Month: August 2024

Let’s check in on the White So—oh god there’s blood everywhere

The record-tying losing streak is over, and somehow, the White Sox are still just as bad as they were during that.

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Monday is Labor Day, and given that this is a labor-focused newsletter, it feels wrong to sign myself up to cover any stories then. So, instead, let’s do our monthly check-in on the White Sox and their horrific 2024 season now, the final weekday of August.

Last we looked in, the White Sox were in the midst of a franchise-worst losing streak that would soon end, but not until after they had tied the historical AL worst mark of 21 in a row. They were 27-84, “good” for a win percentage of .243, and had been outscored by -229 on the season. Things have somehow gotten worse than they were then, which seems impossible. But that’s our 2024 White Sox, baby.

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Notes: NPB free agency, NWSL’s new CBA, NBA’s second apron issues

Japan’s baseball players are looking to make a major change, the National Women’s Soccer League already has, and concerns about what the NBA’s new salary cap rules are doing to player movement.

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According to Evan Drellich at The Athletic, Nippon Professional Baseball players are preparing to fight for a major overhaul of the system used to keep them in place, and in Japan, for as long as it does. They plan to combat the reserve system “on antitrust grounds,” per Drellich, which would mean significant changes to not just movement within the NPB, but for leaving Japan for a league such as Major League Baseball, as well.

Players in Japan have two forms of free agency: domestic and international. Domestic free agency, the freedom to switch to another NPB team, is achieved after seven or eight years in the league, depending on whether the player was drafted out of college or high school.

But to leave as a free agent for a foreign league like MLB, the wait is nine years. Players can depart sooner, but only if their team posts them for bidding. Instead, NPB players want what’s in place in MLB: free agency after a blanket six years, regardless of entry or destination.

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Notes: Kansas City gives up on Royals stadium(?), A’s ballpark financing, trading picks

The Royals get cut out of the public subsidy game (for now), the best an A’s lobbyist can muster is that things are probably on schedule with financing, and my latest at BP.

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Back in April, a referendum was introduced to the voters of Jackson County, Missouri, letting them decide whether or not the public should fund a $500 million subsidy for new stadiums for both the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. The public said no, resoundingly so with 58 percent against.

That story isn’t quite over yet, though, as now a second referendum is being prepared, but this time it will only involve the Chiefs. As Neil deMause put it at Field of Schemes:

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MLB’s rumored innings minimum is the league showing its hand

Whether the idea is a good one or not is beside the point here: just recognize that this is all a warm-up for CBA talks.

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For the last month or so, there have been leaks and instances of Rob Manfred speaking at press conferences that give you an idea of what’s being discussed in MLB’s offices. Which is always notable to some degree, but at this point, this far into the current collective bargaining agreement, it’s worth maybe noting all of it a little bit more than it would have been a year or two back.

The current CBA kicked off in 2022, so it will end after the 2026 season, which means we’re less than two years away from the serious ramp up that leads to the actual end of things. Remember, the 2021 deal expired in the offseason without a new deal in place, and MLB imposed a lockout: that could always occur again, if the league thinks the strategy of purposefully waiting out the players worked for them, or, helped expose rifts within the ranks of the players that the league would like additional chances to exploit.

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The ‘caveat’ MLB requires to allow trading draft picks

And an educated guess as to why MLB would require such a weird caveat in the first place.

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During the All-Star break, the idea of trading MLB draft picks came up. At the time, I was cautiously in favor of this kind of change to the available transaction options:

Without thinking too much on it, it feels like this would be a net positive for the league, to allow for this like other sports do. Especially given that the shorter draft and fewer minor-league clubs post-disaffiliation means it’s a little tougher to find advantages on the farm these days than it used to be: maybe the team that’ll exploit this rule for positive reasons can outweigh the sins of those who will simply use it as yet another excuse for not spending or trying. But I don’t want to underestimate just how annoying and exploitative that second group can be, either.

“Cautiously,” because as I said, I hadn’t thought too much on it just yet, and there are certainly teams who might abuse the system, or some wrinkle that’ll come up that would make it a goofy and convoluted idea instead of a straightforward one.

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Notes: ‘Media disruption distribution’ fund, The Wilpon Zone, Billy Bean

A workaround for RSN troubles, answering a John Fisher-related question, and the passing of an MLB executive.

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Per the Athletic’s Evan Drellich, the collective bargaining agreement has been altered by MLB and the Players Association, as a reaction to the current issues in the regional broadcasting landscape. It’s not something that every team will have access to, since not every team is struggling with their RSN, but it’s meant to assist the clubs that are dealing with any of that fallout. As Drellich put it:

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White Sox franchise-worst losing streak has them historically bad once more

It was so over because the White Sox were just regular bad, but now we’re so back because they’re embarrassing again.

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July started out so promising for White Sox fans. The team was merely bad instead of historically, meaningfully bad. in the prior month. Between June 3 and July 7 — the period of time in between check-ins on the club round these parts — the South Side club went 11-21, no small thing for a team that, in the two months prior, had managed all of 15 combined victories. That pace was a 106-loss pace, which knocked them from “in line to finish with the worst-ever record in modern baseball” to “merely the third-worst team in modern baseball.” You take whatever dub you can when they aren’t regularly showing up, you know?

The rest of July was a course correction. July 8 was the last time that I looked in on the White Sox, and, coincidentally, is right before the wheels came off again. The White Sox are in the midst of a 17-game losing streak, the longest such streak in franchise history — a history that dates back to 1901. They won on July 5, then lost their next three, then won the first game of a doubleheader, and have dropped the 17 games since that W. Which is a long way of saying that, since bringing their record to 26-66 and a .282 winning percentage, they’ve fallen to 27-84, for a .243 mark.

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