This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.
My latest at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required) published a week ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to share it in this space until now. It’s meant to, now that we’ve got clarity on the Diamond bankruptcy situation, point out how we could see this moment in time coming a few years ago as the players were locked out by the owners during collective bargaining, and that we’re not going to see the full effects of the league’s transition from primarily cable broadcast to primarily streaming happen without another CBA battle.
The thing is that the current CBA expires after the 2026 season, while all of the current broadcasting deals — the new ones with Diamond, the national ones that have been in place for a bit now — all expire after 2028. Which leaves the league some space to pretend they don’t know how the future is going to play out, something they’ll attempt to force all of the risk for onto the players during bargaining. It’s probably going to get ugly, especially considering there is unfinished business to discuss from the last CBA, fallout from the way spending and free agency have been handled the past couple of offseasons, and the overall makeup of the Players Association changing so much in the years since the the last bargaining performed by big leaguers, given the unionization of minor leaguers.
You’ve likely come out of your Thanksgiving-induced coma long enough to remember that the Rays’ new ballpark in St. Petersburgh is no longer a given, not with the vote for selling the necessary bonds delayed until December, and delayed mostly in order to keep it from being killed on the spot at that same county commissioners meeting. Things have escalated in the past few days, too: now even one of the commissioners who was for the deal at that last vote is publicly telling the Rays that if they’re going to kill the deal, then kill it and stop wasting everyone’s time.
Neil deMause has the details summed up for you at Field of Schemes, but the gist is that Rays’ co-president Brian Auld reacted, uh, poorly to even the idea of a delayed bond vote, in a way that has commissioner chair Kathleen Peters — again, a supporter of the deal! — saying that Auld’s language basically constitutes a termination of the agreement. The county is seeking some clarification on that, and probably not just because whichever side kills the deal also determines who gets to keep possession of the land the stadium was supposed to be built on. What a fine mess this is. But hey, if it ends with the Rays not getting over one billion in public subsidies, then it’s a mess worth cleaning up.
Michael Baumann has a look at the catcher’s market over at Fangraphs, and boy, it’s not great. The market, I mean, Baumann is his usual high-quality self here. Basically, the answer to why the Guardians would trip over themselves to bring Austin Hedges, the worst hitter in the majors, back on a $4 million deal is that there isn’t a real viable alternative out there. It’s ugly out there.
It reminded me of a piece that Patrick Dubuque wrote for Baseball Prospectus in early 2023, on catcher framing, and how it’s become a homogenized skill over time — the worst framers were those from the generation of catchers where the idea of making Jose Molina your starter still seemed absurd. What from that specifically came to mind again reading Baumann’s piece was this line: “The days of the 30-40 run pitch framer are behind us, the open frontier ruled by the likes of Molina, Jonathan Lucroy, and Russell Martin. So too are the Doumits and Carlos Santanas, as teams stopped using the catcher spot to sneak another bat into the lineup.” This defense-first focus behind the plate, so as not to fall behind a league that’s caught up to the idea of pitch framing being a necessity, has dragged offense at catcher down, since pitch framing is a skill, and one that’s taken precedence over other skills. So we’ve seen a situation created where what Austin Hedges does and how the Guardians treat him makes sense, even if the results look real ugly in the postseason when suddenly he’s at the plate for some at-bats where literally anyone in his place would have been a better choice.
Which maybe says more about the Guardian’s failure to build a bench that can survive having an Austin Hedges than it does about Hedges himself, given this is just How Catcher Is these days. Much to think about, but genuinely so.
Visit my Patreon to become a supporter and help me continue to write articles like this one.