Category: Management Bullshit

An announcement! The good kind!

A little update on me and this newsletter and also everything else.

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.

Good morning, Marvin Miller’s Mustache readers. I’ve got a bit of news to share, and it involves this newsletter a bit. First thing: I accepted an offer for a full-time gig last week, and I start next week. I can’t say where it is yet, but everyone will know in just a few days, anyway.

It’s an editing/writing position, so, I get to stick around in an industry that I was pretty sure I was only going to be allowed to remain in as a freelancer and creator of a couple of independent publications. It’s hard not to think those things when you’ve been unemployed since late-2018 despite applying to a whole bunch of other jobs, but such is the state of said industry. Here goes, though, I’m getting another shot, and I’m thrilled for it.

Continue reading “An announcement! The good kind!”

Notes: Rays and the Trop, MLB scrubs diversity, the A’s and Las Vegas

The latest from two stadium subsidy quests, and MLB’s recent political erasures and silence.

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.

The Rays declined the massive public subsidies they had in place for a new ballpark in St. Petersburgh, but they haven’t abandoned the city or Pinellas County just yet. Which, to be frank, is a little odd, but it seems that current own Stu Sternberg wants to buy a bit more time, but not 30 years’ worth, while he figures out whatever’s next.

Continue reading “Notes: Rays and the Trop, MLB scrubs diversity, the A’s and Las Vegas”

The Rays won’t have a new stadium in St. Petersburg after all

The Rays are likely to stay in the Tampa region, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be in St. Petersburg.

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.

Earlier this week, at Baseball Prospectus, a piece of mine published explaining why it was that commissioner Rob Manfred — along with some team owners — were pressuring Stu Sternberg to sell the Rays. This one is free to read with an email login, so you can check out the whole thing if you’d like, but the key idea to take from it for right this second is that Sternberg was very likely to blow up the stadium deal he had been working on with St. Petersburg practically forever, because he only realized it was a bad deal for the Rays after agreeing to it.

Over the weekend, The Athletic reported that Manfred and Co. would even go so far as to use collective bargaining to pull a reverse A’s on Sternberg, if he couldn’t be convinced to sell the team before then. Basically, rather than using bargained and temporary revenue-sharing funds to help the Rays along in their search, like happened with the A’s, the other owners would instead use the CBA to throttle the Rays’ share of the revenue. If Sternberg barely has the funds he needs to operate the team at a high level now, or to pay for the increased costs that the delay in coming to a final agreement supposedly created, then having his revenue-sharing checks cut down was not going to help matters.

Continue reading “The Rays won’t have a new stadium in St. Petersburg after all”

In case it wasn’t obvious, Tony Clark is against a salary cap

It’s still good to hear it said, given everything else backwards happening in the world.

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.

You knew this to be true without the executive director of the MLB Players Association coming out and saying it, but just in case you needed the reassurance, here it is. Tony Clark has now said, out loud, that a salary cap “is not necessary,” despite MLB owners anonymously grumbling or outright saying the opposite to the press.

That’s per the Baltimore Banner, which has even more of a reason to cover this story than most, given Orioles’ owner David Rubenstein’s coming out in favor of a cap at the World Economic Forum in Davos, since MLB owners possess the kind of wealth that gets you interviewed while at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Continue reading “In case it wasn’t obvious, Tony Clark is against a salary cap”

Notes: Brewers and the World Series, A’s in Vegas timetable

The owner of the Brewers had a quote you just have to stare at for a minute, and Rob Manfred talks about the projected A’s future

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.

Now here’s a fun quote that surely won’t come back to haunt Brewers’ principal owner Mark Attanasio:

“Is my job to win a World Series,” Attanasio said, “or is my job to provide a summer of entertainment and passion and a way for families to come together?”

That’s from a Bob Nightengale story over at USA Today, on why the Brewers refuse to spend “despite decade of NL Central domination.” First off, dominating the NL Central is a lot like an elementary gym teacher kicking the ass of every kindergartener at basketball. It doesn’t mean he stands a chance against a real team. Second, oh boy, Mark Attanasio.

Continue reading “Notes: Brewers and the World Series, A’s in Vegas timetable”

Notes: IRS priorities, sports owners taxes, the cost of steel beams

It’s bad news all around. Well, okay, at least one thing is kind of funny if you aren’t a sports team owner.

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.

Let’s do a Friday roundup based on the idea that the return of Donald Trump to the White House means some potential changes are in store on the sports side of things. None of these issues are full-blown stories on their own at this point, but there’s something to watch for with each of them.

Continue reading “Notes: IRS priorities, sports owners taxes, the cost of steel beams”

Do MLB owners want a salary cap, or for everyone to believe that’s true?

Like with free agency, you have to think of why certain positions are stated in public.

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.

There’s been a whole lot of discussion lately, from the ownership and league side, anonymously and with names attached, to the idea of both an MLB lockout in 2026 when the current collective bargaining agreement expires, and the desire for a salary cap being part of the impetus for said lockout. I’ve already written about the lockout portion of things, but I wanted to reiterate something this morning, given that the owners wrapped their winter meetings in Florida, where the subject of discussion was often the game’s economics.

Evan Drellich wrote a story last week about part of that, headlined, “MLB owners debate push for salary cap at summit this week”. A key section from that piece, for our purposes:

Continue reading “Do MLB owners want a salary cap, or for everyone to believe that’s true?”

Notes: Fay Vincent, Sacramento A’s, SABR Awards

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.

Fay Vincent, former Major League Baseball commissioner, passed away on Saturday at the age of 86. He had been receiving treatment for bladder cancer, according to ESPN, but complications in that treatment led to his death. MLB released a statement announcing Vincent’s passing on Sunday.

Vincent took over as MLB commissioner for Bart Giamatti in 1989, following his sudden death just five months into his tenure. Vincent has had his name come up in this digital pages on more than one occasion, as he was the commissioner during the 1990 lockout, and the stepping stone then-owner Bud Selig used to grab the commissionership for himself.

Continue reading “Notes: Fay Vincent, Sacramento A’s, SABR Awards”

Ignore Rob Manfred: lockouts exist to preempt strikes

Lockouts are a necessity for one thing only, and you’re not going to hear Rob Manfred say what that is.

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.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred can say whatever he wants about the need for a lockout as something of a routine part of collective bargaining. And he certainly has, as evidenced by a recent interview with The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. A pertinent excerpt:

But one action looks virtually certain. Manfred said an offseason lockout, as there was in 2021-22, should be considered the new norm.

“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” he said. “There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA works based on leverage. The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”

To which MLBPA executive director Tony Clark’s responded by saying that, “Players know from first-hand experience that a lockout is neither routine nor positive… It’s a weapon, plain and simple, implemented to pressure players and their families by taking away a player’s ability to work.”

Continue reading “Ignore Rob Manfred: lockouts exist to preempt strikes”

Orioles’ owner publicly wishes for salary cap

David Rubenstein spoke up about his wishes for a salary cap, which signals we should be watching to see if other owners start bringing it up, too.

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.

There’s been all kinds of talk in MLB lately about the need for a salary cap. There is no need at all, of course, given it’s attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist in more ways than one: there’s what Rob Mains pointed out last week at Baseball Prospectus, in that the competitive imbalance cited as evidence of the need for a salary cap doesn’t actually exist, and there’s also what I’ve been harping on for some time now, where the problem is not the teams like the Dodgers that are outspending everyone, but the huge chunk of the league that wasn’t spending enough years ago and isn’t spending more now even as other clubs do increase spending.

It keeps coming up, though, so let’s dive in again. Jeff Passan, over at ESPN, wrote a piece last week that included this bit that I want to highlight:

Continue reading “Orioles’ owner publicly wishes for salary cap”