Marc Normandin is creating baseball coverage, featuring leftism

MLB’s early collective bargaining sessions might just be theater

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If what Evan Drellich has reported at The Athletic is any indication, we should be expecting little to no progress from Major League Baseball and the Players Associations two-years-early collective bargaining sessions. The short of it is that MLB claims they’re still awaiting any meaningful proposal from the MLBPA, while the players’ side doesn’t seem to believe MLB is here to do anything but tell people that they tried to start a dialogue.

From Drellich:

In his opening statement Tuesday in an annual media session before the All-Star Game, Clark listed off the primary talking points for the players: A desire for greater competitiveness amongst teams, improvements to free agency, and so on.

Then Clark quickly suggested that the league will not engage substantively on any of these fronts at this point, because the league doesn’t want to change its economics. A charge, in essence, that the league is willing to listen, but not act meaningfully.

If you’ve ever been involved in collective bargaining or even as part of a union listening to what your bargaining committee is reporting back, then you know this feeling all too well. MLB could very well be presenting a sympathetic face to the media and fans, so that if things come crashing down in the future, they can always point back to this moment and say they tried. If it weren’t for those pesky players, you know?

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The media still isn’t helping

The USWNT’s fight for equal pay takes center stage

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The United States Women’s National Team are your 2019 World Cup champions, just like they were in 2015. This time around, though, there is a discussion going on outside of just how awesome this roster and its players are (incredibly awesome, for the record): it’s beyond time for the women of America’s national team to be paid on par with the men of America’s national team.

It’s not just fans or media who think so, or anything like that: the team itself believes as much, and in fact sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination back in March of this year:

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A look at the NHL and NBA offseasons (and what we can learn about MLB’s from them)

MLB needs to change their domestic violence culture if there’s any hope

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It’s July 1, which means it’s the day that San Francisco Giants’ president and CEO Larry Baer is returning to work. Baer was suspended through the end of June for attacking his wife in public, on camera, and while charges weren’t pressed against him, MLB has the power to hand out suspensions all the same, which tends to be useful in situations like this one.

There were and are more significant questions with regard to MLB and domestic abuse, and Baer’s abuse of his wife, than whether or not this suspension was long enough. As Hannah Keyser asked back in late-March when the suspension was first handed to Baer, who called the attack “a mistake”:

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Reader mailbag: A’s in Oakland, Eaton’s and Vargas’ non-apologies

The Mariners’ owner is all about flexibility and my eyes hurt from all the rolling

Adam Eaton has deluded himself into thinking suffering is good, actually

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The Washington City Paper ran a story on Sunday discussing the poor working and living conditions of low-level minor-league players in the Nationals’ system. For the most part, it’s full of the kind of information you’re already aware of if you’ve been opening up newsletters like this one, but then it gets to current Nats’ outfielder Adam Eaton, and what he has to say about minor-league exploitation. In short, it’s a net good! Who knew?

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The Rays two-city plan is a scam, and they know it

Those Tampa Bay Rays truly are innovators. Most franchises? Well, most franchises would be satisfied screwing over taxpayers in just one major city in order to finance a new ballpark, but the Rays, they’re aiming for two major cities.

The latest stadium “plan” out of the Rays’ ownership group boils down to this: asking Tampa (or St. Petersburg) to finance a smaller, $600 million stadium without a dome, for baseball use in the earlier part of the season. The rest of the season would be played in Montreal, which, by the way, would also have to build a new stadium for the Rays. The idea here is apparently that the Rays could play baseball in Tampa Bay when it’s relatively cooler, earlier in the year, and then the mixed-use stadium would be free for other events when it’s too hot for baseball and also unprotected from central Florida’s torrential downpours.

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If the Padres keep Chris Paddack down, is it service time manipulation?

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Here’s a fun thought exercise for your Monday morning.

The Padres sent rookie starter Chris Paddack down to the minors last week, which was always going to happen regardless of how good he was in the majors. The reason is innings limits: Paddack’s career-high is 90 frames, achieved last summer, and that was after not pitching in 2017 due to undergoing Tommy John surgery.

Now, it’s expected that the Padres will bring Paddack back up shortly, and that this is just a way to get him off of the big-league roster for a spell in order to bring in an arm they can use in his absence. Paddack won’t pitch in the minors, or, if he does, not like he has in the majors, where he’s already logged just under 66 innings of work over 12 starts. As long as Paddack returns to the bigs within 10 days of his demotion, there will be no interruption of his service time, which would avoid any service time manipulation problems. However, it’s worth asking if it would actually be service time manipulation if the Padres kept Paddack in the minors long enough to hit pause on his service time clock.

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