MLB Offseason 2020-21: I'm a Hall of Famer baseball person
- Thread starter Timby
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Ya' gotta have them smart-ass accountants.
Managers, coaches, vendors and GM's get fired more often...
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I guess if you look at a team as a self-contained entity, without the owner pouring in more of their own money, they could lose money. Wouldn't MLB limit the amount of money an owner can put into the team to prevent one team from outspending another team by leaps and bounds?
I don't know if it's revenue sharing as much as if there's a rule saying an owner can't dump unlimited personal money into a team. @Timby would know if such a thing exists.
There is absolutely no rule against ownership pouring their own personal finances into the team. For example, the late Peter Magowan, who owned the Giants for years, made a huge personal enemy of Bud Selig because he financed the construction of Oracle Park out of his own pocket (this was during the late '90s, when Selig was cooking up his contraction scheme and telling owners to threaten to move if they didn't get publicly funded new stadiums).
MLB does have a debt service rule, limiting teams' debt to 10x EBITDA, but it's almost never enforced; the last time I recall it coming up was when MLB was doing everything in its power to force the McCourts out of their ownership of the Dodgers (and then MLB turned a blind eye when Guggenheim Partners incurred massive debt).
That is both surprising....and not surprising. You'd think an pro sports organization would have a rule like that, at least in lieu of a hard salary cap. But not having such a rule sure explains the Yankees.
This isn’t just an issue for big businesses like MLB, I saw a news report the other day about insurance companies trying to weasel their way out of all risk policies being claimed on by individuals/small businesses because of the pandemic.
Seems COVID with be with us for years in the courts. If the insurance companies lose in court (which they should unless there is specific language about pandemics), it will likely crush the industry.
I won't shed any tears for the insurance company scumlords, but I have to imagine that a court will rule that a global pandemic is basically the textbook definition of the "act of God" exception.
Insurance companies make WAY more than they pay out. If it starts getting "sketchy", they raise premiums.
Insurance companies are up there with Big Pharma and the big financial institutions as being completely and irrevocably evil.
The Reds first bit of offseason housecleaning involved releasing Archie Bradley, which is a little strange given Bradley was arguably the best reliever on their roster in September. He can close and he’s in his prime and his arbitration number was expected to be something near $5 million.
The Club’s bullpen was OK last year. Raisel Iglesias, anointed closer, was sometimes erratic. Michael Lorenzen will compete for a rotation job. Do you want to go to war with Lucas Sims and Amir Garrett, both good pitchers, neither a closer?
The team has replacements for two other players they didn’t tender: Tyler Stephenson for Curt Casali, Somebody for Brian Goodwin. R.J. Alaniz is a 29-year-old pitcher with 15 big league innings. Bye, now.
But Bradley?
The Reds took it in the financial shorts last summer. All teams did.
Estimates of Baseball’s losses thanks to the plague vary widely, and clubs guard their books as if they were Hope Diamonds. I’ve heard the Reds lost something close to $100 million last year. The Cubs reportedly lost $140 mil.
Worse, no one can predict better days this year. Will Baseball play 162 games? If not, how many? Will fans be allowed in? When and how many?
Added to that is the CBA, expiring after the season. Labor talks in baseball are always messy and annoying. These talks, with last year and this year as a backdrop, will be messier and annoying-er. Owners will not be in a conciliatory mood. The players never are.
The Reds chose a bad time to try to get good. Hard to blame them for that.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/sp...-reds-had-unfortunate-timing-blog/3808492001/
Labor shouldn't be, especially after they took it in the ass with the last CBA negotiation. Don't forget that one league negotiator said he was shocked at how weakly the union presented itself, saying, "It's like they didn't care about money anymore." Instead they negotiated for extra seat space on buses and having executive chefs in the clubhouses.
That won't happen again with Bruce Meyer in charge of talks for the union.
I agree completely, but especially in MLB, ownership trying to screw labor is a tale as old as time. One of the pre-MLBPA attempts at a union was run by a guy who was explicitly an employee of Major League Baseball, for heaven's sake. The guy negotiating for the players ... was paid by by the owners and was actually negotiating on ownership's best interests. You can't make up that level of cartoon-evil shit.
Edit: A Well Paid Slave by Curt Flood is still the gold standard for this (God, I need to get that book, I kept it from the library for so long I wound up racking like $25 in overdue fees), but Ball Four by Jim Bouton and The Lords of the Realm by John Helyar also go into the various ways MLB ownership was trying to screw players from day one. One of their most common negotiating tactics when a player would take more money would be to take a paternalistic tack, saying, "Hey, c'mon, I've always taken care of you, why would I stop now?" And so players would take below-market deals even below what the reserve clause called for.
This is one of many reasons Marvin Miller is quite possibly the most important person in Major League Baseball history.
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It is a shame Curt Flood is not in the HOF. I understand that the very hall of famers who would have to vote for him are the very people who fucked Flood when he was going through his various legal travails and that their backkup of him would have killed the reserve clause years earlier. They already look like selfish backstabbers so why not put the trailblazer in the hall?
OK, so the pure racist term of Redskins is gone. Indians is a misnomer based on where Columbus thought he was going.
What about Blackhawks (legit tribe name), Braves (legit native American term) and Chiefs (another legit term)?
Any others?
What about Blackhawks (legit tribe name), Braves (legit native American term) and Chiefs (another legit term)?
Any others?
Something tells me Atlanta won't be so quick to follow suit.
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