While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
Category: Management Bullshit
Unlock with PatreonThe Mookie Betts Question has little to do with “worth”
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
The Phillies are frozen by fear, and that should terrify fans
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There’s been an implied (and occasionally leaked) feeling to the decisions of too many MLB teams in the past couple of years regarding the wild card. Why try by making trades or going big in the offseason in a division with a clear leader in order to maybe enter into a one-game playoff, in which your season could end in mere hours? Playing the odds that severely isn’t the right attitude, but it’s at least an understandable one that should make MLB consider that maybe Baseball Thunderdome, despite its exciting setup, is not enticing to the teams that need to be trying to make it there and beyond.
The Phillies have decided to take things one depressing step further: they’re not afraid of making it to the Wild Card Game so much as they are afraid of winning it. Ken Rosenthal reported as much last week:
Yet, once the Phillies began to slump, their front office’s thinking was, “We don’t want to go all-out for the chance to play in the wild-card game and then face the Dodgers in the Division Series.” An honest assessment, perhaps. But also defeatist, sending the wrong message to players and fans.
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“What if MLB’s efficiency fetish could further infect the minors,” asks writer.
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On Monday, Travis Sawchik asked a question to Five Thirty Eight’s audience: “Do we even need Minor League Baseball?” Sawchik’s theory is that so much of player development happens off the field these days, in comparison to how development used to work, that the minors are a waste of time and resources. Sawchik, you might recall, is one of the two authors of The MVP Machine, which looked at how players can kind of just be created these days thanks to advances in analytics and the introduction of the concept of “Betterball,” so this is an arena he knows his way around.
To a point, anyway. As you might also recall, the book brings to mind some key questions regarding labor and homogeneity it does not know the answers to (or even how to answer them), and this article is something of an extension of that. Deadspin’s Albert Burneko, for instance, wants to know who the “we” in Sawchik’s headline refers to, and it’s not an exaggeration that the entire premise of Sawchik’s piece relies on the reader identifying with management in order for it to accomplish the job the author set out for it.
You should read all of Burneko’s piece, as it’s fan-centric and a rebuttal to the idea presented in the initial piece that MiLB exists in the service of MLB teams alone, but I’ll pull this paragraph from it for now:
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Dave Dombrowski’s firing could have MLB-wide implications
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
MLB’s young players are better than ever, so pay them
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
The current NLRB is useless, unless you’re an employer like MLB
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
Jay-Z’s partnership with the NFL isn’t the answer he thinks it is
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This whole Jay-Z and National Football League partnership is only getting weirder and more disappointing. As explained at The Root, Jay-Z is expected to end up with a “significant ownership interest” in an as-of-yet unnamed NFL team, which would make him the first Black owner in the league’s lengthy history. The prospective NFL owner is sticking with the idea that he’ll be some kind of agent of change between his partnership with the league that has his Roc Nation business consult on entertainment while contributing to NFL activism* and this ownership of a team. Shaking things up is not how anyone has ever been accepted into the (white) boys’ club that is sports team ownership, but don’t let that dull your enthusiasm!
*What?
Jay-Z was a proponent of Colin Kaepernick and his protests against police brutality, protests that ended up getting Kaepernick ousted from the NFL: if you don’t believe that the former quarterback was blacklisted by the league, look no further than the fact that the NFL paid him and another former player, Eric Reid, a settlement to make the collusion case disappear. Leagues aren’t in the habit of paying settlements for crimes they’re innocent of committing, but sometimes it pays to make things just go away with cash without ever outright saying you’re guilty. The past-tense following Jay-Z’s name in this graf’s first sentence was intentional, by the way, as the mogul joining forces with the NFL pits him against the player they still won’t allow to play in their league. Once he does own a team, do you think Jay-Z will sign Kaepernick to be its quarterback? Or will he already be committed to keeping his seat at the extremely white table that has kept Kaepernick away?
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MLB’s attendance is shrinking, and their solutions won’t make games cheaper
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USA Today recently ran a feature on the declining attendance of Major League Baseball games, and the smaller stadiums teams have been and continue to want to build to contend with it. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the meat of it for our purposes comes about 1,700 words in:
With the in-game experience so key to building fan loyalty, wouldn’t it behoove teams to fill up empty seats at discount prices?
Perhaps not at the expense of undercutting season-ticket holders.
“Is value important? Certainly. But it’s not a silver bullet in terms of a single solution to ensuring we have the attendance that we want,” says the Indians’ [Alex] King. “Our season ticket holders are investing a significant amount in us and shown a lot of loyalty. We really value that and want to ensure that as the lifeblood of our organization, we protect the investment they’ve made.”
On the other end of the spectrum, smaller, successful stadiums can breed ticket scarcity, tempting teams to increase prices and potentially squeeze out fans of lesser means.
Teams have been de-prioritizing the experience of actually going to the ballpark and watching an MLB game, because the economics of the league are such that they don’t need anyone going to games in order to make money. Attendance helps, of course — ask the Marlins, who pull in less money than anyone else (before revenue-sharing) for a reason despite a new park in a major American city — but with multi-billion dollar regional and national television deals popping up all over the place in addition to the cash raked in by MLBAM’s offerings, no one needs to actually go to a baseball game in order for MLB teams to make a profit. For now, anyway.
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25 years later, the 1994 strike is still the MLB owners’ fault
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Twenty five years ago, on August 12, 1994, the last strike in Major League Baseball occurred. It’s unlikely to be the final strike or work stoppage in the league’s history, but there have been 25 years of what some would refer to as “labor peace” since the last one. You should expect to see takes floating around the internet today suggesting that the strike was a bad idea, or that it was a disaster, and maybe even asking who was to blame for the strike, as if it isn’t management pushing the workers into a strike whenever one happens.
After all, we didn’t get to see Tony Gwynn hit .400, or Matt Williams challenge Roger Maris, or the Expos get a chance to win the World Series because of the strike, which apparently are the things we should really care about. Not that the strike kept MLB’s owners from implementing a salary cap, or that a federal judge stepping in at the tail-end of the strike stopped MLB from putting replacement players — scabs — on the field for games that actually counted, which could have destroyed the power of the MLBPA and had much further-reaching, dire consequences for the game than adding another 25 years onto the wait for someone to hit .400 again.
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