MLB CBA/Labor Dispute Thread

[Camden_yardbird]

5 hours ago, interloper said:

It doesn't matter what you think, frankly, or if you're right. The point is the MLBPA would never go for a worse deal for their players.

Tony Clark would like you to hold his beer.

[OriolesMagic83]

8 hours ago, Moose Milligan said:

I can't wait for the next 10-15 years, hopefully the brainiacs who are constantly tinkering with numbers can come up with a better stat than WAR, rendering it useless.

It's not that I don't like WAR, I think it's a pretty good stat and it does a decent (not perfect) enough job of understanding value.  

I'd just like to see chaos, personally.

Anyway, I still think this gets resolved before spring training.  At the end of the day, no one wants a work stoppage and everyone involved knows that the damage to the game will be irreparable.  

It will also depress player salaries and hurt owner profits.  This is important since neither side seems to care about the health of the game as a whole.

[Can_of_corn]

8 hours ago, Moose Milligan said:

I can't wait for the next 10-15 years, hopefully the brainiacs who are constantly tinkering with numbers can come up with a better stat than WAR, rendering it useless.

It's not that I don't like WAR, I think it's a pretty good stat and it does a decent (not perfect) enough job of understanding value.  

I'd just like to see chaos, personally.

Anyway, I still think this gets resolved before spring training.  At the end of the day, no one wants a work stoppage and everyone involved knows that the damage to the game will be irreparable.  

I think you are giving both sides way more credit than they deserve.

[scOtt]

8 hours ago, Moose Milligan said:

I can't wait for the next 10-15 years, hopefully the brainiacs who are constantly tinkering with numbers can come up with a better stat than WAR, rendering it useless.

It's not that I don't like WAR, I think it's a pretty good stat and it does a decent (not perfect) enough job of understanding value.  

I'd just like to see chaos, personally.

Anyway, I still think this gets resolved before spring training.  At the end of the day, no one wants a work stoppage and everyone involved knows that the damage to the game will be irreparable.  

Let's all hope...

[DrungoHazewood]

On 11/11/2021 at 10:18 PM, Frobby said:

They should use Bill James’ Win Shares.   Probably not as good a stat as WAR but it assigns players a share of the wins the team actually had.   So there’s your incentive to put team wins above individual stats, or at least make them important.  

Except that Win Shares are broken in about five different fundamental ways.  Modern pitchers get far too few Win Shares, Cy Young winners today get 18, 20, 25 win shares compared to 35+ for MVPs.  Max Scherzer had 16 win shares in '21.  So did Mike Yastrzemski, who hit .225 with a .768 OPS.  David Fletcher, .262/.297/.324, had 17 WS.  Anthony Rizzo, .248 with so-so fielding at first, 15 WS.  DJ Le Mahieu had a OPS just over .700, 20 WS.

The fielding is similarly compressed, with about a win a year separating Ozzie's glove from Jeter's.  Since it's a quasi-zero based system (instead of replacement level) every regular gets 6 or 8 WS per full season just for having their name written in the lineup.  And it hasn't been updated in 20 years, so it incorporates none of the advances of the last two decades.

Top closers get about as many WS as top starters, at least in today's game.

The end result is big, slugging 1B/DH types who play 160 games are overvalued, while defense-first players and pitchers (especially starters) undervalued.  Poor basis for a player/salary rating system.

[DrungoHazewood]

On 11/12/2021 at 5:40 PM, Can_of_corn said:

I think relievers should get screwed.  They shouldn't get paid like position players that play 140 games or starting pitchers.

 

Shouldn't you get paid for the wins you deliver for your team, no matter how many games or innings you play?  If a closer gave up no runs and only pitched in very high leverage situations why shouldn't he get paid for that?

[DrungoHazewood]

On 11/13/2021 at 10:00 AM, Moose Milligan said:

I can't wait for the next 10-15 years, hopefully the brainiacs who are constantly tinkering with numbers can come up with a better stat than WAR, rendering it useless.

It's not that I don't like WAR, I think it's a pretty good stat and it does a decent (not perfect) enough job of understanding value.  

I'd just like to see chaos, personally.

Anyway, I still think this gets resolved before spring training.  At the end of the day, no one wants a work stoppage and everyone involved knows that the damage to the game will be irreparable.  

I was going to respond, but before I did I thought maybe you wrote this post just to irk me.  So, ha, I'm not writing anything.

[Frobby]

2 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Except that Win Shares are broken in about five different fundamental ways.  Modern pitchers get far too few Win Shares, Cy Young winners today get 18, 20, 25 win shares compared to 35+ for MVPs.  Max Scherzer had 16 win shares in '21.  So did Mike Yastrzemski, who hit .225 with a .768 OPS.  David Fletcher, .262/.297/.324, had 17 WS.  Anthony Rizzo, .248 with so-so fielding at first, 15 WS.  DJ Le Mahieu had a OPS just over .700, 20 WS.

The fielding is similarly compressed, with about a win a year separating Ozzie's glove from Jeter's.  Since it's a quasi-zero based system (instead of replacement level) every regular gets 6 or 8 WS per full season just for having their name written in the lineup.  And it hasn't been updated in 20 years, so it incorporates none of the advances of the last two decades.

Top closers get about as many WS as top starters, at least in today's game.

The end result is big, slugging 1B/DH types who play 160 games are overvalued, while defense-first players and pitchers (especially starters) undervalued.  Poor basis for a player/salary rating system.

Well other than that, it’s perfect.   OK, maybe not.  But I do kind of like the idea of a system that looks at how many games a team won and then allocates the credit.   (And yes, I realize there are flaws in that idea, too.)

[spiritof66]

On 11/13/2021 at 10:00 AM, Moose Milligan said:

I can't wait for the next 10-15 years, hopefully the brainiacs who are constantly tinkering with numbers can come up with a better stat than WAR, rendering it useless.

It's not that I don't like WAR, I think it's a pretty good stat and it does a decent (not perfect) enough job of understanding value.  

I'd just like to see chaos, personally.

Anyway, I still think this gets resolved before spring training.  At the end of the day, no one wants a work stoppage and everyone involved knows that the damage to the game will be irreparable.  

I'm not so sure. The damage from other work stoppages was serious, but probably not irreparable. In the short-term, each side recovered pretty well from past work stoppage: player salaries continued to climb, and while we don't know whether the owners are making more money, the reported values of their franchises continued to climb. The union/players and the owners might well conclude, as they apparently did in the past, that the income they'll lose from an in-season work stoppage will be less than what they'll gain from improving their position in the CBA that's being negotiated. That's why there have been work stoppages in the past, and there may be more in the future.

Of course, a work stoppage would be bad for the future of MLB, which already faces a bunch of long-term challenges to its long-term financial health. The problem is that neither side appears to care much, and there's nothing that requires them to care if they choose not do, about the long-term future of the game. The union doesn't focus on, or need to focus on, how many ML jobs there will be or what the salary structure will be a generation from now. The owners should care a little more, and maybe they do, but they don't have to. A "real" Commissioner might try to focus the parties on the impact of events like work stoppages on the game's long-term health, but . . . 

[Just Regular]

43 minutes ago, spiritof66 said:

The damage from other work stoppages was serious, but probably not irreparable.

I'm going to guess 2131 Consecutive Pitching Changes wouldn't be as good as 1995 Ripken to ease the pain of baseball fans if this one runs bad.

[DrungoHazewood]

16 hours ago, Frobby said:

Well other than that, it’s perfect.   OK, maybe not.  But I do kind of like the idea of a system that looks at how many games a team won and then allocates the credit.   (And yes, I realize there are flaws in that idea, too.)

We're probably going pretty far afield here, but this is kind of my thing so I'll ramble for a minute...

I don't think there's any value in starting to count from zero instead of replacement level (or .300 winning percentage).  And there are some disadvantages, mainly that you can't really set a zero level, there is no zero level, there's always someone worse.  Win shares picks a level it calls zero (in reality more like a .100 winning percentage), and then rounds off everyone under that to zero.  So it's not even doing what it says it does.

If you want to account for all team wins in your value system just add something like 0.0075 wins per plate appearance (or IP equivalent) to everyone on the team, in addition to their WAR.  That will evenly distribute the 48ish wins that get you to replacement level.  But there's no value to a MLB team in those 48 wins, because even the teams that aren't really trying like the 2019 Orioles or the 1915 A's win about that many games.  Setting a replacement level and measuring value from that is much more meaningful, to me, than dividing up 48 wins and handing them out to everyone equally.

What Win Shares ends up doing is saying that a part time player who was awesome is no more valuable than a poor regular who's getting his chunk of the 48 wins everyone has no matter what.

Also, many times Bill James has said that Win Shares doesn't really work without Loss Shares so you can define the space a player is responsible for.  Who is more valuable, a 13-2 player or a 13-22 player?  Today with WS and (WAR, for that matter) it's just an integer and you need to add in the playing time context in your head. But Bill hasn't updated WS in 20 years, and seems to have lost interest in publishing comprehensive Loss Shares and how to calculate them.  Hell, it's a huge challenge to even find an online source for Win Shares. Bill's own site lists them, but only by looking up individual players one at a time.

[Sports Guy]

Really interesting article here:

https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/2222664

[Sports Guy]

 

Six seasons of service time are still required to become a free agent, unchanged since 1976. A full year of service time is equivalent to 172 days on a major-league roster or injured list. For most players, eligibility for salary arbitration still requires three years of service time, largely unchanged since 1987, though Super Two status was added in 1991.

Big-league career lengths are declining. The average service time of MLB players was 4.79 years in 2003 and fell to 3.71 years in 2019, according to MLBPA data from last year.

There are far fewer players in their 30s. For instance, the share of position players aged 30-plus declined from 40.4% of all hitters in 2004 to 29.9% this past season. Of all players to step on an MLB field in 2019, 63.2% had less than three years of service time.

Careers are also starting later. The average debut age of 25.6 years this season was up from 2011 (24.6 years) and 2001 (24.5), according to Baseball Reference.

That all means fewer players are reaching arbitration and free agency, and when they do, they're more likely to be in the declining phase of their aging curve.

[LookinUp]

32 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

Really interesting article here:

https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/2222664

Very interesting. Seems like the ideas being proposed are tweaks to existing formulas rather than a new way of doing it. Basically:

1. Salary floor for teams,
2. Arbitration after 2 years, not 3, and 
3. Free Agency after 5 years, not 6.

Basically, let guys get paid younger and make teams spend on something. That wouldn't stop gaming of service time, but I'm not sure how else to do it.

[Can_of_corn]

3 minutes ago, LookinUp said:

Very interesting. Seems like the ideas being proposed are tweaks to existing formulas rather than a new way of doing it. Basically:

1. Salary floor for teams,
2. Arbitration after 2 years, not 3, and 
3. Free Agency after 5 years, not 6.

Basically, let guys get paid younger and make teams spend on something. That wouldn't stop gaming of service time, but I'm not sure how else to do it.

One day on a ML roster counts as a year toward arbitration and free agency.  (You can make an exemption for September call-ups if you like).

Will that possibly delay the promotion of a guy like Gausman?  Sure.  I don't see that as a huge negative.