Bertz

Do this please. Gut the old/expensive portion of the defense to build back the draft capital deficit. Go big on a WR and a LT to support Fields, and otherwise focus on efficiency and depth depth depth. You have this year to evaluate Fields, and assuming he looks good you're in great position to go all in next year.

The actual line from the article was: "There is still a month to go before the minor-league season starts, but there’s a chance we could see a pretty aggressive assignment for Crow-Armstrong." PCA had 24 AB as a pro. To skip a full-season level and jump him all the way to A+ would be VERY aggressive. To some degree, skipping short-season and going straight to Myrtle would still qualify as being relatively aggressive for a 24-AB pro. As a California kid, I wonder if they'd like to challenge him with some Midwest-league spring weather, just to experience it a little? Or if that's the last thing they'd want, for a post-injury guy, and where going up to the cold north and batting .135 for the first month could be kind of a confidence-killer? Those 24 ABs we're in full season ball though, and he looked great. I think Myrtle Beach has been the expectation. I definitely double taked when I saw the line, but the implication is certainly South Bend IMO.

Not now, NFL!

YOOOOOOOOOOO

There was a stray report a ~month back that this will happen, but I haven't seen it echoed. If it's true though, between this and deals where teams call players right at 7:01 (or whatever time) this weekend is gonna look like NFL free agency. Btw players are either voting or about to vote, and it sounds like this is gonna happen.

I'm on board with banning the shift, but it needs to be something clean/natural. If every player has "zones" or some horsefeathers I'm going to hate it. But 4 men on the dirt and/or two men on each side of second I think is a good sensible solution.

lol horsefeathering christ

Lots of great stuff here, but an implication that PCA might start out at South Bend is by far the most noteworthy.

It's tough, I want the players to do well but IMO they're going to lose money if they keep fighting. The owners and the players are currently $30M apart on the new bonus pool. Split the difference and that's another $15M per year. Times 5 years that's $75M. Do the same with the luxury tax. Not gonna bore everyone with the math, but let's split the player/owner differences for the LT by year, and assume 5 teams per year will increase their spending by exactly that amount. Basically the teams that either exceed the cap or come in just under it. That's $178M over the life of the CBA. So this is certainly a bit reductive, but ~$250M is the financial gap between the two deals right now. That's a lot of money! However, players are estimated to lose $20M per collective game lost. That's only 12-13 games. So if you're the players, and you break things off here, you better be damn sure at least one of these three things is true: - While a deal is not acceptable, you think an acceptable deal is coming before a dozen games are lost - You can not get the owners to move to not just just splitting the difference, but further - You can get back pay included in any future deal They've got much more info than us obviously, but man I'd be pessimistic on any of those possibilities. Or maybe the non-financial stuff is really that bad, though we've yet to hear anything to that effect. Edit:. Number above were for the previous player offer. They've now largely moves to the midpoints on the financial stuff already

A lot of cold water here. That said I'd be pretty surprised if this thing really gets blown up over non-financial items.

For purely selfish Cubs-centric reasons, an international draft was going to suck because we have one of the top guys, Fernando Cruz, in next year's class. So that's not a worry.

Obviously wring every last penny out of the owners you can, but kind of feels like the PA needs to settle tonight/tomorrow. Estimates are that the players lose ~$20M per game lost, and this is reasonably the last opportunity to get a full season in. Feels like holding out another two weeks and losing $200-$300M to get another couple percent on the CBT and the pre-arb pool would be cutting off their nose to spite their face. If there's some poison pill in the deal that obviously changes things (and wouldn't be a surprise), but we're now in that awkward zone where the deal is a little light but no longer worth losing games for.

$230 in year one is actually pretty solid. Progress a little more through the life of the deal, end up at $250-something, and I think a deal gets done. "Strings attached" looms large though.

It's not, but it probably nets out that way. If a brand can see incremental gains from advertising on the same content across different platforms, I imagine the content is seeing similar lift. Not certain, but likely. It comes down to the cost/benefit of inconveniencing your hardcore fans vs. trying to attract new fans and grow your audience. You don't want to go to far, and knowing MLB they probably will, but I don't think they have yet. There's 2430 MLB games a year right now (or at least there will be 4 out of every 5 years moving forward). ESPN has exclusivity on Sunday nights each week, Fox Sports has their two (I think?) on Saturdays, and Apple now two on Friday. That's 130 games, still leaving 2300, or 153 per team, with the local broadcasters. Let's say MLB makes another two Apple-like moves with Amazon and Peacock. That still leaves a 90/10 split between local broadcasts and national exclusives. That's going to annoy folks like us, but I doubt enough to lose us (and odds are we already own ~2/5 of the other platforms, so the inconvenience on some games would be very minor). I think that's a worthwhile cost to get games in front of people who are not yet willing to throw down $150 on MLB.tv and who don't have RSN access. If Apple was willing to have a non-exclusive deal like the old ESPN weekday broadcasts, and MLB upcharged for that exclusivity, that's a problem. But if Apple demanded exclusivity as part of any deal, and I think the way these sorts of things have gone lately that seems likelu, I think MLB made the right call. And as mentioned above I'd say probably ought to make another comparable move or two.

You'd be surprised. I know Apple TV is no Amazon Prime, but one of the brands I work for saw big gains from doing Thursday night Football on Amazon even though they already do some NFL on traditional TV on Sundays. I can't tell you how the Prime deal has helped the league itself, but I have a hard time imagining the NFL is unhappy considering they went from simulcasting with NFLN to giving Prime exclusive rights. Fragmentation is happening regardless. Travis Sawchik had a great series on the viability of the RSN model a month back: From part 1 of that series The future, probably not too long from now, is that MLB.tv is going to drop blackouts and most big fans are going to get their baseball that way. But you still need ways to reach less hardcore fans and especially new fans, and a great way to do that is to put some morsels of content on Amazon/Hulu/Apple/etc. The average household has 2-3 streaming services (as of a year or two back, it might be more like 3-4 now), so you want to diversify to make sure as many people have an opportunity to see as possible.

It's annoying for fans like us, but this is a good business decision IMO. The unique reach afforded by Apple TV is really important at a time where MLB is getting more and more niche. Frankly they need to copy the NFL's playbook and start throwing some games on Nickelodeon too.

Holy horsefeathers

This is what I'm curious about. My understanding was that to keep Aaron and Davante this year they basically needed to make nearly every other cut and restructure they could. Is that still the case, or did this just kick the can, and one hell of a can, down the road another year?

As Brett gets to here, and as we saw over the weekend with the four hardest line owners getting outed, it seems pretty clear that there's now some leaks coming from the ownership side. I'm curious if that's good news ("things are closer than they seem, let me nudge it a little further along"), or if this is REALLY bad ("things are horsefeathers on this side of the table, so I'm just gonna leak stuff to the media for spite"). All that said, the RSN Rebate issue is a pretty big deal, and likely the last major offramp for this conflict for quite some time. So it seems pretty clear this thing gets hammered out in the next 2-3 weeks or lasts at least 2-3 more months.