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Happy New Year! Sure, that was a couple of days back, but this is the first Marvin Miller’s Mustache of 2025, so it’s fitting all the same. (Sometimes I forget that’s what I ended up naming this newsletter, too, so please enjoy this reminder if you’d forgotten about that change from last year.)
Let’s kick things off with some notes from the holiday break.
Diamond Sports Group announced on Thursday that they’ve officially exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and have cut down their debt from $9 billion to $200 million. To celebrate (?), they’ve also changed their name: no more DSG, as it will now be known as Main Street Sports Group. This switch is annoying, in the sense we already think of Diamond Sports Group as a specific thing, and the Bally/Fanduel Sports Network stuff was already an aggravating enough mental note to make about who we’re even discussing when bringing up one of MLB’s broadcasting partners, but on the other hand, now there’s just one Diamond involved with MLB: the one buying up all of those minor-league teams, Diamond Baseball Holdings. You take what you can get from the news.
The eight MLB teams with Diamond contracts — sorry, Main Street Sports contracts — are, as we’ve discussed in the past, stuck there until 2028. At which time commissioner Rob Manfred will likely reveal a new-look for local MLB broadcasts, by way of ESPN or Amazon or whatever entity offers the most absurd contract terms with the most zeroes in it, one focused heavily on streaming over cable for the first time in league history. Until then, you’ll be forced to remember Main Street Sports is a thing that exists as a company signing massive checks to broadcast MLB games, and not the name of a trading card shop located on Main Street in your town.
Back on December 20, ESPN published a piece looking at the A’s and how they were suddenly spending. I mostly just want to use this as a reminder in this post-holiday, pre-spring training period to remind you that the entire idea that this is a New Kind of A’s team isn’t proven yet. As of the additions of Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs, the A’s had a projected payroll right in line with last season’s too-low figure. There remains work to be done there, and work they have to do, before we can say this is anything actually different rather than just superficially so.
The piece’s author, Alden Gonzalez, did bring up the collective bargaining agreement provision that says the A’s have to spend more now that they’re receiving more revenue-sharing in 2025 than in previous years, and general manager David Forst said that, “That is something that we’re aware of… I can’t say that that is the reason why we’re spending. We’re trying to get better.” Forst is probably happy to have an excuse to actually spend a little money, but the reason he’s got a little money to spend is because of the CBA provision, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise, considering the organization we’re talking about here.
At least Severino signed because the A’s offered him more money than his camp expected to get, as Gonzalez reported in this feature. That’s the kind of thing the A’s are going to have to do if they want to bring in additional players to help them win for real, unless they’re bringing in everyone else via trades. Which, frankly, might have to happen, considering not everyone might be as bowled over or as easily impressed as Severino was. Walker Buehler, for instance, turned down the A’s early entirely because they’re playing in a minor-league park now, and there’s really no way to get around that unless you’re willing to overpay to compensate for that.
Baseball Prospectus runs a “Best Of” series during the holiday break, and one of my pieces from the year got that treatment. “What Will Rob Manfred’s Legacy Be?” is a question worth asking, and BP agreed, as that’s the piece they re-ran on December 28. If you’ve never read it before, this time around, it’s free for everyone, so have a go at it. There’s an Arrested Development joke in there and everything.
I did have a question from a reader that I didn’t address on social media, since it was vacation for me and I didn’t really want to think about it, on how Manfred’s legacy was clearly on increasing revenues for MLB, and as a businessman he’s been a success, and all that sort of stuff. I don’t necessarily agree with that as either an interesting way to look at things or the truth of the matter, though. Plus, we already know that’s not how it actually works. If you bring up Bud Selig and his legacy, how many people are going to respond to you and say that his expanding the postseason and work on national television deals and huge local broadcasting contracts are the stuff legends are made of? Or are you instead going to hear people talk about how he’s responsible for canceling the World Series, or ruining the postseason by adding wild cards, or his one-sided beef with Alex Rodriguez, or his connections with the steroid era, or his threatening to get rid of two baseball teams, and so on?
Sure, revenues rose under Selig, and they’ve risen under Manfred, too. But boiling them and their time in office down to number go up doesn’t tell the story of who they are or how they’ll be remembered by most people. So, instead, I wonder about if being able to see players’ balls in these sheer new pants, or Manfred running things so aggressively anti-player that the minors got over their decades=spanning fears and actually organized, or pissing off MLB players so much that they managed to reverse course on MLB demolishing them and scaling back gains in every new collective bargaining agreement, or letting owners like John Fisher abandon cities like Oakland while pushing for more and more taxpayer-funded stadiums and stadium upgrades across the country, and so on, are what he’ll be remembered for.
That business still thrived under Manfred will be remembered, yes, but that’s only the point for the commissioner himself and the owners who keep him in that role. There are more important and worthwhile considerations for the rest of us to ponder, and so, I did.
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