New CBA negotiations

[cl smooth]

 

"BAH GAWD THAT'S IAN HAPP'S MUSIC!"

 

[UMFan83]

 

"BAH GAWD THAT'S IAN HAPP'S MUSIC!"

 

 

Hopefully he goes back to serial killer looking Ian Happ and not lovable podcaster Ian Happ

[CubinNY]

Reading between the lines a little, it appears the owners can't get in agreement, whether by design or real conflicting interests. They appear to have miscalculated the player's resolve. What a mess.

[UMFan83]

4 days..

 

[JudasIscariotTheBird]

[Andy]

4 days..

 

Something something catastrophe - Manfred

 

What a bunch of horsefeathering assholes. If I thought people would actually see the light and view the owners as the bloodsucking scum they are, I'd actually want the season to be canceled.

[Irrelevant Dude]

Nothing of note happened today?

[Bertz]

Nothing of note happened today?

 

Same as the last few days mostly

 

[CubinNY]

Nothing of note happened today?

 

Same as the last few days mostly

 

The owners ran out of ideas a long time ago.

[Rex Buckingham]

Nothing of note happened today?

 

Same as the last few days mostly

 

The owners ran out of ideas a long time ago.

 

Easy to run out when you only have 1 - do everything possible to limit how much you pay the players so you can make more money.

[Bote McBoteface]

Wait, mlb is proposing that only the top 4 draft picks are assigned using a lottery? So if you finish in the bottom 4 you still have a 25% chance of getting the top pick? Will it be like NBA where your record impacts your odds of getting the top pick? Is it me or does tanking still seem like a viable strategy with only the top 4 in a lottery?

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Wait, mlb is proposing that only the top 4 draft picks are assigned using a lottery? So if you finish in the bottom 4 you still have a 25% chance of getting the top pick? Will it be like NBA where your record impacts your odds of getting the top pick? Is it me or does tanking still seem like a viable strategy with only the top 4 in a lottery?

 

Very doubtful anything changes from a Top 4 lottery, but it depends on the pool specifics. The value in tanking is not really in being able to draft a generational talent at #1 like it is in the NBA(though drafting higher is obviously better), but that you maximize the pool of money you can use across the draft. Tanking as people talk about it isn't an owner-inspired idea that some GM begrudgingly went along with, it's a talent-maximization strategy that also saves money up front. To fix it you need to break the correlation between teams being extra bad and having more of a scarce resource to acquire talent. If you lottery the top 4 spots but change nothing else, I don't see how that changes any incentives. Pittsburgh was 4th last year and I doubt their management feels like they lost out on the chance to make future teams better if they had held on to Frazier or spent more and tried to win 70 games. Similarly, teams just outside the top 4 like the Marlins or Nationals I doubt would feel like they got a raw deal. In an ideal world you'd do an NBA style lottery and/or you'd do some more significant leveling of the bonus pools to blunt the incentive. If you change nothing about the pools I'm not sure any of the proposals I've seen from either side(4, 7, 8) are enough teams to actually change behavior.

[Rob]

Kill the draft and bonus pools. Let the free market sort it out.

[Bertz]

On this issue I'm not sure what the contours of the owners proposal vs. the players, but it looks like every non playoff team is in the lottery, and then the picks get assigned by record from there. For instance here's the full player plan

 

 

I believe the owners proposal does have the "if you finish in the bottom X teams Y years in a row then you can't be in the lottery" but doesn't have the extra picks for small market teams?

[Andy]

Kill the draft and bonus pools. Let the free market sort it out.

Bonus pools was such a stupid idea (except of course for the owners' wallets). Rebuilding teams didn't necessarily have to tank when you could just throw some money around and buy out some college-bound draft prospects, and it was still pretty cheap as talent acquisition goes.

[Rex Buckingham]

The idea of extra picks for "small market teams" is garbage. Every single one of those owners can afford to acquire whatever talent they want, they don't need extra help because they're in a smaller city.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Kill the draft and bonus pools. Let the free market sort it out.

Bonus pools was such a stupid idea (except of course for the owners' wallets). Rebuilding teams didn't necessarily have to tank when you could just throw some money around and buy out some college-bound draft prospects, and it was still pretty cheap as talent acquisition goes.

 

It also meant the Dodgers could functionally outbid for all the talented players with signability questions(look at where Eovaldi, Pederson, or Andy LaRoche were drafted) so I do understand they have a benefit in the same way that draft order has a benefit. The problem is they are way too stratified because of the difference between pick 1 and pick 5 and pick 20. The best solution from a competitive standpoint might be to have a separate pool for first round picks based on order and then everyone has the same pool for all other rounds.

[Irrelevant Dude]

Wait, mlb is proposing that only the top 4 draft picks are assigned using a lottery? So if you finish in the bottom 4 you still have a 25% chance of getting the top pick? Will it be like NBA where your record impacts your odds of getting the top pick? Is it me or does tanking still seem like a viable strategy with only the top 4 in a lottery?

I don't understand limiting it to 4 teams. I say put every non-playoff team in the lottery with equal odds. Combine that with the expanded playoffs and there is virtually no motivation to lose games.

[Cubswin11]

I still think there’s no real fix to “tanking.” The Pirates and other teams are still going to run smaller payrolls, big market teams will have years where they hit the end of a life cycle and have down years but still spend, teams will spend a lot and try to win but things will go wrong and they end bottom 5 or whatever. Baseball is hard and there’s going to still be shitty teams. The idea that every team will be “competitive” and between like 77-88 wins is untenable.

And even if it is a 162 game season becomes less fun to watch or follow if you know every team is going to be in it at the end and it isn’t worth watching until late august or September .

 

 

That being said I do like the idea of a draft pool lottery, whether it’s bottom 4 teams or all the teams that miss playoffs or wherever they land.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

I still think there’s no real fix to “tanking.” The Pirates and other teams are still going to run smaller payrolls, big market teams will have years where they hit the end of a life cycle and have down years but still spend, teams will spend a lot and try to win but things will go wrong and they end bottom 5 or whatever. Baseball is hard and there’s going to still be horsefeathers teams. The idea that every team will be “competitive” and between like 77-88 wins is untenable.

 

I do think that's an important clarification. Sports are zero-sum, and there's always going to be teams that are bad. A flattening of every team into a narrow band isn't even necessarily desirable, who's gonna want to sit through 162 games when everyone is so similar you can just watch September and October to see how it plays out? (there are counterpoints to this but the logic remains)

 

The other part that goes past the draft pools is where good players come from. The game's best players are trending younger and younger and teams are increasingly unwilling to trade prospects and pre-arb players. Even if Bob Nutting gets a brain parasite and opens up the Pirate payroll, free agency is littered with post-prime players to spend money on and those who aren't post-prime are either in extremely high demand, they need player development turnarounds from their recent performance, or a little of both. While player development successes can level that playing field a bit it's not enough to bank on as a roster building strategy, so execs are forced back to the top of the talent funnel(and back to the draft pool convo) to most reliably get a wave of talent needed to turn around the fortunes of a bad team for more than 12-18 months

[UMFan83]

lmao

 

 

Poor owners losing money with their billion dollar franchises.

[Andy]

It's hilarious and completely on brand for it to be a former Marlins executive, of all teams, to go WELL ACTUALLY on publicly reported info showing the opposite of what he claims

[cl smooth]

There’s a reason he was the first boot on Survivor: Cagayan.

[Cubswin11]

That braves statement is interesting. They have “development revenue” of 42 million and 72 million of depreciation and amortization. I wonder what our books look like with all the ventures they’ve taken up with the renovations and development around the stadium and the amount of debt they took on.

[Bertz]

I still think there’s no real fix to “tanking.” The Pirates and other teams are still going to run smaller payrolls, big market teams will have years where they hit the end of a life cycle and have down years but still spend, teams will spend a lot and try to win but things will go wrong and they end bottom 5 or whatever. Baseball is hard and there’s going to still be horsefeathers teams. The idea that every team will be “competitive” and between like 77-88 wins is untenable.

And even if it is a 162 game season becomes less fun to watch or follow if you know every team is going to be in it at the end and it isn’t worth watching until late august or September .

 

 

That being said I do like the idea of a draft pool lottery, whether it’s bottom 4 teams or all the teams that miss playoffs or wherever they land.

 

Yeah, I'm all for completive balance, but there's sometimes a missing the forest for the trees component of you overcorrect and negatively impact the entertainment value of the sport. Like the era we just exited/are exiting where a third of the league either winning or losing 100 games is bad. But you want a few teams on each side of those lines every year.

 

I like the players suggestions a lot. Significant recidivism penalties, as well as carrots for small market teams to actually try. I'd probably change the particulars if I was in charge, but broadly that's the way to go IMO.