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Sure, but that's not what that quote is saying. It's saying it's bad for the team to not have an opt out, that they should want an opt out. right, and that is a different thing from "this is good for the team because he is definitely going to opt out." Sure, but the sentiment is that it is good for the team because the player will hopefully opt out. The distinction doesn't change the overall point, that many times when opt outs are discussed people think they are good for the club even if it doesn't change the money in the contract, but only because they don't want to pay the second half of the contract.

That's not true, this was literally posted yesterday after the Harper news came out: That's far from the first time where an opt out by itself has been considered a good thing from the team's side. saying "hey an opt out might work out for the team" is not the same as "this is good for the team because he is definitely going to opt out." Sure, but that's not what that quote is saying. It's saying it's bad for the team to not have an opt out, that they should want an opt out.

Nah, I get that part. That’s still not how most people describe them. They don’t say “it sucks to give an opt-out but it saves us $60m in guaranteed money.” They say “this is actually good for us because we don’t want his decline years and he is definitely going to opt out.” no one describes them either of those two ways That's not true, this was literally posted yesterday after the Harper news came out: That's far from the first time where an opt out by itself has been considered a good thing from the team's side.

I've seen this comparison a lot, and feel the need to point out that Harper is 6 years younger than Pujols was at the time of their contracts. That's not the comparison I was using. I used Pujols's numbers from age 26 to last year his age 38 season, essentially the 13 years that Bryce just signed for. So the last 6 years with the Cardinals (mostly amazing) and the 7 years with the Angels (mostly disappointing).

Me too, especially as that will be post-strike and with a new CBA. But it's undeniably a gamble - both on his own performance in the interim and the players' resolve holding. Harper would have been a FA at 30 - seems very probable to me he'd be able to get at least a $150 million deal then, and for less than 9 years too. I'm sure he hated this whole disgusting free agency process, with the sham the owners have turned it into, and you can't knock a guy for taking 330 million dollars. But this ended up being a very team-friendly deal. This is the thing that people who are bitching about this deal don’t seem to understand. The total dollars is a big number no doubt, but the guy literally has to average 3.2 WAR over the life of the deal to make it worth it. I’m baffled by fans freaking out over it. I wouldn't be upset by the deal, but anytime you stretch out a deal that long even hitting that low WAR number is a risk. Pujols for example over his last 13 years has averaged 3.88 WAR per year. And those 13 years include 2 MVP years out of him, 2 2nd place finishes, and 2 other top 10 MVP years. Bryce isn't guaranteed to fall off like Pujols did, but he hasn't shown himself to be anywhere close to the player Pujols was either. There are certainly a decent range of outcomes where we look in 13 years and find out he didn't reach that number. And there are scenarios where he doesn't come particularly close. It's still a pretty solid deal, but it isn't a slam dunk or an amazing one.

Thanks! I don't get to follow the team as closely as I used to. I still am around a decent amount, but don't feel like my opinions are informed enough at this point to be of any value. That's the hard thing about baseball, it's hard to have a middle ground between casual fan overreacting to the last thing they saw and super informed fan who can critique each decision because they know all the variables that go behind it.

Speaking of random memories, I'm looking for a video of a play that probably happened around 1990. I believe Dawson (but maybe somebody else) was attempting to throw a runner out at home. The catcher blocked the plate, and when he tagged the runner he dropped the ball. The runner never touched home plate, and I believe the runner started arguing with the umpire because he wouldn't call him safe. I think someone on the Cubs figured it out eventually, got the ball and tagged him out eventually. It was one of my favorite plays as a little kid because of how long it took and how absurd it was, but all the details are really fuzzy now. Does anybody remember this play? I don't have enough details in my brain to search for it now, and that's even if the video is up anywhere.

I absolutely can compare those calls. You’re comparing a missed strike two in an AB where a dude grounded out and a missed play at the plate in the bottom of the 9th. The missed facemask call on Goff probably cost the Rams from scoring a TD and taking the lead with 5 minutes left. That's a pretty massive play. But yes, I would agree it both wasn't as valuable and as egregious as the missed call at the end.

Assuming every play took about 5 seconds, it would have left the Rams 58 seconds left. Personally, I'd rather try to end the game right there than give a great offense that time to drive 35 yards for a game tying field goal try, but it's certainly close.

Eh, the Pacers and Jordan were never really on the same timeline. The Pacers were just a mediocre team during Jordan's first three peat. They made a surprise Eastern Conference Finals run the year that Jordan retired. They made the Eastern Conference Finals again and would have faced the Bulls if Orlando hadn't beaten them. And then the next two years when the Bulls had their historic teams, the Pacers had a Reggie Miller eye injury that torpedoed one season in the first round, and then injuries/mutiny around Larry Brown had them miss the playoffs the next year. The only time they played the Bulls was the closest the Bulls came to getting knocked out during Jordan's title years. The Pacers had the lead in the 4th quarter of game 7, but they couldn't hold it as the Bulls simply outworked them (outrebounded them by 16) down the stretch. Jordan couldn't hit a shot in that game but did everything else. Then after the Bulls left the scene the Pacers made two more Eastern Conference Finals and one NBA Finals before leaving the scene themselves. Although when I looked up details of this game to reminisce, I had to laugh at this call. It had no impact on the game whatsoever but was still hilarious :) https://gfycat.com/PlushNauticalIrishdraughthorse

I think I heard that most of the 11 threes he’s taken this year have been end of the quarter half court heaves. He’s not even taking many end of the shot clock threes. Yeah he hasn't taken many but still so odd that a PG literally hasn't made one, you'd think the situation would find him on a clock running down situation or just a ball being rotated back or kicked out to him that he'd be wide open to take one and one would fall. Yeah, it is odd. I just watched all his 3's attempted this year. Only 3 of them have been in the frontcourt. Two of those were end of quarter on the dead run, and the other one was where the ball got knocked back into the backcourt and was recovered there with 4 seconds left on the shot clock and Simmons had to just advance it as far as he could and then launch at the shotclock buzzer. He really hasn't taken a traditional 3 point attempt all season.

They might as well start with one out and the bases loaded. I have to imagine almost every inning would begin with IBB, sac bunt, IBB. I doubt that would be the strategy, at least for the top of the inning. If you know you are going to get your own runner on second base, why increase the other teams run expectancy? Now if the visiting team doesn't score, I could see that potentially playing out in the bottom of the inning, depending on what area of the batting order the team was in.

Mound visits are the opposite of exciting. Multiple mound visits in the same inning is really really really the opposite of exciting. And they kept huddling after every play in the Super Bowl. Sorry for jumping in late here. To keep that analogy going though, huddling is equivalent to the time between pitches in baseball. It's slightly longer (27.7 seconds between football plays on average compared to 23.8 seconds between pitches) but it's fairly close. Mound visits are more like timeouts, and football already limits those. That of course is partly because of the strategy of the game and the amount of time on the clock, but there's a reason a sport like the NBA is starting to restrict timeouts. The more flow you can get into the game, the better. I personally really enjoy the chances to try to increase the pace of play, but that is partially just being in the Eastern Time Zone talking. It's much harder seeing delays when you know you should be in bed already.

The NFL passing yards leader for that season is now 0-6 in Super Bowls. For all the great QB's who have won passing yards titles and Super Bowls, it's shocking that it's never come in the same year.

I think the big difference with the Dez play is that Dez's steps were not controlled. By the time Dez's second foot comes down from jumping, he's clearly falling. Ertz was running for 3 steps before getting hit and diving. I do hope that part of the rule is changed though. The ground causing an incompletion should only happen in balls where the player catches it while airborne and immediately goes to the ground.

Teams are in the business of selling hope. That used to be accomplished in flashy free agent signings. Go sign a player or two, get the fans excited, and if you need to sell off in July, rinse and repeat. Fans are getting too smart for that strategy. And teams can sell hope in other ways now, because minor league information is much easier to get than it used to be. So it totally makes sense for teams to tank and sell hope that way. Plus, and some may disagree, but I think fans care even more now about wanting their team in the hunt for a title. Mediocre teams that rarely if ever make the playoffs will breed discontentment among the fanbase much faster than it used to. So teams changing their strategies to maximize their chances of being in the upper echelon makes sense. If MLB does too much to get rid of tanking, then there will just be teams who are utterly hopeless, and that's a bad place for the sport to be in because that's when you start bleeding off fans.

I'm a bit nervous about this as standalone networks sometimes have trouble with getting distribution. And being here in Indy, where today we get the vast majority of games, it wouldn't be a great deal if the Cubs got more revenue to play with, but I suddenly fell into the blackout zone (in market without any access to games). The changing TV landscape may make those rules obsolete after awhile, but we will see.

I'm pretty sure this is the third time this season that a team has taken a knee. The Chiefs did it against the Redskins, and then the Eagles did it against the Raiders. It's definitely becoming more common for teams to do that.

For me it tends to be more thrilling when people are playing directly against each other rather than against a clock. Summer has a stronger list of team sports, and the individual sports have many where the races are directly against each other (swimming, track and field being prominent among those). Winter has speed skating which is lots of fun and of course hockey as a team sport, but other than that their events are mostly not like that where the finals are suddenly determined in 5 minutes. I agree the sports are more interesting in winter, but without the adrenaline rush it just doesn't rate as highly in my book.

I personally think they can chip away at some of the edges of the rule and make it a whole lot better. People are pretty much ok with a player needing to establish themselves as a runner and have the ball for enough time before it's considered a catch. The outrage seems to be mostly focused on the part about going to the ground. That was the case for the Calvin Johnson play, the Dez Bryant one, and now the Jesse James play. So I would change the rule to this. If a player has gotten two feet down with the ball, then he just needs to control the ball to the point of being down on the ground, whether that's an elbow, knee or whatever. Contact with the ground causing the ball to come loose would not affect the ruling of a catch. If a player is diving for a ball and does not get two feet down, then he must maintain it through the ground like it is now. Even the James play where his knee hits first he still gets two feet down and then the elbow which causes the ball to move.

While this would simplify the rule, you're going to have about five extra fumbles a game this way, and most of them are not plays where anybody has defined them as a catch for a long time. And even with that huge tradeoff, you're still going to have arguments about if the player truly had the ball securely for .2 seconds before the defender hits them in the back and knocks it out.

I also think group 2 is much bigger than he realizes, but that's part of the point. That's the group that was going to complain about any form of protest. They were going to find it ridiculous and unnecessary. But they weren't going to be as deeply offended as many of them are now (that's not me, and I actually have a vested interest in the protests succeeding, but many around me feel this way). They could have been convinced eventually that there was a problem with police brutality, even if they don't now. But they are never going to change on the National Anthem issue because it's so deeply ingrained. So to take an issue they disagree with but eventually could change about and tack on another issue that they are never going to change on is a big struggle. I think you see it even in some of the NFL players themselves. For example, here's a player (Kevin King of the Packers) who decided to kneel the one time: And here's Adrian Clayborn of the Falcons: So here you have two players who definitely support the protests and are willing to say it publicly, but even they are reluctant to kneel or don't want to because they know what that says to so many people. I'd have to dig them up, but I know I've heard quotes from several other NFL players the same thing: they want to protest and they support the protesters, but the Anthem is a line they don't personally want to cross. http://www.espn.com/nfl/player/_/id/13965/adrian-clayborn

Contreras was a big contributor to this issue this year. I am all in favor of doing anything that speeds up the pace of play. If games go super long, I want it to be because exciting things are happening on the field. Things like Nationals-Cubs game 4 where 5 runs were scored and 9 pitchers combined were used going almost 4 hours is hard.

Those power rankings line up pretty well with where Vegas has set the early odds, where the Cubs are tied for the 6th best chance of winning.

Can he not sign a 1-year deal with a guaranteed non-tender which would make him a free agent his 2nd year? The Olney article says that MLB is already viewing that as an obvious way to get around the rules and would punish the team accordingly. I think the reason for that is because he'll be signing a minor league contract this fall, and then when he makes the team it will move over to a minimum major league contract. So Otani can't insist on an opt out after year 1 with that sort of arrangement. Otani has no leverage, so if the team decides to non-tender him instead of paying him the minimum salary MLB is going to step in and say there had to be a prior agreement to do that.