Miggy's Little Helper

As a labor lawyer, it always seemed that this was the likely result at any initial deadline for negotiations (be it a lockout at season start or strike on the brink of the playoffs). Failure to reach an agreement was likely a baked-in consequence of the starting negotiating positions combined with a relationship that is less than "okay" (to be charitable). Although I understand the frustrations, welcome to labor negotiations--they aren't pretty. We'll get there at some point in the next several weeks to months, but this is how it is designed to work. In baseball, given the resources on both sides, it's about imposing some level of pain on the other in order to get to agreement (again, a product of a fraught relationship). As a baseball fan, I for one am happy that we have a lockout and are seeing this playout before a season starts. Without the lockout, we'd almost certainly just push this down the road to the brink of the playoffs--at which point we'd see the players walk off the job. I leave it up to you as to which of these scenarios, long term, is better for baseball. We'd all prefer option C, an agreement and opening day. But that was basically never in the cards. So we move on to the next best option.

The problem with tonight is clearly that WE DID have the bullpen to close it out. It didn't take a genius to figure out how to get the last nine outs from some combination of Perez, Harper, May, and Hildy. If Perez, May, and Hildy were considered off limits tonight, it's going to be a long year and perhaps the FO should've have thought about signing one of the four hundred thousand 7/8/9 relievers available.

It could result in a drop in productivity. Or he'll be a clone of Mark Buerhle. Excellent soft-tossing lefties have always existed and, even in the age of velocity, some of them can and will continue to thrive. Given his track record, I'd be willing to bet that Keuchel is far more likely to be Mark Buerhle than Tommy Milone. I'd be willing to take up to 4 years if the price was right. 3/$50-55M would seem reasonable given the market. A steal, really, for a team that is staring into the abyss when it comes to starting pitching depth.

Uh, in a word, no. Since when is every feature of capitalism resulting in labor making gains against capital now called "socialism"? Sorry your beloved market economy did a number on your expectation for perpetually low ticket prices to watch the top 750 baseball players on a planet of 7,500,000,000 ply their trade.

The players are not going to give up guaranteed contracts. They'd pool their money with a different group of billionaires and start their own baseball league before agreeing to non-guaranteed contracts. That being said, non-guaranteed contracts would change free agency, but I'm not sure it'd be good for small market teams. What small market teams "save" in being able to cut underperforming players, they'd lose in bonus and contract size. I mean, how much do you think Harper could get on a 5 year deal right now? 40M per? The Twins would never be in on a guy that's 1/3 or their total payroll--not even for 5 years.

From what I understand, there's no way to verify each team's revenue. We can calculate payroll, of course. From what I can gather, the revenue numbers are about: Revenue 2010 - 6.14B 2011 - 6.36B 2012 - 6.81B 2013 - 7.1B 2014 - 7.86B 2015 - 8.39B 2016 - 9.03B 2017 - 9.46B 2018 - 10.3B Payroll is: 2010 - 2.91B 2011 - 3.0B 2012 - 3.15B 2013 - 3.35B 2014 - 3.63B 2015 - 3.9B 2016 - 4.07B 2017 - 4.25B 2018 - 4.22B 2019 - SPOTRAC NUMBER - Currently 3.78B I agree we don't know the whole story behind the numbers. It's rough and can be misleading. These numbers indicate revenue is up about 68% since 2010 and payroll is up 46%. Take that for what you will. Regardless of actual numbers, the players union will look at these numbers and be mighty skeptical of owners--rightfully so.

I forgot about the part where the players are just supposed to shut up and be happy while team revenue and profit increase at a faster rate than player pay.

If you represent the players, isn't the obvious response, "Okay, you want to let basic economics dictate pay? Deal. The players get market wages from day 1. No team control. Pure free agency." The owners obviously balk and now "basic economics" is out the window as a framework for agreement. The whole point of a collective bargaining agreement is that the parties get to play with what you've termed the "economic laws of nature."

Operating "systemically and intelligently to mitigate risk" ignores the fact that the owners and players (a) have a contractual relationship and ( will have a contractual relationship for the foreseeable future. If the owners want to abuse the labor contract "systemically and intelligently to mitigate risk" to extract maximum profit for their side, the owners can't expect that the renegotiation of the contract will proceed smoothly. Something about an equal and opposite reaction. To be clear, the coming labor strife isn't about superstars like Harper and Machado. They get paid and they should get paid. The coming labor strife is about all the players that have to take shorter-term deals for less money than expected or, even worse, minor league contracts. The boneyard of free agency has never seen so many carcasses.

I don't think anyone really disagrees that this is a safer route. But the idea that 5 years of Kepler is better than 1 year of Harper is not correct. Harper is very, very likely to be a much better baseball player than Kepler over the next 10 years. Yes, he'll cost more, but teams can only play one RF. Harper > Kepler.

Here's what the contract says: "The arbitration panel shall, except for a Player with five or more years of Major League service, give particular attention, for comparative salary purposes, to the contracts of Players with Major League service not exceeding one annual service group above the Player’s annual service group."

Or just hold onto it, period. Future profit is secondary to current profit.

As I read the CBA, yes. My guess is that it wouldn't be that persuasive because the rest of the contract structure would also be admissible. The union could argue that the contract controls for Arb-1 and the Team could argue the contract controls for Arb-3. It's not exactly a good benchmark. But anything can happen in arbitration...

I don't see this as a "team friendly" deal--it's pretty close to neutral assuming that Polanco continues his 2017-2018 level of play. It's what he'd likely earn through his next four years (this year plus the three arb years) and about market rate for his first year of FA.

I assume we're talking seven years including this year. As for salary structure, I'd hope for a much flatter structure. They've got bigger extensions to give out after this. Ideally, they'd just flat him at $5-6MM for the first five or even frontload (although I seem to recall this is discouraged by the salary arb calculations in the CBA). If the options are for $13MM and 15MM respectively, the team might as well light the buyout money on fire. Polanco is good. He's not $13MM or $15MM good as currently defined in the market. $11MM is about the highest I'd go--and even then there's a far greater than 50% chance the team option won't be picked up. Overall, thinking about this a bit more, this extension is a bit of a head-scratcher. The team appears to be taking on risk with this extension for almost no reason. There's not much risk that Polanco is going to crush his 2017-2018 performance this year and reset contract expectations. There's more risk of regression lowering contract expectations. And if Polanco regresses to a low .700 OPS player, $10MM per year in the later years if the contract will be a relatively painful drag on a $130MM payroll--let alone a $100MM payroll. It's odd they don't want to "wait and see" on Polanco when we all know they're far too willing to "wait and see" on the state of the team as a whole... This might be the Phil Hughes extension redux.

Explains why they didn't pursue Marwin. Either he slides over to 2B or he becomes the super utility.

That thought certainly crossed my mind as well, and if that's the case, I put that on both Molitor and Falvine. If Duke wasn't available, then you try to cross over to Mejia (and if you're concerned about warm up time, you get him started during the 8th--and then you doubly wonder why he's even on the roster). Beyond that, yesterday the roster was a mess. 6 starters, down one position player, down one reliever, and then, if Duke wasn't available, you want to hold back ANOTHER reliever (on a day that Lance Lynn in pitching no less). Ugh. I can't wait to see that big Wilson haul... Do you think we could trade Wilson for Realmuto straight up?

Last night was just further proof that Paul Molitor shouldn't be managing a little league team, let alone a Major League Baseball team. The bullpen usage in the 9th and 10th was practically criminal to the point that, if you wanted to, you could reasonably believe that he (perhaps at the direction of Falvine) was trying to throw the game. Rodney threw 25 pitches on Thursday, and had thrown three out of the last four. We all lived the FRE on Thursday. That's reason enough to give him a day off. BUT EVEN MORE THAN THAT, we had a rested Zach Duke and three hitters that are essentially useless against LHP due up in the bottom of the 9th. Devers (R/L OPS): .759/.590. Nunez: .670/.543. Leon: .623/.601. HOW DUMB COULD YOU BE? Then Belisle. Both by the eyeball test and stats, if you run Belisle in a tie game, you should immediately be cuffed, thrown in a paddy wagon, and transported to your local holding facility. Molitor did it on Wednesday for two innings and got away with it. He did it again last night and, quelle surprise, was burned. It's amazing how rate statistics work.