Click here to read a transcript of Tuesday’s chat with MLBTR’s Steve Adams.
By Steve Adams | at
Click here to read a transcript of Tuesday’s chat with MLBTR’s Steve Adams.
MLB Trade Rumors is not affiliated with Major League Baseball, MLB or MLB.com
hide arrows
scroll to top
Wow, Steve. “Owners are ‘greedier’ than players because MLB revenues are $10 billion”. Not a business major, eh? Revenue profit. And why should players “maximize earnings” and owners not? Not disagreeing, just looking for a coherent explanation.
Owners – bad/nasty/mean/evil.
Players – good/humble/oppressed/righteous.
Local fans – pay the money and take what you’re given.
What it really is is:
owners greedy –
players greedy –
fans fleeced –
the discussion shouldn’t be who gets the money – the ultra rich players or ultra ultra rich owners, it should be where should the money really go – like to minor league players, bringing the price of tickets down so families can go o the ballgame, improving FO, stadiums and facilities……
I would not have thought this as hard to grasp as it seems to be…
Supply and demand. Currently, there is demand and thus prices will not go down.
That jumped out to me as well. Like the owners shouldn’t be allowed to make profits with the several millions (or billions in some cases) they’ve invested in owning a team.
He sounds bitter, IMO.
That was an odd take. The owners make a ton of cash so, therefore, they should be forced to hand out awful 10 year deals? It’s not collusion, it’s everyone getting smarter. Long-term deals are almost always terrible for the signing team. The players want everything their way with long-term deals and no-trade clauses and opt-outs. Well, the owners are more than justified in shortening what they are willing to commit.
Exactly. Collusion was also never mentioned until Kaepernick. Let’s not pretend it’s something it’s not.
There is a long history of collusion between owners in the baseball. Let’s not be so naive to think that it’s impossible to happen again.
*in the history of baseball.
He really does sound bitter. Any time someone says that a free agent is asking too much people jump to the “why do you side with owners” agruement. I think most would agree the players deserve a fair share of the money but because of the way the system is setup that doesn’t happen sometimes. Things are evolving and I feel the players have done this to themselves. The top free agents get paid very well but the union needs to fight for better pay for the younger players that fuel the game instead of worrying about the vet that is 35-37 getting one last big payday.
Exactly. If we figure that even the top payrolls will only go to $220m(or so), you can only afford so many guys at $30m+ without hurting the rest of the team. Boras forgets this part. How many good players can you sign with the $40m that was supposed to go to Harper? It’s just smarter to consider the best way to allocate those resources and have the best team. Not just trying to have the most high-priced shiny free agents.
And don’t even get me started on what guys in the minor leagues make. Nobody seems to give a crap about them, though.
Honestly though – I don’t think that saying that a team shouldn’t pay nearly a half a billion dollars… let me say it again NEARLY. HALF. A. BILLION. DOLLARS. to one guy to play baseball is siding with the owners – it is just saying that the money is a little out of control. – not that it should go into the pockets of the owners.
Not to mention what it does to the rest of your roster. You can be that top-heavy in the NBA where 1 guy is involved 80% of the time, but it doesn’t work the same way in baseball. Harper isn’t even that good. That’s the scariest part of all of this.
But MLBTR still printed a 14yr/$420m prediction for him with a straight face. As if anyone was EVER going to pay that.
Are you trying to say there are players who aren’t getting a fair share? Avid Price will take up around 31% of Boston’s payroll in 2019
And yet Boston just won the world series AND made a massive profit…
So unfair to the Red Sox…
How did you come up with that math? If their payroll is upwards of $200 million next year, that would mean Price is clearing $62 million.
Buy a calculator before you make ignorant comments like that.
I think his point is that both sides of it are doing the exact same thing, so why is one the villain and the other not?
The owners need the best players to make the amount of money they do
The players need the owners to give them their proverbial stage
Why is the one making a smaller percentage off this arrangement the ‘greedy’ one for asking for more?
There will always be more players than there will be owners of teams.
Next person up. There’s always someone who will do it faster, better and there’s always cost cutting angles as well. The Replacements, MLB style. Sign me up. I can hit better than the Boston catching core for a fraction of the price.
Just because you can field a team of scrubs doesn’t mean people will pay full price for half the quality.
Or that a competing league won’t take advantage of their stupidity ans sign the good players to take the profits being missed out on
Who said “scrubs”? I’m not even sure how much paid attendance matters anyway. TV deals are locked in. So are other multimedia deals. Signing B. Harper(for example) doesn’t really change anything for a team like the Dodgers. Sure he makes the team a little better in the short term, but the costs and risks long-term probably outweigh the benefits.
The amount of money signing Harper will generate in new jersey sales alone will cover his salary even for the Dodgers.
Siging Harper will generate enough new tv subscriptions alone to cover his salary.
The amount of extra tv time the Dodgers get from signing Harper will gaurantee enough future interest to make it well worth the investment
Signing lesser players will not bring nearly the same benefits, so the argument that you don’t need stars is painfully shallow
I could be wrong but even jersey sales revenue is split with all teams, the only team that signed a contract for not sharing was NFL Dallas cowboys.I agree with you 100% on TV and also revenue from stadium naming rights, all in the billions,My Rangers are getting a new stadium next year and I’m sure I will be priced out of buying tickets cause of higher prices.
oh. new. jerseys. not “new jersey”
I think the team gets all the profit from sales at it’s home stadium. They do split things like online and non-stadium sales.
Do you have any idea how many “jerseys” you have to sell to generate $40m? Those sales don’t go right to the bottom line anyway. Regardless, let those fans get Seager, Turner or Bellinger jerseys instead.
As for more “subscriptions”, that makes no sense either. The Dodgers have a set TV deal whether they add Harper or not. This is a team that’s gone to 2 straight World Series, too, so it’s not like Harper would spike the ratings much anyway.
I’m not even going to address your “more TV time” argument. That is your weakest point and makes no sense. Harper might sell a few more tickets, but it’s not like the Dodgers have trouble drawing anyway. I don’t blame them for passing.
One of us has some idea about the economics of baseball, ansd one of us just came to a conclusion and made up the justification for it later
I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide which is which.
Because players are interchangeable cogs in a machine? We root for the laundry, after all.
I’m a Sox fan and I don’t just want to see John Henry pocket more revenues. But I also don’t want to see him hand out more awful long-term deals after what I saw with Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez, Panda, Lackey(and others).
Can anyone name a 7+ year deal that was good for the team that signed him? Meanwhile, the list of regrettable signings in that category is endless. Ownership has gotten smarter.
Not signing an unwise deal is one thing, but to call the player greedy for trying is more what some people take issue with.
The owners shouldn’t have to cave to any demand they don’t want to, but when they’re already taking 60 percent of the profit, why do people act like they’re victims every time a player asks for a big contract?
It just defies logic
Hi, Petrie. Can you link to something re: “60% of the profit” or do you mean “revenue”? These are 2 very different things. I think part of the overall issue with MLB is that no one knows what team “profits” are. I’d guess that the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, etc. turn a tidy profit, but smaller market teams aren’t exactly raking it in.
The lowest revenue for a team last year was $206 million. Can you imagine what its expenses were? That team isn’t making a $100 million profit. Why should a player or two on that team be making more profit than the owner/ownership group? That defies logic.
Your assuming something you said yourself you don’t know to justify the argument against the player. Which also defies logic.
If the teams want to make their gross profits known, no one is stopping them, but by everything we do know, the owners are coming out ahead by a large margin.
So, again, we have two parties, niether of which can exist without the other, attempting to do the exact same thing
Why is only one the bad guy?
lol
But if the owners don’t “cave” the players, agents, and media cry COLLUSION.
How much have players, agents, and media invested in MLB? Zip.
Who built the MLB product? Who supports it no matter who is wearing a teams uni? Who pays people to learn to play the game – including facilities, housing, meals, professional instruction? And who supports that? Players? Agents? Media?
MLBTR is becoming CNN with their activist “journalism”. Sad to see it.
You’re all kinds of special if you believe anything you just posted…
Nobody is saying the owners have to give them what they demand, just that it would be nice if people used reasonable arguments instead of siding with the billionaires who keep raising prices over the millionaires they actually want to see for frankly moronic reasons…
Can you translate that?
petrie,
The dam is about to burst. Real Estate has bubbles….the stock market…..even Facebook.
Horse racing and boxing used to dominate.
Not into anything I believe you’d actually understand without first driving a nail into my frontal lobe…
This is a great comment, Carrington, and SPOT ON.
It’s the billionaires that take all the risk here, though. They are the ones constantly getting burned by awful long-term deals. Suddenly they are figuring that out and that makes them the bad guys? I disagree.
Name me one team that’s signed a mega contract and then reported a net loss the next season
The problem here is you can’t/won’t accept that the risk to the owners is pretty much non-existent from a money stand point.
There’s logical arguments why a team would not want to sign these deals, but attacking the player for trying is not one of them.
His new team will make a fortune for signing him, whether they win anything or not.
The Marlins might have done that with Stanton? I don’t see how the risk is “non-existent”. Sure, the owners can afford to piss away $20m here or $50m there, but they shouldn’t look to run their business that way, should they?
The bigger risk here is the effect of those bad contracts when payroll is fixed at a certain number. John Henry is fine whether the Sox sign Panda, Hanley or Rusney Castillo(or not). But having those awful deals on the books prevents him from making other moves. That’s what happens when you clog 20% of your payroll long-time on one guy. Look what the Pujols deal did to the Angles for another example. They can’t sign anyone else now.
You are looking at this all wrong. A big team doesn’t make a “fortune” for signing a star player. They will make that money anyway. The Dodgers are a cash machine with or without Harper. He barely even moves the needle(plus he isn’t that good anyway).
The Marlins have never reported a net loss. Even will all Loria’s creative book keeping.
You’re desperately trying to completely ignore the argument, and badly undermining yourself by listing teams who have given out multiple bad contracts… Yet still made substantial profits
Remember, the argument here is about greed. Not giving out a big contract for purely baseball reasons is not being disputed, it’s whether or not the player is justified in asking for the contract
And given that teams are making record profits even in the age of megadeals, the evidence would suggest they’re at least reasonable demands.
petrie000,
Economic and behavior are dynamic, not static.
We all adjust our behaviors as economics change. Get more revenue – buy and/or invest more; get laid-off, cut back.
Of course teams don’t lose money if they’re stuck with a bad contract. Because THEY CUT COSTS – the same as any person, family or business does if they made a bad financial decision.
Theo Epstein has always been a celebrity chaser. He wets his seat fantasying about Harper. He doesn’t care if the owner loses money if he gets Harper via an astronomical contract. But the owner sure as heck does……and the owner froze his allowance after 2 years of squandering it.
By your logic the Cubs won’t lose money, so everything is honkey dory.
Bad contracts have the Gianrs cornered. And when the Padres want to kick it in they’ll be hamstrung by the Myers and Hosmer contracts…..but……they won’t lose money. Think the Indians would offer Kluber or Bauer signed to team-friendly contracts if Kuiper wasn’t getting $17m in 2019 (more then Kluber), and producing like 3rd year utility player?
It’s easy to spend other peoples money. Many pro sports fans excel at that.
Your argument is pretty empty anyway, because I don’t think we know how profitable any team is at the moment? I don’t think any of that is public.
But just like GM or Ford might close a plant to become more profitable, a baseball team might trim salary to do the same. That’s what you do when you own the team. You get to make that call. That’s how a free market works.
“It’s easy to spend other peoples money. Many pro sports fans excel at that.”
And may I ask petrie……
What team do you have season tickets with, and how many?
Why don’t you leave this discussion to the adults, Carrington? You clearly have nothing to add…
Frankly niether of you do, because you’re both basically making things up to avoid the actual argument.
We know baseball can afford these contracts, because MLB reported a massive revenue to the federal government. So if the best counter you can pull out of your shorts is ‘well, we don’t know just how many billions of that was pure profit’, neither of you should be commenting on matters of economics….
petrie000,
You always revert to insults.
Here’s the solution……
MLB players all play out their contracts, and join with their agents, the sports media, and fans like you to form a new league. Then they can keep all the profits.
And you always resort to a dumber and dumber response… Gee, I wonder why I’m not convinced you can tie your own shoe laces, let alone argue economics…
What IS the actual argument here then? That Harper would make the Dodgers a viable franchise all of a sudden? This isn’t the NBA and Harper isn’t Lebron. In fact, Harper could walk down the street in LA and nobody would even know who he was. That’s not a market-shifting talent. He’s a pretty good player who wants to be paid like the BEST player. I don’t blame the Dodgers(or any team) from shying away from a 10+ year deal for him.
I’ve asked several times, but haven’t heard any examples of good 7+ year deals. Meanwhile, the list of BAD long-term contracts is endless. You can’t blame the owners for noticing this and finding other ways to win. Harper barely moves the needle at all. $350m for THAT?!?! No thanks.
You love talking about economics, but you have shown very little understanding of the subject. Just because teams are profitable, does that mean they are obligated to spend more on salary? What if signing big ticket free agents makes the team weaker in other areas? What if the entire track record of long-term contracts is that they end up being awful for the signing team? Are smart executives not allowed to make adjustments?
I would say there are NEW economics in place in MLB now; the economics of not paying free agents top dollar for their declining years. Now the players need to adjust to that new reality. So do you, apparently.
The argument is amazingly simple that’s it’s kind of amazing I have to explain it to you…
The teams are making millions of dollars.
The league is making billions.
The players are an integral part of that.
The best players bring in the most profit
So why do some idiots scream ‘greed’ when the players ask for a lot of money, then waste paragraphs of space trying to defend the owners who already make far, far more than the players?
The length of the deal is a completely separate topic, and whether or not it makes sense from a strategic reason is not really relevant in any way. The debate here is purely whether or not the players are truly being greedy by asking for a larger percentage of a profit that cannot exist without thier contributions.
Bryce Harper with make a profit for his team even at the high price he’s demanding. All concerns about future roster impacts aside, is that really unreasonable on his part?
If the salaries cause one to be disillusioned with MLB I surely understand. But any talk of salary caps and floors should begin in at least AA & AAA. Revenue sharing should start in house. 40 man roster at 1 level and the next 40 or so at another minimum salary level. Organizations would want look past roster fillers and promote true prospects from A ball quicker so their money is being spent smarter.
A good part of it the complaint that, because Manny Machado makes $30+ million a year, families can’t afford to go to games.
Which is wrong. Ticket prices are governed by supply and demand like everything else.
A better part of it is that Manny Machado making $30m means the rest of 40-man roster can only make around $170m before incurring penalties. You can only have 1-2 guys like that on a big payroll team, so you’d better get it right. Is Machado the guy you want to give 8+ Years to? Because I’m not sure I do.
The penalties are artificial ans teams that go over it still make a hefty profit
So would it be Machado’s fault team is choosing not to spend?
No, they aren’t artificial at all. First of all, there is a stiff penalty that has to be paid. Since you are obsessed with PROFITS(!!), that eats directly into profits.
Then you get move back in the draft above a certain payroll level. The Red Sox hit that last year and will pick 10 slots lower this year as a result.
Finally, the worst one is the compensation you get for losing free agents is much lower. Instead of getting a 1st round pick for losing Kimbrel this year, the Sox will only get a 4th round pick. The same will happen next year if they lose Porcello, Bogaerts, Sale & JDM. I don’t need to tell you the difference between 1st round picks and 4th round picks.
There is nothing “artificial” about any of this. Those penalties are very real and very stiff.
It’s not even a cap, it’s a competitive balance tax imposed with the naked intention of artificially limiting the spending capacity of large market teams.
And the penalties aren’t even that strict, it’s a couple of million dollars (to other owners) and a choice between winning immediately or stockpiling minor leaguers (who are so valuable because their salaries are artificially limited as well…)
No, that’s totally not an artificial cap…
And as pointed out, teams over the luxury tax are some of the most profitable in the sport
So again we’re left with you defending a system designed to make the rich richer while trying to justify calling the less rich the greedy ones…
People should not argue so passionately about things they don’t even want to understand…
You totally ignored the larger part about reduced draft pick compensation and lower draft picks. If you don’t think the draft is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to building an organization than you don’t understand this game at all. But keep referring to yourself as an expert while continuously showing your ignorance. It’s quite comical.
No I didn’t, you probably just didn’t read it
The lower draft pick is another artificial penalty that isn’t nearly as bad as you’re assuming
It only ‘hurts’ because it impacts a teams ability to or exploit artificially cheap labor… Slightly. Even the stiffist penalty is really marginal, since it’s just slightly less money for a slightly less theoretically talented draft pick
If the team instead decides to spend more on already good players, it’s not like that’s a huge hardship.
So, again, we’re left with you trying to claim Machado not just settling for what the owners want to pay him makes him at fault for his team mates to likewise be forced to just take whatever the owners decide they want to pay them.
There is no cap, at all, to how much a team CAN spend, it’s a choice on ownerships part, so why does the player become the villain in that scenario?
This is like talking to a child. Do you not see the difference between a 1st round pick and 4th round pick? Do you have any idea how large that gap is historically? Instead of being able to recoup a bunch of 1st round picks, the Red Sox will be left with a bunch of insignificant picks instead. Stop pretending this is not a real penalty.
As for Machado, he should take what the market will bear. He doesn’t have any other discernible talents that anyone would pay him for(he might be good working for UPS) so he would be wise to take it. Just because teams are profitable and revenues are high doesn’t mean that owners should have to pay out awful long-term deals. The players will have to adapt to that. If not, there are plenty of others that can take their jobs.
Here’s the thing, though…
Right now it’s reported that the players get 39% of the revenue. Players in the leagues with salary cap/floors all get about 50% of the revenue in their respective leagues.
At this point, supporting a cap/floor system is not anti-player, at all. If MLB players were guaranteed a 50/50 cut, salaries would be almost a billion a year higher.
Here’s the thing, though……
Players in other leagues are developed at colleges, schools and in other countries. Owners in those sports have no development costs. If they draft a guy and he can’t cut it, they dump him and try another guy.
Here’s the thing, owners are willing to shell out millions for those players to develop, and unless they’re idiots, they make a profit doing so
So the cost of developing them can’t be anything close to what you’re assuming.
“Here’s the thing, owners are willing to shell out “tens of thousands ” for those players to develop”
FIFY – guys get paid less than fast food in the minors
I fully agree that minor league salaries are a travesty. They’re the life blood of the industry and they make peanuts.
But my point is more the owners are willing to pay the best ones 5+ million, so it can’t cost them that much to develop them, otherwise they wouldn’t.
How many college kids learning their trade from professionals get free housing, meals, clothes, medical insurance, and get a stipend to boot?
What aspiring professional in any discipline gets this?
How many minor leaguers get close to anything your describing? That may occur in rookie ball, which it does, & DSL, but the same assurances are not rewarded beyond that. I’ve had so many friends try to get by on crappy stipends which basically comes out to next to nothing especially after clubby fees. The basic fact of the matter is development fees are drop in the bucket to owners. They pay a stipend and an unlivable wage. Owners aren’t even responsible for stadium up-keeping as counties or venues hold that responsibility. And if they don’t , oh hey we’re packing up and finding a new affiliate.
Everyone wants to talk about bad ten year contracts when owners don’t even pay close to market value for their “prime years.” The league minimum is the lowest of the three sports and the mlb has basic control over a player upwards to 13 years. So owners are basically capping players on both the front end & the backend. They capped the IFA market and the draft. When we talk about the game as a whole and why it lags behind the NFL and NBA it’s becomes a major issue. Owners aren’t helping at all in this aspect.
You want parents and kids to choose a sport that is expensive as all hell when younger to hopefully maybe earn a 25% scholarship to play college baseball or to ink a measly signing bonus. To then toil in the minors to make an unlivable wage only to maybe make it on the 40 man. And then the years where they should be making money, they get yo-yo “Ed” to conserve control. It’s an absolutely joke. This is not helping the growth of the game plain and simple. It’s stagnating it and there are ramifications. I never fault players for goin after the money. The system is archaic and broken beyond belief. It needs to be changed. If you don’t want to pay for players decline years I don’t blame owners, but there also needs to be a compromise. Pay players up front. Up the league minimum and cut years of control. Allow teams less than 6 years of minor league control. If you’re not added to the 40 man at year 4 or 5 you should be an FA. Fans don’t watch games for the owners. When the product on the field suffers interest and attendance suffers. Only owners don’t care about attendance because that revenue doesn’t move the needle. They end up pocketing the revenues, because the payroll is minimal. What does move the needle is tv revenue, bam payouts, rev sharing etc. The mlb also owns significant responsibility on this end also, If owners can’t afford to own a team they shouldn’t. But owners are more than ok with it, because well it artificially depresses salaries along with tanking.
Blue_Painted_Dreams_LA;
Those are all good arguments. But if young players must get paid, where does it leave the fans in small and medium markets?
Right now small and medium markets only have a short time – maybe 2-3 years to compete. They have to develop their own players that they have rights to for 6 years – 1) all quality prospects do not come up the same year, and 2) most guys need a year or two to produce at the ML level.
If you want to pay those guys high salaries earlier, how? Do they become FA’s after 4 years? Does the league step in with formulas to dictate how much the player should get?
Do you realize that 2/3’rds of MLB teams will not be able to pay all those guys, so most will migrate to the large market teams via FA or salary dumps, assuring that fans in 20 ML cities have no realistic chance to get to a WS? What happened to “the customer is king”?
See, all this talk is about how unfair it is to some players, or how the owners are banking all the profits. What I don’t see is a concern for 2/3’rds of MLB fans. A product that treats its customers that way is doomed to fail.
The cost of living and income in large cities compared to small and medium grows larger each year. Most fans in Pittsburgh, KC, Tampa, Detroit and elsewhere cannot afford to pay the ticket prices fans pay in NY, SF, Boston and others. Then we get to the outrageous local TV-radio revenue disparity.
Until the 30 teams in MLB have near equal amounts to be able to offer in salaries, nothing will be solved. Large market teams can take a step back and rebuild in 2 years, then compete for 5-6 years. Small-medium markets take 4-6 years to rebuild, and compete for 2-3 years…..if successful. What you’re proposing makes the gap even worse…….and rest assured the large market owners want this to continue – they’re the ones getting the stacked teams and big profits.
well the disparity is more the issue – guys in the minors aren’t making minimum wage, younger league leaders are making a couple of hundred thousand and then there are guys want a big payday of hundreds of millions which they won’t be worth at the end of their contract. the bottom needs to be pushed up and the top down..
Talk about disparity…….
There are 30 MLB teams with 750 players. But only one team and 25 players win the World Series each year!
Agree. Everyone should get participation trophies! Let’s stop keeping score too!
Not so long ago, Marxism was still about the plight of the working-class stiff who was darn near enslaved to the billionaire owner. Now it is apparently about the plight of the hundred-millionaire vs. the billionaire. First world problems…
Yeah, let’s bash billionaires who help create millionaires. The horror.
Taking away picks is asinine.. Teams can be that bad. THe ones who don’t care, won’t care about the picks. THe ones really trying to get better wiill be hesitant to do a full rebuild.
If you don’t want the team to run things how they want, do not grant them a franchise or approve the sale to them.
If you want competition, stop expanding, stop diluting talent and get rid of the cap.
COntract teams that can’t draw fans…..Tampa. for example.
Players who are tired of owners they feel are not trying do not have to to sign or stay there.
Two things…
1. I wholeheartedly agree that players in MiLB should be paid better and I do think that players should be allowed to hit FA after four years.
2. Owners don’t make their profits public, because everyone would be SICKENED to see how much they make as opposed to what they actually invest in the team.
A lot of you are saying that a player like Harper wouldn’t benefit a Superpowered club, like the Dodgers or Yankees, financially.
I can’t say for certain, on that.
I can tell you this, though…my team is the Atlanta Braves…if the Braves were to sign Harper, he, alone, would make a mid-market team, like the Braves, a friggin’ fortune! SunTrust Park would be sold-out, all the time. Jersey sales would go through the roof. Believe me, he would pay for himself 10 X’s over.
One other thing…
Harper/Machado are in NO WAY going to be albatross contracts. These guys are 26 years old going into the 2019 season. If they sign 10 year deals, at the conclusion of the contract, they’d only be 35 years old. So, unless they just decline like Dan Uggla, these two are pretty safe bets.
Crazy to me that some of the same people saying “Harper and Manny ain’t that good” are the same ones RAVING about Realmuto being the best receiver in the game.
Guys…Harper is good. REALLY good. He has some dings, to be sure, he could improve his game, but at 26…he may not have even hit the peak of his prime, yet.
So, yeah…a team is gonna hafta pay for those prime years. Those ages 26-34 years.
Some time ago I read an article that said 27 years old was peak age in careers of HOF offensive players. Of course that was 25 or so years ago when building a rotisserie team. It worked then but times may be different now