Baldkin

If the owners want the players on board with their latest proposalthey should open up their books and demonstrate these financial hardships.

The premise of your post (that spending more doesn't mean more wins) is completely untrue. We have decades of data to demonstrate that payroll (and franchise valuations) are tied closely to wins over a long period of time. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/in-2019-team-payroll-and-wins-are-closely-linked/ For example: There hasn't been a World Series champion from the bottom half of MLB payroll since the Wild Card was introduced. https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/world-series-champion-opening-day-payroll-ranks-in-the-wild-card-era/ Equity and parity doesn't come from a salary cap unless MLB institutes revenue sharing. MLB is the only major sport where the majority of money stems from local TV deals (instead of national deals), and that local TV deal money isn't shared league wide. What would the Red Sox TV deal be worth if they didn't have anyone to play? Shouldn't the Rays get a bit of that $$? The owners will never push for revenue sharing, even the owners of small market teams, because that would require them to open up their books - which would lead to the players making more money.

"But what about ME?" Why should your wants and desires matter at all to these two groups of people? Why should they matter more than mine? Why are you saying "fans" as though we're all one group of people who all want the same thing?

If someone told you negotiations for an issue were urgent and needed to happen, you'd think they wouldn't wait 6 weeks to begin negotiations like the owners did. Once you started to make some concessions in these negotiations, you'd think they would make some on their side as well - the owners have not. 4 days to solve this or games will be cancelled. One group, and one group only is to blame - the owners. Just because you believe the players should "Play for free" doesn't mean the players should have to. This is their career. Overwhelmingly, the players love baseball, do you think you can say the same for the owners? If you answer that "Yes" ask yourself how Rob Manfred is still commissioner.

Stubhub, Seatgeek, Tickpick and Gametime all vary. Those are the four sites I use.

Joe Sheehan on twitter. The thread is worth a read. We may not have baseball for quite awhile. The owners are, once again, being completely disingenuous in their negotiations

Switching from Spectrum to AT&T fiber. I've been on the phone with Spectrum for 20 minutes trying to shut off my service. They have offered me 6 better deals to try to get me to stay on. What a scam.

I really enjoyed Resident Alien season 1 with Alan Tudyk.

I worked at a company that pushed a windows 8 update to everyone. They pushed the tablet version of windows 8 to users with desktops. Not having a start button and being asked to drag on the screen to do things in the "introduction" led to some hilarious support calls.

I decided to climb into the shower with socks on this morning. So, that was interesting. Thankfully, no injuries occurred.

Jrue and Giannis is fine but when Jrue is out that hurts the team a lot as they have to rely on Hill being the PG or Giannis being the PG which hurts both offensively and defensively. Missing Middleton hurts the least and to a lesser extent Lopez. Defensively there is a gap between Portis and Lopez but offensively there is not, I actually believe the offense is better with Portis in the lineup than with Lopez. Jrue being out has hurt the Bucks a lot as the PG play takes a deep dive going from Jrue to Hill. Having Jrue out also hurts the guard rotations as DDV isn't 100% healthy and is still trying to get into a groove. The guard rotation with Jrue is nearly perfect as they can substitute and go smaller with Hill and DDV/Connaughton. The Bucks also have a good rotation with bringing in Allen/Matthews/Connaughton/Nwora/Hood for Middleton. I think the SF and SG position is covered very well with DDV, Connaughton, Hood, Nwora, Matthews and Allen. It is PG just like last year that is lacking. While I like Hill and what he brings to the team he is old and he shouldn't really be playing a lot of minutes as the main PG on a team. I think once they get fully healthy and have their full rotation setup so some of the fringe players are not playing more minutes than they should be the Bucks will be ok. The Nets just lost KD for awhile and will be basically going through what the Bucks had to go through in the first half of the season though they were without Kyrie for awhile and still are somewhat. Repeating is also hard to do in any sport. It is going to be hard for the Bucks to repeat but I think they have the best shot to repeat. The problem isn't so much Jrue to Hill (Hill has been fantastic) the problem not having a legitimate third PG. The dropoff from Hill to.... DDV? Giannis? Middleton? Mamu? Whomever becomes that primary ball handler and calming force for the offense is massive.

They are 2 games worse than they were last year. 29-17 vs 27-19. Is it really time to panic?

Over a 10 outing stretch in August and September in 1993 he averaged 127 pitches per start.

That or Kareem's double OT sky hook in game 6 to force game 7 in 1974.

No, they make the large tax firms (TurboTax, H&R Block), who lobby for laws like this more money because people like you and I now have to pay someone to do our much more complex taxes.

That's not true. https://behindthebuckpass.com/2021/08/02/milwaukee-bucks-threats-sign-pj-tucker-free-agency/ The Bucks had no sway over resigning him if he didn't want to stay here. They held his Bird rights, meaning they could go over the cap to resign him, but if he didn't want to sign in Milwaukee there was nothing the Bucks could do.

Tucker was an unrestricted free agent. You really think this guy wanted to stay in Milwaukee?

If Giannis and Bud still wanted Boogie on the team, he'd still be on the team.

Thursday at 6pm vs Louisville Game is on ESPN.

Is it running the latest OS? Is it overheating? https://www.firesticktricks.com/fix-firestick-buffering.html

Non-Frozen pizza variety... Tried this out, and it was amazing: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe

https://www.mlb.com/news/2021-hall-of-fame-committee-election-results So happy for all of them, they deserve to be in the hall, especially Fowler & Buck. Dick Allen fell 1 vote shy of being elected as well. Joe Posnanski, who wrote a wonderful book about Buck O'Neil, wrote a happy article about his induction. https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/give-it-up-for-buck-oneil It's a shame Buck and Minnie won't be there to accept their honors.

There will never be a salary cap unless the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Cubs, et al. agree to sharing their market's television revenue with smaller markets. That is the only way you could set up a cap that the players union would agree with. Otherwise, you are vastly shorting the percentage of money that the players are getting from revenue. The fact that most owners are now treating the Luxury Tax threshold as a salary cap is a huge reason why there is a lockout right now. Revenue has gone up 59% over the past decade. Salaries have only gone up 51%. Ron Cox wrote a solid article about it here: https://www.justbaseball.com/mlb/major-league-baseball-strike-possibility/ This battle has been brewing (pun not intended) since the spring of 2020, when the Owners set off negotiations around the pandemic shortened season and demanded that the players accept a % of the revenue to prorate their salaries. The players then asked to be able to see the books, which of course, the owners denied. I mean, it went like this, and it always goes like this: Owner: "We promise to give you half." MLBPA: "Okay. We will agree to that, but you have to show us what we're getting half of. We want to see the numbers and the data." Owners: "Nope. We have nothing to hide, but we won't show you that. We promise to give you half."

The NBA and the NHL both have guaranteed contracts. The NFL is the only exception. The players share of revenue has gone down drastically over the past 20 years, with the richest owners using the luxury tax as an excuse to pocket more money. The players want their money back. The biggest question is will the MLBPA be forward thinking and try to undo some of the arbitration process which artificially diminishes salaries of players compared to what they would get on the open market. The problem is, players vote for their own money, and getting rid of that means (for most MLBers) a smaller share of the revenue pie.