Despite how obnoxious he was, you can’t say George didn’t do whatever it took to win. His son is a total embarassment by comparison.  

This is all totally correct, but there is another element: baseball players are peaking younger, and declining earlier, owing to the higher physical demands in a league where everyone throws 95/has an average off-bat exit velocity of 100 mph (or because they don’t have the pick-me-up of amphetamines to quiet those…

I’ll do some napkin math using the numbers in here. If you divide 10.3 billion by 30 (admittedly unfair, since the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, and Cubs probably make more combined than the bottom 15 teams combined, but again, napkin math) it totals to 343,333,333 per team.

There are really three competing interests here: the owners, the players, and the game. I don’t have any answers that others haven’t already explored in greater depth (hard salary floor, restoring the 50/50ish split between owners and players, mandatory investment of revenue into the product, etc.), but the aims of…

I think it’s an unsolvable dilemma because at the end of the day players in the union have to agree to take less money so players not yet in the union (College, HS, International) can hit free agency quicker. What is going to happen to the 29 year old journeyman who just went through his years of control, when 23 year…

Yeah, it would be one thing if the owners were saying “we’re going to pay the players less to keep ticket prices down and make being a fan more affordable,” but it’s the exact opposite. And if you want to hate guys for getting paid millions “just for playing a kid’s game,” you should hate the owners even more for…

Its a well made point, but the years of fuckery from MLB owners don’t cause me any concern about making the floor too high, but it may drive some franchises to move/fold, which is likely against any league growth model, which then means that revenue sharing becomes a likely solution.

Without a hard floor, though, we’re still right where we are where it’s still more profitable to ownership to promote a prospect for $0.5M than drop $30M on a free agent.

Like so many conservatives think... *Their* union is okay. It’s everyone else’s that is ruining America.

Finally my economics degree has a use!

There is a big pile of money. What percentage of that should go to the players? What should go to the owners? I don’t think it’s radical to suggest that the players get 50%. Personally, I think they should get more than that as their window is very small and owners own these teams forever and seem to get free stadiums…

Thanks for a great recap of how MLB’s luxury cap system and how it affects the power imbalance between players and owners. I stopped watching baseball since they stole my Expos, but I’ve been curious how that differed from the NHL and NFL salary cap systems. (Note to NHLPA members: If you’re going to have to live in a…

All of this. Also, the next labor negotiation needs to go after getting rid of arbitration entirely.

Problem here is that the “CFO” in your example has had his pay artificially deflated for six years, and just as he became eligible to seek market wages, suddenly every company is only looking to hire another young’un with less experience and cheaper pay.

Also, can we all LOL at the yankees. If old man Steinbrenner were still in charge, Harper and Machado, would both be Yankees by now. After watching the Red sox win their 4th world series in the same time the yankees have 1 win, he would not care a second about spending money to win. Also, their spending as compared to…

Seems like the ‘real’ issue (that applies to other sports too) is that teams’ revenues stopped being directly correlated with winning. With most income generated via league-wide streams and locked-in local TV contracts, you earn more being OK without Bryce Harper than being better with him.

I mean, they are the labor in this case, so it’s fair to label them as such.

Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!

He’s saying teams should overpay a Nick Markakis, a durable yet mostly unremarkable 34-year-old outfielder (with negligent foot speed) who had a super-outlier career year and a prime candidate for regression considering the last time he put up a .750+ OPS was in 2012 despite his constant solid excellent plate…

Shoes are thrown because the feet are considered dirty and gross in that region, and therefore insulting to the target.