Celebrating kids celebrating a high school graduation is good, yes, but consider why it’s a notable story, too.
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Mailbag time! This one on international signings and how weird MLB’s behavior with literal children gets to be. If you have a mailbag question you’d like to see answered, either respond to this newsletter email, or hit me up on @Marc_Normandin on Twitter.
Forbes’ annual report is a tool, not the finished product you’d build with them.
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Forbes’ annual look at the most valuable teams in MLB posted on Thursday, and it’s, as always, worth opening up and perusing. Seeing that there are increases in team valuations and the like is always fascinating — even if they’re just estimates — especially when they’re balanced against this idea that teams just aren’t making all that much money: an idea perpetuated by Forbes’ own report, even.
Continue reading “The annual Forbes’ MLB valuations are out; don’t forget about context”
The Angels might be good in 2023. They also might just be the Angels, and then lose Shohei Ohtani forever.
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Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, the two best players on the Angels, faced off on Tuesday night in the World Baseball Classic final. Ohtani came in to close out a one-run game in the ninth, and he blew his teammate — one of the greatest hitters to ever take the field, whose only issue these days is actually being on the field — away with a couple of fastballs that gave away how much Ohtani wanted this match-up, and then a slider that not even Trout was going to be dialed in for. It’s going to be a lasting memory of the incredible 2023 WBC, and Angels fans are going to want to hold onto it, because they very well might need it.
The 2023 Angels might be pretty good! They usually aren’t, of course, but this year might be different. Ohtani has been teammates with Trout since 2018, and in that stretch, the Angels are 328-380. They haven’t posted a .500 record in those five years, never mind a winning one, and have lost 90 games in the season in which Ohtani didn’t take the mound, but could still show up to hit. Even with Trout batting .283/.369/.630 with a 178 OPS+ and Ohtani following up his MVP-winning 2021 with a .273/.356/.519 line and 2.33 ERA over 166 innings, powered by an AL-leading 11.9 strikeouts per nine, the 2022 Angels lost 89 games.
Continue reading “From the highs of the WBC to the lows of the Angels”
Diamond finally declares bankruptcy, Team USA is struggling with pitching restrictions, and Bomani Jones has something to say to MLB’s cheap owners.
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We’ve got a few things to catch up on, so let’s hit the ground running.
Diamond declares bankruptcy
We knew it was going to happen eventually, but Diamond, the owners of Bally Broadcasting, which serves as the regional broadcasting network for a not insignificant number of MLB’s teams, declared bankruptcy. That sounds scary on the surface, but as I wrote about a few weeks back, it’s more of a sign of things to come than it is a notice of an interruption of how you consume baseball in 2023. Here’s Sportico’s Brendan Coffey with an explanation and quotes:
Continue reading “Round-up: Diamond bankruptcy, WBC pitchers, cheap owners”
The Yankees have bills to pay, but they’re raking in way more than they’re spending from the looks of just their ticket revenue.
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The gate for a baseball team isn’t just tickets: there’s also parking and concessions and local merchandise to account for. And yet, just from tickets, the 2022 Yankees raked in $345 million. That’s not a rumor, it’s from a market disclosure the Yankees had to send to the state of New York, which owns Yankee Stadium thanks to the whole publicly funded thing. Via Sportico:
Continue reading “The Yankees made a ton of money just from tickets in 2023”
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A few weeks back, I wrote about how arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere, despite MLB’s attempts to get rid of the system they’ve hated since its inception in the days of Marvin Miller. Hell, the fact MLB wants to get rid of arbitration remains the best proof that the system is worth salvaging. Arbitration certainly isn’t a perfect tool these days, though, as teams figure out how to manipulate hearings in a way that earns them victories. While things on the position player and starting pitcher side are a little more evenly split in terms of which side, teams or player, wins out, as Malachi Hayes wrote for Baseball Prospectus, relievers are doomed.
Read the entire feature, but here’s a snippet of the findings:
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If you needed a reminder that Major League Baseball is disingenuous in their public desire to make life better for minor-league players, you only have to check the news to find it. They might have chosen to voluntarily recognize that the players had unionized and sought representation under the Players Association, and they have certainly spoken on how they gave the players raises across the board and are now paying for their housing, look at us, aren’t we just the greatest? But that’s just the surface level stuff: underneath, they’re the same old MLB.
Continue reading “MLB hasn’t given up on restricting minor-league pay yet”
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We hadn’t heard a peep about the nature of the minor-league collective bargaining between Major League Baseball and the Players Association despite it going on for months now, but we finally got a tiny morsel to reflect on. Tony Clark spoke on various matters around the league, which Evan Drellich published at The Athletic, and it’s all worth looking at. The newest info in there, though, pertains to the ongoing bargaining, and an ask MLB is making that the union isn’t about to budge on:
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Whispers turned to anonymous leaks, which became Dick Monfort and Rob Manfred publicly complaining/shaming, and then an “economic reform committee” was unveiled by MLB. All of this was predictable, and because of that, it’s not too difficulty to suss out what it all means.
MLB is using the recent issues of Diamond Sports Group — which runs the Bally regional sports networks that Sinclair purchased from FOX after Disney grabbed everything besides those RSNs and the fascist cable news network portion of the company in their quest to own every IP in existence — as an excuse for the existence of this economic reform committee, and I’m sure that’s true to a degree: the owners will all be in some uncharted waters soon, and rather than end up in a situation like Bud Selig arguing with George Steinbrenner about revenue-sharing for years, or any number of 1980s commissioners trying to explain how cable was good for the owners’ bank accounts, actually, Manfred and Co. are trying to get ahead of the discussions about this brave new world.
Continue reading “Thoughts on MLB’s economic reform committee”
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The greatest evidence that exists in favor of arbitration is that Major League Baseball wants to do away with it. It’s not a perfect system, no, given the arbitrators themselves are inconsistent, and MLB spends an awful lot of time coaching up its teams on specific talking points so that they can defend their positions, but in aggregate, there is a reason that the Players Association is in favor of keeping an arbitration system in place, while the league would love very much to be done with it.
Even in an offseason like this one, where the players were trounced in arbitration itself, the system still allows for teams to negotiate with players — for players to ask for more than they could without the threat of an arbitration hearing in place — and end up with a higher salary than they would have with no such event looming in the distance. As I wrote back in 2019 for Deadspin: