Tony Clark Keeping His Eye on the Orioles

[24fps]

8 minutes ago, Richmond Bird 9 said:

I know he does. I  expressed it poorly. IF we had spend less on Chris when we signed him (in years and money), we would have more money to spend now on players.

Tony Clark will only be happy when every player has a Davis-like contract.  Well every MLB player.  Who the hell cares if minor leaguers starve, right?

[Can_of_corn]

4 hours ago, Frobby said:

My remark had to do with your comment that the public doesn’t know all that history.    All that information is out there in public.   That’s how you know about it.    So why do you say the public doesn’t know?    The public knows, but it doesn’t really care.   

You and I know and you might not care.  Your average fan probably never realized what was going on.

[Satyr3206]

5 hours ago, 24fps said:

Tony Clark will only be happy when every player has a Davis-like contract.  Well every MLB player.  Who the hell cares if minor leaguers starve, right?

So true.

[spiritof66]

On 3/20/2019 at 4:22 PM, TonySoprano said:

2018 Opening Day payroll was around $142M*.  Tanking was not by design.  Let me save him some time; near-term, the Orioles are slashing payroll.  Deal with it.  

* https://www.usatoday.com/sports/mlb/orioles/salaries/2018/team/all/

I hope that if Clark or his minions do keep an eye on Baltimore, they will see (to the extent they're privy to such information) an enormous increase in the amounts spent on things other than MLB salaries -- building out the analytics and and scouting departments, signing and developing international talent, adding and improving Latin American training facilities, that kind of stuff. Being a reasonable fellow, I'm sure Clark would agree that it's important for all teams to spend a lot on those non-MLB salary items, but especially important for the Orioles to do so because their status as baseball's worst team has resulted in large part from skimping on those non-payroll items for years and directing far too much of their limited resources to their MLB payroll, including long-term contracts to veterans whose help to the team was and is short-term, negligible or non-existent.  

If they're going to have a chance to be competitive in the AL East, the Orioles will have to make some long overdue payments to various non-MLB payroll pipers. That means devoting much, much less to the MLB payroll than they have in a long time. It means not even thinking about signing high-priced MLB free agents or entering into/extending contracts to talent that is past, say, age 29, and looking to trade talent that is approaching that age. And it means putting aside a substantial hunk of their revenues -- revenues that have been shrinking, relative to most other teams' due to dwindling attendance and that remain both threatened and uncertain because of the MASN situation (I'll stay out of the estate tax issue for now) -- for the future to retain some of their own talented players as they age and approach free agency and to add higher-priced free agents (from the MLB and maybe internationally) who might fill needs on the team. 

That's what I hope to see -- plenty of spending, just not on the members of the union. If Clark sees that he should be pleased, no matter how low the Orioles' MLB payroll is. And if he's not, I'd like to see him come up with another strategy for trying to build the Orioles into a team that might compete for the AL East title by the mid-2020s.

[spiritof66]

On 3/20/2019 at 6:24 PM, Frobby said:

I have never understood the culture that allows young doctors to be on call for ridiculous lengths of time.    How can that possibly be good for patients, to be seen by some doctor who’s been working 18-20 hours straight?    I realize there have been some changes in the last decade or so, but why the heck did that take so long?    Strikes me as hypocritical, not Hippocratical.

I think the short answer as to why hospitals train and treat resident doctors the way they do is that they can.

It's true that a number of states have enacted laws limiting the numbers of consecutive hours residents can work. (This movement started in the 90s, after the daughter of a prominent New York journalist, Sidney Zion, died because of, it was claimed and proven at trial (though disputed by the hospital), the inattention of the resident in charge of her case while on a 36-hour shift.) Zion led a campaign to impose limits that were enacted in New York, California, I'm pretty sure Massachusetts and probably other states. https://www.healio.com/orthopedics/business-of-orthopedics/news/print/orthopedics-today/{b24aa59b-2bdb-444c-9338-711a931e7665}/liability-courts-judge-resident-conduct-by-same-standards-as-those-that-apply-to-attending-physicians)

Some physicians have argued that these legal limitations on residents' hours impair the quality of the training of young doctors because they don't get to see as many cases through to completion. I have read and heard, but sure don't know, that some hospital departments make it clear that residents should ignore these limitations, I think by working more hours than they sign for, if they want to get ahead. There are also some that require, and this I know directly, that require residents to analyze and prepare reports on their cases, and to do that work outside the hospital so that those hours don't count against the legal limits.

But I think -- and this is just my opinion, watching mostly from afar -- is that further reducing residents' hours (to what most of us would consider amounts that would permit human beings, whose decisions and actions affect the lives and health of other human beings, to function at a high level) would be very expensive because you'd need a lot more residents. The same is true of paying residents salaries that come anywhere near what they will earn after their residencies. Those added costs would be imposed in the first instance on the hospitals but eventually borne (for the most part, anyway) by health insurers, Medicare, Medicaid, the government picking up the tab for uninsured patients -- that is, by all of us. Imposing changes that would increase the costs of in-hospital health care probably would lack political appeal right now. So, to repeat, they do it because they can.

 

[theocean]

On 3/20/2019 at 4:22 PM, TonySoprano said:

2018 Opening Day payroll was around $142M*.  Tanking was not by design.  Let me save him some time; near-term, the Orioles are slashing payroll.  Deal with it.  

* https://www.usatoday.com/sports/mlb/orioles/salaries/2018/team/all/

I'm sure the Angelos family will be thrilled that MASN will have at least one viewer this year.