Cap'n Piranha

I think (assuming the Twins sign Story), Polanco and Story will each play in the field 6x a week, and DH 0-1x a week, Urshela will play in the field 4-5x a week (1x 2B, 1x SS, 2-3x 3B), Miranda will play in the field 2-3x a week and DH 2-3x a week, and Arraez will bounce around a lot (LF 1x, 3B 1-2x, DH 1-2x). As soon as one of those 4 guys gets hurt, playing time is no longer an issue.

What pitching are you going to spend money on right now? I think I'd rather spend money on Story than money AND prospects on pitching.

There are worse problems to have than 2 MLB-caliber shortstops on the big league roster at the same time.

They don't need it just because it's there. They need it because the Twins have currently 0 even average options at shortstop in their entire system. It's not like Lewis is a surefire stick at short, and I'm not enthused about Urshela, Polanco, or Gordon as even a platoon option. Not only do the Twins have $35M to $45M they could easily spend now, they can shed the Sano and Sanchez contracts after this year--that's close to $12M even if you account for Sano's buyout. Kepler is off the books the year after that--that's $20Mish that is easily replaceable, and there are very few things money can better be spent on than a SS who's 6th in the league in WAR amongst SS's since becoming a full-time regular.

There are no pitchers available for just money anymore. Fangraphs estimates the Twins payroll for 2022 as currently at $94M--that's just not acceptable if the Twins are trying to compete, and if the Twins aren't trying to compete, why in the heck did they trade for Sonny Gray (absent somehow finding out Cincy was willing to just give him away, relatively speaking, and they think they can flip him for something better than Petty). The Twins, if they are competing, should have no qualms upping their payroll by $30M to $40M--it will be hard for them to do that without signing either Story or Correa at this point.

If Story or Correa is not starting at SS for the Twins on Opening Day, then this series of movies was a mistake. There is no reason to give up your starting catcher, shortstop, third baseman, and a top prospect, for 2 years of a good-not-great pitcher, a questionable DH, and a guy who's best being a utility player.

The MLBPA could have easily gotten a salary floor had they wanted it, so long as they also agreed to a hard salary cap. They didn't, so they didn't.

I read it as if the player submits pre-draft physicals, you do indeed have to offer him a contract, and it has to be for at least 75% of the slot value--this is under the assumption that if you have a player's physicals, and still draft him, you can't then back out by claiming his physicals aren't good. If I'm right, this opens a potentially nasty can of worms (although the frequency of if happening would probably be pretty low), which is what happens if something non-physical related happens after the pick is made, but the contract is offered? Say a player is accused of a crime the day after the draft, for example; does the team still have to offer him a contract?

The thing that strikes me through this entire offseason, both before and after the disruption, is how "reasonable" the rates have been for free agent pitching. The fact that we haven't been in on any of it is discouraging to me in that light. I think it's safe to say that in two years Falvine is either going to look like a genius, or is going to be fired.

I'm fine with whatever the Twins want to do, so long as it does not impact our ability to compete in 2023 or beyond. Obviously, things change when the games start being played, but I just don't see how the Twins perform better than at least 3 of NYY, BOS, TOR, TBR, CWS, HOU, OAK, and SEA, not to mention LAA, DET, and TEX could all be significantly improved. If the Twins sign Rodon, Story, Pineda, and bullpen help, they certainly should be a strong contender, but that will take at least $60M, so I just don't see that happening. As such, I think the Twins should make a couple smaller moves, but leave room for the up and coming core to develop; if they do, great! We all feel really good about 2023. If they don't, then having Rodon/Story et al on your team probably isn't going to do you much good beyond maybe 2022 anyways.

I said the Twins were fortunate with their passel of prospects, which implies that just being terrible and amassing prospects will not be a surefire path to success. As has been pointed out by others, in 2001, Cleveland was 5th in payroll, and Arizona 8th. In 2002, Arizona rose to 4th. In fact, if we use the (somewhat crude) breakout of high payroll, mid payroll, and small payroll as 1-10, 11-20, and 21-30, the Twins became mid-payroll in 2003, meaning that out of the 48 teams that made the playoffs in 2001-2006, the breakout is as follows: 2001--5-2-1 2002--4-2-2 2003--4-2-2 2004--6-2-0 2005--5-3-0 2006--3-4-1 So the breakdown ends up being 27-15-6, so 56% high payroll, 31% mid-payroll, 13% low payroll. Put another way, 45% of high payroll teams made the playoffs (27/60), 25% of mid-payroll teams (15/60), and 10% of low payroll teams (6/60). In fact, other than the A's, only 2 other organization in the low payroll group made the playoffs--Florida 1x, and the Twins 1x (who immediately after making the playoffs stopped being low payroll). This demonstrates just how much better from an analytical standpoint the A's were than everyone else in the early 2000's.

I'm much more inclined to think the 2001-2006 Twins were fortunate with the passel of prospects they accumulated while being awful for essentially 7 straight years (1993-1999), than that they were smart and good. Look at the paucity of small market teams that made the playoffs in 2001-2006--other than the A's and Twins, you had the Marlins once and the Padres twice. Going further though, this sort of reinforces my point--there are too many smart teams these days, and they are all smart through analytics. There will never again be another team that can compete through getting fortunate, or drafting in the top 5 for 5 straight years. Analytics has been a great leveller of the playing field in the sense that any team can now compete. Money is less important (although still important), so the best thing that can happen for the league is to correct the inclination to lean completely into analytical rebuilding. The only way that happens is by making it so all teams can compete relatively equally in free agency.

This is true, and of course $100M is enough to be competitive in baseball--because of analytics. It has levelled the playing field in a way that didn't exist 20 years ago, where a team like the Rays can more or less match the Yankees on non-payroll spending, and then run a low payroll to offset that.

Eh, it's more like this.

In the exact sense I said. Amazon does not need Walmart (or any other retailer) in order to sell goods to consumers. The Yankees do need someone (preferably multiple someones, as 162 games of NYY v BOS is pretty boring) in order to have baseball games. The NFL is doing perfectly fine from a revenue standpoint, despite paying much more to it's players ($6Bish in 2021, compared to $4B for MLB in 2021). Maybe that's because football is nationally popular, whereas baseball tends to be regionally popular--this is a reality of baseball's own making. More national interest equals more national contracts, which are invariably more lucrative than local ones. Might true revenue splits hurt the 4-6 biggest teams in the short term? Yes. But that would be made up if baseball itself was more popular.

The Pirates, under the most recent CBA (or anything like it) would never be able to get within $100M on payroll with the Yankees/Dodgers/Red Sox, etc. By definition they cannot compete. They can have (relatively) higher payrolls, but that will be because they paid their homegrown players more to stick around through a year or two of FA, not because they went toe-to-toe against the Yankees in the bidding for Gerrit Cole. The teams that compete for $100M do so because they employ cutting edge analytics which offset the otherwise insurmountable gap in payroll. Put another way--would you rather have $200 a week to spend on groceries for a family of 4, or $100? Now how about if I told you that if you choose $200, you can only shop regular price items at Byerly's, but if you choose $100 you can use coupons and shop anywhere you want, while also getting an e-mail blast of everything that's on sale, and where? Minus the analytics, you would never be able to get as much food for $100 as you could for $200--the same thing holds true for payroll.

Maybe they're collecting data at games that no one else is able to? Maybe tracking hundreds of data points across hundreds of players across hundreds of games requires very robust data collection, processing, and analyzing processes? The Pirates could fire their whole analytics department true, but they would not finish 57-105. They'd finish 20-142, because they would constantly have no MLB quality players, and the players they did have on the MLB roster would stagnate and be completely overmatched in every single game. The point of analytics is that, unlike payroll, the Pirates can compete with any team. If the Pirates spend $20M and the Yankees $200M, the Yankees will not get vastly more worth from that, like they would on payroll. As such, analytics is the only way small market teams can compete with large market teams, barring true revenue sharing (each MLB team gets $333M of the $10B total revenue MLB creates, regardless of how much of that revenue that team actually created). The better analogy would be that analytics departments are like an entrepreneur. They identify an inefficiency in the system, and create a product (i.e. players) to fill that inefficiency, and then sell that product to another business before it gets too expensive to run. The proceeds from that sale are then used to pay the bills, and develop the next product. Wash, rinse, repeat. Shipt can't compete with Target, but it can do something Target is not. The Pirates can't compete with the Yankees on payroll, but they can on analytics.

You really think MLB teams are using open source data? I guarantee you MLB teams have access to way more data than the casual fan, and are also generating and cleaning their own proprietary data. The Twins don't have a fangraphs analyst, a bref analyst, a statcast anaylst, etc. The Pirates don't spend an extra $20M on payroll because they don't need to, because their analysts make it so they don't need to. The only reason to throw cash at a problem (for example, how to build a winning roster) is because you lack the capability to find alternative solutions. As the professor in the article I linked opined, payroll is not the biggest mover in terms of success in MLB--analytics, scouting, and good management are. That's why the Rays are one of the 5 best organizations in baseball, and the Mets can't even make the playoffs. Further, even if the Pirates DID spend another $20M on payroll, it's irrelevant and pointless. $20M on the FA agent market will get you, on average, 2-3 WAR. So the Pirates can do that, and instead of finish 61-101, they can finish 64-98? Or if they kill it on their signings, and get triple the expected WAR for their $20M, they still finish 70-92. Or they can spend half that $20M on analytics (by employing 50-100 guys whose purpose is to sustain and operate the analytics department), and find the next wave of players that will form the core of the team that can win 80 or 90 or 100 games. The Pirates will never be able to build a competitive team by spending on payroll. Never. So why even try?

MLB teams are not competitors, in the truest sense of the word. Amazon doesn't need Walmart and Target to operate. The Yankees do need the Red Sox and Blue Jays to operate. Enhanced national revenues are good for all.

I like that more people are jumping on my "MLBPA directs allocated revenue as it sees fit idea!"

I mean, leaving aside that your chart there is almost 4 years old, and comes from an anonymous poster on reddit of all places (forgive me if I take that with a grain of salt), I've heard from other sources that dozens/hundreds is now the norm. Mike Sixel on this site had a post awhile back about the Cardinals (not reputed as cutting edge in analytics) about them adding 100 people to their R&D department (I'd have to deep dive to find that post). Gleeman on GatG has talked about how full the Twins FO is when he goes down there. That said, even if I'm wrong, the larger point I was making is that FO's today are very large organizations--the Cardinals actually list their entire FO (including coaching staff and scouts) on their website--it's 345 people. If the average cost to the Cardinals to employ those people is $100k (including salary, 401k match, payroll taxes, health benefits, etc.), which seems low if anything, that's $34.5M just to pay the people who operate the team. The 2021 Braves are not a particularly good example if we're attempting to find a median team--as commenters on that article pointed out, the Braves get revenue from land surrounding the stadium that many (most?) other teams don't get. They also were 2nd in attendance, and got to play in every round of the playoffs (a playoff game, assuming 40k tickets sold at an average of $50 is an extra $2M in revenue), netting them potentially $16M in extra revenue; that's almost as much as the Marlins make on their total TV deal (source). In that same article, it shows the Braves TV deal is 8th highest in the league.

So in short, they don't have 26 players making the minimum. Got it. And for what it's worth, the Pirates are just about at the bottom of their bottoming out. OF COURSE their payroll is low. But go back 6 years to 2016, when they were coming off of 3 straight playoff years, including a 98 win year in 2015, and the payroll was $99M, under the same owner as today I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand. Bad teams who expect to be bad don't pay for veterans so they can lose 90 games instead of 100. But once those teams start getting good, they invariably start spending. Also, what is your source on that revenue sharing number? The closest I could find was about $210M in an article that incidentally quotes a guy saying payroll is only about 16% of the variation between teams in winning percentage (take that for what you will). According to this, the Pirates would be much better off spending $100M on scouts and analytic capabilities than players, none of which would show up in payroll figures. Therein is a part of the debate that I've yet to see mentioned--when payroll is excluded, it is far more expensive to field a competitive club today than it was even 10 years ago. Between draft/international signing money, MiLB pay, 5-6 full coaching staffs, roving instructors, a full baseball operations suite (including dozens if not hundreds of analytics guys), stadium operation and upkeep, travel expenses, and more, I would guess that every single team wishing to be at all competitive is paying $100M or more a year. That would mean MLB teams are paying $3B a year before a single player is payed or game is played. In that sense, players are actually getting the lion's share of the remaining revenue (approx $7B, players made $4B last year). https://triblive.com/sports/bucco-baseball-lacking-dollars-and-sense/

No, there's no chance they would. Because there's nothing stopping them from doing that now--and yet they don't.

I'm sure there are myriad holes that would need to be plugged up--there's no chance I though of everything, haha.

Couldn't agree more with this. I honestly don't know what I'm missing--how can the MLBPA honestly think it will increase payroll to reduce the penalties for exceeding an amount that almost no teams are exceeding, or for that matter, even approaching? The only fair way forward is for there to be a 50/50 split of all revenue, including any future expansion fees. I've in the past proposed going one step further, and taking player pay completely out of the hands of the teams, and having the MLBPA divide their share of the revenue however they see fit. In this system, all players are under contract to the team that holds their rights (whether through drafting/IFA signing) for a specified period of time (12 years for IFA which includes the year of signing if before/during the regular season, 10 years for HS signees, and 7 years for college draftees). Players in this period get a restricted no-trade clause 2 years before FA (10 teams), and full NTC in the last year before FA. Players who are a certain amount of years past their initial acquisition (7 for IFA, 5 for HS, 3 for college) must be on the 40 man roster. Upon entering FA, a player can sign wherever they want, except no team can have more than 15 players on FA contracts, or more than 40 years in future contracts at any given time (example--if a team has 8 players, each on a 5 year deal, they cannot sign any more FA-eligible players, even ones they currently have control over). This solves just about every issue the owners and players have over pay. No more salary caps, salary floors, or luxury taxes. No more service time manipulation. No more underpaid young guys, no more overpaid old guys. No more tanking to accumulate assets.