Category: Management Bullshit

The annual Forbes’ MLB valuations are out; don’t forget about context

Forbes’ annual report is a tool, not the finished product you’d build with them.

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Forbes’ annual look at the most valuable teams in MLB posted on Thursday, and it’s, as always, worth opening up and perusing. Seeing that there are increases in team valuations and the like is always fascinating — even if they’re just estimates — especially when they’re balanced against this idea that teams just aren’t making all that much money: an idea perpetuated by Forbes’ own report, even.

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From the highs of the WBC to the lows of the Angels

The Angels might be good in 2023. They also might just be the Angels, and then lose Shohei Ohtani forever.

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Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, the two best players on the Angels, faced off on Tuesday night in the World Baseball Classic final. Ohtani came in to close out a one-run game in the ninth, and he blew his teammate — one of the greatest hitters to ever take the field, whose only issue these days is actually being on the field — away with a couple of fastballs that gave away how much Ohtani wanted this match-up, and then a slider that not even Trout was going to be dialed in for. It’s going to be a lasting memory of the incredible 2023 WBC, and Angels fans are going to want to hold onto it, because they very well might need it.

The 2023 Angels might be pretty good! They usually aren’t, of course, but this year might be different. Ohtani has been teammates with Trout since 2018, and in that stretch, the Angels are 328-380. They haven’t posted a .500 record in those five years, never mind a winning one, and have lost 90 games in the season in which Ohtani didn’t take the mound, but could still show up to hit. Even with Trout batting .283/.369/.630 with a 178 OPS+ and Ohtani following up his MVP-winning 2021 with a .273/.356/.519 line and 2.33 ERA over 166 innings, powered by an AL-leading 11.9 strikeouts per nine, the 2022 Angels lost 89 games.

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There’s work to do to fix arbitration

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A few weeks back, I wrote about how arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere, despite MLB’s attempts to get rid of the system they’ve hated since its inception in the days of Marvin Miller. Hell, the fact MLB wants to get rid of arbitration remains the best proof that the system is worth salvaging. Arbitration certainly isn’t a perfect tool these days, though, as teams figure out how to manipulate hearings in a way that earns them victories. While things on the position player and starting pitcher side are a little more evenly split in terms of which side, teams or player, wins out, as Malachi Hayes wrote for Baseball Prospectus, relievers are doomed.

Read the entire feature, but here’s a snippet of the findings:

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MLB hasn’t given up on restricting minor-league pay yet

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If you needed a reminder that Major League Baseball is disingenuous in their public desire to make life better for minor-league players, you only have to check the news to find it. They might have chosen to voluntarily recognize that the players had unionized and sought representation under the Players Association, and they have certainly spoken on how they gave the players raises across the board and are now paying for their housing, look at us, aren’t we just the greatest? But that’s just the surface level stuff: underneath, they’re the same old MLB.

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MLB is trying to shrink the minors again

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We hadn’t heard a peep about the nature of the minor-league collective bargaining between Major League Baseball and the Players Association despite it going on for months now, but we finally got a tiny morsel to reflect on. Tony Clark spoke on various matters around the league, which Evan Drellich published at The Athletic, and it’s all worth looking at. The newest info in there, though, pertains to the ongoing bargaining, and an ask MLB is making that the union isn’t about to budge on:

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Thoughts on MLB’s economic reform committee

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Whispers turned to anonymous leaks, which became Dick Monfort and Rob Manfred publicly complaining/shaming, and then an “economic reform committee” was unveiled by MLB. All of this was predictable, and because of that, it’s not too difficulty to suss out what it all means.

MLB is using the recent issues of Diamond Sports Group — which runs the Bally regional sports networks that Sinclair purchased from FOX after Disney grabbed everything besides those RSNs and the fascist cable news network portion of the company in their quest to own every IP in existence — as an excuse for the existence of this economic reform committee, and I’m sure that’s true to a degree: the owners will all be in some uncharted waters soon, and rather than end up in a situation like Bud Selig arguing with George Steinbrenner about revenue-sharing for years, or any number of 1980s commissioners trying to explain how cable was good for the owners’ bank accounts, actually, Manfred and Co. are trying to get ahead of the discussions about this brave new world.

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Arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere

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The greatest evidence that exists in favor of arbitration is that Major League Baseball wants to do away with it. It’s not a perfect system, no, given the arbitrators themselves are inconsistent, and MLB spends an awful lot of time coaching up its teams on specific talking points so that they can defend their positions, but in aggregate, there is a reason that the Players Association is in favor of keeping an arbitration system in place, while the league would love very much to be done with it.

Even in an offseason like this one, where the players were trounced in arbitration itself, the system still allows for teams to negotiate with players — for players to ask for more than they could without the threat of an arbitration hearing in place — and end up with a higher salary than they would have with no such event looming in the distance. As I wrote back in 2019 for Deadspin:

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The A’s have been busy, but only relatively speaking

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The A’s keep on making moves this offseason, with the latest of them a trade of reliever-turning-starter A.J. Puk to the Marlins for sophomore outfielder JJ Bleday. It’s something of a challenge trade, since Puk converted to the bullpen in the minors and hasn’t made a start in the bigs, while Bleday’s rookie season didn’t approach his Triple-A production, but the thing I mostly want to note is that the A’s have been busy, but they haven’t exactly been putting in full effort. Again.

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A reminder the ‘Steve Cohen tax’ hasn’t really hit yet

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Shohei Ohtani won’t be a free agent until next winter, but he’s also literally Shohei Ohtani, so discussions about what his free agency will look like are already happening. A notable one occurred last week, when a “high-ranking exec” predicted to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman “a reckoning” when the current collective bargaining agreement expires to attempt to keep the spending of Mets’ owner Steve Cohen in check:

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Dick Monfort is good for a laugh, at least

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The owners of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams are quite the bunch, in the sense that the vast majority of them are capable of doing or saying something that will either raise my blood pressure or get me to start giggling at how much of a dingus they are. Rockies’ owner Dick Monfort could very well be king dingus in this group: a man who has won nothing ever, and yet is so publicly sure that the way he’s doing things is the right way. And to the point where he’s now openly criticizing the spending of fellow NL West club the Padres, as well as any of the Rockies’ fans who believe that the way San Diego is operating is the right way to go about building a successful team.

From Saturday’s Denver Post:

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