Brock Beauchamp

Tagging users and embedding table data are literally my two favorite features of this system and I use both constantly.

Or Korea. Or the various leagues around the world that play professionally. Those exceptions you listed are kinda how we got into this weird place at all. Baseball is closer to soccer in its organic growth than basketball or American football, which have very clean and easy draft rules because of how the sport originated and matured in a single country.

Because it benefits the owners financially and they are using it as a bargaining position to get what they want. You also have former international signees who want the system to stay because it brings a lot of money to their country and communities regardless of how well those players perform. These 16 year olds get their bonus straight up which means more people benefit within their country. A draft will suppress that influx of cash and put a cap on earnings for the vast majority since it will have hard slotted bonuses. The top prospects will still get their millions, but those players towards the middle and bottom will be phased out of their life changing money comparatively. A 16 year old with a $100k bonus has changed the trajectory of their whole family in the Dominican Republic, et al whereas MLB teams throw that around pretty easily to hopefully hit on a gem. A draft will limit that for the vast majority of players. This pretty much sums it up, for good and bad.

Grah, I just realized the contact form on the new site is not functioning correctly so if you can't log in, PM me here for the time being. Thanks!

This is the test installation we're using to check migration, software, display, etc. It's not going to stay around, it's just temporary, so have a ball. Play around with the feature set, the blogs, etc. and see what you think. https://brewers.diamondcentric.net/ You'll be prompted for a password just to see the site. Use the following: user: brewers pass: 82wallbangers You will then be presented the site itself. To log in, use your email address not your username. This is done for security purposes. If you can't remember your email, use the contact form at the bottom of the page to notify me and I'll figure it out. Your password is the same as it is here. Once you're logged in, test out the threads and features like embedding tweets, video, tagging users, etc.

Thanks. If anyone else knows of anyone doing that work, please share it here!

It never fails to amaze me how difficult a supposed "spectator sport" makes it for the average person to "spectate".

One nice touch is that the Bally Sports app is due to release soon - before the season, by my understanding - and the Brewers are one of only five teams that have signed an agreement. I hope I'm allowed to purchase it, despite being out of market for the Brewers.

I'm looking through YouTube and have found a few people creating Brewers-related videos but any of you out there have any favorites you'd like to share?

You'll get no argument from me that the current aesthetic of baseball is really bad and, as a Twins fan, watching Max Kepler hit 25 homers while batting .206 is infuriating, especially considering that Max Kepler is wildly athletic. He doesn't have to be that kind of hitter but he is and it's bloody boring to watch on a nightly basis. But I also don't think the shift existing has prevented a bunch of Max Keplers to populate the league because the value of line drives is so high. On the other hand, the shift has caused second base to become an afterthought, with players like Mike Moustakas manning "second base" while spending 50% of their time in shallow right field. And I won't be even a little bit sorry to see that part of baseball go away.

I'm also curious about this and interested to see how they implement the rule. Will players be allowed to move during the delivery or do they have to stay in place until contact is made?

I wish hitters weren't so reliant on the TTO but as we've seen over the past five years, the shift hasn't deterred them from that route in the slightest bit. Removing the shift isn't a perfect solution but it's better than nothing, as hitters have shown they will not adjust their swing to compensate, there's just too much value in the occasional line drive over going oppo every once in awhile.

The pitch clock is badly needed, I personally hate the shift but don't think it will make much of a difference either way, and while I don't really understand why they think making the bases bigger is something that needs to be done, I also don't really care.

If MLB agreed to share revenue, set the cap and floor reasonably, and dedicated a firm number (say 45%) to player salaries, I'm pretty sure the players would agree to that before the owners finished the sentence. The players are currently getting quite a bit less than 45% by my understanding. Players are only against a salary cap if it doesn't help them earn more revenue. If you guarantee them a percentage of revenue, that's no longer an issue and they'd be foolish to reject the offer.

You can get someone to agree not to strike by making them sign a short-term contract not to strike. And to be clear, the owners are the only people who can fix the economic inequality in baseball. Let's put that to bed right now. If you want the Brewers to be competitive with the Cubs financially, the owners need to agree to share revenue. The players cannot make the owners share their money. Just like in the NFL and NBA, ownership needs to agree that is the right course of action and implement it themselves. And if MLB ownership ever decides to make such a radical change to the game and improve it, then a bunch of squabbling problems between MLB and the MLBPA go away pretty quickly.

The owners could probably get the players to agree not to strike and re-negotiate next offseason if they agreed to make real concessions next offseason. The problem is that MLB ownership is wildly fragmented right now and after soundly beating the players two CBAs in a row, they now expect the players to lay down and accept whatever they offer. MLB ownership is in a bad place. They're incredibly insular and try their best to keep the Steve Cohens and Mark Cubans out of the sport because they don't like *legitimate competition* that spends money. They also have little interest in fixing the economic inequities in the sport that perpetuate their internal fragmentation. Hell, they barely made any concessions with their final offer before the deadline and four owners still voted against that meager offer. All it takes is seven owners to torpedo any offer or change to baseball. They were over halfway to that breaking point with an offer that wasn't even trying. The owners are a huge problem right now and I have absolutely no idea how baseball is going to fix it. It's not like they're going to fire themselves and Manfred sure isn't capable of leading them anywhere.

Seconded. Two good pods from them this week. The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that this is about owners trying to squeeze every dollar they can. And the reality is it's probably small-market owners being the most ruthless, and, even as a Brewer fan, I think that's bad. I get that we're all prone to buying arguments about "competitive balance." Baseball is economically unfair. That sucks. The reality, though, is it's going to stay fundamentally unfair, and that's because of TV money. Other than straight-up NFL-style revenue sharing, the system is going to be 98% tilted to New York, LA, and, to an extent Chicago. And haggling over the CBT (and moving almost zero on it) is just a way to say "we're fine with 98% unfair but 98.1%? NO!" I think that's especially troubling because Mark A, for example, did not buy the Brewers to maximize year over year profit. If he did, he's not nearly as smart as we give him credit for. I like Mark A, mind you. He's the right owner for this team. But (and I'm not singling him out) this lockout, at this point, is about small-market owners trying to hit that nearly impossible window of perennial contention and profitability when every smart owner in a city like Pittsburgh knows that getting both is a top 5% outcome at best. These guys know analytics well enough to know this stuff isn't moving the needle for them. They know they buy these teams for occasional yearly dividends but mostly for prestige, fun, adrenaline, and the massive asset appreciation. And yet here they are, haggling over literal pennies on the dollar. The argument that these teams are a business defeats itself. Anyone who buys the Reds expecting to be both competitive and year-to-year rich bought into the wrong industry. It's like the equivalent of buying a Sun Belt football team. You signed the deal knowing the system was tilted toward big money teams. Deal with it or change it, but at this point you're just being greedy. Let me be clear. I wish baseball was more economically fair. But none of these proposals make a dent in that. It's like, yeah we'd all be technically safer by a tiny bit if we were still wiping down groceries, but it just isn't worth the effort, anxiety, and knock-on effects because the benefit is trivial. I'd rather watch a more equitable product in terms of owners/players because a more market-balanced league ain't happening. The thing I keep coming back to is that the inherent competitive imbalance can only be solved by the owners. Anything else we're squawking about dances around the huge problem that the Dodgers make $250m from TV and the Brewers make about $50m. If the owners were truly interested in fixing the sport, they'd start sharing a lot more revenue. And if they did that, I suspect the MLBPA would relax their anti-cap stance in trade for a $120m floor. But a floor cannot be set high enough under baseball's current economic situation to appease the players in trade for a hard cap. So ultimately, while we may be angry at the players for any number of reasons, the real fix - the only fix, really - is 100% dependent on the owners. The players can't force the owners to balance the game financially, the owners need to do it themselves.

As usual, Effectively Wild had a great podcast about the lockout today, bringing in Even Drellich (probably the best reporter through this process) to talk in-depth about where the sides are and where we might be going. In general, I just highly recommend the EW podcast for general basebally-ness. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effectively-wild-episode-1818-smile-youre-on-manfred-camera/

The moderators here at BF do a great job, IMO, so I don't see any reason I need to muck about with their work. They have the forums under control, which allows me to work on the technical aspect of the site, not wrangle community issues. Don't expect much to change about how conversations are handled, what posters are allowed to post, and how the community interacts with one another. As for prospects, well... I have good news for you. I spent most of the winter working on this over at Twins Daily: https://twinsdaily.com/minnesota-twins-top-prospects/2022/ It will be some time before we have the infrastructure and content creators here to maintain that type of project but it's a goal to have the Brewers equivalent to that page operational by mid-season or so.

This is a complex question but I'll try to answer as honestly as possible. First, I really like doing this work. I don't make a living from Twins Daily but after chipping away at it for over ten years, it earns me a modest paycheck, which has been great while I'm raising young kids. Some background on me personally is that, like Brian, I'm a web developer by trade and have been for the past 20+ years. About five years ago, my wife and I became foster parents and I stopped taking contracts for a few years while I stayed home and raised kids, working part-time on contracts when I had the time. We ended up adopting and now the kids are older, the youngest heading to kindergarten next fall. So as my ability to work on Twins Daily increased (I had more time to work but not really to take dedicated full-time contracts), I started seeing a lot of different avenues where we could both make more money AND pay our content creators a lot better. So I got to work. Second, I'm an old school internet guy. I love independent sites and forums. And, to be blunt, they're dying. Maybe not all of them but 90% of them are dead or dying. But at Twins Daily, we found that if we surround a community with daily news and content, it acts as a shield to constantly infuse new life into the community as existing members age out or just lose interest. This, coupled with my increased time and ability to monetize Twins Daily got my mind spinning... Third, I like the Brewers. I was born in the UP, spent some of my very young childhood in northern WI, and then returned to Milwaukee for a year+ in 2009. Before I was a Twins fan, I had a Brewers hat and listened to them on the radio. Coming back to Milwaukee for a year only cemented that. I watch a lot of baseball and if there isn't a Twins game on, a Brewers game is my follow-up choice. And as opposed to when I was a child, the modern AL/NL split between the teams means that outside of those six games a year, cheering for both on any given night involves little to no conflict. Fourth, and pardon my French for a moment, but I ******* despise SB Nation, Facebook groups, Reddit, and all the other mega-conglomerate trash that is killing independent communities, sucking the life out of the internet, all the while selling your personal information and giving the worst aspects of our society the loudest microphones. So yeah, any time I feel I have the chance to hand those bastards the "L", I'm going to leap at the chance. With Twins Daily, we've largely pushed those entities to irrelevancy when it comes to Twins coverage and I'm excited to try to do it again. Combine all those things and that's how we end up where we are today!

I hear all of your concerns about ads. After some thought, here are some decent compromises I've come up with: 1. It looks like we're going to launch the new site in a more limited scope and earlier, which means we probably won't run ANY ads on the site at all for 60 days. I'll have more info on this as we figure out our plans and capabilities. One of my partners is in Europe for March (he usually covers spring training for TD and this was him getting back at baseball) and then I'm off to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks in April to visit friends. Our schedules are a bit of a mess right now. 2. Right now, there is a video popup on the Twins Daily forum index page. If you scroll, you'll see the video slide to the bottom right of the screen. I will remove this on *all* forum pages and I'll find a way to make up the difference to our video creators elsewhere on the site. Here's the page I'm talking about: https://twinsdaily.com/forums/ This means there won't be any pop-up ads in the forum section of the site. 3. If we stagger the launch, I think that will give me enough time to squeeze in a detailed analysis of our ad deliveries on Twins Daily and get those changed up a bit. Now, the number of ads won't *drastically* decrease but I fully expect to do two things: slightly decrease the number of ads per page and spread them out more effectively so there aren't weird things like no ads on half the page and then an ad between every post. That would make the ads, particularly on the forums, a lot less obtrusive. As I said earlier, I've been meaning to address the ads for awhile but just haven't had time. This conversation has been a good impetus to get me moving on that particular item.

We can and will keep this in mind. On the upside, the new site will not launch with video. That's some ways down the road.

This would be the ultimate BF.net-ism! Definitely a +1 from me. Okay, this will definitely happen. Love it. I've been browsing that forum and to quote my Yooper family, "uff da".

All of this is absolutely true. I welcome the feedback. We may not see eye-to-eye on every issue but I will listen to feedback every single time. I cannot stress enough that our mission is community-based; all of you have a voice in how this website operates because without all of you, I'd be talking to myself. And I already do enough of that in the shower, no need to also do it on the internet.

We are actively looking for writers so if you'd like to try your hand at it, please PM me a sample of your work. It certainly won't be a career but we pay as well as we can and it's a pretty fun side hustle if you're interested. We don't have min-max requirements for frequency so it's a "how much do you want to write?" scenario most of the time. If your stuff is good, you can write three times a week, once a month, or anywhere in between, your choice.