Moshagge3

Unfortunate OF positioning there.

Well, there will be a big ol' ad for Bill's Carpet Fair or some such on the uni, so there's that.

I don't like his use of the word "cycle", as I was previously assured by him that this phase was a one-off, in order to clear out the rubble of past incompetence and create a pipeline of elite talent that would sustain itself unto eternity. But actually we're going to lose 110 games every seven or eight years now?

Not a lawyer but pretty sure instituting a lockout puts the onus on MLB to make a proposal, which they did not do for weeks.

MLB's vision of how a 14-team playoff system would look is absolutely terrible. If they gave byes to the league division winners and the other four teams did a single-game elimination tournament to advance to the division series, it would be stupid, but not too objectionable. But MLB only wants to give one bye? So if two teams in different divisions finish tied for the best record with 102 wins, one team gets a bye based on head-to-head record or something, and the other team has to play a best-of-three crapshoot against a .500 team? And their pitching isn't lined up because they were going for the bye until the very end of the season, while the .500 team can send their ace to the mound? Woof. The "ghost win" idea sounded silly on its face, but it would do its job in this case.

Let's never forget that all of this could have been hashed out in December if owners cared about starting the season on time.

After last week, I'm just waiting for the tweet from an MLB source saying that MLBPA has all of a sudden changed its mind and is somehow refusing to take MLB's "amazing" offer.

I wonder what would happen if some President in the future decided to come out and say, "I don't care who wins the World Series, I'm inviting the team with the best regular season record to the White House." I would have to consider voting for whoever says this during the campaign.

Get ready to celebrate, because the Orioles paid more luxury tax money than any other team in baseball from 1997-99. Seriously, though, the CBT levels affect every team. If the Yankees are restricted to spending $210m on payroll, the Blue Jays can set a budget of, say, $150m and still appear credible to their fans, who are conditioned to not expect them to try to outspend the Yankees even though they are owned by a megacorporation that has revenues in the billions. No fan is going to shed a tear that Bryce Harper's contract pays him "only" $25m/year, less than he thought he was going to get, but that figure sets a baseline that gets used in arbitration. Harper had to settle for a longer contract and less per year because the richest teams were avoiding the CBT threshold. MLB loves it when reporters suggest that the CBT is only relevant to the wealthiest, most elite of players because they want to drive a wedge between union members.

The argument is over what amounts to $1M per team, owners are an absolute joke.

What I wrote wasn't an "analogy", it was a description of what is literally happening. And what exactly did Max Scherzer say that you had a problem with? Keep in mind that he is on what is probably the last contract of his career, so he doesn't stand to gain anything down the line by holding out. The lockout is probably going to cost him what, $8-10 million or something? Scherzer is literally putting three times as much on the line as it would have cost each billionaire owner to do that bonus pool increase that players were asking for.

They also paid $3 million last year for Shohei Ohtani's season. They can GTFO.

Can you identify what player demands you specifically find "hypocritical"? Pretend you're from a very remote island and you have no idea what any player currently makes or even what baseball is. "Baseball player" might be very lucrative or it might be a working-class job as far as you know. All you know is that there is a labor dispute where the baseball players have conceded and dropped every one of their demands to make major changes to the structure of the current agreement. They want only for the numbers involved to increase basically at the rate of inflation, retroactive to when the deal was signed. Hmmm, you ask, is this industry in financial decline? No, in fact, not only is the industry still turning a healthy profit, the baseball players have agreed to things that make the owners a lot of extra money on top of that. Hmmm, you ask, are these workers easy to replace? No, in fact, their skills are so freakishly rare that it costs a fair amount of money just to identify those skills in people and then to develop them. When you zoom out like that, it sure sounds like the players are being reasonable and even conciliatory and the owners are being unbelievably petty. It's only when you intrude your emotions into it, "can't believe they make millions to hit a ball with a stick when my mom's a teacher and only makes 65k a year etc. etc." that you start to blame the players, and that's exactly what the owners count on and have counted on for more than a century.

I know what a bye is. I also know that the *players* wanted to give *more* advantages to division winners and the *owners* wanted to give *fewer*. That tells me that owners don't want to feel any incentive or pressure to outspend the teams in their division.

What about, like, Rylan Bannon? He signed for $122K but that was five years ago. Is it fair that he's locked out?

It was extremely telling that the players' proposals involved rewarding the division winners with byes or an automatic 1-0 series lead, and owners only want to give them homefield. Owners say that playoff expansion is about giving more fans meaningful September baseball, but it's very obvious they don't want to have to shell out payroll for more than about 85 wins a year.

Aside from what others have pointed out - Lions, Jaguars, Browns, etc. mired in mediocrity for decades - NFL and MLB are apples to oranges. In the NFL, one top draft pick can make you a contender immediately. That's how Cincinnati went from a joke to the Super Bowl. That's not how it works in MLB.

This. People say that concerns about the CBT are only for the wealthiest superstars, but a cap of $230m for the Yankees and Dodgers becomes cover for the Reds to spend $100m and the Rays to spend even less. Total payroll has declined since 2016. If the beneficiaries of CBT were actually spending the money they were getting, it wouldn't be nearly as big a point of contention.

Does the "you can't afford to take your family to a MLB game anymore" crowd not have anything to say about the prospect of cutting the supply of games by 40%?

He appears on MLB Network all the time, so he definitely has ties to the other side.

Yup, this was the owners' game. Not sure how MLBPA failed to get in front of this.

Competitive balance is a good thing and it's what players want. Players want to hit FA and have 30 different teams interested in their services, rather than three or four. But the players have seen that "competitive balance" translates to penalizing teams for spending in the form of a tax that goes into the owners' pockets and usually stays there. I can appreciate that the Yankees and the Brewers have very different revenue streams. However, the CBT on the Yankees' payroll isn't allowing the Brewers to catch up to the Yankees in spending. What it's doing is letting the Brewers get away with a $100 million payroll by saying "Well, obviously we aren't going to be in the same neighborhood as the Yankees."

Makes as much sense as anything being proposed right now.

They certainly are. As are best-of-three, best-of-five, and even best-of-seven series. But the single-elimination tourney would get great ratings (ratings always spike for a Game 7) and the winner would be so obviously illegitimate that people would have to give some recognition the team with the best record.

This is America, where college basketball fans will argue with a straight face, "My team went 7-9 in a tough conference and they beat the #20 team once and they were really competitive with the #17 team. Can you believe they didn't get a bid to play for the championship of the entire sport??? They really need to expand the tournament." In baseball, they should give a trophy to the team with the best record in each league, then they can play whatever postseason tournament they want.