August J Gloop

I'm certain he pocketed all the cash after misreporting payroll to the pohlads. And he would have got away with it if not for that dog and meddling kids. Luis Arraez is so keyed in to anayltics that he tailors his swing based on count, defense, opposing pitcher. He can't create big power with that approach but he sure can hit the ball where fielders aren't standing. The reason why more guys don't do it is its a) nearly impossible without Arraez hand eye coordination and b) not actually all that valuable (see Arraez WRC ratings only slightly above average. Because it sounds crazy. Could you point us to the Gleeman quotes?

The main reason the Trade market has stalled is because at least 11 teams don't really know how much money they will have for next year. The Fish don't know if they really need to trade Luzardo now or if they can wait until the deadline. The Ms don't know if they actually need to find a way to get two infielders for a net price of $0 or not. Literally nobody has what the Twins have: Two reliable MLB vets on great one year deals. Quality bats with limited risk. Small enough contracts that if you offer up 1 good cost controlled MLB pitcher, you could get them for actual 0. Blake Snell isn't holding that up. The Yankees don't have Polo and Max, No Phils, Atlanta, nobody. Teams that miss out on Snell can't pivot to offering up a 3 win player for free and the Twins have two players who fit that bill.

The connection is that AMZN is currently using these bankruptcy proceedings to create a baseline market value for streaming negotiations. What is settled here will likely impact how much leverage the Twins have in getting their own deal from AMZN or anyone else. In the absence of an agreement, pessimism and optimism are doing a tango in Twins Territory.

EmRod OPS at A+ 863. He's 2 years younger than average, age 20, still learning english and living in the middle of flipping IOWA. Still we've got some cats in this thread questioning his dedication to getting better or his professionalism. It bears repeating: He's 20. I dunno if these tools will translate, but literally nothing about his 23 season says they won't. At his age taking almost 100 walks. I don't know where to find minor league splits, but it would be good to know how many of his PAs got to two strikes. Maybe he actually hits better than average at two strikes. He's at A+ ball, he should be trying to develop skills like that anyway. Obviously, like Julien when he gets to the bigs he'll want to start ending things earlier in ABs with authority, but for now, working on a 2 stike approach is good, even if Ks become part of the deal.

I think the problem we're really running into on this is that there is no useful info. So all we can do is go on what has been done. AMZN would be smart to disregard the past and just offer all the games of the teams they have rights to to anyone with a prime account. They could sneak the price in to an increase and basically nobody would notice. It's hard for us who don't hold AMZN in high regard to imagine a future where they tear RSNs down and replace them with something actually consumer friendly. Imagine a sports sub where all the leagues of the world are easily searched and indexed. Scores can be hidden. Streams are up to 8K HDR. You can follow your favorite teams and players. All built on the great work of the MLB.TV app. I get misty. But nope. It'll be $15 bucks a month and you'll have to select your home market, and will only be able to do that once a year.

You make a solid point there. I just kinda assumed AMZN would want to charge. I'd push them not to. I mean considering it's all fantasy land anyway. If people were watching all the games, the numbers wouldn't be so wildly different between the day starts and the night starts.

https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2023/10/mlb-wild-card-viewership-declines-espn-sweeps/ All of it was down, particularly the day games. But its also not like the games don't end up overlapping anyway. One would have to start at 10 AM to have no overlap. The obvious other easy solution is to have that wild card stuff on the weekend (or not have it at all). I think it's fun and I'm sure the owners like the extra bucks.

With Fried, i think the main thing was his injuries were badly timed and he wants to test the market. I am maybe less optimistic about the long term prospects of Lee anyway so I am thinking the 5 Mil year of Fried and the comp pick will be similar value, and would be willing to risk being wrong. As for Polo I think most teams would do it, but they don't have Polo and a better replacement at 2B. The Twins are darn close to having two of the top 10 2Bs on the same roster. In fact I don't think most teams have any surplus value on their infield (Reds excluded), let alone two top shelf hitters. I assume the delay is the Twins waiting out teams hoping that the Twins will instead send Julien. His placement on the top10 right now is fortuitous, since it means that most teams have their shredder placing Julien high as well. Julien for Luzardo and Meyer? I feel like Julien is currently worth two good chips. That could be dumb. But I'd definitely be willing to make that risk as well, but then the ATL deal would have to be cash for cash, no Brooks lee.

That trade also had Julien in it. It's stupid lopsided in favor of the mariners.

I could definitely see 45 becoming the free to air RSN, now that we know RSNs really don't make much money. Probably turn more profit as a part time RSN than a 24 hour one that fights with every provider about per subscriber $$.

Because they only exist due to the foolish idea that people will watch them all. They don't. But the media deals require that no other game start at the same time. It would be trivial to have a superfan broadcast for the wild card round with 2 games at once and some actually charismatic (Trevor Plouffe comes to mind) in studio hosts keeping everyone up with the key plays. Otherwise the digital sub-channels would have each game on them and hopping would work easy.

Just remember Clevinger is a clubhouse cancer who sidelines in beating women. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaredwyllys/2023/01/25/mike-clevinger-is-a-problem-the-chicago-white-sox-dont-want/?sh=6e28c6003c14 and then look at his grody projections https://www.fangraphs.com/players/mike-clevinger/12808/stats?position=P I'm good there.

We also have to remember that ad revenue is a value add problem if we want to charge for the service. People don't really like ponying up to pay for a service to just have Shaq come on and hawk garbage car insurance with a cheap CGI character. It lowers the price they'd be willing to pay. Even to the point that they generally expect ad support to render the service free.

Assuming that #4 is Vazquez, the only question is who is Kirilloff's platoon partner at first. My hunch is that it's Farmer if those are the 4.

Martin can serve as a limited platoon partner for Julien at 2B, facing those tougher lefty starter that his contact profile actually matches well against and as a timeshare CF to manage Bux playing time. Give Bux two consecutive off days coupled with scheduled off days and Martin is the CF on those games. He's pretty fleet, so he'd be useful off the bench after a late Jeffers double.

This is darn right, Ya'll. Pablo, Luzardo, Ryan, Ober, Woo, Paddack. Upside, multiple seasons of staying together. That's a great starting 6. Can be had with limited expenditures of anything but money, Kep and Polo. A couple mid level prospects might need to get involved, but it's within reach, even in these uncertain financial times. I'm actually kinda keen on pointing MaxK to Atlanta these days. I think there's a bigger deal that could be done for Max Fried. ATL has failed to lock him up like all the others. If they sent Kepler, that would let Acuna move to left where their OF D would be truly elite and ATL could score a top prospect to help soothe the loss of Fried. Would one season of Fried at 5 Million be worth Brooks Lee to the Twins? Probably. If there was a sensible extension to have, certainly. Then I would wrestle with what to with Polo. Is there a deal with MIA that gets Luzardo? Odds are if they pay Polo's salary and Luzardo's, they can probably get it done with SWR or maybe Festa (not sure who the untouchables in pitching really are, know SWR isn' one of them). I'm fuzzy on if Polo is even attractive to the Marlins who seem to need OF more than IF.

I hate being negative about stuff. My brain works best in a building way so let's talk about the problem MLB finds itself in how it can get eyeballs in front of games. Over in the thread on John's post about the Bally stuff I threw together a Q&D estimate on how much MLB needs to pull in per team per season to make the Twins Baseline revenue (which was considered one of the worst TV deals, bTW). It came to 370M. Considering that was a bad deal, we'll bump it to 400M in revenue. How the blazes can they get that money without selling their essence to some major media conglomerate? By remembering that MLB already is one of those. They need 30 local channels, each like 45 KSTC. The acquisition cost would be high, but not impossible. They would need someone to help them clear a bunch of existing deals. AMZN and Apple come to mind. We'll get back that. The Dodgers are probably paying Shohei more than it would cost to buy 45, so the league can get together and buy up these networks. These nets wouldn't be baseball 24/7 but generally stick with what they currently carry, even continue being affiliates to the networks like they are now. They would just have some additional programming around the year. Caribbean Series, Ausssie leagues, that kind of stuff from time to time. It would be totally free to air, and part of basic cable packages. No attempt to really turn a profit, but just to break even on the production side. Let's say that they needed some deep pockets to help front all that cash (even these billionaires probably would). We already know AMZN and Apple are very interested in having MLB as an exclusive on their service and I bet Peacock and Hulu (The mouse is angry) would get interested quick. In exchange for helping in that acquisition and buying out of all existing deals, they would get exclusive streaming rights to all games for 10 years. Each fan would pick a home market and they wold get those games for free, but to watch the out of market games and national games and MLB network or the library of old games, you'd have to be a subscriber to that service. No extra fees, just a base exclusive perk. These local broadcast channels could negotiate with other sports leagues, and such. Much like YES. YES would essentially be buying a tower to transmit from, really. They could run reruns of MASH. Doesn't really matter. Outside of the Baseball season, it would be drip income. Because they would be using all this as a way to grow the fan interest in attending games. There would be space for MiLB game of the week, the post season would be viewable OTA and they wouldn't have any more of these dum dum post season games at 2 in the afternoon on a weekday. All this is to say that the model is broken, so quit trying to glue it back together. Build something new that actually adds value to the consumer. I'm sure there are tons of roadblocks, starting with the fact that nobody but me wants to even try this. But I wanted to share my stupid idea. So if you read all the way to here, thanks.

TL/DR - It's really expensive and teams are most likely going to be losing money on broadcast without RSNs to help. Let's just say that there's personnel cost of 60 people per MLB team who wouldn't be paid if there were no broadcast. Those individual pay rates would vary by market and a bunch of other factors, but for our discussion let's just grab at a figure that will likely be way too low. And it's probably more than 60 people since we're just guessing and i can't find any consistent data on broadcast crews. Anyhow. The average salary of our fake broadcast team will be 100K per season. 60 mil / 81. 740,740.74 per game for people. We have to consider benefits and insurance and all the other things that come with having people running around with cables and electricity. It's very quickly up to 1M for human costs to put on a baseball game. Now we have to consider all the non-human costs. Electricity, equipment depreciation and damage, media licensing (gotta pay to use Song 2 in your bump), and a bunch of other things us non production types haven't thought of will bring the cost easily up to 1.5M per game at any stadium. So that's 121,500,00. The Twins haven't had to worry about that since they were essentially just selling the product that this expensive production were pointing their cameras at. They just planned to play and get around 150M from the two deals (local and national). So for the Twins, they need to generate 370M for their home season. We'll consider the road games lost money as it's likely a way everything will balance out. The road team will kick in 30% or something to the production, who knows how that breaks out, but for our dirty calcs we'll just say revenue needs to be that 370 figure for the Twins to get back to the Bally levels. We're back to guessing how many people will subscribe. Let's just make a quick table. The subscribers will average 7 months to smooth out cancels and late adds FANS----REV at $5per month----15---25 100K --- 3,500,000 (eek) --- 10,500,000 (uhoh) --- 17,500,000 (I think we get the point) T0 get a cost that people are likely to pay at the numbers they need, subs can't be more than 7.50 a month. Streaming data is clear on that. Unless you're Netflix, that's the ceiling where you lose subscribers en masse. Each team needs to average 7 million subscribers on various platforms at 7.50. This can't be done. Before you say, AJG you forgot ad revenue. I'll ask you to consider how many commercials you actually saw during broadcasts. Dairy Queen, car insurance and ads for the short boys. Even on YES, the ad revenue is not that great. They make up for it in 24 hour volume. (And the yankees only own 26% of YES). Even if teams can (they can't) subsidize 2.50 (and then only charge 5 per), it's still an impossible number for each team on their own. Which is why I'm so skeptical of AMZN's motives here. For AMZN, consolidating all the streaming into a tidy worldwide package where they need to consider a worldwide viewership value of 32 Million people? That doesn't seem nearly as crazy. Since for them it could be more fuzzy when you consider other factors like injecting ads for AMZN services, bundling it with prime, so on, etc. Owning the streaming rights for these 5 teams just doesn't make any sense unless it's just step one to becoming the only MLB network.

Buck is on the board at AMZN, though.

Do you think the company that uses AI to handle most customer complaints is too worried about baseball fans continuing to complain about something they've been constantly crying about for 20 years?

What other reason would AMZN have to bail Diamond out? It's literally not worth anything and all they need to do is wait and they can get this stuff for free next year after Diamond liquidates. But by investing now, they have agreements in place they can use to their advantage. Do we think they just feel sorry for Diamond employees and don't want them to have a crappy Christmas '24? There's a tactical advantage to investing vs acquiring. Less oversight. They made this agreement in secret and blindsided MLB lawyers today. This is an aggressive move, not something one does when they want to build a harmonious agreement. MLB and linear sports in general are weak right now and AMZN sees a chance to force some outcomes.

We know that AMZN is not going to stop at 5 teams, for sure. Literally the only reason to buy the streaming rights at this flea market price is to have an established position for negotiations. They can hold the streaming of 1/6th of the teams hostage to force those negotiations. They can demand a slice of mlb.tv saying that their rights supersede mlb's. They could have a sympathetic judge issue an injunction preventing any operation of mlb.tv until the rights mess was sorted out, but then issue continuances until June. They do these dirty deals all the dang time. Amazon can also pressure (or even dictate, we don't know the terms of the purchase) Diamond to not broadcast any MLB games on cable. Effectively take MLB off the air in 11 markets unless MLB agrees to their streaming terms which will now be less than the 150 (for 11 teams over 3 years) MLB turned down this winter. (https://cordcuttersnews.com/mlb-reportedly-rejects-amazons-offer-to-take-over-live-streaming-of-mlb-games-from-bally-sports/) So no, this is NOT a likely good result for the Twins or the fans. It might give us a halfway decent stream partner, and probably will result in Twolves and Wild games on Prime by the end of the month. It's highly unlikely to be worth everything that is lost. Trust that AMZN doesn't really care about the short term implications or inconveniences for the Twins and Cardinals. They want to put the screws to everything until they hold the rights to Yankees games. Consider that they spent over a billion dollars on the Lord of the Rings show that 37% of people who started it even finished. They are still making season 2. They can absorb huge losses if they think it helps them keep people subscribed to prime. Being the exclusive provider of MLB would be such a perk for prime. Let's just hope they don't accidentally kill MLB along the way.

I don't think this will be that great for the Twins. All AMZN did was buy the streaming rights to the 5 teams that Bally's held them on. I doubt AMZN has any intention of carrying Bally's or even helping them out of bankruptcy. They're just raiding the streaming rights, to have a stronger postion on their negotiation with MLB. They now have a settled price of $20M per small market team for the stream rights (likely multiple years, too). Bally's has exhaustively established that the broadcast rights aren't worth 50M so the Twins are gonna take a hit there.

The Twins can and should consider trading both Lee and or Lewis in the right deal. Logan Gilbert is definitely not that deal. CES and Steer would have been better spent on someone other than Mahle, for sure, but that's just a general failing of Mahle not the idea. Although my guess is that they wanted to Trade CES and SS and Mahle was the best starter they could get for them. And the Twins aren't really out much, since Steer and CES would likely just have played mostly in StPaul last year. I suppose you could say that Steer would have been a instead of Donny Barrels. Wen Polo got hurt, CES would have come up to join the platoon mess. I doubt Steer would have put up the same numbers for the Twins, since Barrells got 200 fewer PAs than steer in 23. WAR is basically a counting stat for nerds, and you can't just go per PA,but it kinda works like that. if we figure Steers WAR/PA* 450 PA that Barrels got he works out to 1.4 WAR. so they sacrificed .2 WAR by sending Steer away. CED was worth .5 last year and his PT likely would have been similar, so let's say that they lost out on .7 WAR and 4 Million in Solono Salary last year as a consequence of Mahle being a misfire. Not exactly franchise destroying. I guess it mostly hinges on if you think these two have a future in MLB. (I tend to think CES - yes, Steer, no)

Huh, I hadn't noticed he didn't capitalize the p. But my point is that if the Twins paid both Polo and Gilbert's salary that would save the Ms an additional 4 Million. You know Jerry would do it. He's not scared of throwing some cast off into the 5 spot in the rotation to save some cash and hope to make another trade in a few days.