jjgott

Personally I think the players should get a greater share of the pie, but I don’t see how a compromise can’t be that ALL baseball-related revenue be split down the middle 50/50 and call it a day. The owners can make more money with all the “ballpark village” real estate etc., but $ coming from TV, game day, apparel, video games etc should be split down the middle. Not sure why the owners are so opposed to that.

Those leagues also realized that player movement is great for the sport and adds to interest in the offseason. MLB Owners from time immemorial are all about how much control they can have over the players and only want to see a player leave on the Owner's terms.

Labor Woahs Officially Not Solvdd

Yep, already part of the package! At first I'll just use the base Twins Daily reacts (currently Like, Sad, Yikes Bro, ***, and Incorrect) but those can be easily changed to fit whatever the community here wants. Okay... so one of them is starred out here. :D Obviously, that one will change. Need a react that says Woah Solvdd.

I would say a few things: The have nots are not burning. Most are “have nots” of their own choosing like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Oakland, and Baltimore. I think having a league of juggernauts and plucky underdogs is more interesting than a league full of teams going 84-78 and 78-84. And even if parity is a worthwhile goal, the league’s method of ensuring it, a salary cap, doesn’t actually help. From Jeff Passan’s article today on ESPN: “Since the CBT's arrival in 2003, 13 MLB franchises have won the World Series and 19 have played in it. That is the exact same number of teams as in the salary-capped NFL, far better than the nine champions and 14 competitors in the salary-capped NBA and right there with the 11 Stanley Cup winners and 21 finalists in the salary-capped NHL. In the championship seasons prior to the CBT era, 14 organizations won the World Series and 20 made it. The CBT was about competitive balance like "Citizen Kane" was about a sled.”

Last I checked all the MLB teams play by the same rules and the diamonds are all the same size. But going with analogy, the bigger countries DO pay for better training and otherwise financially support their athletes better than the small ones in the non-Olympic years. Does that make it unfair? And I really don’t see Brewers/Dodgers as akin to Alabama/Beloit College. It’s more like Alabama/Wisconsin. Should Alabama be capped at the number of 5 Star recruits they can have on their team so Wisconsin has a better chance of beating them in the CFP?

I really wasn’t trying to be trolly! I guess for me I don’t necessarily buy the argument that it’s a necessity for the game for small market teams to be put on as close to equal footing with the large market teams. I can be ok with the fact that Milwaukee has a smaller media market than Los Angeles and so it might not have as much money to work with as the Dodgers. wntrtxn21 said baseball depends on competition to survive but it has survived for the past 100 years without a hard cap. Granted, a good chunk of that time included the Reserve clause, but people have showed up to games and cheered on their small market teams even though the deck was stacked against them. I really don’t think the lack of turnover of the top teams is what’s making baseball fandom decline. I also reject the premise that the small market teams are just going to wither and die. They are legally protected from dying by the Supreme Court. So long as Mark A. ponies up enough dough to pay 26 guys, he is guaranteed 81 home games and 81 away games and all the national media and licensing revenues. It was brought up that a World Series champion hasn’t come from the bottom half of MLB payroll since the Wild Card was introduced. All that says to me is that if an owner wants to win a championship, they better spend on talent to be in the top half of MLB payroll. Instead, there are 15 owners who prioritize maximizing profit (totally their right btw!) than win a championship. It’s why I don’t understand why fans aren’t more demanding of the owners to spend money to win championships. Instead, we all sort of shrug and just accept we can’t spend more than our “budget” (*cough* salary cap *cough*). The Bucks were never going to win a championship until the owners finally agreed to pay the luxury tax. Weird how the owners were ok with it once their desire to win a championship outweighed their desire to adhere to the salary cap.

I was thinking of writing this in the lockout thread but didn't want to derail it from talk about the mechanisms of the lockout negotiations. There's been a lot of talk on here about how the playing field should be leveled via a salary cap so that teams like the Brewers can compete with the Yankees' and Dodgers' of the world. However, I haven't seen a compelling reason as to why? Why shouldn't teams that exist in big markets have a bigger advantage over the smaller ones? Why should a team like the Brewers have an "equal" shot at the championship? If we really wanted equity in baseball so the smaller markets could compete with the big boys, shouldn't the salary cap for the Brewers be like $200 million and only $150 million for the Yankees? Because if it's $200 million for everyone, the Brewers are probably still not going to reach that figure year in and year out while the Yankees and Dodgers will go right up to the cap. The "free market" MLB really does not see the dynasty winners like the capped leagues of the NFL or NBA (outside of the late 90s Yankees). Most of the MLB has made the playoffs at least twice in the last 30 years and most have won their division at least once. Without a salary cap the Brewers have been to the playoffs 4 straight years and carried higher nominal payrolls in 2014 and 2015 than they did in 2021, even though inflation means we should be able to afford much higher nominal payrolls. As we've also seen, the institution of the CBT hasn't really done anything re: ticket or concessions prices and a hard cap won't do anything either (pretty sure beer costs the same if not more at Fiserv or Lambeau). So again, what is the moral/competitive reason for why MLB should actively try to manufacture parity?

Wut? It’s about as low risk a business as there is in this country. They literally have an exemption to antitrust laws!

I mean, that's probably true but it's still the fact it's the owners that locked the players out. If the owners were smart, they would've offered the players to continue operating under the old CBA for this season while they continued to negotiate and dared the players to strike but instead locked the players out. It's unclear what the owner's end game is unless they really thought they could break the union. They say they want to increase parity however do you really think they are going to bring the hammer down on cheapskate owners? I was going to write out a longer response but then realized Lathund already said I was going to say earlier in the thread. Call the player's greedy all you want, but the owners are the ones that are preventing baseball from starting and frankly should not have any sort of sympathy when it comes to these negotiations going nowhere.

Why is this a both sides issue? The owners locked the players out.

Me to the owners saying they can’t afford to pay market rate salaries

Looking like we'll see SF in GB next week

So does Love get the start next week? Give Rodgers two weeks to rest the toe?

If you had to guess when do you think the lockout ends? Before Arb Figures Exchanged (~ middle of January) Before Spring Training (Pitchers/Catchers ~ Feb 14th) Before Start of Season (Little/no ST, all 162 games are played) After Start of Season (Fewer than 162 games are played)

There you go!

I really hope this KC game doesn't cost us the first round bye. That's the consequence of Rodgers being selfish. Rodgers talked last year about how important it was to get the HFA and bye in the playoffs. He'll have no excuse if we don't get there this year.

O Line not helping

Special Teams tonight sure is special

Thanks Chiefs!

Rodgers: "I realize I'm in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now"

Right, I know the MLBPA isn’t going to be lobbying for nonmember rights, but I was thinking it was more a preemptive PR move from the MLB if things get nasty. Similar to how Amazon now runs ads showcasing people who parlayed a warehouse job into a college education while defending against unionization.

Fingers crossed the Brewers don't pull a Packers and somehow hire a worse hitting coach than the guy they just fired.

Felt this was big enough news to get bumped to the Major League forum. Could have huge ramifications about the development of prospects. This is probably MLB getting ahead of an issue before the CBA expires but it's about time nonetheless. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32419545/major-league-baseball-require-teams-provide-housing-minor-league-players-starting-2022-sources-say "Amid mounting pressure from players and advocacy groups, Major League Baseball said on Sunday it will require teams to provide housing for minor league players starting in 2022. While MLB has yet to outline its plan formally, six team officials told ESPN they are starting to prepare to help house players across each of their four minor league affiliates. In mid-September, owners from the league's 30 teams agreed unanimously to a plan that would provide housing for certain minor league players, the league said in a statement. Whether they will offer stipends that fully cover housing or provide the lodging itself has yet to be decided, sources said."