DrungoHazewood

My guess is because most of those expenses are not expenses. As I said in the other thread, I think that fans wouldn't recognize most of that as operating expenses. Things like depreciation of tangible assets as well as players. Other things that they probably have some discretion as to how they're categorized and taken credit for. With the information we have access to we have no idea how that $102M is broken down and what it's comprised of. It's possible infrastructure and analytics investment went up $20M and other things offset that.

I get it, you hate the change and nothing I say will do anything about that. Have fun complaining about it forever.

Over the last three seasons Judge has hit 79 home runs. Just 28 have been categorized as no-doubters by Statcast. Adding 20-30 feet to LF at Camden Yards will almost certainly cost him a few homers.

C'mon, this is America. Land of the free, home of the socialized ballpark costs. Only suckers pay for their own sports stadium renovation.

If they're off the bat of, say, Gary Sanchez I'll agree. As the park used to be configured he homered once every 11 PAs, or more frequently than the Babe used to hit homers. If we've now cut that to once every 20 or 30 I'd call it a win.

But to do that they'd have to rip off the city of Baltimore and Maryland taxpayers in a craven money grab to pay for the additional changes. This was the fiscally prudent approach.

They used to say Babe Ruth would roll into Cleveland and hit 3-4 homers every series at League Park, which was 280 to RF and maybe 325 to RC. If this limits Aaron Judge's ability to do that in Baltimore I'm good with it.

Remember, baseball has evolved into an unrecognizable mess that everyone from 1950 thinks is an abomination in the face of God. But any attempt to change it, even explicitly trying to get back to the game of 1950, is pure sacrilege and will be opposed at every turn. The only acceptable solution for many die-hard fans is for the game to naturally un-evolve into what it was 50 or 75 years ago. Which, of course, will never happen in a million years.

My assumption is that those numbers bear little or no resemblance to what laypeople would call operating expenses. My guess is that the actual amount necessary to sustain reasonable operations of a MLB organization is in the $20-40M range.

Positives to this change: Makes baseball at OPACY more of an athletic competition with fielders given space to run, and hitters not being able to sit back and wait for cheap homers as much. If teams across MLB were to do things like this it could force the game to adopt more contact and speed oriented strategies and rosters, rather than wall-to-wall Chris Davis clones. Ballparks have long been designed to the specs of the 1920s, and players are much larger and more athletic, parks should be scaled appropriately. Negatives: It's not how Camden Yards looked in 1992, so it's dumb and stupid and I want them to put it back.

We could ask Willie Mays how he managed to play 399 games at the Polo Grounds and its abrupt angles in CF without dying.

It's interesting that high-level professional soccer teams will sometimes spend as much as 80-90% of revenues on player payroll, with revenues in the same ballpark as MLB teams. MLB teams will cry poor in the 40-50% range. I doubt EPL teams have much leaner operations than MLB teams. In 2018 Everton and the Orioles had almost the same revenues (about $250M), but Everton spent 83% on player payroll. The Orioles were under 60% and shed payroll rapidly afterwards. They don't have sprawling minor league systems, but otherwise I'd expect operating expenses to be somewhat comparable. They have stadiums that are usually not taxpayer-funded, and they often have to pay for upkeep and maintenance. They have large staffs of front office personnel, trainers, analysts, financial people, scouts, assistant coaches, just like baseball. Maybe travel is a bit less on average. A major difference is that they usually have more open financial books so it's harder to pretend losses. Another is promotion/relegation incentivizes teams to never tank. They'd much rather lose money this year by adding payroll than get sent down a level and lose $100M+ in annual revenues for who knows how long.

In the world of Premier League Soccer it's sometimes said that the fans never want to see an American ownership group come in because almost all of them want to see the team turn a profit. If you get a Saudi oil prince or a Russian oligarch or a former Asian despot buy the team they almost always do it for the fame and the vanity and their own egos. They'll put as much money in the team as they can, buying players at outrageous sums and cooking the books enough to get by any kind of financial fair play regulations (which are kind of comical, they say that you can't spend more on payroll than your revenues. In baseball most teams spend 40% of revenues on MLB payroll, there are Premier League teams close to 100%*). In the US they cook the books to make it look like they're losing money to get an upper hand in the victim game with the press, the fans, and the MLBPA. The Orioles have always been run by the prototypical American businessman who wants his business to turn a profit every year. I don't know that it's realistic to think that'll change if/when the Angeloses sell. * Of course. OF COURSE my team in the EPL is 20th of 20 on this chart in % revenues spent on payroll.

The 1998 Orioles had the highest payroll in baseball, if I recall correctly. They won 78 games. That seems to have been an inflection point. A couple years later Mussina was a free agent and Angelos had gone from "sure, let's sign Alomar, Bonilla, Raffy, Bordick, Erickson, Key, Myers" to "no pitcher is worth five years and that kind of money!" The late 90s teams had payrolls in the $70M range, the 2011 Orioles were about $80M. While the Yanks in that same period went from about $65M to $200M. The '98 Phillies had a $28M payroll, the '11 Phils $172M. Angelos was as aggressive as anyone in the 90s, but hit some kind of a ceiling just as everyone else spent like crazy. And that's really only half the story, because Angelos only spent on MLB payroll. While everyone else was building stuff in the Dominican and spending lavishly on overslot draft picks and comp picks and international signings, the O's spent essentially nothing on any of that. Our minds like simple answers that aren't always true, but here the simple answer seems to be that the '98 Orioles didn't turn the profit he wanted from his then-large investment, and it colored his future decisions.

Can you stop subscribing to MASN as a stand-alone decision? I stopped subscribing, but that's because I dumped DirecTV and moved on to streaming, and the only way to stream MASN is to sign up for that AT&T service that's $100 a month and I don't want. Do other cable/satellite services offer à la carte MASN? I thought most every service bundled it with other stuff most people wouldn't want to cut. So 50% of Orioles' local media revenues are from 78-year-old ladies who just watch the Flower Channel but get MASN in some kind of package. My aunt has Directv in rural western Virginia, and I think she gets MASN and pays for it without even having any sports package whatsoever. So you really have to want to stick it to the Angeloses to figure out some way to watch the other stuff you want but still cut MASN.

$300 times like 35! That's like $10k a road trip! What they could also do is if they're just going on a quick 3-game series, they leave the last two starting pitchers at home. That's $600 without even trying. They could double up on rooms, too. Hell, quadruple it up. Two queen beds, four guys. That would save them thousands of dollars a night. Most of the team is just happy they're not in the Atlantic League, so they probably wouldn't complain that much. Also, you know the soccer team Chelsea is under tight budgets because their owner is a Russian oligarch who's been sanctioned. They're having to take a bus to their road games. The Orioles could just use that as a proof of concept. London-to-Middleborough is basically the same distance as Baltimore to New York. Do they still run that bus from DC to NYC that's like $5?

I don't think there's any solid evidence that profits today will go to spending tomorrow. The best we can hope for is profits today could go into investment in non-payroll areas today. The remainder goes back to the owners. The budget for 2023 or 2025 is based on projected revenues in those seasons. I think it's highly unlikely, and probably fiscally imprudent, to think any business would project future payrolls based on future revenues plus money we have squirreled away from sometime in the past. It's unlikely an owner of a MLB team or a restaurant or a widget company would plan on a $200M payroll based on $150M in expected revenues-expenditures plus $50M we have stuffed in the mattress. We're all better served by assuming money not spent in 2022 is just gone.

There's a business opportunity for someone with a phone app and a trebuchet, for when I get a hankerin' for a $1 hot dog in the 6th inning.

You do remember that one of the longest threads of the 2014 season (reference: 96 wins, division title) was arguing about whether they should completely tear it down in June, sell everyone at the deadline, and try to reload the right way for 2018 or 2020 or whatever? 2013 was the team's second best record this century up to that point and the universal mood here that entire year was Why Does God Hate Us?!?

The MLBPA and every agent must think Nelson Cruz is the best thing in the history of things. Every free agent in their 30s says, hey, I'm not going to be out of the league at 33 or 35 like almost everyone in history. I'm going to be Nelson Cruz, it can happen, you're not a blind drunk idiot to sign me through my 39th birthday at $25M per. Really you're not.

Taking Freeman's top 10 through-age 31 comps (bb-ref), and their value in their age 32-37 seasons: Murray, 15 WAR Raffy, 27 Yaz, 17.6 Prince Fielder, -1.6 Shawn Green, 0.6 Orlando Cepeda, 5.6 Bagwell, 23 Luzinski, 2 Olerud, 14 Teixeira, 6.6 Of the 10 one or two would have been worth the contract, an additional three were basically average to average+ players over the length of the deal, and five (or half) were trainwrecks. Through 31 Mark Teixeira and Freeman were pretty comparable first basemen, both highly sought after in free agency, and Teixeira was worth six wins the rest of his life.

My point is that his starting point is three wins a year, so to break even over the whole deal he'd have to magically surge back to his production from years ago and then decline like you'd expect from there.

Well of course it's an overpay. You'd have to assume that Bryant won't age to think it's not. The Rockies know this, and we have to look at this as they just don't care. I suppose that's better for the fans than teams reflexively trading off anyone who is in line to make arb/free agent salaries. Okay, this year's fans, and next. Not the fans in 2026 who're wondering what kind of crack the front office was smoking to have a 34, 35-year-old on the roster who plays 66 games and has a 80 OPS+ while making almost $30M a year. I value Bryant at something like 4/80. Established value of three wins, assume a decline of half a win a year, pray he doesn't pull a Chris Davis and decline at three wins a year. Rockies, if they care, are implicitly assuming he declines at zero wins a year.

Through his current age (31) Freeman has been worth 43 wins. Through age 31 Eddie Murray was worth 53 wins. From 32-on Eddie was worth 15. He had just two more 3+ win seasons in the tank. The Dodgers are counting on Freeman to age much better than Eddie. Good luck with that. I suppose when you have $500M+ a year in revenues normal guidelines like "you're an idiot to sign a guy on the wrong side of 30 to a 5+ year deal" just don't apply.

Let's say it is. Since the start of 2018 Bryant has played about three seasons worth of games and has been worth a bit over 10 wins. So 3+ wins a season. They're paying him to continue to to that for the next seven years, through his age 36 season. It's a deal from 10 or 20 years ago when either the GM didn't believe in age-related decline, didn't care about an ugly back end of the deal because he knew they'd be in the playoffs a lot in the next 2, 3, 4 years, or was counting on PEDs to arrest the normal aging. Which of those do you think applies to this deal? Amazing they'd pass on a better home grown player at the same position, then sign this contract.