What is the end game?

[ewen21]

 

I guess I don't get your anger. Sports is a billion dollar industry. It's not a game. It's very hard work. I'd rather that the players get paid more and owners get paid less. That's basically the only two options. Ticket prices aren't going down. Fans aren't going to get a discount. The game is incredibly popular now and that's because the players, not the owners, have made it so. Why on earth anyone would root for the owners to make more money is beyond me.

You are mischaracterizing my statements if this is what you believe.

 

I have never once said I want the owners to earn more.  I could care less about them.  I think what they are doing now is completely justified.  The unscrupulousness of owners isn't a matter I care to discuss.  I don't view them, study them, care much about them.  What I do care about is the player.  They get more than enough and the fans pay for it.  At some point there needs to be a correction.

 

And it isn't entirely true to say the game is popular because of the players.  Baseball is a great game and it became more popular because of a number of different factors beyond what goes down on the field.  This would include the Internet, Fantasy sports, gambling, an improved fan experience, MLB.TV and on and on.  Baseball player has benefitted enormously from these things.  They get paid a ridiculous amount of money, are given pensions and many of them get money from other side interests.  

 

Not where you detect anger from me. Maybe you don't like my opinion and saying I am "angry" marginalizes me in some way.  Not sure I get that.  Just discussing a viewpoint that is a little different from the prevailing viewpoint here.  Not that big a deal

 

[jkcarew]

It makes no sense to me (anymore) to pull for one side or the other.  The owners lost the reserve clause years ago, and the players are very well represented.  So, I pull for signed agreements that are legal and binding...and hope that the game itself is in a healthy enough spot for the agreement to be sustainable.

[ewen21]

 

It makes no sense to me (anymore) to pull for one side or the other.  The owners lost the reserve clause years ago, and the players are very well represented.  So, I pull for signed agreements that are legal and binding...and hope that the game itself is in a healthy enough spot for the agreement to be sustainable.

Agreed.  This is the only circumstance I would pull for the owners that I can recall.  The last strike I saw so much of Donald Fehr it just made me totally ambivalent to the game and the process.

 

There seems to be an almost cite-wide defense of the players here and that is what I am quizzical about.  To me, there is no justifying the player salaries.  The players union is unlike any other in the world. Why are they so entitled?

 

 

[Monkeypaws]

End game?

 

Alienation of major league baseball fans looks like a real option. 

 

I can watch H.S. ball, college ball, town ball, make a short road trip to minor league ball, even watch some little league if I want.

 

Love me some Target Field, but I can go to the other end of the light rail and watch the Saints for a fraction of the price, get much better seats for much less money, better selection of cheaper brew, etc.

 

Depends whether you are a baseball fan or a MLB fan only.

 

The greed vs. entitlement battle has no appeal to me.

[prouster]

How much are these guys worth. Plan and simple.

 

Enough to break the bank? Any approach "franchise player" status?

 

Yes, the flipside always is that money saved go into the pockets of owners. That teams should spend 55% or so of their revenue on players -- be THAT player is good or not.

 

At some point, it does have to end...or stabalize even more. We saw an increase in the $$$ for middle relief that is hard to comprehend in the grand scheme of things. Next thing you know, multi-year $7-10 million contracts for bench players.

 

How much are players wrth?

 

Yet are owners banking the money, or putting it into their own pet projects or billfolds.

 

In the end, the fans end up paying more for everything and, just maybe, not getting the best possible product.

Labor has no intrinsic value. A baseball player's worth is the culmination of various factors artificially imposed on their work. In our culture, we tend to treat these artificially imposed factors as natural. That is, we believe that the Market operates independently of human will, which is simply untrue.

 

It's tempting to say that valuation is a function of supply and demand, but I suspect it's actually a function of power. Right now, the owners have power to set the market, and the players want that power. This is the reason behind every labor dispute in modern history. Who sets the terms of work?

 

That said, player salaries have nothing to do with ticket prices, cable sunbscriptions, streaming sunbscriptions, merchandise and memorabilia prices--i.e. the costs we pay to be fans. Those prices are determined by teams and the league when considering what people will pay compared to the alternatives. Are they more likely to spend $50 for a ballgame or $18 for a movie? $200 for a jersey or some other toy?

 

My point: pay the players more, because their labor supplies the owners with virtually every cent of revenue.

[South Dakota Tom]

  One of the things I love most about baseball is its correlation to life:  some days you win, some days you lose, you try another day with maximum effort and hope.    I do not want to see a hard cap on salaries, and most folks agree with that.   I love the fact that smaller market teams beat bigger market teams and nothing in the world is more fun as a fan than to watch somebody (anybody) beat the Yankees.    That is life.    It is also life that plenty of people are more talented, richer, prettier, and smarter than I am, but I will continue to try, as I've been on sports teams that were less pretty, smart, and talented, but still managed to win (and somehow those victories are more precious than the expected results).

   But there is a logical way to avoid the tanking and revenue-sharing and luxury tax avoiding, and it is simply by requiring a floor in salaries.   A team doesn't have to exceed that floor, but they must spend at least X% of their revenues on major league player salaries.    That way, we all win.    When MLB revenues increase, so do player salaries.    A team is required to spend proportionate to their income, including shared revenues.    That boosts the speculative contracts on controllable younger players; that increases the primary and secondary market for free agents (and I think both need some tweaking as well, especially as it relates to the onset of free agency, as younger players are becoming more valued in the current analytic environment).    So instead of a pre-arb 1, 2, 3 and 3 years of arbitration, we'd have a pre-arb 1 and 2 and an arbitration 1 and 2 but we wouldn't start counting the years until a player had been signed or reached 18, whichever occurred later (to avoid the situation where a "not ready for prime time" player has to be added to the 40-man).  Or, 1,2,3 for high school grads and 1,2 for college drafted players, to encourage education and an alternative to pro baseball....

    There is a way to share revenues, avoid a hard salary cap, start free agency sooner, and reward players who bring revenue to the sport.    It takes some negotiation, but wouldn't this off-season be more fun if we knew, for a fact, that teams 1-17 still needed to spend a certain number of dollars in order to avoid forfeiting that revenue-sharing?    I hate tanking in sports, even while I acknowledge the intelligence of it when the facts support that decision.

 

[Mr. Brooks]

Athletes, baseball players in particular, have had pay increases that have gone through the troposphere. This is not some boom industry that produces something for the benefit of humankind. This is entertainment. The owners are giving the players some necessary pushback. For anyone who wants to counter with, "but the owners....." save it. I have no interest in defending them. Fact is, this insanity has to stop. If it did not then by 2025 we'd have players making 100,000,000 a year. The only thing moving that fast is the National Debt. These contracts are getting more and more ridiculous. Lorenzo Cain is a nice player, but going into his 32 year old season he is given 75 million in guaranteed money. Absolute insanity if you ask me.

 

Again. Baseball is entertainment. These men play a child's game. We all love it, but the players are getting to be so cushioned from reality it is hard to take. Watching baseball for me has been a passion for almost 40 years. One might say an addiction. If these players begin to counter with some kind of sit-out thing I don't know if I can stand it. I walked away for several years after the last strike and hockey was my #1 sport.

 

These players need to read the fan base. It costs so much more to attend a ballgame now and as Laloesch pointed out, cable companies continue to raise rates largely because these sports franchises play with Monopoly money and the players are more than just complicit in this. I would love to see a hard salary cap in baseball. I would love to see owners be able to take back money for the team from underperforming players. As it is, the system is set up where players have been able to hold up the owners with ridiculous guaranteed contracts that almost always contain several years where the team takes it on the chin at the end,

 

This is going to be like the housing market, I hope. I want to see the players eat some humble pie

Paying the players less won't result in lower ticket prices or cable bills though. Those things are determined by supply and demand, the players pool of that money is then determined by their ability to collectively bargain and/ot negotiate in FA for their cut.

[ashbury]

It's cool that you disagree; you are entitled to that as I am entitled to my opinion, but to not add anything to the conversation seems odd.

OK, here goes.

• I just think these players want too much money I don't. At least, not phrased anything close to that way.
• when they aren’t worth it. It's how the salary system works, with many years of absolute team control.
• Every player available has question marks attached to them. True of essentially any free agent any year, thus meaningless.
• I think owners and gms have seen too many long high dollar contracts not work out and thus don’t want to have another bad contract or players into their late thirties on their teams. This might be our one point of agreement, to base a discussion on. Teams appear to be coalescing around a common form of forecasting.
• There is no collusion, It's way too early to make a firm statement either way
• simply the players aren’t that good anymore Players in general have never been better
• and the agents, specifically Scott Boras, think they’re players are fantastic Agents work under the direction of the individual players and will be fired if they don't deliver.
• and should be compensated for past performances. Forecasts are based on past performances, with tweaks for downward progression of course, and again the CBA agreed to by both sides has limited the market to specific players
• How many big time free agents have the Astros signed? How many have the Indians signed? It just doesn’t work to build through aging players. Straw man argument, since no one is saying to build that way.
• I for one am glad the owners are taking a stand. I don't see a sudden principled stand, I see a convergence of methodology.
• In reality, these players all make too much money for what they do. Now we really part company. The revenue in this industry is there regardless of how it is divvied up. There are 3 choices for who gets what share of that money: ticket scalpers, owners, and players. For the players to be worth less than they currently are, as partners in an enterprise worth billions, pro sports would have to change dramatically.
• Stop being greedy and you will get a contract. Players operate by self-interest, teams operate by self-interest. You could just as well accuse the teams of being greedy by not ponying up. I don't think either position is accurate.
• Pretty simple.Anything but.

I'm not especially interested in a big back-and-forth, particularly as it represents about six further tangents away from the thread topic, but you felt I was ducking you so there you have it. But I'm not sure this lengthy version is any real improvement in conversation going forward, over the short version I posted first. It's not my preference to seem like I'm tearing into someone so unrelentingly.

[Jham]

Agreed. This is the only circumstance I would pull for the owners that I can recall. The last strike I saw so much of Donald Fehr it just made me totally ambivalent to the game and the process.

 

There seems to be an almost cite-wide defense of the players here and that is what I am quizzical about. To me, there is no justifying the player salaries. The players union is unlike any other in the world. Why are they so entitled?

Consider the following possibilities based on your observation vis a vis labor sentiment on the site. 1) you, who have bemoaned the current state of affairs but haven't made a single suggestion as how to improve things for anyone but the cost sensitive fan, could be right and everyone wrong.

 

2) everyone else might be on to a little something that you're failing to grasp.

 

Fixing player salaries is basically socialism. Fixing ticket prices and concessions is socialism. There may be times where human nature (greed) exceeds the balance of free market enterprise, but this hardly seems like that time. Not to say we don't need to be careful, but costs aren't out of control, imo.

 

People need to stop referring to baseball as a kids game. Until I see a runner replaced by a ghost runner at third, I'll go ahead and say the game we played in the back yard is slightly different to the version we watch and post on. By slightly I mean entirely.

 

You're obviously passionate. What is your idea to even out the baseball economy? And you can't say just lower ticket prices. Or that you don't care about owners etc. It seems you care plenty!

[Major League Ready]

 

Players have been screwed over by owners much more than the other way around. The owners that were part of collusion in the 80s should have been kicked out of the game. I'm pretty sure there's collusion now but it'll be hard for the players to prove it. I think it sucks that Pohlad will make more money while the players make less.

 

"Players Screwed".  You have to be kidding me.  If the MLB owners decided to pay half of the percentage of revenue they pay to today,they would still be paying the highest rate for players in the world.  In other words, they would not loose any talent and it's not like any prospects would decide not to play baseball because it did not pay enough.  How many industries do you know that pay 3X what they need to pay to be competitive for talent?

 

Do you think Forbes is a credible source?  If you look at team spending over a period of several years, all of the teams spend  at about the same rate.  Obviously, rebuilding teams are less aggressive but its not like MLB team profits are different than other healthy industries. 

 

The game the top talent and their agents are playing is to try to get paid for as many years as possible when they are no longer playing at a high level or perhaps even at replacement level.   BTW ... They are asking to be paid 10X in a single year what the average American makes over a 50 year period and they want to be paid that rate for 2 or 3 years while they are likely at replacement level.  I am not sure why we should look at this scenario and conclude the problem is greedy owners.

[Mr. Brooks]

"Players Screwed". You have to be kidding me. If the MLB owners decided to pay half of the percentage they pay to today,they would still be paying the highest rate for players in the world. In other words, they would not loose any talent and it's not like any prospects would decide not to play baseball because it did not pay enough. How many industries do you know that pay 3X what they need to pay to be competitive for talent?

 

Do you think Forbes is a credible source? If you look at team spending over a period of several years, all of the teams spend at about the same rate. Obviously, rebuilding teams are less aggressive but its not like MLB team profits are different than other healthy industries.

Curious what data you are using for those claims?

[diehardtwinsfan]

The problem with these discussions is the tendency to center in around one or two issues when it's in fact a conflation of many of these issues. Most have already been stated by various people in this thread:

 

• Front offices are getting smarter (Ash hit this one, in that it really does look like a convergence in forecasting.  That's pretty normal when people within FOs change roles and go to different FOs, that proprietary data eventually becomes generally accepted across all teams).
• The big spending gap is giving incentive to teams without windows to "tank" so to speak.
• The big spenders happen to be sitting out this year. They are the ones driving up the prices, and they aren't bidding. It's why Darvish hasn't signed. Even if he wanted to come to MN, he would want to do it at the best possible price. When LA, NY, and CHI aren't bidding, it makes it hard for him to drive up his market.
• There's a real market share problem in MLB. Their fan base is aging and baseball doesn't appeal to millennials in the way it appeals to us old people. They are getting great contracts now, but it's not hard to notice that the median age of it's fans continues to age. That's not good, as those fans won't live forever.
• As is usual, and mentioned here, the big name players haven't set the market for the lower tier players.
• The players seem a bit late to adjusting to the new reality. They are, right now at least, doing what would be normal in their shoes and trying to get their best offer. They aren't likely thrilled with that.

I don't (yet at least) think there's collusion. Contracts are still being signed. I think front offices are just getting smarter. Plenty of people were able to read the tea leaves and predicted that this would a year that a team like MN could walk away with a Darvish. Even if he doesn't sign here, it sure looks accurate.

[Mike Sixel]

How many times can you like a post? Is there a button for love? Is it legal to marry this post?

Get in line!

[Riverbrian]

 

How about being paid for performance??  4 million for ten home runs, 6 million for fifteen home runs, 8 million for twenty home runs, etc.  If a player think hes worth x amount, then he shouldn't be afraid to earn it.  The agents and GM's could figure out some standard that works for both parties.

 

Kind of like Commission. Sell X amount of product and collect your commission check. Don't meet your goal... Tough break kid. 

 

The biggest problem with this... and I think big isn't strong enough... I'd say a HUGE problem would be:

 

How do you convince anyone to play team baseball? How do you convince them they shouldn't swing for the million dollar home run every single time regardless of the situation. How do you ask a player to sacrifice without making a personal sacrifice. How do you convince players to supportive of the guy ahead of him on the depth chart. Why would a player risk any injury or be honest about injuries if he can no longer pad those important metrics after suffering the injury. Starting pitchers don't like the ball being taken from them right now. It will be interesting to see what they start saying when bringing in a reliever costs them money each time. 

 

I'd imagine... Pure chaos. 

[jimmer]

 

End game?

 

Alienation of major league baseball fans looks like a real option. 

 

I can watch H.S. ball, college ball, town ball, make a short road trip to minor league ball, even watch some little league if I want.

 

Love me some Target Field, but I can go to the other end of the light rail and watch the Saints for a fraction of the price, get much better seats for much less money, better selection of cheaper brew, etc.

 

Depends whether you are a baseball fan or a MLB fan only.

 

The greed vs. entitlement battle has no appeal to me.

Yup.  I have rookie ball and AAA ball really close to where I live.  Of course, I like watching the major league games (usually one series a year, and two this year), but I don't need to.

[ewen21]

 

Paying the players less won't result in lower ticket prices or cable bills though. Those things are determined by supply and demand, the players pool of that money is then determined by their ability to collectively bargain and/ot negotiate in FA for their cut.

Don't need to defend something I never said.

 

I said paying the players a lot more correlates to very nicely with the rise in ticket prices, concessions, and cable packages.  The Houston Astros lived off a lucrative TV contract and was able to do what they did in 2013.  It was reported that the TV ratings for one home game was ZERO.  The teams with the most lucrative TV contracts pay out the most to player salaries.

 

That is what I am saying.  Do you disagree with that?  

 

 

[jimmer]

 

It makes no sense to me (anymore) to pull for one side or the other.  The owners lost the reserve clause years ago, and the players are very well represented.  So, I pull for signed agreements that are legal and binding...and hope that the game itself is in a healthy enough spot for the agreement to be sustainable.

Yup, I just want baseball.  Don't care who 'wins'. 

 

In this case though, like I said before, I think teams are getting smarter at evaluating players and most teams are seeing players in mostly the same way.  Then they are making their offers.  The players must think the FOs should be operating in old school ways.  Apparently they are learning that's not the case.

 

Now, I'm all for players getting what they can, but the market has decided what they are worth and it's not what the players thought it would be. It's not collusion, unless getting smarter across the game is collusion.

[jimbo92107]

 

I have to admit, I am perplexed. What seemed like a slow off-season has morphed into a non-off-season. There are dozens offers agents, including most of the top starters and position players, without a team, a week into February. Now there are the players union and agents coming forward to cry foul and a battle of press releases over who is to blame.

Obviously, teams aren’t offering what they did in the past. They seem to be offering fewer years than expected, or considerably less annual salary than expected. Is there collusion? I think there must be. But having several majors players “out” seems to be a factor too.

What is the end game here?
Are players going to relent and take the cheaper contracts?
Are Darvish and JD going to sign $100mm+ contracts and a flurry of signings going to follow?
Is spring training simply going to start with no one signed? If so, still...how does it end?
Does this end in a strike (knowing the CBA last for another few years)?

It’s so hard to tell what is really going on behind the scenes. It was always my impression that free agency worked like a cascade after the top pitcher signed, as teams “in the mix” don’t want to sign a lesser pitcher if they are still hoping to land their top target. But I also thought that there was usually a time limit imposed at some step of the way by someone in the negotiation: “Here is our best offer, let us know by X or we are moving on.” Or “We’ve got a good offer on the table now, you have until X to make a better one.” Why isn’t that happening this year?

The one thing I do know, is that the Twins are in a better situation to land the top free agent starter than they ever have been. They have the perfect storm of payroll space, and lack of major competition, and, seemingly, downward pressure on salaries.

What do others think about the current free agent situation, and how do you think it ends?

The best possible protest would be for all these high-priced free agents to land with the Twins for about 2/3 the money. Just sayin.

[Riverbrian]

 

Labor has no intrinsic value. A baseball player's worth is the culmination of various factors artificially imposed on their work. In our culture, we tend to treat these artificially imposed factors as natural. That is, we believe that the Market operates independently of human will, which is simply untrue.

It's tempting to say that valuation is a function of supply and demand, but I suspect it's actually a function of power. Right now, the owners have power to set the market, and the players want that power. This is the reason behind every labor dispute in modern history. Who sets the terms of work?

That said, player salaries have nothing to do with ticket prices, cable sunbscriptions, streaming sunbscriptions, merchandise and memorabilia prices--i.e. the costs we pay to be fans. Those prices are determined by teams and the league when considering what people will pay compared to the alternatives. Are they more likely to spend $50 for a ballgame or $18 for a movie? $200 for a jersey or some other toy?

My point: pay the players more, because their labor supplies the owners with virtually every cent of revenue.

 

Nicely Done!!! 

[Mr. Brooks]

Don't need to defend something I never said.

 

I said paying the players a lot more correlates to very nicely with the rise in ticket prices, concessions, and cable packages. The Houston Astros lived off a lucrative TV contract and was able to do what they did in 2013. It was reported that the TV ratings for one home game was ZERO. The teams with the most lucrative TV contracts pay out the most to player salaries.

 

That is what I am saying. Do you disagree with that?

But they are not charging more for TV contracts due to paying higher salaries.

Teams are going to negotiate the highest contract that someone is willing to pay them for the TV rights. They'd be doing that even if the players made minimum wage.

 

Like any for profit business in America, teams are going to try to make as much money as demand will allow.

And the players, like any workforce in America, is going to attempt to get as much of that pie as the demand for their services will allow.

Neither side is in the wrong, or greedy.

 

And nowhere did I ask you to defend anything.

[laloesch]

Labor has no intrinsic value. A baseball player's worth is the culmination of various factors artificially imposed on their work. In our culture, we tend to treat these artificially imposed factors as natural. That is, we believe that the Market operates independently of human will, which is simply untrue.

It's tempting to say that valuation is a function of supply and demand, but I suspect it's actually a function of power. Right now, the owners have power to set the market, and the players want that power. This is the reason behind every labor dispute in modern history. Who sets the terms of work?

That said, player salaries have nothing to do with ticket prices, cable sunbscriptions, streaming sunbscriptions, merchandise and memorabilia prices--i.e. the costs we pay to be fans. Those prices are determined by teams and the league when considering what people will pay compared to the alternatives. Are they more likely to spend $50 for a ballgame or $18 for a movie? $200 for a jersey or some other toy?

My point: pay the players more, because their labor supplies the owners with virtually every cent of revenue.

I choose not to pay either of them PERIOD if i can help it because BOTH sides are spoiled self entitled rich elitists who collectively make rediculous huge amounts of money off hard working Americans for a silly game.

[ThejacKmp]

 

Hitting arbitration sooner seems more than fair. Cutting years of team control would be pushing the pendulum even further in favor of large market teams. Maybe if it was accompanied by a hard cap but I can't see why the players union would (or should,) agree to a hard cap. 

Yeah, it would take the owners doing something like letting players hit free agency earlier.

 

One thing I've always thought would be interesting is a 6 years or 29 years old thing. That way teams would be incentivized to push players to the majors a bit faster and for the guys who make it to 27 like Garver, they have a shot at a contract.

[AlwaysinModeration]

There have been many arguments persuasively made on here (and elsewhere) that it is just a confluence of events that led to this result.

 

I don’t know, I am still very suspicious. How do you go from the usual most signed by February to almost none signed in February. If the market were undergoing a natural resetting of prices, I would have envisioned a gradual change, not a sudden one. And why are the relievers all pretty much gone?

 

It seems just...very convenient.

[Richie the Rally Goat]

[*]There's a real market share problem in MLB. Their fan base is aging and baseball doesn't appeal to millennials in the way it appeals to us old people. They are getting great contracts now, but it's not hard to notice that the median age of it's fans continues to age. That's not good, as those fans won't live forever.

 

I think a very related market issue is that cable tv will soon go the way of CDs and DVDs, and VHS and Cassette tapes before them. They are all becoming obsolete by a changing consumption of media. The model of big cable tv contracts and bundled channel packages must change to an online al a carte model of some kind.

[twinssporto]

 

I guess I don't get your anger. Sports is a billion dollar industry. It's not a game. It's very hard work. I'd rather that the players get paid more and owners get paid less. That's basically the only two options. Ticket prices aren't going down. Fans aren't going to get a discount. The game is incredibly popular now and that's because the players, not the owners, have made it so. Why on earth anyone would root for the owners to make more money is beyond me. 

Not sure if you were referring to me regarding anger but I intentionally wrote that I am neither for player or owner in my comments...I've mentioned this before but if you follow your logic all the way through why have owners at all?  The players can pool their own money and buy the teams outright thus eliminating the owners all together. 

 

It would be interesting to see how that model would play out.

[laloesch]

End game?

 

Alienation of major league baseball fans looks like a real option.

 

I can watch H.S. ball, college ball, town ball, make a short road trip to minor league ball, even watch some little league if I want.

 

Love me some Target Field, but I can go to the other end of the light rail and watch the Saints for a fraction of the price, get much better seats for much less money, better selection of cheaper brew, etc.

 

Depends whether you are a baseball fan or a MLB fan only.

 

The greed vs. entitlement battle has no appeal to me.

That's why i like minor league ball and college sports. For the most part you don't have to deal with the political BS being inserted into athletic events as well as owners and players squabbling like whining babies over ludicrous amounts of money.

 

Now that i live in Charlotte i go to many Knights games (AAA white sox affiliate). They have a beautiful brand new stadium downtown. The sight lines are amazing, the food great, ticket prices are cheap and the beer reasonable. Not at all a white sox fan but i love the sport so i go.

[old nurse]

 

The greed goes both ways. The owners do assume the risk, but the players are the draw for revenues for the most part. The fix, and others have stated this in other threads, is that players should be paid more earlier and then expect more reasonable contracts later in their careers. The owners look at Pujols, Miggy, Fielder, Crawford, et al. and now have enough data to realize those are stupid contracts. The players still want their piece of the pie, which they have every right to negotiate. The problem in arriving at "the fix" is that the union reps will have to be forward thinking. More Mookie Betts type arb salaries are a step in the right direction.

Longoria, Price an Shields  just packed them in when they played together in Tampa. Winning in Detroit brought out more fans than not winning and still having  Miggy, Verlander or Upton somewhere in the stadium

[old nurse]

 

I think a very related market issue is that cable tv will soon go the way of CDs and DVDs, and VHS and Cassette tapes before them. They are all becoming obsolete by a changing consumption of media. The model of big cable tv contracts and bundled channel packages must change to an online al a carte model of some kind.

https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/subscribe

 

The league owns the internet rights.

 

[DocBauer]

I LOVE baseball and the Twins specifically. And let me state very clearly, I AM NOT TAKING SIDES in a players vs owners debate. In fact, I find it a bit silly to do so. What I do find interesting, however, is how some have vitriol to billionaire owners who OWN the teams vs players who are employees. Is this more a deep seeded "anger" towards haves and have nots? Right now, a utility baseball player who plays 5 season's, for example, will earn more money is his career than I will in a lifetime and be treated as a 1st class citizen on flights, hotel rooms, etc. And this is a "low earning" player. People talk about what a franchise is worth. Well, if it's worth that it's worth that when/if sold. It's not like that profit margin is stashed in a slush fund every single year. If any of us buys a stock or makes an investment that pays off, there may be dividends involved, but that big payday is when the stock/investment is sold.

 

I have NO PROBLEM with any player maximizing his earning potential! Conversely, I don't have a problem, overall, with a business owner maximizing profits and running a business intelligently. Now, I DO have a problem with any owner in an entertainment business pocketing money at the risk/loss of fair entertainment value. After all, these owners earn/earned their money elsewhere to begin with. They bought these franchises for anything from ego to being sports enthusiasts themselves. And I think ownership, as a collective, should hold certain owners accountable. But taking sides in a debate about billionaire owners and millionaire employees is kind of silly, IMO.

 

To the point that is supposed to be discussed!

 

On the field analytics are at an all time high. You don't think financial analytics aren't also being employed?

 

In 2017, 4 teams had payrolls of $200M or skirting it. The Royals were at the mean of $145M with several important players reaching FA. KC is paying a ton of money for Alex Gordon...a quality player in the past and a local Nebraska hero...to play LF and not hit, and not hit with power. Their window is probably closed and Hosmer is, reportedly, asking for 8 years at a huge salary. (Just one of their key players). What are they to do?

 

I don't buy collusion, though it's possible. Our own Twins, notoriously frugal, earned reputation or not, have offered a HUGE contract to Darvish, rumored to be the top offer thus far. I just don't see a conspiracy. I see teams being smarter about years and dollars. You think the Angels aren't holding out regrets for the Pujlos deal these days? I don't care what profession you are talking about, there are market corrections that take place. We are seeing one this year for various reasons.

 

Going forward, you want to fix this? Get rid of or lower arbitration years. Keep penalties in place, providing a soft cap, if not a hard cap. But also place minimum caps on teams. Other than non-guaranteed contacts, the NFL is so healthy for a reason. Yes, signing/roster bonuses and the such help offset this, but come on! If FO employees and coaches are guaranteed, then why aren't the players? And if you are an owner, and a member of the player's union, then do something for the milb players that are the supposed lifeblood for your organization! Except for bonus babies, they live in virtual poverty.

[TheLeviathan]

 

And if you are an owner, and a member of the player's union, then do something for the milb players that are the supposed lifeblood for your organization! Except for bonus babies, they live in virtual poverty.

 

This, if it wasn't said before, definitely needed to be said.  Earlier I said taxpayers and fans lose in this, but minor league players are used as a pawn by both sides, neither of which give a rip about their best interest.  

 

So add them on too.

 

I'd be careful also, as others have suggested, to equate revenues with popularity.