DrungoHazewood

Not many in LF/LC. My guess is an additional three triples a year.

50. I want 50+. It's way overdue to make modern ballparks match modern players. We've been racing F1 cars in Safeway parking lots for 30 years. Now we've moved up to a mall parking lot.

The other sports don't have antitrust exemptions at all, and there hasn't been a major competing league since, what... the ABA 50 years ago? The impediments to a new league are primarily: 1. MLB already employs 95% of the professional baseball players in the US. The XFL wasn't really competition to the NFL, but it could exist because AAA-quality NFL players are all free agents, instead of being under contract to the NFL. 2. Governments have already purchased billion dollar stadiums for MLB teams, but won't for an upstart league 3. It takes decades for new teams to be on the same footing as existing teams

You'll always have ways to game the system. My preference would be to do away with the draft altogether, and make all amateurs free agents. But each team gets a bonus pool based on market size and efficient utilization of market. I leave it up to someone else to work out the formula, but teams in more advantaged markets get less. Wins and losses wouldn't come into play, or at least not in the same way they do for the draft. So the Orioles, Pirates, Royals and Rays get to spend, say, $25M a year on amateur signings, the Yankees and Dodgers $5M. Something like that. The Cardinals will love this since St. Louis is roughly the same size as Baltimore but they draw huge crowds and win all the time.

I don't see them as overlapping very much. I don't get much sports news from newspapers. And I have yet to see a site like the Athletic that I want to read so much I add it to the already-too-long list of subscriptions I have.

Nashville is currently blacked out from receiving both the Braves and the Reds on MLB.com. I'm surprised they can get the Cardinals, as St. Louis is only a few miles further than Cincy. Anyway, the Reds and Braves might both ask for compensation for stealing their territory.

I'm sure most are convinced they're a little tweak to their swing away from hitting .230 at Delmarva to being a starter on the Orioles. Many are delusional. But that doesn't mean that if they got union membership they wouldn't act in their immediate best interests. Do you really think a union of 5000 people is going to vote to continue a system where David Price makes more money than everyone in A ball combined? (Did a little back-of-the-napkin math and I think that's actually true. I think it's also true that a very small handful of the best paid major leaguers make more than everyone in the minors combined.) I think it's inevitable that if you give players making $8000 a voice in the same union as MLBers things will change. Heck, there are probably more guys hitting .220 in the low minors terrified they're about to get cut than there are major leaguers. They'll vote in their own best interest.

The primary reason for tanking isn't to get the #1 pick. That's a secondary thing. The primary thing is saving $50M a year by not signing Kevin Millar and Jay Payton and six of their buddies to try to win 74 games. And even if you lose 500k in attendance, at $50 a head you're still $25M to the good.

There are about five or six times as many minor leaguers as major leaguers, even after contraction. If all the minor leaguers were part of the union they'd always win. They'd never vote for anything that primarily benefited major leaguers, or free agents. If a guy is hitting .230 in A ball what does he care about five or six years for arb? He may never get to the majors at all. He's trying to divert resources so that he doesn't have to sleep on an air mattress in an apartment he shares with six other guys. The entire perspective of the union would be radically different, and to the detriment of major leaguers, if minor leaguers were included.

Pluses for expanded playoffs: More money! Also, randomizes outcomes so an 83-win team only has slightly worse odds of winning it all than a 97-win team. Minuses: Randomizes outcomes so an 83-win team only has slightly worse odds of winning it all than a 97-win team. If they can't agree on any real fixes for competitive balance expanding the playoffs is always the way they've faked it in the past.

Maybe. Depending on how they value long-term contracts (see: Corn's post). A deal for someone like Rutschman would almost certainly be back-loaded with him making a maybe a few million in what otherwise would be his pre-arb years and more later. Longoria signed that very team-friendly deal early on and never made $10M a year until he was 29. Bumgardner was similar. I think if they signed those four to long-term deals right now it would cost less than $20M in 2022, and that's with an ill-advised $8-10M '22 contract for Mancini. They'd still have to sign about $50M in 2022 contracts above that. Two huge signings, or 3-5 big signings. I don't think it's possible without drastically overpaying. Even using AAV those four are probably only getting the O's halfway there.

What's their current projected payroll? $30 or $40M? They would have to phase in a floor. There's no way a 53-win team is going to add the equivalent of four $15M a season players in one offseason. Certainly not with something like 10 other teams trying to sign everyone to meet the floor at the same time. If they really had to many teams would end up with below-average players who'd otherwise be trying to sign 1/3 deals instead making $10, 15, 20M a year.

The problem from the players' perspective it that the owners have an avenue that they're fully willing to go down where they don't have to pay free agent salaries. They talk about young players not getting their fair share, but the issue is that teams like the Orioles and Pirates and even to some extent the Rays can basically opt out of ever paying free agent rates because other cheaper players are available. The problem is there are still ways to have a $40M payroll. The players would probably stop talking about old/young split altogether if the owners proposed a $100M floor.

Over the last five full seasons the median age of a player who DH'd at least 50 games was 32. I'm going to guess that the average 32-year-old MLBer makes a lot more money than a typical MLB player.

It's not common for someone to start off walking in 7% of PAs and eventually get to 13% or more. It can happen, but I think it's usually because the hitter has become really dangerous and pitchers much, much more cautious pitching to him. Sammy Sosa, Chris Davis. Alfonso Soriano started off walking in less than 5% of PAs. He eventually got as high as 9%, but that was in his best offensive season, and with the help of 16 intentional walks and probably quite a few intentional-unintentional walks. His career rate ended up at 5.9%. Adam Jones, Salvador Perez, Mark Trumbo, all those guys may have improved a little, but nothing significant.

Corn was right in that he was very good at controlling the running game. A typical Tillman season was allowing two steals and three caught, all year. He also didn't have any difference in outcomes with runners on or bases empty. A typical pitcher has an OPSvs 40 points higher with men on, working from the stretch. Tillman's numbers were even. I think he was an average MLB starter who did some small but significant things well that helped him be pretty effective for a while.

Yes, I think Trumbo is a good comp. I hope Mountcastle hits .270 instead of .249, which might allow him to be a 3-win player instead of a 2-win guy in good years. But you really have to hit extremely well to be much above average if you don't bring much to the table fielding or baserunning and you walk 40 times a year.

I'm always curious about the sources and methods used when putting together lists like this. About half the references are to an LA Times article that's behind a paywall. Perhaps coincidentally it looks like all of the owners who are not billionaires have that LA Times article as the source. An example is the Reds' primary owner is listed as being worth $400M. Forbes says the Reds are worth just over a $1B. So, how much of the Reds does Bob Castellini own? It couldn't be more than 40%, right? Probably can't be that much, otherwise his entire net worth is the Reds. I think it would be very unusual for a modern MLB owner to have few assets outside of the team.

The difference between the Rays over the last four seasons and "beast" is small. You could argue they're already one of the 3-4 best teams in baseball, winning about 60% of their games in a tough division. Although I'd say the injection of $25M or $50M a year isn't guaranteed to produce more wins. A big part of the Rays' model is to be ruthlessly unemotional and trade or otherwise part ways with anyone who isn't providing the required ROI, including favorites like Longoria. More money would change that calculation, and that's not always positive. They might have chosen to pay $100M or more for Longoria's last four years of league-average production, instead of the very similar numbers they got for a grand total of less than 1/10th of that in reality.

More resources? As poorly as the O's have drawn recently the Rays have done worse with a (much) better team.

Mountcastle's .335 wOBA was almost exactly league-average for a first baseman. If he's lucky he has 2-3 more years of growth and will end up being somewhat better than average. His plate discipline will make it challenging to be a big asset, but he doesn't necessarily have to be that. Teams win with just good players as most positions.

Head big = an affront to dignity and history Belly big = funny Being mean to reporters = bad Obliterating a bullpen phone and fighting Kevin Gregg = funny

But Ortiz is a nice guy who donates to charity and loves Boston, he couldn't have taken anything illegal. And even if somehow he did it's okay, he didn't break any records set by players the baby boomer writers love.

I'd consider that the ultimate insult. We're going to steal your team and move it 1000 miles away and call it something else, but you can still watch their prospects play for three months for the BaySox on their way to Nashville. I'd give PG County Stadium the finger every time I drove by. What would be interesting is if the Atlantic League somehow negotiated a lease and put a team in OPACY. I'd go watch them. I supposed they'd have to drop the OP part. Again, not expecting any of this to happen.

Remember, when your team sucks everything they do is inept and no other team would have done this.