jacksonianmarch

That’s what I’m thinking. I think Machado is telling teams that the first team to reach $300 mil guaranteed will get him and all he is getting is crickets. The Yanks care about the lux tax. They really could care less about what they actually pay. They just don’t want to give money away, especially as you climb higher into the penalties, and they will never, IMO, cross the final line. I think the players and the owners need to create something like the NBA. Shorten the “rookie” control and then create “max deals”. The duration may top out at 5 years, but the AAV’s would be dizzying. Free agency is at 4 years, arb is after 2, but your first contract, you’re only eligible for a 4 yr $80 mil deal after year 4. Player options built in. Escalating Max AAV’s as years pass to keep up with inflation and incomes. It’s just a thought. The problem with MLB contracts has been the dead years at the end of contracts. This way, guys in their prime get their money and the dead years are limited.

8 years $220 mil is a great starting point for Machado. I thought he’d beat that, but it’s not a “hang up the phone” offer. I wonder if Machado wishes he took that at this point. Here’s the thing Machado should do. He should come back to the Yankees and say yes to 8 years $220 mil. He should ask for the first $100 mil in the first 3 years with an opt out after that. He hits the market again at 29 with a new CBA agreed to. The Yanks get the AAV down, Machado goes to the team he wants with an AAV he won’t beat if he exercises the opt out. The thing we are seeing with NY to this point is flexibility. Stanton is the longest contracted Yankee, but even he could be off the books in 2 years and with the Marlins extended deal and $30 mil kicked in, his lux tax hit is only $22 mil AAV. The bad deal for Ellsbury ends after 2020. Tanaka’s contract ends after 2020. Every other player on the team can be cleared from the payroll within 3 seasons. I am surprised the Yanks haven’t dipped into the Harper or Machado sweeps in a harder way, but flexibility is something they didn’t have for years and is the exact reason why the yanks fell from grace from 13-16.

You’re making a lot of assumptions. Barnes has never closed. His talent suggests he should do fine, but some guys just cannot close. You won’t know until April whether he can. Brasier should do fine? He’s got a half season track record of success (also bolstered by unsustainable ERA based on peripherals), is 31 years old and was recently in the Japanese minor league system. Assuming he’s going to be a fine setup man based on 30 innings or so is not sound. Maybe he is, but expecting him to be fine may leave you hoping. Hembree’s MO is a clean inning? Lol. Hembree’s MO is lots of baserunners and lots of homers. But yeah, clean innings are his Mo, lol Workman should do fine? He of the “I give up lots of homers and my FIP has never been below 4.3”. He’s a disaster waiting to happen in higher leverage spots. The rest of your current big league options are a pile of s***. You’ve got some guys you hope adapt to new roles. You have other guys with track records of mediocrity or worse. You have other guys who just plain suck. The best thing the Sox can hope for is more of the same from Workman and Hembree, a good SU-CL combo and a kid taking the league by storm that nobody expects (Lakins, etc)

We aren’t talking the last 30 years. We are talking about the dozen FA market of the past two seasons

The White Sox are a large market club. They’ve added two relievers to this point. If they land Machado or Harper then I rescind my comment. The Rangers signing Lynn early does constitute an “effort” but they’re seeing a payroll drop and are still actively selling off parts. I’m mostly talking about good relievers who would have commanded $5-6 mil are signing for minor league deals with incentives. Second rate starting position players like Derek Dietrich still on the market likely looking at a non guaranteed deal when they’re likely to be a starter. Going back to last year, deals for Lynn, Walker and Morrison going into February screwing up their seasons (all three had abysmal first halves). Owners have tightened their wallets while reaping in big profits. Good players who should have good paydays are on the market. Elite talent is still on the market heading into pitchers and catchers. It’s a bad thing

This past year saw 8 teams lose 95 or more games. Of those 8 teams, only one had tried to get better (Cincy). There are two teams just outside that cuff that are aging or rebuilding and seem poised to fall into the 95 loss range in Toronto and SF. Seattle is anyone’s guess as an 89 win team, but they’ve since jettisoned off their talent and are left with a roster made up mostly of beyond prime vets or green prospects with a couple useful parts sprinkled in. They could end up a 95 loss team. The players want better contracts. The players want more teams bidding. Not every team, even contending ones, can afford Machado and Harper, but other free agents are being slammed here that are affordable for all teams but being passed upon because the franchise isn’t looking to win.

I just read the article on their proposal. Mostly general for now, but penalizing teams who lose 90 games in back to back seasons, cutting picks and draft funds. I’ve got a better idea. MLB has 30 teams. 20 do not make the playoffs. Institute a draft lottery. Team with the 11th best record in baseball gets one ball in the lottery. Team with the 12th gets 2, etc. the team with the worst record gets 20 balls. If you’ve lost 90 for consecutive seasons, then the worst team gets their balls cut in half. If you lose 90 for a third straight year, it’s quartered and so on. I’d lottery picks 1-10, not just 1-3 so the possibility of falling out of the top 10 is pretty real for a tanking team on a 3-4 year 90 loss bender. The difference in draft pool is pretty high when you consider dropping from #1 all the way down to #11. For INTL funds, I’d just cut the funds in half if you lose 90 or more in consecutive years. For a third year, it’s quartered. And BTW, I’m entirely with the players here. The last two seasons where we basically knew who the top 4 teams in the AL were from nearly the beginning isn’t good for the game. The NL is a bit more wide open, but you still have multiple teams with no prayer of competing. This year, the following squads are already eliminated Toronto Baltimore KC Detroit CWS Seattle Texas Miami SF ARI San Diego is to be added to the list if they don’t add Machado or Harper. You’ve got 10 teams with no prayer, likely 11. And I could easily throw Cincy, Minn, and the Angels in there too as teams with nearly no shot of competing. At least Cincy is trying. That takes the number of non compete or incredibly unlikely to compete to 14. That means we have 16 teams vying for 10 spots. And the only reason for that is due to the terrible NL East that has flawed Philly, Met and Nat teams trying to make ground on a top young for prime time Braves team. If one team in that division pulls away, we can remove 3 teams from the “likely to contend” category, bringing our total down to 13 teams for 10 spots or more appropriately, 12 teams for 9 spots and a mishmash in the NL East. That’s bad for baseball

It would be. Yates is coming off a brilliant season and really his second good season in a row. He's a high K, improved command reliever who's move to Petco has limited his HR tendencies. He is also only 31 yrs old and comes with 2 years of control. He is gonna cost a lot more than a middling prospect, the overpaid hobbit 3b, and other trash. A team that wants him will have to pay a return similar to what they got for Hand, and send over a legit top 25 prospect or a package that makes up for a non top 25-er

They would have to graduate it to punish perennial losers or teams who rebuild. It is smart. It forces rebuilding clubs to at least feign relativity

But it will likely throw the highly paid player to the scrap heap unable to get the chance to return to prior performance. Which player is the union going to try and protect?

How do you not think the sox are worse? You returned everyone you had at the end of the year except Kimbrel and Kelly. You have nobody ready in the minors to bust out. Your team, on the whole, achieved as expected or exceeded expectations. Your 2019 starts with Chris Sale as an injury concern. And any time a team wins 108 games, one has to assume just due to the natural order of things, there will be a dropoff. So going by the lack of a real down year, pre season health questions, loss of your best reliever plus another and the ebb and flow of season to season performance, how can you not say the sox are worse?

JBJ is gonna bust out in 2 months, be average in one and be absolutely abhorrent in 3. It's kinda his MO. World beater for short stints

If you look at the amount you crossed the final threshold in 2018, Pablo's deal was one of a multitude of contracts that cost you 10 spots and $500K in the draft. If the sox cross again, which I have to think it going to occur, then his contract will be partly responsible for two draft drops

Because the players will get cut instead of held on the roster due to the contract. The albatross of the contract usually keeps the player playing or at least on the roster. You don't see many Tulo's or Panda's with guys getting cut in the middle of a lucrative contract

The union doesn't actually represent all of the players, though. Take a look at the reps from each team. They are seasoned veterans who have all reached free agency. Why would the reps of the union who have all benefited from the FA market try to bring up the pay for the new guys when their pay is directly related to the pay of the top tier? Think about it. If Harper gets $30 mil per season, then a good, not great OFer may be worth $20 mil. But if Harper sees $25 mil, that good but not great OFer may only be worth $17 mil. This isn't trickle down economics where the top earners spend their money and it trickles down. This is a value based economic system where the top tier pulls up the contracts due to relevant value

Consider this slav. The Yankees and the Dodgers made no FA moves and in the Dodgers's case, made moves that made them worse on paper to start 2018 to monkey around with the cap. Clearly, they care about the cap. Having the Dodgers and Yankees out of the running caused the entire FA market to falter. Considering that the Dodgers and Yankees have stars reaching arbitration soon, making long term commitments doesn't help them cap wise when that time comes, so they aren't really in the Harper or Machado sweeps. By not having the Yanks and Dodgers in those sweeps, the marquis FA's of our time are staring at much smaller contracts than expected. In baseball, the big contracts drive the middle markets up. You don't drive big contracts by increasing the pay at the bottom. It is a VERY capitalist ideal the players lean towards and the idea of increasing the minimum wont fly as it would likely lead to a firmer cap at the top. The players are going to blow the top off the lux tax market. They're going to try and go back to the economics of the late 90s when it was a free for all and if a team wanted to outspend 2nd place by double, then they could. The owners negotiated for this CBA with the express intent to tighten the reins on increasing contracts. They are now using analytics to drive down costs and pointing to the cap that they negotiated as a reason for the failure of salaries to progress. The players aren't represented by stupid people and I guarantee you will see Boras et al on the front lines picketed for the players to release the top off the spending.

If you remove the penalties for spending, the big budget teams are always in the bidding, driving prices up

slav, owners have wised up. They also see the downside of crossing the lux tax thresholds and with the shift towards development, absolutely see the problem that a 10 spot drop and a $500K loss in draft budget can do to a team

Theo and Ben were able to play the "departing free agent" lottery and gain significant advantages in the draft, which is why the rules have changed. Back in Theo's Boston time, you lost a level A free agent, you got the receiving team's first rounder and a supp pick. Theo used that to his advantage. Damon, Ellsbury, etc all brought back big returns in the prospect department. The most recent CBA iteration pounds a team like the sox and for next year, the Yankees. The sox are looking likely to lose Kimbrel. Instead of getting the #31 pick in the draft (or thereabouts) for losing Kimbrel, the sox are poised to get pick #133 for losing Kimbrel. How much easier would it be to rebuild if losing Sale, Porcello and JD netted you 6 picks in the top 40 plus your own? Instead, the sox are likely to cross the final threshold, moving them out of the top 30 again and then the 3 departing players will return picks #133, 134, and 135 because the sox are over the first threshold. Rebuilding becomes very hard at that point. What the rule changes have done is make it really hard to rebuild during a window. The sox are feeling that right now. The Yanks will feel that too, although the new CBA may bail them out.

It is going to be a dogfight. But the sox and yankees are going to use their pen about the same in terms of IP. Last year the sox got 10 more innings out of their rotation. The sox have Eovaldi for the whole year, we have Happ and Paxton for the whole year. I expect about the same workload team to team. Provided that, you take Kimbrel and Kelly away from your pen, you remove Robertson and add Ottavino and a full, healthy (presumably) year from Britton to ours. How is that not a plus to our advantage? Also, yes, the sox have the best pitcher on either team in Sale. That works well in the post season (except for Sale's penchant for being spent by October) but in the regular season, the #5 slot is as important than the #1 in theory. Our 1-5 is far more proven and actually did better than the sox did last year. Can it be replicated? I don't know, but I anticipate the yankees entire staff should outperform the sox' staff and with the back end of the pen wide open, I see a bunch of crushing late inning losses coming. The 2019 sox are worse than the 2018 sox. The 2019 Yanks are better than the 2018 Yanks

The job of the GM is to put the best team on paper on the field. The jobs of the coaches and the players is to play to or above the potential. If DD doesn’t get creative, he’s has failed. Re-signing Pearce to a platoon role at the given rate with Chavis sitting in the minors was a dumb move and something I’m sure he’d say in retrospect he hadn’t done. Take the $6 mil he spent on Pearce plus the buffer and go out and get Wilson and Kelley and you’ve got at least some big league level options out there

The Yanks have improved coming into this season. If the sox are as currently constituted, could you honestly tell yourself the same thing about your squad?

You're gonna make the playoffs no matter what IMO. The composite talent on the sox plus the dearth of talent beyond the playoff teams from last year tells me there are 6 teams vying for 5 spots and the sox are still better than the Rays and A's (two teams where I think one of them is team #5). The pen will not cause you to not play beyond 162. But the WC game is a huge change from year's past. You can win 100 games and have a do or die game to go to the ALDS. We've gone 2-1 in that game since it was instituted, and the one loss just plain sucks. You go from being excited your team is in the POs to watching a single game, then the season ends. It blew. With how good the Yankees are on paper coming into this season and the sox leaving a critical piece of today's game completely exposed, there is a strong chance the pen experiment puts you in a play in game. If you're gonna spend to the max line, incur a penalty for last year and probably be forced to incur another this year, your team should do everything in its power to maximize the chances of avoiding a one and done scenario

A gross and very important error. 10 spots in the draft may not hurt them in terms of the player they select (at that range, they may get the same guy they'd have wanted at 30) but the loss of nearly $500K in draft funds is big. It will harm their ability to get the post round 10 higher bonus signees or keep them from taking a signability case in round 2

The problem with taking a revenue percentage is the books are private for the most part and the number can be a moving target. If the players want to really make inroads, they need to shorten the pre-arb and arb process to 4 years. That will see a massive influx of free agents in the 24-26 age range and make contracts go bonkers. It will also really pare down the team friendly extensions these young guys sign to lock in a real payday but heavily underpay the kids as they mature