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“Dave 5:43
Honestly Steve, I kind of feel like your preaching from a soapbox that has left all the horrific contracts of the past out of view. If I’m sitting on an Ellsbury/Pujols contract, am I a villain for not wanting to hand another one out?”
Why are so many fans acting like they own the team? Are you all really that egotistical about your fandom? Owning a baseball team is a dam hobby to these guys, nothing more nothing less. They all are making hand over fist on top of that and the salaries of the players who create the revenue are getting locked out of their careers for simply wanting fair value for what their massive revenue-producing skillset produces.
For the life of me I cannot understand why people get mad at MLB salaries. Is your company a billion dollar industry? Does your earning ability in it end at age 40? If the answer is no to both then you should be fighting for more profits shared equally amongst all professional players, not owners. Teams have operated without owners before, maybe we should get rid of them all and let MLB do all the work owners do for all teams.
I understand your point. It doesnt affect me in any way. But if you’re an owner, are you gonna like being forced to pay 9-figure salaries? What’s the point of having a farm system if you’ve just got to bypass it? I think the biggest problem is teams tanking. We haven’t even started the season, and we all know for a fact that 33% of the teams are gonna stink it up. The market decided the value of the players, and when you have 1/3 of the teams putting out non-competitive teams, the market for talent isnt gonna be there
I don’t understand why it has to be framed like that: “Do you think the owner will like making 70 million in profit instead of 100 million?” What? This is a hobby to them and no player contract has directly affected an owners life in any way.
Seriously, name the people who signed off on all the $100 mill contracts over the years, I’ll bet they’re all still wealthy no matter how badly the player played.
If you own a business, you should be able to run it. The notion that it doesnt affect the owners life is irrelevant. If that’s the case, every owner would put $500 million into their payroll every year. It’s only money, right? I never agreed with the concept that an employee has the right to set his own wages.
tanking is part of this though too – f you put a leash on the high end salaries but push up the bottom end – increase the league minimum and create arbitration annually for players the first off-season after their first appearance (so yeah – you game the system to get control of a rookie and you get a shortened season + you have to pay arb the next year) while also increasing minor league salaries – (at least in AAA if nothing else)then you can create a disincentive for negotiation that creates astronomical worthless contracts. At the same time I think that capping and regulating the ticket prices ought to happen. As a giants fan I think they have been pretty good with this most of the time, where you can get in a most of the times in the cheap seats for $10 or less but at the same time other ballparks will charge 20-30 and up per game, it becomes a barrier to getting the youth involved, for me – I still have the ticket from the first game I saw – it was the twins and the ticket was $1.25…..
For shame……
“Owning a baseball team is a dam hobby to these guys, nothing more nothing less.”
@ Strike Four;
No.
To most owners, their baseball team is their business, or their main business. For many it’s a full-time job to them, and often their family.
George Steinbrenner gradually sold off his families American Shipbuilding Company to run the Yankees. Arte Mareno owns the Angels and TV networks. Do you think he just drives by the Stadium once in a while and asks how it’s going? John Henry headed a group to buy the Red Sox, using his Investment Management Company – i.e. a Hedge Fund. He closed that after buying the Red Sox, and he and his partners expanded primarily into other sports. Off the top of my head, the Dodgers are owned by a corporate investment group involved in other businesses as are the Blue Jays and Braves. White Sox owner runs them and the Bulls.
MLB teams are now worth at least $1 billion. No one plays around with that as a “hobby”. It’s a serious business that’s chock full of attorneys, business executives, IT Department professionals, and people from other support disciplines. The costs in running an MLB franchise have exploded. In turn, those peoples jobs are to assure that the business is being handled in a responsible, accountable manner. Even the Mets and Orioles ownership have had to begrudgingly accept 21 century business reproaches.
not really – you need to realize the trend of owners and owners groups being replaced by investment groups. – kind of like the dodgers , people say it is magic’s team but really it is he and a number of corporations and private investors’ team. The fact of the matter is that if you have a team valued @ say 2bn but you have an annual salary cost of300mm + FO cost + operating cost – you are suddenly running operations really close to your valuation. If you want to go over that or are looking to acquire high cost talent – that money hurts less when spread among multiple investors.
@ Wolf Chan
Here is the faulty logic –
The players are being told that they are bringing in the revenue. OK. But MLB owners and executives and are the ones working with businesspeople to constantly add new revenue streams. And those people don’t work for free.
Take this home to the current situation – if Bryce Harper and Manny Machado are not signed this year, is ML attendance going to collapse? If they don’t return to the Nationals and Orioles, will those teams attendance collapse?
Fans follow the sport for many reasons. Primarily the majority follow it because their team is winning….and they don’t care if they have no name players or a dozen name players.Take this home to the current situation – if Bryce Harper and Manny Machado are not signed this year, is ML attendance going to collapse? If they don’t return to the Nationals and Orioles, will those teams attendance collapse?
Fans follow the sport for many reasons. Primarily the majority follow it because their team is winning….and they don’t care if they have no name players or a dozen name players.
Then why have payroll caps? Eliminate the caps and I’m sure the Nats, Yankees, Cubs, Red Sox, and Dodgers would be willing to pay astronomical salaries for some of these players.
However, it will hurt the MLB overall if all these teams can afford to go above and beyond in payroll.
I mean, really, when you think about it, why do you need owners? You don’t!
MLB is the company, the teams are a part of the company, the players make all the money by playing for the teams.
Why do they need middlemen (like owners) of the teams?
well technically mlb isn’t a company – the franchises are companies (though they aren’t bound by the same rules when it comes to antitrust) mlb
Why do owners need the expensive players? There’s always replacements who will do it for less.
“Why do they need middlemen (like owners) of the teams?”
@ Strike Four;
Thank You!
I knew it would come this.
The government should oversee the teams. Candidates for office could run on what front office people would be appointed. Players would have their salaries determined by a government panel.
After all the government tries to run everything else.
All the current MLB players could quit and we’ll just have move up the AAA rosters and still see the stadiums filled up.
So no, it’s not just about the current players.
You probably don’t remember the disaster that was replacement players in 1995 and how watching them play hastened the end of the lockout.
It’s hilarious reading that the Twins should be all in for 2019….to what, win the division? Why not build to win a championship? Tossing money at a closer or a Machado/Harper does not make them compete with NY, Boston or Houston if Buxton, Sano, Kepler fail, and if their starting catcher can’t recover from knee surgery.
Adding Harper, Machado, Keuchel and Kimbrel would definitely make the Twins a legit contender up there with those teams you mentioned.
Did the Twins ownership honestly think signing Mauer to that contract meant they were going to win a title? Did they really get gunshy because of Phil Hughes? There’s no legit reason why Minnesota can’t throw $200M at someone or even a group of guys right now. They have so many holes that Martin Perez isn’t going to fix. The fact that they didn’t go after minimum Kimbrel and Keuchel is really annoying to me.
Your first 2 sentences said it all.
Then you contradicted them.
lol
Yeah I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all to say that they should go all in now.
It’s probably ridiculous to think it’s actually gonna happen though
Agreed
Off the top of my head only Arte Moreno is an “owner” aka it’s HIS team with the passing of Mike Ilitch in Detroit a few years back. Now teams are mostly ownership groups and in a few cases run by families who inherited the team from a patriarch, think Yankees, Twins and even they might have some minority owners/limited partners.
In the past MLBPA has been good but not as good as everyone thought. In retrospect it might very well be the key to the free agent market has been the omnipresent “one dumb owner” Along side the shift in ownership types has been radical change to GM, Baseball ops departments/front offices. MLBPA and the agents are no longer the smartest people in the room and MLBPA’s decades long strategy of “rising tides lifts all boats” AKA get stars paid big $ has created a system that has created a HUGE pay gap within major league rosters and in the minor league ranks. This had created a cheap labor class that has crushed the MLB middle class veteran and now is putting a drag on even the $$’s big stars earn. Look at Kershaw, and the fact this market can’t support both Harper and Machado.
This current CBA was criticized by agents the moment it was signed for having CBT’s that was too low, certainly that assessment seems painfully correct now. Attempts by the MLBPA to “fix” the QO system has only made things worse. Who thought it was a good idea to hit revenue share paying teams harder? Honestly given how LAD seems to (over) value prospects I am shocked they signed AJ Pollock.
MLBPA needs to find ways to get 1-3yr guys paid. Why are they all paid similarly for starters, how does a guy not hitting his 1yr of service time not get some sort of pay bump, ditto 2nd and 3rd years, makes zero sense. There should also be a WAR bonus for 1-3 yr players that doesn’t count against the CBT. Service time on last day of season X $50K X an agreed upon WAR calculation. A 3rd yr min wage player who puts up a 4 WAR season would get an extra $600K. What team isn’t going to want to pay that bonus every time for that production?
MLBPA needs to start caring a little more about rank & file fix the pay gap because stars will get their money but like the stock market, prices don’t always rise, there are market “corrections” however the long term trend is up.
Great post!
Now…..
“MLBPA needs to find ways to get 1-3yr guys paid.”
You do that by WAR? That sets a nice precedent. So players now play for a stat other then helping their team to win? Since most players come into MLB still needing to be developed, how does that work?
And the bigger picture…….
If the money is in fact going to be pushed down from the veterans to the younger players, how is that mandated? Veteran players are squealing the past 2 years about salaries not going up as much as they want.
I have a suggestion……
Let the market do it. After each year, a player with at least x games or innings of play at the ML level will become a free argent. All contracts can only be for one year.
Now, I thought about the current team being allowed to match a proposed contract, but that would result in large market teams forcing small and mid market teams to pay some players more then they can afford – which they would make up by signing inferior players on the rest of the roster. And of course, this makes running a farm system irrelevant. Since ML teams lose money on their farm systems, why should they continue to invest large amounts of money to have a player’s rights for a year? Then there are the local fans of the team that will be left out…..but no one gives a hoot about them now, so who cares?
MLB is going to change. It always does. But after watching for over half a century, MLB is going the way of other pop culture entities such as movies, TV, and popular music. All formulated. Limited skill level of the participants hidden by Svengali’s.