Transmogrified Tiger

I don't think the nature of the sport has much to do with it coming back or doing so successfully. All of the stated plans involve such constant testing that you have a much lower surface area for exposure while practicing/playing, and most sports do not or barely meet the criteria to be risky for transmission.

This is at least half playing devil's advocate, but I think you can make the argument that you should order based on record, but reverse the order for non-playoff teams(best non-playoff team drafts #1, worst record drafts 18th). The thinking being: - Both the current draft and IFA are investments in long term success, a team's outlook for at least the next 2 years has very little to do with their draft pick except in rare circumstances. The team with the worst record in year 1 has a similar ability to improve in year 2 whether they draft 1st or 15th(heck the draft isn't until after the ensuing offseason happens anyway) - In a world with draft pools(which I'll assume as a practical exercise are here to stay) draft position carries extra meaning because it's not just the difference between drafting 4th and 2nd, it's the difference in the money that can get spread across many players. If you have draft pools, you need to change the incentive to maximize them. By flipping the record order, you force people to make their MLB teams better and more watchable in the short term if they also want to have the maximum chance to make the team better in the long term. Crucially, this is not an either/or financial proposition because higher draft pools are a drop in the bucket financially. - This has the knock on effect of making MLB free agency more competitive. Teams right now can spend nothing on the MLB team, cycle through cheap roster flotsam to try to unearth an asset or two(think Valbuena and Coghlan from the Cubs rebuild), but remain bad enough to maximize their prospect spending to get a wave of prospects worth supplementing with free agents or high contract trades. If teams are incentivized to make their short term fortunes better in order to maximize their long term futures, then prices rise for that FA lower/middle class that has recently taken a big hit. - The MLB draft and IFA are still lotteries in their own right so even a team doing their best and still failing miserably can still draft/sign smartly and improve their fortunes. Plenty of valuable and even star players come outside the Top 5 so you aren't resigning a bad team to an indefinite fate of being terrible. Plus they can always just go into Dombrowski mode and use any prospects as currency until they're able to get out of the hole somewhat.

yes, there has to be some significant reward for finishing first. 16 does not suggest byes though. 8 divisions of 4 would lend itself to them pretty easily. With everyone under the DH and smaller divisions you could realign more optimally for geography too.

If you go to 32 teams and make 2nd place teams earn their way in the way it works now(one game playoff), then the format is still fairly similar. That also opens up some interesting possibilities of making the season shorter and making scheduling more equitable. For 2021 it'd be a real bummer, though I imagine they're already hedging hard against a potential shorter season/delayed start again.

Since they've own MLBAM and have already pinned down the players on salaries a great deal, it would be the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to buy goodwill by making MLB.tv free, though they would need to keep blackout restrictions since they can't upset the TV gravy train. Considering the owners steadfast objection to doing the easiest and most obvious thing in most situations, I'm not optimistic.

...not that I'm disagreeing with your overall point, but isn't a shortened, disrupted season exactly the type of season a 32+ SP should thrive in? Maybe, sometimes 32+ SP go downhill because they run out of steam during the year. Sometimes it's that they just aren't as good regardless. They also have the biggest hill to climb to peak fitness/performance level(which hurts them here) so I'm guessing there isn't a big swing either way.

Time for Justin Stone to earn that paycheck Wouldn’t no stride theoretically help with pitch recognition since your eye level is less likely to be changing? Not sure I understand that part.

ZiPS has the Rangers with 4 players/positions with 2+ fWAR, and 3 of those are SP at age 32+. I know a short season increases randomness but I don't see it with them, especially since they aren't in a 2019 AL Central situation in terms of the division.

I don't have the willpower to look up every name, but that strikes me as mostly guys who are either just added on MiLB FA deals, or fringe/non-prospects who have been with the org for 4+ years. EDIT: This is probably a better distillation [tweet] [/tweet]

I think absurdly expanded rosters are part of the deal and why they think they can pull that off.

[tweet] [/tweet]

the 1927 Yankees didn’t win a single game in the ALCS so how good were they anyway

Why in the world would the players association get stuck on, of all things, community dressing rooms and showers. It sounds engineered to be the dumbest hangup they could possibly choose.

Everyone please take this occasion to remember to be grown ups.

I've mentioned this before, but if you love stories like that, you should definitely read Crazy '08. It's full of that stuff plus as we all know that season has a happy ending.

That home run is so burned into my brain I knew immediately that they incorrectly said it was hit to RF instead of LF

That would be....very advantageous for the Cubs. Just to use ZiPS as a neutral point of comparison, they go from being the 6th best team in the NL and 3 of those teams being 5+ wins better, to 5th in the Cactus League and 1 team being 4+ wins better.

May is almost certainly too aggressive, if for no other reason than you need to have a reduced ramp up spring training, but I don't think it's that unreasonable an idea. You eliminate the risk of travel, and while yes there are non-players that would need to work to support this, we're almost as close to June as we are to Valentine's Day, and by that point on the current trajectory it doesn't appear to be a hyper-dangerous proposition. Certainly possible that circumstances change, but they need to start planning now for whatever the season could look like.

I follow a handful of their writers on Twitter already so some interesting articles come through passively. You can also turn any section into an RSS feed, which works for my habits: https://theathletic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000294867-Do-you-have-an-RSS-feed-

Looks like Passan is saying he had it last week.

the only breakdown of the Farnsworth fight I recognize includes the phrase "racky-tacks him"

Injuries? Probably, that's likely the tradeoff for having something resembling a fulfilling season given the circumstances Lesser performance? It would affect everyone equally so even if hitters are less sharp and pitchers lose some velo, I don't think most would really notice. It's not going to be like the difference between the NBA and high school or even college basketball if that does show up. More variance? Sounds awesome for what is already going to be an asterisk of a season anyway.

As a nominal Schalke fan I'd love to see Steffen there, especially since as a GK their inconsistent attack wouldn't stunt his development.

There are things to worry about with Kimbrel(someone on twitter made the point that he really needs elite velocity since his fastball is so straight), but we're still talking spring training. He had 5+ ST ERAs in both 2013 and 2017 and in those years he had a cumulative 1.30 ERA

If you told me the Cubs were talking about Limet and Campusano I would've said 'that's a little less than I'd hope to get for Contreras'. Would have been unimaginably dumb for Bryant.