Yea he will definitely play in mlb again, he is terribly streaky, but when he is locked in he is as legit as almost anyone
I didn’t say he wouldn’t, I said he may not. At this point I think it’s pretty likely that he’s going to have to take a minor league deal. And if thats the case he’s likely going to be relying on somebody getting hurt to make a major league roster. He does still project to be a productive bat (.246/.305/.463). If he could convince a team he can still catch 60 games in a season, he would become a lot more valuable and could possibly even secure a major league deal. Like I said, I love the guy and am rooting for him.
Me too....I just think unless he is picky, there will be teams out there who will roster him. There are some pretty bad players around baseball, Gattis is so streaky but like I say when he is locked in he is something
Agree. Chris Carter still had a couple of years after we cut bait, and he was significantly worse. Gattis will get a job
Gattis is a couple of years older. Also, league is in a lack of parity stage which should be very anti-mid tier free agent. Teams for the most part should want good players if they are good and have depth or want to try out young maybe players if bad. Not sure what happens with Gattis looking at the middle teams in the AL. The teams that are in the middle in the AL tend to have a DH (Cruz, Ohtani, Davis). Rays may have most need, but they have a guy that hit last season a little better than Gattis. I'm thinking he ends up as a backup catcher for a team that has an injury in spring training.
The fact that employable players can't find jobs is, to me, far more alarming than the fact that all-star studs can't nail down 150m+ contracts like they used to. The national storyline has really focused on the latter, but I can't help but feel for the majority of the FA class. No one is talking about the Evan Gattis' of the FA market. There's a slew of legitimate professional ballplayers who should be able to find one of 30 professional teams to use their services. It's just absurd. There's a ton of good, playable players left who can help teams win. The amount of tanking teams (or just teams not willing to spend) is absurd. Something needs to change. Evan Gattis is a major league ballplayer. He can help teams win games, or at the very least, can help teams be competitive. The fact that he, and players of his echelon, don't even have offers on the table is nothing short of pathetic. I get that every team is trying to find competitive advantages, and that HOU more or less created the over-arching problem, but the league needs to do something to address the amount of tanking/not spending going on. I'll take all the easy wins HOU can get, but someone (besides Ramgers) employ this damn man! Gattis is such a joy to watch, I'd hate to see players like him fizzle out just because 2/3rds of the league doesn't want to win.
1. Have some sort of draft lottery like the NBA so tanking doesn't guarantee a top draft pick. 2. Add more teams to the playoffs so they have a reason to spend money. Something like 6 teams in the playoffs in each league and give the top 2 seeds a bye while the bottom 4 teams play a 3 game series to move on.
With all due respect, those are terrible ideas. 1. Even with the lottery, it doesn't stop plenty of NBA teams from tanking. More than 1/2 the teams make it and there are teams in playoff position or close to it that are talked of being sellers. 2. There are 5 teams in each league now. The Wild Card game is enough. It's not necessarily beneficial to the top seeds to have to wait a week to play. Plus you're pushing the playoffs well into November, which could be problematic for northern teams. And no one wants a 10 month long season.
Then you get the status quo where 2/3 of the league is in tank mode. The Astros season ended on a Sunday and they didn't play game one of the ALDS until Friday. If you have the bottom 4 teams playing Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and start the next round on Sunday you are talking a 2 day difference. I don't think that matters. Or make the first round Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and start the next round Saturday for only one day difference. Teams aren't going to spend money without a reason.
What needs to change is the league minimum salary (or otherwise some form of set % of revenue that ends up distributed to the players). The fact of the matter is that Gattis projects as a replacement-level player next season. He does not project to be more valuable than the average AAAA guy (like AJ Reed, JD Davis, and on and on and on). So he actually won't be helping a team win more than most players on those teams' 40 man roser who will be optioned to the minors. So the sad thing isn't that Gattis can't make more than he's worth. The sad thing is that all those guys don't make more before they reach free agency. If the league minimum were something like $3M, it wouldn't be a matter of "are we going to overpay a replacement level veteran or underpay a rookie?", it would be a matter of "who would we rather have for the same price, a veteran replacement level player, or a rookie replacement level player?".
I've heard plenty of national media discussing how the mid tier free agents are ones negatively impacted the most.
They could do a schedule like that...but they wouldn't. There would be at least a travel day in that series. One would start on a Tuesday and be over Friday. The other wouldn't start until Wednesday and be over Saturday. Have to give them at least 1 day in between. You see it as only 2 more days. The higher seeded teams would see it as "2 more freakin days". Adding 2 more teams to the playoffs isn't going to change the number of teams that are tanking. The ones on the fringe now aren't the ones that would be in a rebuild. They're the likely ones coming out of it. For good or bad, the Astros created a monster. It worked out great for us and gave the rest of the league a blueprint. You're not going to stop it. Even if they implement a salary floor, teams will find a way to manipulate it.
I agree all systems are susceptible to manipulation. In this case, the system allows teams to get better, quicker, by tanking. Rewarding the bottom dwellers the high draft picks. The manipulation is possible because of how the rewards are handed out. If we want real change, draft pick allocation has to change also.
A system like that would never be agreed to. Baseball is so different than other sports. If you are drafted high in football or hoops you are in the NFL or NBA, baseball you are in the minors and not a part of the mlbpa. While there are many busts in all drafts, the baseball draft is far more of a crapshoot than the others. If anything is going to be done draft wise it will be an international draft, I see that being a big part of negotiations for the new CBA I also don’t think it would be that hard to implement a salary floor that would be difficult to manipulate. You make it a solid floor and only money actually paid out that year counts towards it. So if you trade away a high dollar guy late in the year only the portion already paid counts, and the penalty for being under is 100% The next CBA will be fascinating, so much at stake, and a strike or lockout would have devastating long term affects for both sides
Perhaps not. But as long as the incentive is there, teams will tank to take advantage of it. For me, any sport that rewards the middling to poor teams into trying to be worse than their fellow bottom dwellers is bad for the sport. Not just the fans in those cities where their team is among those trying to lose rather than win, but to the winners as well given 1/3 to 2/3rds of the teams are not even trying to beat them. I am not saying blow the entire system apart, but adjustments that would make tanking less attractive while still shifting a disproportionate amount of drafting talent into the lower end should be possible.
Love that idea. Should be better for the league on all fronts. Give teams 2 incentives to finish top two: rest and a bye, and he league showcases top teams in the playoffs by way of series instead of a few play-in games. They could easily add a 3rd WC team and do a simple bracket: WC3 @ Division Winner, and WC2 @ WC1. Winners go to play the top two teams. Last year would have been epic. (4) series of CHC/COL, ATL/STL, NYY/SEA, and OAK/TAM? Like, why not? There are some high quality teams and great players in the league. Win and in game just doesn't sit right with how random October baseball is. Yeah, the Gattis part was a bit in jest. The current CBA expires in 2021, so we'll see what they do soon. That type of transition would be really interesting to watch unfold, though.
I just don't think the Owners or the MLBPA is that worried about the tanking. I know the easy answer is that the players are, because it affects their salaries in free agency. I just don't know that having teams taking is what is making the huge change. First off the biggest thing holding everything up right now is Harper and Machado not getting their $300-$400 million contract, and teams that are willing to spend are not willing to spend on mid range guys until they find out if they are getting these guys. I have no doubt that if those two guys were signed, guys like Keuchel and Moustakas and Marwin would be signed pretty quickly. Part of it is the sheer amount of some of these contracts got so high that it reduced the number of teams that even have a legit chance at signing them. So if you are a team in the middle trying to sign the Keuchels and Marwins of the world, they won't sign with you yet because they might get more from a high dollar team if that team doesn't get Harper/Machado. I think the best answer is a solid salary floor, a hard floor without options to get around it, and a NBA style individual max (this will never happen, the mlbpa is too strong)...but if you have a certain percentage of the profits going to the players that's all fine and well, but if you have $400 million contracts and so forth, that eats up that percentage. I don't think they need a true salary cap, but a floor and individual cap would be the best scenario In reality, we have no idea what kind of ideas they are actually tossing around, but if we did, we would be able to make a lot more sense out of the current free agent situation
I hate NBA max deals. It allows teams to have several players on same team worth significantly more than the max on max contracts. Still think best thing would be to double (or triple) the minimum contract that would effectively double (or triple) salary floor.
