pride mean more to them than hundreds of $millions? If the MLBPA had gotten locked in at 46 or 47% of revenues back when that was the number, players would be paid something like $400M a year more than they are today.

Someone needs to save him from the indignity of being a Wahoo for the rest of his life.

Beyond stupid is probably overselling it, but every pick has a higher shot at success than every pick behind it. You can probably come up with edge cases and special circumstances with overslots or whatever that plausibly could make sense to take someone else. But in general taking a guy you have graded 6th at #2 is a bad idea. You're hoping that buying 50 lottery tickets is going to work out better than buying 150, and sometimes it does. But in general it's pretty stupid. Picking amateur baseball players is like stocks. The difference between being a genius and being lucky is pretty hard to distinguish and may not even be real. So if it were me I'd go with the consensus best player as per my scouts and analysts almost every time, and hope for the best.

I would have thought they'd be open to it because salaries as a percentage of revenues are at their lowest spot in a long time. Teams are doing a better job than ever at restraining themselves from signing over-the-hill Kevin Millars and Jamie Walkers for $8M a year. I'd think a proposal that locked in 44-46% of revenues compared to the 42% or so today would get some interest. Unless the players really think it's just a matter of time before the restraints come off and the owners won't be able to control themselves again. Or if they think they can get much better compensation for younger players with no concessions from the owners.

I think there were a few instances of forfeits caused by teams stalling in the era before lights. From the SABR forfeit log:

How would they slow play it? They'd just do everything slowly. Umps don't enforce the pitch clock. They still let guys fix their gloves between every pitch. The batter takes off his 11 pads and slowly walks to first after four balls. The catcher visits the mound six times. They throw to first 22 times with Matt Wieters on base. The pitcher gets the signs mixed up four times an inning. The batter gets dust in his eye or has to fix his contacts six times a game. They change pitchers every three batters, and the new pitcher ambles in from the pen then takes his eight leisurely warmups. Baseball games can be played in 90 minutes, but they're actually played in three hours so every single major league team is a DaVinci in the art of slowing down a ballgame.

In my experience, my kids have ended up committing to soccer by the time they were 10. But it wasn't because, or not completely because, they were super focused on being the best soccer players. It was a combination of things, including being on a team of friends. And they wanted to focus on what they're good at. So when there's a sport where they can play with their buddies and they're good it makes it fun, they really don't have much incentive to go play something else. They're also among the smallest kids in their classes and on their teams, so that makes football or basketball a challenge. Also, juggling multiple sports today can be borderline insane. A lot of sports have both spring and fall seasons. Indoor soccer and basketball and wrestling overlap. I've coached kids who played baseball and soccer at the same time, and there are a bunch of times where they had to pick which game or which practice to go to. They were at a game or a practice six days a week. I have no idea when they'd get their homework done. And at least here where I Iive select soccer teams are a year-long commitment, where you're expected to play spring and fall seasons along with futsal in the winter.

I don't know. I think a lot of really rich guys like the idea of owning one of 30 MLB teams. This isn't a free market, with all the normal free market assumptions. This is a cartel, with strictly limited supply of available teams. It would be nice to see the books, to know for sure what owners take as profit.

There is a good point hidden in there: Players should make a proposal that ties salaries to revenues, in all circumstances. If that was already in place we wouldn't have a dispute. Owners would open up the books, and if they're bringing in 20% of normal revenues the players still get 45% of that (or whatever the number is).

My personal theory based on my own sample of one is that years ago almost as many or just as high a percentage of kids needed Tommy John, but it didn't exist. Or it just wasn't a thing for 12-year-olds. I'm sure my shoulder/labrum/UCL looks like Dresden after the firebombing just from endless hours of playing catch and playing sandlot ball and softball. At some point about 25 years ago I felt a sharp pain in my arm and shrugged it off. Now every once in a while I go to throw a snowball at my kid and it feels like an ice pick got jabbed into my tricep.

That's possible. I haven't done any kind of comprehensive survey.

Also, talking about short-term profitability of a MLB franchise is kind of irrelevant. Although this year is a little different, but that's a blip. Almost everyone who's a big part of an ownership group got rich doing something else and then bought into a pro sports team mostly because it's cool to own a sports team. It's not like 120 years ago when Connie Mack bought into the A's when the franchise cost like $20,000, and that was basically his only source of income or wealth. Nobody buys the Mariners because they're thinking that's going to net them $50M a year. They buy it because they want to say they own a team.

I'm not sure what you mean. In any case that can't literally be true. Not unless there are only 25 good players, and half of the best 25 players in the world don't mind sitting the bench. The situation we have right now is pretty close to the Yanks having a very good player at every starting position. Red Sox and Dodgers, too.

I think that DeWitt is talking in the language of a large business owner, parsing his words very carefully to improve his position. I'm guessing that, for example, the Royals make very little reportable, taxable profit in any given year. So their owners would be correct in saying that the industry isn't very profitable, in that sense. But 20 years ago the Royals franchise value was something like $100M. The team was recently sold for $1B. If you bought an asset at $100 and sold it 20 years later for $1000 that's 12.2% a year, which beats the long-term average returns of the S&P 500. To me that's pretty profitable.

Rule 5.07(f) A pitcher must indicate visually to the umpire-in-chief, the batter and any runners the hand with which he intends to pitch, which may be done by wearing his glove on the other hand while touching the pitcher's plate. The pitcher is not permitted to pitch with the other hand until the batter is retired, the batter becomes a runner, the inning ends, the batter is substituted for by a pinch-hitter or the pitcher incurs an injury. In the event a pitcher switches pitching hands during an at-bat because he has suffered an injury, the pitcher may not, for the remainder of the game, pitch with the hand from which he has switched. The pitcher shall not be given the opportunity to throw any preparatory pitches after switching pitching hands. Any change of pitching hands must be indicated clearly to the umpire-in-chief.

I don't think it was. But you can see how the progression worked. Years ago people formed all star teams. Then the all star teams played each other, and the coaches said "hey, why don't we make a whole league of just all star teams?" And a few decades later you're not taking Johnny's and Suzy's future as seriously as the other parents unless you're driving seven hours to a tournament in North Carolina every three weeks. Someone is always willing to be just a little crazier, and that ratchets the whole thing upwards. When my boys were in rec soccer and little league I was perfectly fine with them doing that. Then they tried out for RecPlus just for anyway, and they both made it. As a parent you're like "that's cool, maybe my boys are pretty good." Then the oldest makes a travel team, and you think "Huh, my kid is a travel soccer player. He's pretty awesome." It's easy to get swept up. Although it helps that they're on teams with good, sane coaches and really good parents and kids. If they were on these sadistic teams that are laser focused on college and pro development I'm sure they'd have already quit.

Parents and kids aim for all kinds of stuff. My kids are both on travel soccer teams and that doesn't mean they're even going make the high school team, and only a handful of kids on the good high school teams play college soccer. The vast majority of 10-year-olds will peak in middle school or maybe high school. I'm not going to convince anyone to be realistic, especially not the parents screaming at the ref and the coaches in a U11 league. But making sports decisions for 10-year-olds based on how quick you can get to the top level is like putting down a deposit on a house in Baltimore when you're playing in the Gulf Coast League.

Okay, so maybe that's a thing for high-end prospects. But I don't think that's anywhere in the decision making process for kids trying to figure out if they want to play football or soccer or baseball or (more likely) sitting on the couch eating Cheetos playing Fortnite (admitting only the olds think Fortnite is still a thing).