Transmogrified Tiger

It's also self-defeating, because if you hold someone back for the first weeks/month of the season their odds of winning ROY go down. Just to skim recent years: 2021: the ROY and 2nd place in both leagues were rostered the full season 2019: Alvarez didn't come up til June, and Soroka debuted on April 18th 2018: Acuna debuted April 25th, Soto May 20th 2017: Bellinger debuted April 25th, DeJong May 28th 2016: Fulmer debuted April 29th, Turner June 3rd, and Sanchez August 3rd 2015: Bryant debuted April 17th, Lindor June 14th, Correa June 8th So of the last 24 players who would've gotten the extra service year, 12 of them got it anyway(10 of the last 16!), and 5 more debuted so late that service time wasn't the primary(or secondary) reason.

Drafting a reasonably certain BOR starter that has the foundation to develop beyond that at 21 is good value. I think we haven't caught up our mental models to account for the player development revolution, especially as it relates to pitching. Historically the markers of a BOR starter involved hard limits(e.g. velocity) that you couldn't coach your way out of, so drafting someone with that outcome was an intentional decision to lower the potential upside. In a world where it's not unusual to add several MPH and/or develop a plus breaking pitch where there was barely an average one before, the risk/reward is closer to the toolsy high schooler or low control flamethrower than it used to be. This goes doubly so when an organization starts showing an ability to do this with some consistency, so it's not some hypothetical exercise. Doesn't mean we can't prefer the person who already has the stuff, but we should calibrate our enthusiasm and also reconsider what statistical thresholds are particularly good or worrisome.

Correct, though the expectation is that the men won't have any for 2026 as the host.

US Soccer's new media rights deal is going to Turner, though I think this is basically friendlies for both USMNT and USWNT and things like SheBelieves Cup. Fox still has the Gold Cup and the World Cups in 2022, 2023, and 2026, and CBS still has Nations League.

This is the thought that's been circling my head since his Leipzig experience. Blitzing teams with a high press/chaos soccer and little else doesn't really work in MLS anymore with the growth in spending, and winning the Austrian Bundesliga with Salzburg but not doing anything noteworthy in Champions/Europa league is a replacement level outcome for that job. He finds that extra tactical gear with Leeds, because he's gonna be at a talent deficit in the league in way more games than he has been for a long time. He seems like a thoughtful and smart guy so I'm guessing he's going to learn from his mistakes so I'm optimistic.

Seeing it spelled out like you did(big thanks for that) makes me feel a bit better about this for the players. Yes the CBT is barely keeping pace with inflation and not with revenue growth, but ultimately that's a lever that impacts only a few teams and mostly in how they spend on free agents, which is not a population I care about getting maximum gains from. If they can get as high as possible on the minimum salary, stacked with the pre-arb bonus pools, (very mild) service time manipulation protections, and option limits, I think that's a decent outcome under the circumstances(owners negotiating in such bad faith they resemble cartoon villains) in terms of getting younger players paid. In terms of helping the game itself and the competitive landscape, I don't really see anything that is going to change the tide. Maybe the many small changes add up to something I can't see, but I'm not seeing anything materially changing the incentives when it comes to roster building. This is largely the owners doing(treating super two expansion as a third rail is again, bad faith garbage that precludes meaningful reform), but on the whole that part is a miss.

I'm curious what the likelihood is that they'd keep Marsch for the Championship if they do get relegated. Right now they're a couple points clear but functionally tied for a relegation spot when considering Burnley's PPG and games in hand. The only other team between them is Everton, and Everton have a lot more control over their finish given their talent than Leeds or Burnley. If Marsch stops the bleeding and looks like he's building to something coherent, do they let him keep the job post-relegation? If that's a reasonable option then I don't think there's a ton of risk, the only real downside would be sabotaging his reputation if he fails hard, and there's never going to be a great fit for a fired coach without a ton of European bona fides to find a notch between Salzburg and Leipzig to rebound with anyway.

Is TAA the worst defender in the premier league? Defense is never going to be his strong suit, but I think a fair amount of his shortcomings are tactical decisions. In general Liverpool play with an incredibly high line which is going to put him in space/isolated against attackers a fair amount(a situation very few consistently succeed in). After Chelsea made the Lukaku and Werner subs, Liverpool dropped their lines a bit and even with fresh legs running at TAA, there was far less danger created. The other part is that with the ball, TAA gets used like a central midfielder, so when the ball does turn over he's more regularly going to have to burn energy to get into position to defend wide or be in suboptimal position to prevent attacks. The heatmap for him v. Azpilicueta/James is a good representation, especially considering Chelsea was in a back 3 so the comparison is to a wingback.

RE2IGN

Acosta is definitely going to play at the Azteca given what we can reasonably expect in terms of possession. The other 2 games though, LDLT impressed enough that I think he's gonna be heavily considered for those games where we'll have lots of the ball. And as much as some might hate it, those 2 games are a solid fit for Lletget too, especially if he starts the MLS season hot(he had a goal on a nice finish last night).

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

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.

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.

welp

horsefeathers i had to read that three times before i calmed down Real “we’re having a fire….sale” vibes

I very clearly don't understand this well, but I'm thinking that this would only increase the opportunity for service time manipulation by the owners? Probably the opposite. Right now there is some possible manipulation of potential Super Twos, it's not as common as what happens to rookies but it can happen when you only need to keep a player from getting very close to (but not over) 3 years of service time. In this scenario it's flipped, instead of there being very few Super Twos there's a lot more, which means in order to keep these players out of arbitration you need to keep them over 2 years of service time but not much over 2 years, which is a lot harder to do. It's the difference in needing to keep someone off the 25 man roster for a ~2 months over 3 years to needing to keep them off for ~5 months over 3 years.

gonna stop you right there pal

Didn't the Court of Arbitration for Sport require that the IOC let her compete? I haven't followed this closely but my understanding was the IOC wanted her out, and the lack of medal ceremony is their symbolic objection to the ruling.

We’ve gone over this before, but it’s not a hugely consequential thing in either direction. Bullpen and lineup management without a DH is small but real, and Pitchers take like 4% of PA in the NL game.

I have a hard time seeing the Hosmer thing work out for a handful of reasons. What might be more likely is especially if they miss on Correa, trying to get something like Kim and Paddack for lesser prospects. The Padres get their flexibility, keep their best prospects, and save face while only dealing from the fringe of the roster, the Cubs get a true defensive SS and a good SP gamble while still having money to drop on e.g. Conforto.

There's something that feels incomplete about Minor League ERA being the Y axis. Not in a deceptive/misleading way, in thinking about it a minute I don't know if there's a better single metric to use, but without any other context it's not a full picture. Maybe something about command or even control, or somehow accounting for prospect v. non-prospect innings(sure your 25 year old A+ SP might have better odds if he throws 95 w/ a 90 mph slider, but to what end is that representative of a system). I dunno, maybe I'm overthinking it.

Also of note, Canada has climbed up to 33rd, and if my napkin mathing is accurate, right now they should stay in front of at least 6 other qualifying teams barring final window catastrophe. That means to make it to Pot 3 they'd need 2 of these to happen (roughly sorted by likelihood): - AFC playoff team(currently Australia or UAE) to beat the CONMEBOL playoff team(currently Peru) - Ghana beat Nigeria in their CAF playoff - Congo beat Morocco in their CAF playoff - Scotland win their playoff but not leapfrog Canada on points(currently 40th) - Russia win their playoff but not leapfrog Canada(currently 35th) - Turkey or North Macedonia win their playoff but not leapfrog Canada(currently 39th and 67th) If Canada does get those breaks, it not only helps them avoid a group of death, but also keeps another Pot 4 team available for the US(and Mexico) while cutting out a potential Pot 3 match.

Not as well versed on pot draws for the WC, does the US have the same chance of getting any of the pot 1 teams? Basically asking the US odds of being in a group with Qatar. I don't know, I did a little searching and found very little about the draw itself, I had to lean on wikipedia to see that 2018 changed to doing pure FIFA ranking pots instead of geographic pots 2-4, so even that is assuming it stays the same. Since Qatar isn't in a confederation with any other Pot 2 teams(unless Iran has a lot of things go right) I think the odds are equal, but I'm not sure how much they change the draw to prevent downstream issues with other confederations(e.g. 3 UEFA teams in a group).

New FIFA rankings out today: https://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men?dateId=id13554 US swaps places with Mexico, dropping to 13th. With the caveat that I'm not super well versed in how sensitive the rankings are, getting into Pot 1 is functionally if not statistically impossible at this stage, but thanks to Italy and Portugal being drawn in the same UEFA playoff path, they only need to stay in the Top 16 to be in Pot 2. The extra good news is they have a healthy lead on that front, they're as close to 8th as they are to 17th. Plus, all the immediate teams ready to jump into the Top 16 are in danger of not even qualifying: 14 - Switzerland - qualified, no more competitive games before draw, a qualified US shouldn't drop below them 15 - Croatia - qualified, no more competitive games before draw, a qualified US shouldn't drop below them 16 - Uruguay - in 4th of 4 auto-qualifier spots w/ 2 match days left -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 17 - Sweden - playoff w/ Russia/Poland/Czech 18 - Senegal - playoff w/ Egypt 19 - Columbia - 4 points out of inter-confederation playoff(5 points from auto-qualifying) w/ 2 match days left 20 - Wales - playoff w/ Scotland/Ukraine/Austria 21 - Iran - qualified w/ 2 match days left, further from the US on points than the US is to pot 1 tl;dr if the US plays well enough to qualify, they'll almost certainly be in Pot 2. Bummer because there was a small window to make it to Pot 1, but nice that it goes a long way to avoiding a group of death.