Read his article this morning. It was terrible. He was all over the place. You're seeing pitchers trying to get deals in place before the lockout. There is an obvious reason for this. I think these massive contracts are about to capped soon.
Based on this, average player salaries have stagnated the last 6 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236213/mean-salaray-of-players-in-majpr-league-baseball/ Assuming MLB revenues have been increasing, I suspect players will fight pretty hard this time if this stat is accurate.
Well last time we lost games because of a work stoppage they turned their eyes from Steroids cause chicks dig the long ball Maybe just make the ball fly further this time and keep the players safe
I mean, there's a way to guarantee player salaries scale with revenue. But players have consistently favored the pot of gold strategy as opposed to any caps and floors.
Do they still do the thing where team's local media deals are not necessarily counted in the "increasing MLB revenue" dollars... which would mean actual average team revenue is rising even more than reported, given that media rights deals continue to go up as live sports advertising is one of the last footholds in this day/age of streaming/on-demand/cord cutting.
These negotiations will be interesting to watch shake out. Hopefully they don't forget history, lest be doomed to repeat it. The 1994-95 strike wasted a playoffs and World Series. And after all the bargaining, grand standing and public groveling, the owners and the players ended up playing under terms of a CBA that were close to identical to those terms before the strike. Anyway, I think McHugh has the right mindset. The players aren't going to change everything with this negotiation. They have to take a long term approach and look for incremental changes over the years. And when the players ask the owners for concessions, the logical response from the owners is going to be "well, what are you going to concede on?". Most of the articles I've read on the negotiations always stress what the players want, but rarely stress what the players are willing to give up in order to get what they want.
• The team with the best record in each league would get a bye into the best-of-five division series. • The remaining two division winners would get to pick their wild-card opponent from the bottom three wild-card teams. The division winner with the second-best record would pick first, then the No. 3 seed in the league would pick its opponent from the final two wild-card teams. The wild-card team with the best record would play the wild-card team that wasn't picked by a division winner. • Once matchups are set, the higher-seeded teams would host all three games in a best-of-three wild-card round. • Winners in the wild-card round would advance to the division series and the playoffs would continue as they have in the past. A more recent addition to the negotiations is an NBA-style lottery system for the draft. The league believes it will at least partly address players' tanking concerns. Right now, the team with the worst record in baseball gets the No. 1 pick in the amateur draft the following summer. It's created a "race to the bottom," as agent Scott Boras put it earlier this month. The league is offering a system where all non-playoff teams would have a chance at the No. 1 pick -- not just the team with the worst record. The worst team would still have better odds than the second-worst team, and so on and so forth, but in theory, any non-playoff team could end up with a top-three pick. The lottery would only be for picks No. 1 through No. 3, then the draft would continue as it has in the past, based on regular-season record. The playoff teams would pick according to how they finished in the postseason. The World Series winner would pick last.
The thought of a 14 team baseball playoff disgusts me. I'm sure there's more money in it though, and thats all that matters.
Slippery slope to the NBA disgrace. The advent of the WC and the 8 team playoff was a great one. Adding the 2nd WC hasn't been the end of the world, though I still hate one game playoffs between teams with potentially very different records (i.e. Dodgers/Cardinals last year).
The NBA has a far more entertaining regular season because of the soap opera and the fact that basketball is simply more watchable. For most of my life (not so much here recently) I would be there tipoff to buzzer for most Rockets games. Even at my most engaged I will DVR a lot of Astro games, or have it on in the background. There's only a handful of baseball games I will watch first pitch to last pitch during a season. The grind is all baseball has, and now the truly great teams are gonna start load managing the hell out of the regular season, because it's the logical thing to do. What even is the excitement for a pennant chase when half the damn teams get in. edit The Rangers strategy make a lot more sense if the league is gonna start rewarding mediocrity like the NBA does.
I think this data is misleading. One could easily say the 2020 average salary is right in line with what it should have been based on data from 2004 through 2015. 2016 had a big jump in average salaries (Heyward, Chris Davis, Cespedes) and then it appears the market corrected itself by being stagnant until the pandemic hit. If I was the players, I would more concerned with total payroll for MLB players (not average) not going up at the same rate as revenue over the last 15-20 years or so than I would be in average salaries (which can fluctuate based on injuries/call ups). Club controlled player salaries do not increase with revenue. Free agent contracts increase more closely with revenue, but even those contracts don't match revenue increases if my memory serves me correctly. If the average salaries kept increasing at the rate they were from 2004-2015, the players would still be losing percentage points of revenue despite the spike in 2016. For me, I wish MLB and MLBPA would agree to tying salaries to a percent of revenue going to the players with a mechanism to keep owners from hiding revenue. If revenue goes up more than expected, players get paid more. If revenues go down such as with the pandemic, player salaries go down.
On service time, the simple solution is one that will never be brought up I suppose but Service time with an organization should begin when the player joins the organization. You would have to expand longer than 6 years, but maybe go 8 years until free agency, but it starts immediately That's really the only way you won't have "service time" manipulation
I agree with you in theory - that's what they all *should* do. But neither side seems to really want it. Players want it both ways - if revenues go up, they can demand more. If they don't, they can say it's not their problem (as we saw in the near-implosion of the 2020 season). Owners probably like it for similar reasons on the opposite side. You're right that there was a jump around 2017, but I suspect players will still try to make the argument that wages have stagnated. It would be helpful if we had more data on MLB revenues during the same time frame.
