Moshagge3

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.

Joe Sheehan proposed a single-game elimination tournament with 16 teams for the postseason. I think that's perfect, as you can get that done in a couple of weeks.

I'm confused that these playoff proposals are leaking right now. MLBPA has firmly said that if any games are missed, they will not agree to any extended playoffs. They would look extremely weak if they backed off from this.

The cynical interpretation of the tweets from Heyman, Nightengale, etc. would be that the owners are eager to instill some optimism so that when the players walk away from a ridiculous lowball offer from MLB tomorrow, it looks like they're the ones who blew it up and dashed everyone's hopes. That unfortunately sounds like just the game the owners are playing here.

The MLBPA has made it clear that if any games are missed, the owners don't get their precious expanded playoffs. So I don't think there's much chance of a 150 game season or anything similar. Either a deal gets done or the season gets blown up drastically.

That sounds like an argument in favor of getting more money to the young guys: higher minimum salary, more money in arb pool, getting to FA quicker. All things the players want and the owners oppose. Who is trying to "get around" this fact exactly?

The players do care about competitive balance in their own weird way, though. Of course any FA would rather have 30 teams competing for their services than five teams. The players didn't ask for a team to be placed in, say, Milwaukee, or negotiate the regional TV deal with FOX Sports Upper Midwest or whoever carries the Brewers. So if the owner of the Brewers can't compete, why did he buy the Brewers and why is that the players' fault?

I keep hearing versions of this rant, but I still don't understand. Players are employees of the business. The owners are, well, the owners. It isn't Cedric Mullins who decides what a hot dog costs at OPACY, it's ownership. It isn't Aaron Judge who decides what time playoff games start, it's ownership. It isn't Mike Trout who decides how highlights are shared over social media, it's ownership. It isn't Max Scherzer who decides whether the baseball factory is going to put out dead or juiced baseballs, it's ownership. What aspects of the fan experience do the players have any say over? When they only have so many bargaining chips, are the players supposed to put their livelihoods on the line to demand day games in the World Series, which the owners could make a reality whenever they wanted?

It's hilarious that ESPN is doing this just a few months after Joe Posnanski's bestselling (and fantastic) Baseball 100 came out. It's like some guy running behind Leonardo da Vinci waving around a stick-figure drawing of the Last Supper.

The Frontier League is really shaking things up: https://www.courierpress.com/story/sports/baseball/2022/01/25/sudden-death-baseball-frontier-league-evansvilles-bosse-field/9210366002/ I have to say, although I prefer the traditional way of just playing the extra innings as normal, this sounds better and way more interesting than the runner on second.

Total choke job by me, 36. Man, Chance Sisco and Rio Ruiz seem like they were from a decade ago this year has been such a grind.

Let's go Rays

The Red Sox. The Yankees were supposed to be the class of the AL and to not even get a home playoff game would be deeply humiliating to them. Also I think the Yankees are more of a threat to get hot and run the table, whereas I think the Red Sox have pretty slim odds of getting past Tampa Bay.

I don't see any chance that both (1) the service time rules stay the same and (2) the season begins on time without a work stoppage.

Mike Wright Jr. about to get the loss or the win for the White Sox in extra innings. He let the ghost runner score in the top of the tenth. 9-8 Red Sox going into the bottom of the inning.

Wait, there's a rule now against bumping old threads? So we're never going to see that dumb dancing gifs thread again?