TheLeviathan

Unless Roden and Rojas for Varland is on the table.....pass on any trades for established guys. Relievers are at their highest "buy" point right now and the investment simply isn't worth the risk. I'd argue you can sell and improve this pen AND not jeopardize the future.

And also add a couple of arms that are fringe starters/good reliever conversion types as your second or third piece in trades. As @Mike Sixelhas pointed out, the Yankees AAA has a few guys with some really nice peripherals that aren't going to be hard to add in as filler for someone like Jeffers that could supplement this plan.

I like that last idea a lot, I think it's a much cleaner way to eliminate the shenanigans these measures are fighting against. The more I consider these the more I see them as a significant negative to the Quad A, short-term big leaguers with very little upside gained from it.

I also dislike that. I'd rather accelerate free agency once majpr league service time starts. I also wonder if the drop from 5 to 3 options will cause releases which is counter productive to their goal.

X-men '97 is all the campy, heartfelt, and action a cartoon can muster.

It's been nice to see the offense scoring more when they have opportunities, but there is a good chance of regression in the months ahead. The team is 8th in slugging, 11th in average and OBP, 11th in OPS.....yet 6th in runs scored. It wouldn't surprise me if we see a dip in some of that offensive output for a long stretch simply because they no longer sequence their way into some good fortune in run scoring. Also, I keep hearing that the new management team is somehow radically different. Did I imagine us trotting out terrible shortstops over and over again despite evidence the eyes and the stats couldn't deny? Or that they are still putting Trevor Larnach in the field? Or they waited half a season to conclude that Luke Keaschall's arm couldn't break a wet napkin? This is still a front office and a manager that are slow to respond and far too trusting of veteran players. I honestly don't see anything other than the players loving the good vibes being any different. (And...to be fair....I think managers are basically just that: short term vibe creators. Shelton appears to be good at that. For now) Lastly, I'll never understand why so many fans want analysis to be "good" or "bad". Analysis should take the evidence in front of you and dig into it for what it is. I guess I'm the crazy person that when I ask why my head is warm, I'd rather have someone shoot straight with me whether it's a warm sunny day or my hat is on fire.

How can anyone disagree with such a profound and succinct argument. /thread.

At this point you can pretty much name a Twin and the answer to "Can they field their position well?" is an emphatic "No." There are like....3 guys?....Maybe?.....where the answer is yes.

Twins have two more with Houston, 3 with the Yanks, 7 with the Guardians, 3 with the Cubs, 3 with the Royals, 3 with the A's, and 3 with the Angels before the deadline. 3 teams above .500 and 4 below, so it's not a daunting schedule but this team also lost a series 3-1 to the Royals earlier this year. At the end of the day, reaching .500 is supposed to be the point where you take a deep breath and get to work on contending, whereas we're talking about it as if it makes you a contender. This team simply doesn't have the defense, bullpen, or consistency offensively to be considered a contender. I honestly don't care that the AL is weak, that's a terrible reason to pretend we're something we're not. We should be sellers.

Forgot to check the underside of your boat der Craig, dontcha know?

The person who refuses to read and respond to arguments in good faith is going to whine now? Good lord. Page 3 had two rational explanations made for why a revenue sharing agreement will likely need those parameters to move forward. They have since been elaborated on repeatedly. On ignore you go. Good day.

Bad faith and unserious.

I've alreasy stated their last two releases were stupid and bad for the game. It'd be nice to not have to keep repeating myself. But here we go having to do it again: Total revenue sharing is absolutely necessary and number one by a country mile. That won't happen without a cap and floor as part of that agreement. Why that's necessary has been elaborated on north of a dozen times now. I expect nothing short of yet another bad faith retort. Go nuts, there is nothing I have left for this unserious conversation.

I'll happily bash the owners. They aren't my white knights. Eff them for taking public money on their stadiums and all sorts of other things and privatizing all the wealth generated from it. Eff them for underpaying the minor leaguers for so long. Eff them for being billionaires and siphoning so much wealth out of the economy. Eff them for creating this stupid revenue system in the first place. They're terrible, awful, crappy people. I hate everything they represent. They're the worst people in the room. But even the worst people can be correct. They are the ones closest to what is best for the game. I wish that wasn't the case. Let me be clear: I'm rooting for the league to be strong and have a great CBA for a healthy, competitive environment. Full stop, two sides be damned. I wish the players were making an argument that supported that instead of one that continues the status quo.

It's almost like a certain organization purposely kept those folks from being represented. Weird behavior by our champions of the little guy! But yeah, another bad faith answer concedes to my point and the general tone here that you are unserious.

Yeah? How is Matthew Becker's paycheck looking? Shall we scroll through minor league baseball and observe all the wealth that strong union has fought for? Or the awesome system that definitely doesn't push players to football and basketball over a league that requires a decade of indentured servitude? Again....straight face tell me who they use their strength to fight for?

They are strong. And they have used that strength in service to Scott Boras over literally thousands of their members for decades. What an odd thing to be devoted to and so passionately unwilling to consider the rational arguments laid out for you in this thread. Just bizarre and simplistic. I hold no such devotion to the owners, in fact, it angers me that they're more reasonable right now. I hate it.

So just plain bad faith and continuing to deny what is in black and white....cool. This is my shocked face you had nothing to say about 30 years of screwing minor leaguers and young players:

It's hard to have a rational conversation when you've set it up in such a way that one side is evil and the other is the pinnacle of goodness. And yes...that is exactly what you're doing. Your lack of nuance is causing you to take a larger political opinion you have and apply it ham-handedily to a situation that is really weird relative to other labor disputes. Firstly....yes, the players often invoke the fans. Here. Here. Here. Basically every single time they respond to the league. So right away you are painfully wrong, made an assumption about your precious white knights, and predicated your whole argument around that falsehood. It's kinda the theme here. So I'm going to reiterate my obviously correct statement: both sides are trying to win over fan sentiment. Right now, based on the data we have, the owners are closer on that issue than the players are. The players are going to need to improve their PR on this or risk it being leveraged against them at the bargaining table. This stubbornly simplistic view is why you don't see how the cap and floor work together as assurance for an agreement on revenue sharing. Essentially...you don't want to. You aren't considering the situation with any fairness or depth here. "Me say one side bad guy! Bad guy bad!" is kinda what we're dealing with here. I'll give you an example, this time of "Me say one side good guy! Good guy good!" and try to argue the union looks out for the 1200 members. Explain to me how you can say that with a straight face while MLB players are essentially indentured servants until they're 30 on, BY FAR, the worst CBA for drafted players in all of sports? If they cared about their 1200 members, you'd think their top priority the last 30 years would be making sure the one thing ALL OF THEIR MEMBERS GO THROUGH, would be the compensation piece they want right. Instead? They care more about a concept that only a very small share of their membership ever gets to enjoy. Let Ryan Kreidler and thousands like him suffer....Mr. Boras has that sweet, sweet Joe Ryan money to worry about. The union's arguments don't do squat for Matt Wallner, Matt Wallbeck, or any other rando Matts that teams have exploited for their prime years at pennies on the dollar. They've never made that their argument. Can we be less simplistic about this? Otherwise, what's the point?

5 games under. -30 run differential. People are talking about playoffs. Question for you folks, are you as equally, easily convinced in other ventures? I have a few lake cabins in the Sonoran I'd like to discuss with you.....

If the fans perceptions didn't matter, neither side would be so actively trying to curry their favor. It's ridiculous to pretend that the optics towards the paying customer are irrelevant. Or catering to the desires of the paying customer are irrelevant. (Hence why the players keep talking about ticket prices and the owners keep talking about competitive balance. Both things that fans overwhelmingly have strong feelings about that their side is actively on the better side of that sentiment on.) Again....in order to reach a point in which owners agree to pool and share revenues, there will have to be agreements and parameters put on this. Nearly every full brain-stemmed person on the planet agrees that sharing revenues is necessary for the betterment of the league, the next question is...how do we get an agreement on that? Well, in part you get it with a floor. That way money from big markets going out to small markets is spent per the CBA. It's a mandatory piece that ensures all ownership parties act in good faith towards this joined effort. Likewise, a cap also ensures that all parties act in good faith and don't find alternative revenues or bring in revenues beyond which other parties can do so to likewise break that arrangement. It's just like parameters you should setup before ever agreeing to split the bill with a group of largely selfish people. (Which is what the ownership group is) If you don't, the revenue splitting agreement won't be worth the paper it was forged on.

I think you're probably right. I hate the NBA's Frankenstein of nonsense they call a cap, but it feels like we may be headed there with baseball. It's better than nothing. I really wish for the outcome of 60/40 and a hard cap though.

I compared how money is shared, not anything between the lines. I find the comparisons between the lines to be silly, but money is money. Cap/floor arrangements are the guardrails and sanity checks that allow an agreement on shared revenue to proceed. It's like everyone agreeing to split the bill at a restaurant but not before the ensure that no one is just getting water or buying their way through the most expensive items on the list.

Part of my issue is people say things like "comparisons aren't very useful" and then proceed to make that comparison as if it is. I agree that revenue distribution is wildly important. I do not see that happening without a cap and a floor. These things all are inter-related. The owner of the New York Knicks would probably love to keep all of the money he'd get in broadcasting, distribution, gate, etc. Instead he shares all of that revenue...but in return he wants a system in place that prevents other owners from underspending the money that is being shared (floor) as well as a measure to prevent some guy (like...Detroit Tiger owner who was about to die and spent like a drunken sailor) from having an advantage he could have had by keeping all his own revenues but he no longer has because he shared. All of those elements have to work in lockstep to create a balanced competitive environment. Like the rest of the leagues have. When the Milwaukee Brewers go to play the New York Yankees they have a metric f*ck-ton of disadvantages working against them that the Bucks and Knicks don't. Or the Packers and Jets. Or the Mammoth and Rangers. Revenue sharing is the central thing and should be shared with zero carve-outs - players get a share of everything. But no league can set that up without a cap/floor that ensures the competition happens between the lines and through competent management. What every other league has, regardless of the whacky nature of each individual sport, is that last part. Baseball does not. Fans - who have a great deal of say in how this turns out contrary to other opinions - want that to change. Either side tht doesn't understand that could deeply regret it in the years ahead.