Category: Management Bullshit

Notes: 2028 and beyond, Rays get their bonds, holiday sign-off

My latest at Baseball Prospectus (and reasons to subscribe to BP), the Rays get their way in the end, and saying goodbye to 2024.

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I said I’d get my thoughts organized here for use in a feature down the road, and that’s just what I did. My latest for Baseball Prospectus — titled “Baseball in the Future, Tense” by the wonderfully witty editors I work with over there — published on Thursday.

Within, I give some background on how things stood in the league, regarding spending in relation to the luxury tax threshold, back before the 2019 season, and where it stands now. Which is all a build up to show that there’s a growing divide between the teams willing to spend — which barely existed six years ago, in the runup to what MLB and its owners knew would be a defining labor battle with the Players Association over the new CBA — and those who are not. One that’s only going to worsen for sure as the new broadcasting arrangement comes into play in 2028 and requires a heavier revenue-sharing load for the “big” market teams to carry in order to subsidize the “small” market ones, and might worsen further depending on the ability — or lack thereof — of Rob Manfred’s successor as commissioner to keep everyone unified despite said growing divide.

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The A’s have to spend now, or else

The A’s have to spend, due to increased revenue-sharing, and oh, they also aren’t projected to spend more than they did in 2024, so maybe relax the “dawn of a new era” reactions.

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The A’s publicly said, quite awhile ago, that they planned on increasing their payroll in the future. They also stated that the expectation was that this would begin in the 2024-2025 offseason — it was clear that signing players might be difficult for them, given convincing anyone to intentionally play for them in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento for a few years was going to be a tough sell, but trades were always an option, too.

They’ve recently added a couple of expensive — for them — players onto the roster, which of course implies that it truly was Oakland holding them back, or that their ways have changed, or whatever positive interpretation they hope you take away from this for their benefit; MLB’s own website is of course happy to promote a “new direction” for the franchise. The truth of the matter is much simpler, however: the A’s have to spend, or else a grievance will be filed against them.

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Time skip

More teams are spending the resources they have even as others run in place, the next CBA is Manfred’s last, with his final major act likely being a landscape-altering broadcasting deal. Pieces are starting to come together that will still be in play at the end of the decade.

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The Juan Soto deal has me thinking about the future a bit. Not Soto’s future, but what’s going on in MLB. You’ll have to excuse me for using this space to get some thoughts down and further organize them, but it’ll end up resulting in another piece or two down the line once that’s all done.

Event: The Dodgers spend and spend some more, deferring even more money, and are projected for a $279 million Opening Day payroll after kicking off 2024 at $267 million — please recall that Shohei Ohtani was paid just $2 million in 2024, with the other $68 million in the deal deferred until the playing time portion of the contract expires for 2034. The Dodgers ranked third in payroll, but second for luxury tax implications, as more of Ohtani’s deal counts towards that figure in the present than in the figure calculated with actual dollars.

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Juan Soto, the Mets, Dodgers, and spending

Even if only the Mets could get Juan Soto because Steve Cohen would do anything to get him, there’s plenty to learn from the signing on what this says about the rest of the league and their spending habits.

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Earlier in the offseason, there was an entire cycle of outrage at the Dodgers, for their decision to keep adding good baseball players who cost money to their team, that won a championship in 2024. The deferrals were a particular sticking point, but also just the idea that a team had resources and was using them was another. Let’s prepare ourselves for the same thing happening now, with the Mets, as they signed Juan Soto to a 15-year, $765 million contract — and one without deferrals, too, to really show off how much owner Steve Cohen has more money than anyone else in the league.

You’re going to hear people complain about a salary cap, or the fact that the Mets spending like this isn’t fair because not every team has this kind of money. Conveniently enough, I already covered the aforementioned outrage cycle for the Dodgers over at Baseball Prospectus, and quite a bit of it overlaps here with the Mets — to the degree that I already used Juan Soto as an example for points I was making within. So, I’ll just share some of that now:

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Notes: Diamond, the catcher market, Rays’ stadium deal dead or dying

Catching up on the week of holiday news, before the winter meetings shift.

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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.

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The A’s are already failing at free agency

Sacramento has already cost the A’s a free agent pitcher that made sense for them.

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The A’s can say that they don’t want to be known as the Sacramento A’s all they want, but the thing is, that’s where their home games are. And the players that they might want to sign know this, and on top of the A’s not being a very good team and not offering competitive contracts to basically anyone for years and years now, it’s going to impact their player acquisition.

In fact, it already has. Walker Buehler, a free agent for the first time after seven seasons and eight years with the Dodgers, would have been the perfect fit for a team like the A’s on a short-term deal. Buehler missed 2023 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, and pitched pretty poorly in 75 regular season innings after returning, allowing nearly two homers per nine innings while posting an ERA of 5.38. He was better in the postseason, but we’re also talking about 15 innings there: he had plenty left to prove, especially with his 2022 just being a league-average campaign.

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The Fair Ball Act would close an exploitable loophole

A collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its minor leaguers only goes as far as federal and state exemptions allow it to.

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Minor league baseball players might have unionized in the fall of 2022, leading to their first-ever collective bargaining agreement early the next year, but that alone isn’t enough. This was obvious at the time, as, even while MLB was at the bargaining table with the Players Association, the former was trying to support an exemption that would allow them to a CBA workaround in Florida — one that would have let them avoid adhering to the state’s minimum wage laws.

Here’s what I said at the time about that, in March of 2023:

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St. Petersburg, Oakland, and public subsidies

A reminder that cities, counties, and states giving up hundreds of millions of dollars (or even over $1 billion) in public subsidies to stadiums can hurt those places far more than a new stadium can help.

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We’ve spent a whole lot of 2024 talking about the Tampa Bay Rays and the Oakland A’s, as well as how the former was set to stay that way while the latter wormed their way into just being the A’s, no hometown, for a few years. Those stories aren’t just covered because they involve the obscenely wealthy casually and easily lying in order to avoid spending their money as much as possible, but also because the thing they’re going for is public subsidies.

These subsidies don’t exist in a vacuum. If they go to a stadium, they aren’t going to something else. This is why Schools Over Stadiums formed in Nevada after state, county, and city politicians got into bed with the A’s: Nevada’s public schools were in desperate need of financial assistance, and, once again, everyone with the power to give those funds to a billionaire for a new stadium wanted to do that instead. As Chris Daly, the Deputy Executive Director of Government Relations for the Nevada State Education Association, told me last September:

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Notes: Cubs already giving up, Pride Nights, Dodgers and Trout

The Cubs, at best, think you’re stupid. And more from the week that was.

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Free agency has already started, in the sense that players are declaring their free agency, qualifying offers have been sent out, and all of that happy stuff that kicks off the period. Free agency hasn’t really truly gotten moving, though, even if players are able to sign already. There hasn’t been a ton of movement yet, just like there never is right at the beginning of what is a slow-burn process (that seems to move a little slower every year, too).

And yet, the Cubs have already quit on bringing in either the top free agent hitter or pitcher available, according to The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney:

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Notes: Latest on the A’s, Reinsdorf’s Nashville gambit, WNBPA opts out of CBA

John Fisher is good for the money, he promises, also could someone please wildly overpay for a stake in the A’s, and soon? Also, Jerry Reinsdorf’s attempt to create leverage from the ether intensifies, and the WNBA players opt out.

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On Wednesday, Baseball Prospectus published a piece of mine updating their readers on what’s going on with the A’s and their quest to move to Las Vegas. I’ll give you the short version here: sources close to the A’s have been saying that there’s a plan “in place” for the private funds needed to cover the over $1 billion the A’s are on the hook for to build a stadium in Vegas, but no one is allowed to see the plan, there is no set date for revealing the plan despite a ticking clock, and oh, also the plan isn’t actually finished or in place, and is still mostly a hypothetical about things owner John Fisher could do if he wanted or needed to, I guess.

I bring this up here not just to point you in the direction of related writings elsewhere, but also because, later that same say, the New York Post published an “exclusive” story about the A’s and their quest to sell 25 percent of the team for $500 million, which some simple math tells us means they’re valuing the franchise at $2 billion. Two things: first, those same figures were reported nearly a year ago by the Los Angeles Times, and second, this doesn’t mean the Post is necessarily behind the times or the Times, so much as that it’s like Fisher simply isn’t moving off of this amount of money for this amount of ownership, and the calls for it are just getting louder given the aforementioned ticking clock.

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