Transmogrified Tiger

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.

Unclear if the draft pick comp would apply to the remaining offseason, but if so then consequential for these players: Correa, Story, Conforto, Castellanos, Taylor, and Freeman

I hadn't paid close attention to it, but Everton are gonna be playing with relegation fire pretty quick if they don't sort things out. After this loss to Newcastle they're gonna be 3 points over the line with a game in hand, and after this weekend they'll have already played their second match against Newcastle, Norwich, and Leeds. Not a lot of breathing room for Lampard and his new additions to get up to speed.

He isn't a FA and has limitations of his own, but I'd add Moustakas to this list, since he's likely to be as easy to acquire as a FA if they want to.

There are 33 1B with 500+ PA since the start of 2020. Rizzo is 21st in wOBA and 23rd in wRC+. Yes his defense helps a little, but when you add in age, injury, and lack of positional flexibility, I don't see a great reason to use scarce resources on him.

Zagadou just had an error(leading to an own goal) so bad that I’m still not sure what he was trying to do edit:

I haven't deeply investigated this(and some of it is unknowable), but there's a theory that if you make offsides more lenient, you actually suppress scoring because defenders respond by playing lower lines and take fewer chances. That might not be the worst thing in the world given the current trend towards 90 minutes of pressing, but it's one of those counterintuitive things where you do have to be mindful of how incentives change behavior. but that would open more space . . . I agree it could have unforeseen consequences but I actually don't think this would be that big of a change. except of course what constitutes whole body . . . As the theory goes you do have more space in the middle, but teams are just less adventurous. It wouldn't be this extreme but imagine a bunker v. a bunker, more space in the middle doesn't mean as much if you're attacking 7 v 9 instead of e.g. 2 v 3 with an opponent's high line. But we just don't know, and it'd take years for tactics to evolve, like it did when they stopped letting keepers pick up back passes.

MLBPA has been fairly specific that they aren't trying to peg a specific percentage of revenues. I'm not sure if they think that's a good concession(unlimited growth potential for owners), they don't trust MLB not to manipulate revenues in bad faith, they don't think the size of the pot is the problem compared to the inequality/competitive concerns, or some combination of those reasons.