bean5302

He's not as rough vs. lefties as you make him out to be. Of the 92 left handed hitters in MLB with 170+ plate appearances vs left handed pitching, the median wRC+ was 85. Luis Arraez's career wRC+ against lefties is wRC+ 88. Certainly not good, but not "horrible" at least in my opinion.

Arraez was 22-24 while Buxton was 25-27. Arraez and Buxton have similar bWAR values (6.0 vs. 6.3), games played (245 vs 260) and plate appearances (966 vs. 936) through their age 22-24 seasons. The obsession with Buxton around here...

Then the front office deals with the failure. Not making the trade is just as bad as making a bad trade.

The NFL has done it previously in 1987 and threatened to do it again in 2011. If there is no CBA in place, the "Basic Agreement" which governs contracts under the CBA becomes void. I'm sure the MLBPA would sue. In the United States, you can sue for whatever you want, trillions even. It doesn't mean the MLBPA would be successful. In the meantime, unless an injuction was imposed based on a complaint filed for unfair labor practices by the MLBPA, the league would continue to operate and the players would continue earning nothing while they watch their permanent jobs start being earned by the former MiLB players. Any lawsuit would have to be ended as a condition of any future CBA MLB would agree to so it's pretty moot. In such a scenario, the MLBPA would break in days or weeks. While it's possible the MLBPA would be dissolved, it's unlikely because even MLB wouldn't want a total free for all. It's more likely the players would have a new set of rules much less favorable crammed down their throats as the season goes on and fans continue going to games. You may disagree, but that's how I see things.

I'd honestly expect owners to move ahead with replacement players relatively quickly once the regular season games start needing to be canceled due to a CBA not being finalized. Remember, MLB recently culled a number of MiLB teams leaving a whole lot of baseball player talent with no where to go and MiLB players would happily cross the picket lines for a shot at the big show. Even 40 man roster players would be seriously tempted since the MLBPA has done absolutely nothing for MiLB players while the owners have recently sowed dissent with the MiLB players and the MLBPA by improving working conditions recently. The MLBPA would be powerless except for to once again, file an unfair labor practice charge; however, the reason the last one was successful was because of several key moves amounting to collusion to alter the actual market for players. Also, it helped that one of the most liberal judges in the US was hearing the case. There's no guarantee the MLBPA would be effective this time around... and if they were to lose, the MLBPA would crumble apart entirely. The union would be broken and a new union would need to be formed.

MiLB are often not owned by the same people as the MLB franchise. MiLB owners spend millions to secure a affiliate contract with MLB and work out a final contract with an MLB franchise. St. Paul Saints tickets are already harder to get, and often more expensive in the secondary market, than Twins tickets for any given game. Punishing the MiLB players who want to play in front of a crowd and the MiLB franchise owners who are often turning very small profits because you're mad at the owners of MLB isn't rational.

It's not Spring Training that's the issue. It's the threat players could walk off the job on April 5th or May 2nd when the team has hundreds of employees they're paying, a stadium they spent millions on to get ready, millions in advertising costs, millions in travel bookings, tens of millions of seats sold they need to potentially refund (even if it's not "profit" this is cash flow and revenue and that matters to teams because investments are not all sitting in money market), television contracts which they need to repay, it goes on and on and on. Each team would be in a position to lose at least $25MM if the players walked on April 1st. It'd be too late to book the stadiums for other events, etc. You're talking about hundreds of millions if not billions of actual, real losses by moving ahead to watch the players walk and the owners are already going to lose enormous revenue and profit by canceling games once it becomes necessary, just like in 2020.

I've long held the opinion teams can trade any player and it won't matter a bit to the fans when it comes to putting butts in the seats or revenue to the team based on what's happened after the Twins saw the departure of some of the recently most popular players. 1996 - Kirby Puckett was gone, attendance was up. 2008 - Torii Hunter & Johan Santana were gone, attendance was up. 2019 - Joe Mauer was gone, attedance was up. There are some instances of course where attendance was down (Hrbek, Cuddyer, Morneau), but it's not like it fell off a cliff or something. Bottom line? In my opinion, fans are fans of the team, not the individual players so fans will almost always find a new favorite player. Arraez or Polanco. One of them really should be traded. Based on just how good Polanco has been over the past 3 years combined, he has to be considered a bonefide All Star caliber player and he's still inexpensive with multiple years of team control. Arraez still has some question marks due to his knees and conditioning. Doctors told Arraez to lose weight and do squats to strengthen his legs and improve his knee health. He didn't, he missed a bunch of games and slumped down the stretch. I love the type of game Arraez brings to baseball. He makes a lot of solid, line drive contact which makes the game more exciting to watch, but there are question marks and he's redudant on the roster if the Twins keep Polanco.

Baseball markets sort of work on general metro areas. The immediate city and surrounding 30 minute area has the Twins with a 25%+ population advantage over Cleveland. Having that immediate area advantage is important for attendance and contributes to game day revenues. There's also the median household income. MSP = $84k. Greater Cleveland = $57k. https://community.fangraphs.com/the-importance-of-the-30-minute-population-radius-on-mlb-attendance/ Cincinatti is further from Cleveland than Duluth is from Minneapolis, and if you expand the metros out within reason, Minneapolis/St. Paul generally owns a significant advantage in population density. It's tough for me to consider the markets super comparable. Though if you expand things out far enough, Ohio is a much bigger state than Minnesota overall. Even so, in the northwest of the state, Toledo, OH is Detroit Tigers area and Pittsburgh starts to get as close to Cleveland as suburbs east and south of Canton. So there are 4 baseball teams Ohio residents might consider their "home" team. Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Cincinatti Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates.

I think the dump in payroll reflects the Guardians entering a tank/rebuild cycle which is employed by all small market teams and most mid market teams in some capacity. The White Sox and Tigers are going to own the division for probably 2-3 years at least with the Royals next, the Guardians and Twins at the bottom if I had to wager right now. A change in ownership in Cleveland would likely accelerate their rebuild and make them a better team on average, but Cleveland is still small market so I don't see a fundamental change coming. Besides, small market Cleveland and Kansas City have already had opening day payrolls higher than the mid-market Twins have ever seen. Maybe the competent ownership change that's necessary is in Minnesota, not Ohio.

I have no objections to a stepped cap with a luxury/hard cap at say $200 and $250MM and I don't think it would cause issues, but I also don't think it would almost ever come into play. The reason I believe hard caps on their own will cause problems has been noted before so I'm just going to copy my previous responses. I expect a hard cap would be set about $150MM with a floor at $130MM or so based on the current economics of baseball. Bad for fans - reduced competition. Teams which have bad, fully guaranteed contracts in combination with up and coming talented players will be unable to shed the bad contracts and therefore incapable of retaining key young up and coming talent. An example would be the Angels prior to the 2013 season, assuming a $150MM hard cap at the time. They had $80MM committed to Pujols, Hamilton and Wells on long term contracts. They also had C.J. Wilson under contract long term for a salary ramping up to $20MM a year along with a fairly talented young player named Mike Trout. In a hard cap system, the Rangers and Yankees would have been much less willing to take on the bad contracts of Hamilton and Wells, even if the Angels still ate a big portion. Could the Angels have found a way to retain Trout if the only had $20MM to sign 20 of the 25 people on their active roster? Essentially, no team big or small would be able to make significant mistakes on long term contracts or they'd be locked into a long term period of being non-competitive during which they'd also be unable to retain young breakout talent. Could you imagine the fans watching Trout be traded simply because the Angels couldn't afford him because the league's salary cap wouldn't allow it? Bad for owners - increased risk. Since owners would be backed into a hard corner like in the scenario above, big contracts would become far more risky, but teams committed to winning would still have to make big bids and pray they get Max Scherzer instead of David Price. Bad for players - reduced compensation. While owners would still pay big dollars, the truly long contracts, say anything longer than 5 years, would be pretty much non-existent without accepting team options. Top players will now have much less security and lower contract value. In my opinion, Price would have maybe gotten 4yrs and $100MM guaranteed with $25MM in incentives he wouldn't actually hit instead of 7yrs $217MM fully guaranteed. Players are aware of how valuable the fully guaranteed contract is in MLB today. With a hard cap, the guarantee becomes so risky for owners that it severely reduces contract length and total compensation for player seeking security. The only way around this is to ditch the base guarantee contract structure for baseball. But even if baseball did ditch the guarantees (which would obviously be the ultimate never in a million years case scenario for MLBPA), the caps wouldn't be workable. The average player payroll for teams in MLB last year was about $150MM. Setting the hard cap at $160MM and a floor at $140MM to ensure competition wouldn't work. There would be no more luxury tax to pump into revenue sharing, and due to the enormous disparity in team revenues in MLB, probably at least 1/3 of teams would be projected to lose money while 1/3 of the teams would be fabulously profitable. So then MLB would need to completely revamp revenue sharing to a full pooled revenue system. This means the Yankees, who achieved $683MM of revenue would profiting probably $240MM after revenue sharing and the Oakland Athletics at $220MM of revenue would be ($75MM) in the losses even after revenue sharing and operating at the league minimum. So the current revenue sharing system would need to be totally replaced... basically with an almost fully pooled system. Why on Earth would the large market teams even consider this to be acceptable? When teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and the like have worked tirelessly to market their brands, build competitive teams and reinvest in their organization while teams like the Twins (who didn't need to) and the Rays and Athletics (who did need to, but who cares?) have fed off those large market teams' hard work and success already. Now we're going to tell those successful owners they have to give up everything they worked for because Jim Pohlad doesn't feel like opening his wallet and trying to win because there's a risk his team won't make money one year? That's the never in a million years scenario for the big teams ownership, and rightfully so. They've worked hard to make their franchises profitable and they've earned the additional profits which have come with the investment. But let's say the MLBPA agreed to ditch base contract guarantees and a hard salary cap which would potentially severely reduce their compensation and MLB ownership agreed to fully pooled revenue to support a hard cap and floor methodology which would slash profits from large market teams, does that make baseball more competitive? It's already the most competitive sport of the big 4 in the United States. I don't know as it would. It's honestly all moot to me, the fan, because baseball is as boring to watch as paint drying right now with the 25 second delay between pitches as the hitter backs out of the batters box, checks his shin guard, takes 3 deep breaths, inspects his bat, re-tightens his batting gloves, steps back in, and takes 5 practice swings while waiting for the pitcher to perform his amazing dance routine on the mound before he's ready to throw the next 100mph ball in the general direction of home plate at least 2 more times before his UCL blows out again all with with only 3 possible results, and by far the likeliest, just one more of the 30 strikeouts which will be recorded during the game. Don't mind me, I'm standing in line for the Walleye on a spike and some cheese curds. Not like I'm going to miss anything in the 30 minutes it takes, anyway.

Why would MLB funnel large amounts of revenue from MLB ball clubs to players who do not, and are not good enough to play on the MLB team? Fair compensation for non-roster MiLB players who are not covered by the CBA isn't likely to be part of a new CBA. As was noted previously, NFL team revenues are similar. MLB team revenues are not similar. Also, giving an example of a long term poor (or great) performances of any team in any market is an example of what fans do not want. Fans do not want the New York Yankees or the Milwaukee Brewers to suck for 10 years straight any more than they want the Los Angeles Dodgers to dominate for 10 years straight. Forcing teams who pay 100% guaranteed base salaries to players and a merit based arbitration into a situation where hard floor/caps are implemented can be catastrophic to the competitive level of the team because the team is unable to retain key talent even if they want because of other contracts for players they do not want to keep. A better, but still not great example is Zach Parise and Ryan Suter and their impact on the roster construction and severe limitations of the Minnesota Wild. Now imagine Zach Parise also had a huge and unexpected decline which happens far more frequently in baseball than hockey. In the current luxury tax system, teams can eat the bad contracts and go a bit above their preferred level of spending for the needed short term flexibility to retain key talent and remain competitive with a penalty.

Base contracts in baseball are 100% guaranteed, period. You cannot reduce the amount guaranteed in baseball unless you're talking about team options or incentives. Free agent players have traditionally been uninterested in contracts with significant incentives or team options and the MLBPA and agents both push players not to accept non-guaranteed contracts. The lack of a hard cap is the only reason teams can guarantee so much of their compensation. Your proposal of a hard cap is: Bad for fans - reduced competition Bad for owners - increased risk Bad for players - reduced compensation

As has been noted in other articles and comments, MLB players already get 50% of the share. The MLBPA has acknowledged players get 50% and the MLBPA has been happy with the figures MLB owners have provided in proving the 50%. I keep seeing people commenting on about NFL without a fundamental understanding of the economics or competition level of baseball. The NFL is less competitive than MLB. Not only is there more turnover as a percentage of eligible teams in the MLB playoffs, but the regular season has far more parity as well. The best MLB team could convert to 11-6 in the NFL. The worst MLB team could convert to 6-11 in the NFL. The NFL deals in nearly exclusively non-guaranteed contracts. Patrick Mahomes is a fantastic example. He just signed an eyeball popping 10 year $450MM base contract with $25MM in potential incentives. Only $63MM of the $450MM is fully guaranteed. Mike Trout signed a 12 year $426MM contract of which all $426MM is guaranteed because there is no salary cap. This means a team can absorb bad contracts and be flexible with them. Proposing changes that would not benefit the sport and neither players nor owners would accept just doesn't make sense.

I think I misunderstood the intention of your original response. I read it as don't trade Sano even at the deadline when it seems you meant, don't trade him before he has an opportunity to build some value during the regular season because you're convinced his value is currently nil so the Twins lose nothing by holding/waiting. I'd agree with the expectation his value is low; however, I don't know for sure that's the case. If the CBA includes a full time DH in the NL, Sano could have more significant value than expected after his hot finish to the season. I'd rather the Twins trade him now if they can get something for him rather than risk him having another horrible start to the year. Sano was rocking a .196/.279/.426 triple slash for a .705 OPS at the All Star Break last year. That's good for about an OPS+ or wRC+ of 85-ish. Now that is truly no value.

Here's what would happen. Long contracts with high AAV would vanish from the market.

I don't believe rigid caps would be remotely functional in MLB because all contracts are guaranteed. Teams would find themselves locked into bad situations with no legitimate path to competitive play and revenue sharing would have to massively expand to support what would probably be a floor of something like $130MM. With the massive differences in revenues and profits across MLB, a lot of owners would be just as furious about the potential acceptance of the hard floor/cap system as the players would be.

Neat story, but no lasting impact on the game of baseball. I'd say no to inclusion in the hall based on privilege points.

You mean like if Miguel Sano was worth extending then he would also have trade value...

1. The owners proposed the $100MM salary floor, not the players. One significant negative, in my opinion, is that it could lead to increased strongarm tactics for owners to use against metro areas to force new stadiums. The tactic will be employed against Oakland and Tampa Bay now and it will certainly be used as a threat and weapon against other cities every time an owner wants a new stadium (which is like every other year). Depending on penalties for violating the floor, it would be good for baseball as it could do 3 things. It's about competitive parity so the floor needs to be the same for all the teams. Giving the Yankees a floor of $180MM and the Rays a floor of $30MM doesn't improve competition, it institutionalizes anti-competive behavior. De-incentivize tanking. Increase competition. Help force out bad ownership. 2. Raising the luxury tax ceiling cannot realistically be accomplished while simultaneously implementing the salary floor. The luxury tax is used as a line for revenue sharing which supports the salary floor. Raising the floor is bad for baseball. While baseball has remained more competitive than other big sports like football, it definitely feels like the dynasty teams are becoming more common. The age of the Juggernaut is upon us, and it's as boring as the 3 outcome plate appearance. 3. Shorter control before free agency. I don't think this has to be better or worse for baseball. Players have not really asked for this, though. From my understanding the MLBPA proposal starts at 6 years control, then goes to 5 if a player is 30.5+ and then 5 only if the player is 29.5+. Basically, MLBPA agrees with 6 years service time with a tweak that helps players who are older when drafted or spend a long time in the minors. Players did propose everybody should essentially be super 2's and arbitration eligible after 2 years instead of 3. 4. The 800lb gorilla in the room. Players want to essentially gut revenue sharing. This is the most horrible thing which could potentially happen in baseball. It's lunacy and clearly makes the MLBPA look disconnected from reality and incompetent in my eyes. Raising the luxury tax ceiling to $245MM and eliminating all non monetary penalties would allow super-Dodgers and super-Yankees to spend with impunity. The only teeth in the luxury tax ceiling is really the potential impact to drafting.

and that's exactly what MLB did. See you later, Ken Rosenthal. You can still report on baseball (hang out with the spouse), just not this close to MLB operations (alone at your place). This analogy is getting tough...

RE: $100MM floor / $200MM ceiling for luxury tax I don't think the players have much leverage here. The owners want the floor and need the revenue sharing from the lower ceiling to fund the floor. While I don't think owners would be opposed to changing the penalty structure somewhat, it's already fair with teams cross the threshhold with frequency and a floor with penalties makes it more than fair. Though whether or not something is perceived as fair by me makes little difference in the negotiations.

If the owners invest into all the hundreds in millions of costs associated with getting the 2022 baseball season rolling, they give the players enormous financial leverage and the owners would be operating under the looming and real threat of a strike at any time.

...and when the source is confidential, how do you hold that source responsible? Like when sealed, confidential lab test results are supposedly leaked and nobody ever knows where it came from. It's very much like your spouse wanting to hang out with their close friend (who is also their ex) alone all the time. Sure, it would be your spouse's fault if something happened, but it's risky and irresponsible to put people into that situation to begin with.

So you think he'll have no trade value, but he'll totally be worth extending? Aside from that, I'm not sure where you get durable and athletic? Sano barely qualified for the batting title last year for the very first time in his entire career, but still missed nearly 30 games during the season. It was the first time in his career he's played more than 116 games. In regard to athleticism, that left him some years ago. He's now a well below average speed runner and his quickness and range departed several years ago. Even his glove has turned to stone as he put together an unimaginably poor defensive effort in 2021.