Richie the Rally Goat

butterscotch with cashews over high quality vanilla

1) I think the FF popularity is a symptom and enhancement of the accessibility, not a cause. Because people understand the game better than they used to, the fantasy football experience became more fun and created newer and deeper fans. Fantasy Football was absolutely a late stage driver, but it needed a Madden to build the baseline first.

Agreed, but that’s won’t not can’t. This CBA negotiation shows me a continued unwillingness to change, but if things continue down the observed course, they could change out of necessity. As the other poster identified in the 94 strike, losing fans can change attitudes

Major League Baseball made that choice 40-ish years ago. Why can’t they make choices to change it? why is this a permanent situation?

If if if… Baines played DH for the last decade of his career. If he played OF for his whole career, who’s to say he would have played 17, or even 10 players need to be evaluated on their accomplishments not their potential personally i agree with the both crowd, and voted yes because the poll on the forum page didn’t give any context to the question that the post provided.

Bingo! You need to evaluate your strategy based on capability to execute. If you are not capable of execution (or the market isn't feasible) the strategy needs to change and thus far hasn't.

@chpettit19 stole my thunder as well, I would add that the strategy of developing pitching talent and supplementing with free agents is a good strategy but execution last year and current offseason to date has been less than desired.

You are correct, money is finite (or inflation would run even more rampant) and there is only so much to go around. we don’t know how much, and that is very important to the negotiation for both sides. until there is mutual agreement on how much there really is, you get these preposterous starting points. Ultimately it is what it is, and overpaid or underpaid is agreed upon in the CBA.

Welcome to TD - great first post - Keep it up!

I don’t understand what you are trying to say here. Should baseball players pay higher taxes? That’s not relevant to a CBA negotiation. Re: the second paragraph: the point here is establishing a shared perception of revenue. If one strategy in the negotiation is opaqueness then the counter is asking for more than you think you can get in order to achieve counter proposal higher than assumed target. The idea is with enough counter proposals meeting in the middle is mutually agreeable, or at least not bad. the work stoppage is mutually destructive. How the two sides get out of it is through negotiation. Leverage in negotiation is key and that is based on the Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement. If the two sides come to a stalemate what is the best outcome for each? For the owners: scabs, but that decreases the value of their teams and associated IP. Over a long enough period TV, Streaming, and Ticket revenue will decline along with advertising revenue. For players it’s joining other leagues. We’ve already seen several players take that as their primary (their value was already short term and couldn’t afford to wait it out). Flooding additional markets with new talent dilutes their market. Not ideal, clearly. lost games for both parties seems like the least painful option for both over the long term, but the market will sour quickly and will become the most painful in a learning curve type of trajectory so by using common negotiation strategy logic we can make some assumptions based on what we know to try to guess at what the objective was for each of the proposals and counters. It is a straw man, but from what I believe to be a reasonably thought out conclusion. YMMV if we agree on assumed objectives, then we can debate outcomes and effectiveness of negotiations and “measure” progress. Could be an interesting exercise

The 94 strike absolutely hurt MLB fandom, but if you look back before the 94 strike MLB averaged a work stoppage every 3 years from the late 70s until ‘94. Your observation on the strike impact is astute but all of the other leagues had work stoppages since the last MLB stoppage in ‘94. it’s a contributor, for sure, but less of a smoking gun

Channeling my inner Chief here: yes

I absolutely agree with the OP that a strike shortened offseason negatively impacts the Twins strategy significantly. I would also add that the change in offseason rhythm exposed Levine as a bit of a one-trick pony. Resilience means adjusting to changing markets. 2021 plan in free agency was the same as it was in 2019 and 2020, but settling for Shoemaker and Happ backfired. This offseason the plan didn't change, Levine went back to the same well. When Plan A is to swoop in on undervalued assets at the end of the offseason but there is never any wiggle room to target players earlier in the offseason, you can't recover and aren't resilient.

If the revenue split is a non-issue, why are they arguing over pre-arb bonus pool? because the players want a larger proportion of the revenue the septupling of income is the PA trying to expand the pie. Instead of taking money away from free agent eligible players. This indicates that the players don’t just accept the owners numbers, they just aren’t getting anywhere arguing about it.

I know it’s small, but agreeing on a bonus pool parameter for top 30 war pre-arbitration players is at least a start. it is more encouraging than any development since December 2 but so I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The owners proposed a 50/50 split without opening their books. In other words they proposed “you’ll get what I choose to give you”

Considering 29 teams are unwilling to open their books, I’d say your radical idea is doa

He is awesome, I agree, but he’s not going to be around the booth for much longer. The learning from him other broadcasters could especially do well: grace. Kaat is such a kind and graceful commentator, he speaks very well to what he knows (which is broad and deep) and doesn’t about which he doesn’t. lots of wisdom there

you could superimpose a simplified spray chart and speak to the shift, or heat maps of pitcher v hitter to show why the catcher sets up, and when that wild pitch gets away... mechanics and fundamentals, there's ways even if the plays aren't as scripted

@Brock Beauchampwhen are we getting the sarc font?

Oh man! It’s an inspirational sports movie in the making

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33140500/mlb-players-association-plan-meet-again-tuesday-sides-make-progress-sources-say Former Twins scout and assistant pitching coach Jeremy Hefner is the only coach kept in the new regime in the Mets organization. Happy to hear of Jeremy’s success

Hooray! They talked for two hours and didn’t have a setback!

Great story, well written - Thanks!

I went off on a tangent in mikelink45’s extremely well written and thought provoking post “When Baseball was King”. But started thinking about why baseball isn’t king. In my mind a significant shift happened in the late 70s and early 80s. The sport that I think was a major contributor was the NFL and not just that the NFL broadcasted it’s games to wide regional audiences scheduled to minimize overlap and put premium matchups in prime time, there was one man… If you’ve been watching NFL games lately, you probably know who I’m talking about: John Madden. The man was a superstar of TV broadcasting. The formula was simple, teach the game in understandable jargon, show everyone how much you LOVE the game. 1988’s John Madden Football video game has the quintessential story about it. The narrative is that Madden wouldn’t lend his name to the game unless it taught kids the strategy and critical thinking. By the 90s many NFL commentators copied Madden, pulling out the telestrator and yelling “boom” but Madden’s legacy lives today through new teachers of the game like Tony Romo. Henry Ford was quoted once "I will build a motor car for the great multitude...constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise...so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces." What Madden, the NFL, and Henry Ford got right is achieving accessible consumer products and experiences. By making them affordable, available and understandable the products/services blossomed into dominant actors in their segments. But alas, this is not a football blog. This, is a baseball blog. In the early days of cable, the MLB didn’t coordinate on an mlb schedule or TV contract that facilitated the growth of the league or airing prime matchups to nation wide audiences. They let the individual teams reach their own TV contracts, competing not only on the diamond, but limiting viewership on the air waves. Has there ever been an MLB teacher of the game, a John Madden-esque commentator who taught deeper insights, strategies? A superstar? Not just describing what happened, but why. There’s many Bert Blylevens’s and John Smoltz’s while on air, talk about why they don’t like the game, and bad-mouth the math nerds, while saying stuff that is antithetical to the strategy of why the shift or pitch call was actually happening in the game. I fall into the camp of fan that the analytics enhances my enjoyment of the game. That is not the case for every fan. The analytical math nerds have taken over many of the successful teams, but of course we don’t want math lessons live on TV. How can baseball more thoroughly democratize the data? Teach the strategies that make the game so slow and confusing for casual fans? Accentuate the minutia that Madden did with the telestrator 40 years ago? Who can be the baseball equivalent of Henry Ford and John Madden?