Category: COVID-19

Time skip

More teams are spending the resources they have even as others run in place, the next CBA is Manfred’s last, with his final major act likely being a landscape-altering broadcasting deal. Pieces are starting to come together that will still be in play at the end of the decade.

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The Juan Soto deal has me thinking about the future a bit. Not Soto’s future, but what’s going on in MLB. You’ll have to excuse me for using this space to get some thoughts down and further organize them, but it’ll end up resulting in another piece or two down the line once that’s all done.

Event: The Dodgers spend and spend some more, deferring even more money, and are projected for a $279 million Opening Day payroll after kicking off 2024 at $267 million — please recall that Shohei Ohtani was paid just $2 million in 2024, with the other $68 million in the deal deferred until the playing time portion of the contract expires for 2034. The Dodgers ranked third in payroll, but second for luxury tax implications, as more of Ohtani’s deal counts towards that figure in the present than in the figure calculated with actual dollars.

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Juan Soto, the Mets, Dodgers, and spending

Even if only the Mets could get Juan Soto because Steve Cohen would do anything to get him, there’s plenty to learn from the signing on what this says about the rest of the league and their spending habits.

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Earlier in the offseason, there was an entire cycle of outrage at the Dodgers, for their decision to keep adding good baseball players who cost money to their team, that won a championship in 2024. The deferrals were a particular sticking point, but also just the idea that a team had resources and was using them was another. Let’s prepare ourselves for the same thing happening now, with the Mets, as they signed Juan Soto to a 15-year, $765 million contract — and one without deferrals, too, to really show off how much owner Steve Cohen has more money than anyone else in the league.

You’re going to hear people complain about a salary cap, or the fact that the Mets spending like this isn’t fair because not every team has this kind of money. Conveniently enough, I already covered the aforementioned outrage cycle for the Dodgers over at Baseball Prospectus, and quite a bit of it overlaps here with the Mets — to the degree that I already used Juan Soto as an example for points I was making within. So, I’ll just share some of that now:

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Climate change, new stadiums, and the Rays

The Trop is likely no more. The Rays’ new stadium deal might also be no more. A hurricane spawned by a warming Atlantic caused both of these issues, and there are more hurricanes to come.

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The Rays aren’t going to play in Tropicana again — the damage caused to both the roof and the inside of the domed stadium, and the no vote by the county commission to cover the costs of repairs confirmed that — but they also might not play in St. Petersburg again. To a degree, that’s about the upcoming vote on selling the bonds necessary for Pinellas county to fund the construction of a new stadium, but it’s also about what destroyed the Trop in the first place: a hurricane.

Florida is no stranger to hurricanes, but the intensity of the ones that make landfall, and the length of the hurricane season, are both growing. The Trop was built to withstand the hurricanes of a different era — the Rays began playing there in 1998, yes, but it was actually completed in 1990, when it was known as the Florida Suncoast Dome, and $70 million in renovations were made on a stadium that had cost $130 million to build less than a decade before.

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Notes: Diamond, the catcher market, Rays’ stadium deal dead or dying

Catching up on the week of holiday news, before the winter meetings shift.

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My latest at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required) published a week ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to share it in this space until now. It’s meant to, now that we’ve got clarity on the Diamond bankruptcy situation, point out how we could see this moment in time coming a few years ago as the players were locked out by the owners during collective bargaining, and that we’re not going to see the full effects of the league’s transition from primarily cable broadcast to primarily streaming happen without another CBA battle.

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The A’s are already failing at free agency

Sacramento has already cost the A’s a free agent pitcher that made sense for them.

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The A’s can say that they don’t want to be known as the Sacramento A’s all they want, but the thing is, that’s where their home games are. And the players that they might want to sign know this, and on top of the A’s not being a very good team and not offering competitive contracts to basically anyone for years and years now, it’s going to impact their player acquisition.

In fact, it already has. Walker Buehler, a free agent for the first time after seven seasons and eight years with the Dodgers, would have been the perfect fit for a team like the A’s on a short-term deal. Buehler missed 2023 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, and pitched pretty poorly in 75 regular season innings after returning, allowing nearly two homers per nine innings while posting an ERA of 5.38. He was better in the postseason, but we’re also talking about 15 innings there: he had plenty left to prove, especially with his 2022 just being a league-average campaign.

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The Fair Ball Act would close an exploitable loophole

A collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its minor leaguers only goes as far as federal and state exemptions allow it to.

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Minor league baseball players might have unionized in the fall of 2022, leading to their first-ever collective bargaining agreement early the next year, but that alone isn’t enough. This was obvious at the time, as, even while MLB was at the bargaining table with the Players Association, the former was trying to support an exemption that would allow them to a CBA workaround in Florida — one that would have let them avoid adhering to the state’s minimum wage laws.

Here’s what I said at the time about that, in March of 2023:

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The year in creating sports coverage, featuring leftism

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The end of 2021 approaches, which means another year of this labor-focused newsletter has wrapped up. It was an eventful year, for both major- and minor-league players, and the goal of this particular column, as always, is to remind you of the year that was. Let’s get right to it — each paragraph represents a month, and I’ll highlight a few pieces from all 12 of them.

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Round-up: Athletes as workers, rediscovering America’s pastime, and the NWSL

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I’ve been pretty lax of late pointing y’all toward things I’ve been reading that I also think you should read, which was kind of the fault of a whole bunch of factors, but hey. Let’s change that up, and dedicate this whole newsletter entry to stuff I’ve been reading that I think you should read.

First up is Britni de la Cretaz and the return of Mic. Their first feature for the relaunched publication is on the fact we’re not used to seeing athletes as workers, even though they have to deal with management, even though they are not in control of capital within their own leagues, even though there are plenty of professional athletes out there who are making less money each year than some of the folks reading this right now. The topic is not only one that is close to me, but de la Cretaz spoke to me a bit about the subject, and I’m quoted in there a few times.

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On Saturday, Giants’ concession workers to vote on strike

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Major League Baseball has mostly hit a point where, sometimes, players test positive for coronavirus, and everyone just moves on. The impacted players hit the injured list designated specifically for COVID-19, call-ups are made to fill the roster holes left by the virus, and everything continues otherwise unabated. It’s basically been treated like any other injury, which apparently works well enough for the players who are, by and large, vaccinated, but the normalization of how coronavirus works for them has helped obscure that those with less in the way of means and without the same spotlight are struggling and living in fear of contracting the virus.

Look no further than concessions workers for Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. These workers, who are part of UNITE HERE Local 2 that represents thousands of workers in the San Francisco and San Mateo areas of California, will hold a vote on Saturday prior to the Giants’ game against the Dodgers, to determine whether or not they’re going on strike. Their demands? Hazard pay, and recognition from the Giants that they have helped to create an unsafe work environment for them, one where COVID protocols are not enforced — hence the hazard pay demand. More than 20 concessions workers have contracted coronavirus since returning to work at Oracle Park back in June.

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MiLB players can barely afford their hotel and meals, even after pay increase

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​I keep seeing in random conversations on social media that it’s in bad taste, or won’t be well accepted, to continue to clamor for minor-league baseball players to receive raises right after they just received one for the 2021 season. This simply isn’t true: it’s exactly what MLB wanted to happen, sure, that everyone would feel compelled to lay off of their treatment of minor leageurs because hey, a raise, and I said as much back in 2019 when news of a 50 percent bump first appeared:

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