Brock Beauchamp

I don't really want Sonny Gray in 2024 so that seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement. Tyler Mahle, on the other hand...

Compare those to Bundy, who I don’t think has gone more than five innings since the ASB (without checking, admittedly). I don’t even care if they wedge Gray in there, it could just as easily be Ryan or Mahle. My point is to break up Bundy and Archer, Gray is just the easiest one to move to that slot.

He's insanely young, which is why all this dumb crap is so frustrating. He could have been a 70-win player at age 30, the kind of elite shortstop we see once a generation. As a 20 through 22-year-old, he accumulated about 13 fWAR... or about 7 fWAR per 140 games (3 fWAR in Covid 2020, for crying out loud). He wasn't just good, he was Soto-level incredible.

There isn't a big difference in quantity but there is in quality. And Gray has been injured and taken it easy a bit. Bundy is more likely to have the catastrophic short start, which is troublesome if chased by an Archer short start. Also, it's more likely Gray will exit with a lead while Bundy or Archer will not. Setting up a bullpen to use the best four one day and not the other two days - at least in early innings - allows more bullpen flexibility. If Bundy leaves in the fifth with a three run deficit, that's when you use Pagan. It's less likely Gray will exit under those circumstances.

Exactly. My problem with the management of this pitching staff is that they don't sacrifice ANYTHING on the front-end of the situation, which causes havoc on the back-end. You can't have short starts AND a bunch of one-inning relievers AND a bad back-end of the bullpen AND your worst starters clustered AND... That leads us to seeing Emilio Pagan in a high leverage situation. Or not having enough bullpen arms on any given night. Or another form of disaster. The reality of the situation is that you can't have a "perfect" solution when you have an assload of imperfect pitchers on the roster. You need to choose where you're willing to sacrifice something - like letting a starter go through a third time or a dedicated piggyback with a long reliever - or you're replacing that "sacrifice" with something MUCH worse, like Emilio Pagan pitching in a tie game.

I know, it's my biggest bullet point to address as soon as the kids are back in school.

I move some stuff around last night and the site seems a lot snappier now, particularly while hitting submit on a post. Let me know your experiences, particularly during game times or busy times. That's when we were seeing the system bog down the most.

All season long, there had been something nagging at the back of my head about seeing Bundy and then Archer - or vice versa - go back-to-back. Then John Bonnes finally pinned down the problem - they're the two most likely pitchers to have short starts. Couple that with a crappy bullpen for most of the season and it's a continual recipe for disaster. You're burning a bunch of relievers to cover for two mediocre/bad pitchers and that makes it really hard to set up an effective bullpen. These two should have been separated in the rotation months ago. The next off day should see Gray move up a day and wedge his starts between the two weakest links, giving the bullpen a little more breathing room in the process. Sonny has had plenty of rest this season, he can go on regular rest while everyone else shifts backward.

So disappointing. He’s one of my favorite players and a bright star who can’t stay on the field due to a chronic case of Doing Dumb ****.

Dude, tone it down. Everyone here was having a civil conversation until you showed up.

Primarily this, yes, but without checking I believe Boston also wanted to get back under the luxury tax threshold for one season to reset the penalty to zero. The luxury tax penalty stacks the more consecutive seasons a team is over it.

Revenue sharing is at its highest but the revenue GAP is enormous and also rising due to TV contracts. Again, look at the Dodgers and their $240m contract versus the Brewers and their $45m contract.

I'm not picking on you but this drives home the larger point I've been making: fans look at the end result of something and say "that needs to be fixed!" without asking "why is this the case?" Imagine if baseball was more like one of the other major sports. Jose Miranda's rookie season would net him a really nice contract. He wouldn't be forced into the minimum year after year, then given a fraction of his value for several more seasons, only AFTER would he hit free agency and then look for a massive, long-term deal. If Jose Miranda was paid $8m for his 2022 campaign and others were paid for early-career performance, the union wouldn't focus so much on securing this massive free agency deals because that's the only way players make competitive money in baseball. But the A's and Pittsburgh would really struggle under the current system if Oneil Cruz is paid $12m for the 2023 season after showing such promise in his rookie campaign. Which, AGAIN, brings us back to real revenue sharing, the scale of which only owners can agree to make happen. Baseball is set up to wildly underpay young players, who then aggressively pursue the longest guaranteed contracts possible the moment they finally break into free agency. The entire system needs to change; young players need to be paid and the revenue gap needs to be a lot smaller. Only AFTER those things are done can we start talking about salary caps and floors along with changing how guaranteed money works in the sport. The union fights to pay its players, they will agree to changes if the players continue to be paid but the distribution changes. But the proposals we see - primarily from ownership - are focused on limiting how much players can be paid and decreasing the portion of revenue players receive. And the owners have actually won this battle, MLB players are paid a smaller portion of revenue than they were three decades ago, revenue has skyrocketed that much. Put the players in your own shoes. You work at an underpaid position in a company that sees skyrocketing revenue for years and years. After several years of being underpaid in comparison to others in adjacent industries, you point to the huge revenue increases and say "I want more money, it's only fair", at which point your boss says "I'll pay you a little more than you get now but to get this, I'm going to demand a cap on company labor expenses, which will actually decrease your pay in comparison to revenue over the next five years." NO ONE would agree to that. Oh, and your boss can also try to force you to accept those terms because the government supports the company in preventing any competition from existing. Do you kinda get why the players have such a strong union and fight so hard to preserve it?

It’s weird how the Red Sox “couldn’t afford him” as their payroll dropped from $236m in 2019 (after which Betts was traded) to $189m in 2021 and is now back up over $200m again after signing Trevor Story.

C'mon now, the Dodgers traded for Betts knowing full well they intended to offer him a massive contract and get him to extend while they had exclusive negotiating rights. No way do they pay that price for just one year of Betts, the exclusive negotiation period was part of the package. A mid-market team could not afford to do the same. The Dodgers traded for Betts because they had the money to sign him.

The Dodgers’ 2022 leaders in fWAR are Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts.

Not even close to the level of the Angels, who are something like 25 games under .500 over the past few months.

Hah, I forgot the Giants broke their streak last season because the Dodgers turned around and beat the Giants in the postseason. It was actually the only good series last postseason.

Yeah, exactly. Teams in MLB can be good for short periods of time but sustained success in anything but the largest markets is really rare. The Dodgers have won the NL West about 114 times in a row now. The Yankees have made the postseason about 230 times in a row. The Rays manage to remain competitive but have to do it in the most god-awful way. The Cards are in it often but aren't consistently good, they just hang around mediocre often enough to make a run from time to time. There isn't anything in other sports to rival how several of the coastal teams can just buy themselves to relevancy on a yearly basis in baseball. And it's not good for the sport. If ownership was willing to make REAL concessions about revenue sharing and a payroll floor, I think the MLBPA would fall in line in a hurry. After all, their goal is to get as much as possible for their constituents and should MLB teams start sharing money and forcing spending in a REAL way, a salary cap suddenly becomes a real possibility. But players aren't going to just let owners enact a salary cap without spending guarantees to go with it. And ownership's "offerings" of a salary floor were laughable. They offered a $100m floor, which would only impact about a half-dozen teams. The entire point of a floor is to force a large percentage of teams upward in salary, not to stop a handful from holding laughable payrolls. Why would players agree to a salary cap if overall spending decreases as a result, which it would with a $100m floor? MLBPA execs should be run out on rails should they make such a horrible concession. But to have a reasonable salary floor, more revenue sharing needs to happen and it needs to be LEGIT revenue sharing. If you set a floor at $130m, under the current rules teams like the A's and Pirates would really struggle to stay afloat. And players can't force owners to share their money, that needs to come from the owners themselves.

The fact Baldelli was not suspended for blowing his lid in such an epic way tells me everything I need to know about whether the call was horse **** or not.

You mean like how the owners locked out the players eight months ago?

The owners have proposed some revenue sharing stuff but remember two things: 1. The revenue sharing has never been anywhere close to the numbers it needs to be 2. It’s always attached to something the players REALLY hate like a hard salary cap The owners have done a fantastic job of making absolutely **** offers to the players so they can turn around and say “Sse? We’re not the problem!” The owners could get a salary cap out of the players if they were actually willing to make the requisite number of concessions in trade. For example, I bet the players would agree to a salary cap in a heartbeat if it came with a $150m salary floor. But the owners won’t do that because they like scraping the barrel for a few seasons with a $60m payroll and making money hand over fist. The owners want to get everything they want while never conceding anything from their wildly profitable enterprises. They’re the biggest problem, full stop. Not fun fact: despite MLB players being such greedy bastards intent on destroying the sport, MLB baseball players make a smaller portion of revenue than their NFL and NBA counterparts. Players are not the problem.

The players resist revenue sharing? When and where? Sure, when the owners affix some draconian measure to something, players resist it but the owners have never presented REAL revenue sharing, not once. Personally, I don’t include “we’ll share $5m but you have to agree to a $90m salary cap to get it” as legitimate negotiations. The owners have never made an honest attempt at balancing market sizes with revenue sharing. That’s how the Dodgers ended up with a TV contract literally 6x larger than the Brewers.

Hah, fair enough.