DrungoHazewood

The last two paragraphs I agree with, but you'll still have the problem with players dawdling and standing around and not playing baseball an hour+ a game. I am in favor of a brand of baseball that has more people on base, more balls in play, and more athletes doing athletic stuff like running and stealing bases. Yes, home runs have become commonplace and boring. Pitchers make a good pitch and it seems like half the time they're down 3-0 in the first. But to get there you have to make changes. To rules, to equipment, to the ball, to stadiums. They missed a great opportunity the last 25 years, they should have made every stadium have minimum fence distances. I would have said that the sum of the LF, LC, CF, RC, and RF lines had to be greater than 1830 feet. That means you could have a stadium that's 330-380-420-380-330. Or... 300-390-440-400-300. Or whatever you want, just so long as it adds up. They need to mandate minimum bat diameters, and handle diameters, and weights. Phase in larger and larger bats over five years until few players can do max bat speed all the time against max effort pitchers. Contact has to come back. Deaden the ball and shrink the strike zone in the rule book. But there has to be some kind of time enforcement. With an unbounded clock there's nothing stopping teams from constantly delaying the game. The time continues to grow unchecked. We will have 3.5-4 hour games unless someone steps in and says that's enough. Baseball can't become old-school cricket, where a small group of old guys and die hards won't watch anything but five-day test matches because only ADHD kids like a sport that takes less than five days.

Sure. But how many boring games of three hours do you have a season? Last year the Yanks played 49 games that were over three hours and were decided by four runs or more. The Orioles played 41. Over a quarter of the schedule were games that weren't particularly close and took forever. What's great is a tense, suspenseful game played in a crisp 2:05. Baseball used to be played in two hours. They haven't added an hour more baseball, they've added an hour more standing around and talking and doing nothing.

That's what Japan does, too. Like I said before, I'm kind of torn. It's nice to have those ridiculous Chris Davis/Lenn Sakata games. But ain't no way I'm getting to extras in any weeknight or Sunday night game probably ever again.

It would be nice if the AL could run an alternate set up for a decade like with 2-3 levels of minors, and the NL the current one. Then we could do a big study and compare who developed the best prospects. Otherwise it's hard to tell. Japan has one level of minors, so does Korea. Running short seasons. Mexico has a small feeder league below their main league, every team doesn't have an affiliate. At 18-19 Ichrio split the season between Orix and their Ni-Gun League affiliate. It would be interesting to see how a contracted minor league system might influence things like free agency eligibility. I think many really good players would be just as well off being part-time players in the majors at earlier ages than spending years riding buses around the minors. But that never happens because of service time. If everyone became a free agent at 28 and there was no expectation of winding his way through multiple levels of minors, Ryan Mountcastle would now have almost 1000 MLB plate appearances.

Those are just preferences. And your preferences are just as valid as mine, but I very much think game length is a problem. And you can have more strategic decisions with a DH than without. It's not really strategy when you have a .077 hitter coming up in the 7th, you're down three runs and have two guys on. You pinch hit. Any baseball fan knows that. But if you have a DH and a long bench... you might pinch hit to get the platoon advantage. Or not. You might save your guy for the 8th or the 9th. You pull your pitcher if you want another pitcher, not because he hits like a Little Leaguer. Baseball is what we decide it to be.

Drungo's dream scenario: 1. MLB aggressively contracts the minors to save cash. Eventually abandoning some fairly large markets that are now AAA or AA cities. 2. Some rich guys start a fairly high level independent league, moving into these abandoned cities and stadiums. They're able to cut pretty good deals since the stadiums sat unused for a while. They have some key rules differences to address game pace, lack of contact, emphasize athleticism, etc. 3. Some older major leaguers and mid-career AAAA guys jump to the new league, kind of like going to Japan or Korea just closer to home. A handful of MLB draftees unhappy with their offers also jump. A few of the teams with big benefactors lead the charge. Which helps grow attendance. 4. MLB has a strike/lockout. 5. A substantial number of free agents sign with the indy league due to the lockout. Maybe even a handful of pre-free agency players jump, too. 6. The new league puts expansion teams in places like Brooklyn, Providence, Montreal, and makes moves towards becoming a 3rd (okay, MLB is just one league, so 2nd) major league. 7. MLB is forced to make reforms and changes that only real competition can drive.

For 50+ years the only goals of a minor league owner was to field a good, competitive team and win championships and make money. When many owners found making money to be a challenge, that coincided with MLB owners becoming disenchanted with paying market rates for minor league players. So they worked out a deal: the MiLB owners would sell players to the MLBers at a set fee, whenever the MLB wanted, and whomever they wanted. Over time that became the MLB team paying all minor league salaries, and having immediate access to any player they wanted. And the minor league teams really didn't have to worry so much about turning a profit. So by roughly 1960 there were no real minor league competitions any more, they were all in it for the good of the majors. Even if that means Edmonton and Walla Walla exist solely to benefit a MLB team thousands of miles away with no organic connection to the area. And Edmonton and Walla Walla have no control whatsoever on the quality or makeup of their team. And because players rarely spend even a full year at a level there is NO lasting connection between players and fans. You can develop major league players without nuking the community nature of your local ballclub.

Korea and Japan and Taiwan are probably having a really tough time because their fans are more like football or soccer fans. They sing, they chant, they stand and jump and scream and they're into the game in a way that would annoy a lot of US baseball fans. Watching Korean baseball this week has been fun, but a constant refrain from announcers and guests is "you should see this when there are crowds."

Tony Clark: Salaries should never be tied to revenues!! The owners: We have no revenues. Tony Clark: Don't care, take a loan out or something. Tony isn't going to win this one. The fans already side with the owners over the players, in a normal situation.

Of course minor league baseball is a business. And a particularly obvious one. In the beginning there were minor league teams because owners liked baseball and wanted to make money. When that became a challenge they sold out to the majors, co-opting all affiliated minor league seasons for all time so that the MLB teams could have a source of inexpensive talent and the minor league owners could turn a profit. The minor leagues are the only sports leagues in the world that I know of that have completely given up on the idea of fielding legitimate and competitive teams and having competitive championship races because turning a profit was more important. The idea that this construct should be held in the same regard as state-run universities and colleges is, at least to me, ludicrous.

You know you're arguing for massive, unregulated change. They did nothing and homers went from one every four games to two a game. They did nothing and strikeouts went from two a game to nine. They did nothing and game times went from less than two hours to over three. They did nothing and we went from two pitchers a game to six. They changed no rules and pitchers went from completing 75% of their games to completing 1% of their games. If you want the game to completely change the simplest way is to leave it alone and give it time. If you actually have a preference for what baseball should be like someone is going have to take some action.

I wouldn't limit it to the lower-salaried guys. Don't underestimate the ability of newfound millionaires to spend 120% of their income. Hey, me, mom, sis, and my buddy Wayne all really needed $880k houses. And new Mercedeses. And that tiger. Something like 50% of NFL players are bankrupt within a couple years of leaving the league.

Talent in baseball is distributed exponentially or logarithmically. For every star there are five guys in the next tier. For every Ryan Flaherty there are five or 10 guys who wash out in AA. For every of those AA journeymen there are five or 10 guys who play three years in the low minors and get released. Corn is right, each MLB has about one full minor league roster of guys who'll have even a short, forgettable MLB career. Spread across seven levels. Cutting org guys or players who look like org guys will suck for org guys, but decrease the level of play in the majors by an imperceptible amount. And perhaps increase the level of play in foreign and non-affiliated leagues by a small amount, which I think is a good thing.

Think of Little League. In a typical game the kids stand around for 90 minutes and bat three times, usually striking out. Most of them find it so much fun they quit by the time they're in middle school. Game situations are important, but there has to be a better way for a 19-year-old prospect to get reps than getting four PAs a day all summer against mostly non-prospects.

I'm torn on this. Some of the most epic games in Oriole history were extra inning games. But the fans speak with their feet and their remotes. By the 14th or 15th inning less people are watching the Orioles than an Elizabethton Twins Appy League game. Extra innings would be much less of an issue if the first nine didn't take 3.5 hours. The famous 26-inning Oeschger-Cadore game in 1920 was 3:50. Today that's called Tuesday's nine-inning Red Sox game.

The last ump walkout showed pretty clearly that the umps have almost no leverage. If they really strike a hard line... they've been replaced once. It could certainly happen again. Nothing would accelerate implementation of robot umps like human umps refusing to work.

MLBPA also recognizes that there is no floor, and the player's share of the revenues has dropped from nearly 50% to something a bit over 40%. Teams have realized just how stupid 5- and 8-year contracts for pretty good 33-year-olds are, and they're focusing efforts on development and much cheaper pre-free agency players. The union would do well to tie salaries to revenues, like in most every other sport. They could have some kind of window, where overall compensation to players has to be between 43-46% of revenues (or whatever they negotiate). Otherwise they might get a slightly higher percentage in some years or time periods, but there's no stopping teams from dropping that under 40% right now.

Every team has flawed players. The dynastic 1990s Yanks had Luis Sojo getting multiple rings for basically being Stevie Wilkerson. Bob Johnson had a .544 OPS for the '66 Orioles. The 1983 Orioles had Todd Cruz hitting .208. Rocky Coppinger had a 5.18 ERA for the '96 Orioles. When bad players are on good teams they become fan favorites, cult heroes. The current Orioles just have a few more of them.

I think that would be a very unfortunate outcome. College football and basketball grew organically, when both sports were far less popular. They were more like intramural games, club teams, that over time evolved into what they are today. Which is basically professional sports teams. I'm not sure that if we were starting from scratch that many people would advocate for a large group of taxpayer funded instututions of higher learning to have very large pro sports organizations (with the benefit of being too pure to pay the players) attached. Especially when the players on these teams often are going to class only in the most minimal sense, and if they have a hint of professional ability they'll drop out the minute they're draft eligible. Also, not sure how the mechanics would work for very for-profit MLB to push and (presumably) fund non-profit state run universities to turn their non-revenue-generating baseball programs into the equivalent of minor league teams. Of course MLB would love for the NCAA to function as a free minor league system. It would take a huge amount of risk and expense and transfer that to the schools. But who does this benefit besides the MLB owners? A relatively small handful of players who get a degree who might not otherwise? But at the cost of further corrupting the already horribly corrupted NCAA.

You do understand that the Barons were listed as one of the top 20 most valuable teams in minor league baseball, right? And according to Rick's article they're in the top ten operating income in the minors. So of 160 affiliated teams, 80 complex teams, and maybe another 40-60 indy league teams they're in the top 5%. You might want to draw another straw to get a more representative sample, before you take some of your pocket change and buy a controlling share of a $35M business.

My take on that, which is just a semi-informed opinion, is that mid-range teams like the BaySox bring in $5M a year. And don't turn much of a profit. And the Appy League and similar must be run with budgets like your local antiques and craft store. When you draw 30k a season your revenues can't be half a million a year. At that level four or five employees making much over minimum wage starts eating a lot of your margin.

If you own it outright, maybe. I think nearly all people who own majority shares in a minor league team were already quite well off beforehand. Maybe you could get a Pecos League team relatively cheap, but I have no idea how the lowest levels of indy ball even exist. You're probably not getting rich owning the Santa Fe Fuego.

Agreed. And that's hardest for an outsider to try to put a number on. Clearly if those teams in Rick's article have $15-20M in annual revenues, the majors are paying salaries, and they end up with $1-2M in operating profits there are a lot of expenses I didn't account for.

MLB has some incentive for the minors to survive, but they also are probably thinking that they have a backup plan: they could just have some kind of extended spring training with intersquad games, scrimmages and tailored workouts. There is some benefit to having real games, both to players and baseball fans. But you can guarantee that if the bean counters decide that having only a couple levels of affiliated minors saves each MLB team $10M they'll move that direction. On your point about reduced revenues and salaries... it would be a very painful transition. Sure, baseball would still exist if MLB had five or three or one $billion in revenues instead of $10B. But the contracts, the media, the advertising... everything is set up on a $10B budget. It would be like someone making $150k a year suddenly making $60k. They won't starve, they'll do fine. They'll sell their house and their cars, downsize, forget about vacations, eat out once a month instead of every other day. For at least a few years it'll be pretty crappy. But they'll live. Baseball would be similar. It would survive, but there would be big, uncomfortable change.

Like I said, my assumptions aren't your assumptions neither of which may not be the ground truth. Salaries are paid by MLB, unless you're an indy league team like the Blue Crabs I was talking about. It is interesting in the link Rick provided that even the AAA teams that draw almost 10k a game and have higher ticket prices only have operating profits of a few $million a year. Most indy league teams have to be operating on a shoestring.