Is the emerging CBA the right one?

[Major League Ready]

1 hour ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

MLB teams are not competitors, in the truest sense of the word.  Amazon doesn't need Walmart and Target to operate.  The Yankees do need the Red Sox and Blue Jays to operate.  Enhanced national revenues are good for all.

In what sense of the word are professional sports teams not competitors?  Having said this, I understand your point, but the top revenue teams don't need the low revenue teams to be good, just present.

The theory behind this subject is that revenue sharing would make for a healthier league.  That's debatable at least in terms of total revenue generated.  Having strong teams in the large markets consistently may very well net the highest total revenue.  It no doubt would improve parity but the impact on the health and wealth of the league is debatable.

[Major League Ready]

2 hours ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

That said, even if I'm wrong, the larger point I was making is that FO's today are very large organizations--the Cardinals actually list their entire FO (including coaching staff and scouts) on their website--it's 345 people.  If the average cost to the Cardinals to employ those people is $100k (including salary, 401k match, payroll taxes, health benefits, etc.), which seems low if anything, that's $34.5M just to pay the people who operate the team.

 

I agree the estimate of 100K per employee is probably low given they also probably provide office space for some of them, computers, some travel, etc.  Even at 100K or $34M, that's 10% of revenue.  This is a common thing in many businesses.  Their investment in personnel changes as they find better ways to compete.  Of course, when you spend an additional 10% of revenue on new resources, that money has to come from somewhere.  Some of it has come from player salaries and that's a major contributor to the problem we are facing now.  The players are upset that teams have found an alternative investment that produces more wins/dollar spent.   Actually, I am not sure they even recognize this is a major contributor to the decrease in percentage spent on payroll.  Maybe the understand but don't accept it's a very normal thing in every business.  It has just never happened in this business.

[Cap'n Piranha]

2 hours ago, DJL44 said:

Any data from baseball games themselves is open source. If there is additional data it must be from practices - Rapsodo and Blast Motion, etc. How much practice time is being spent on data generation so the analytics team can have something to do at work?

I'm saying for the Pirates the whole analytics department is irrelevant. They can finish 57-105 with no analytics team at all. Why spend $20M on analytics and finish 61-101? It's still last place by a country mile. That's like a business hiring a bunch of people to analyze the market for new products and deciding not to pursue any of the opportunities. Why do the analysis if you aren't going to act on any of the information? Just cut the department.

Maybe they're collecting data at games that no one else is able to?  Maybe tracking hundreds of data points across hundreds of players across hundreds of games requires very robust data collection, processing, and analyzing processes?

The Pirates could fire their whole analytics department true, but they would not finish 57-105.  They'd finish 20-142, because they would constantly have no MLB quality players, and the players they did have on the MLB roster would stagnate and be completely overmatched in every single game.

The point of analytics is that, unlike payroll, the Pirates can compete with any team.  If the Pirates spend $20M and the Yankees $200M, the Yankees will not get vastly more worth from that, like they would on payroll.  As such, analytics is the only way small market teams can compete with large market teams, barring true revenue sharing (each MLB team gets $333M of the $10B total revenue MLB creates, regardless of how much of that revenue that team actually created).

The better analogy would be that analytics departments are like an entrepreneur.  They identify an inefficiency in the system, and create a product (i.e. players) to fill that inefficiency, and then sell that product to another business before it gets too expensive to run.  The proceeds from that sale are then used to pay the bills, and develop the next product.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Shipt can't compete with Target, but it can do something Target is not.  The Pirates can't compete with the Yankees on payroll, but they can on analytics.

[Cap'n Piranha]

2 hours ago, DJL44 said:

I'm going to call BS on the Pirates "never" being able to compete through payroll. There are plenty of teams who are able to compete with a $100M payroll. That number is affordable for any team in baseball. There are a lot of things a team can do with a marginal $75M.

The Pirates, under the most recent CBA (or anything like it) would never be able to get within $100M on payroll with the Yankees/Dodgers/Red Sox, etc.  By definition they cannot compete.  They can have (relatively) higher payrolls, but that will be because they paid their homegrown players more to stick around through a year or two of FA, not because they went toe-to-toe against the Yankees in the bidding for Gerrit Cole.

The teams that compete for $100M do so because they employ cutting edge analytics which offset the otherwise insurmountable gap in payroll.  Put another way--would you rather have $200 a week to spend on groceries for a family of 4, or $100?  Now how about if I told you that if you choose $200, you can only shop regular price items at Byerly's, but if you choose $100 you can use coupons and shop anywhere you want, while also getting an e-mail blast of everything that's on sale, and where?  Minus the analytics, you would never be able to get as much food for $100 as you could for $200--the same thing holds true for payroll.

[DJL44]

23 minutes ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

Maybe tracking hundreds of data points across hundreds of players across hundreds of games requires very robust data collection, processing, and analyzing processes?

I think I figured out the problem with the Pirates analytics department

[Cap'n Piranha]

2 hours ago, Major League Ready said:

In what sense of the word are professional sports teams not competitors?  Having said this, I understand your point, but the top revenue teams don't need the low revenue teams to be good, just present.

The theory behind this subject is that revenue sharing would make for a healthier league.  That's debatable at least in terms of total revenue generated.  Having strong teams in the large markets consistently may very well net the highest total revenue.  It no doubt would improve parity but the impact on the health and wealth of the league is debatable.

In the exact sense I said.  Amazon does not need Walmart (or any other retailer) in order to sell goods to consumers.  The Yankees do need someone (preferably multiple someones, as 162 games of NYY v BOS is pretty boring) in order to have baseball games.

The NFL is doing perfectly fine from a revenue standpoint, despite paying much more to it's players ($6Bish in 2021, compared to $4B for MLB in 2021).  Maybe that's because football is nationally popular, whereas baseball tends to be regionally popular--this is a reality of baseball's own making.  More national interest equals more national contracts, which are invariably more lucrative than local ones.  Might true revenue splits hurt the 4-6 biggest teams in the short term?  Yes.  But that would be made up if baseball itself was more popular.

[Cap'n Piranha]

7 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

I think I figured out the problem with the Pirates analytics department

Eh, it's more like this.

[TheLeviathan]

6 hours ago, bean5302 said:

There is no dis

Owners already pool 50% of their revenue for revenue sharing. So the Steinbrenners pay for the Pohlads already. The expectation well run franchises act as charity foundations for poor running franchises is hardly fair.

Aside from that, the biggest issue in the sport is 3 outcomes right now. MLB is the most competitive major sport in the United States and every time MLB proposes a rule change to try and improve the sport, the MLBPA tries to block it and use it for leverage.

Baseball has been dying before the 3 outcomes.  This march to the sport's irrelevancy predates it.

But the larger error you make here is equating "making more money" with "well run franchise".  The Red Sox have been, at times, an absolute ****-show of decision making in the last decade, Yankees too, but that hasn't stopped them from making bank on their media deals.  The Angels should be renamed Mike Trout and the Sunk Costs, but that hasn't impacted their revenues.  In MLB, the revenue disparities have significantly less to do with the acumen of the management team than the geographic location than any other major sport.  And it ain't even close.

[bean5302]

22 hours ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

The Pirates, under the most recent CBA (or anything like it) would never be able to get within $100M on payroll with the Yankees/Dodgers/Red Sox, etc.  By definition they cannot compete.  They can have (relatively) higher payrolls, but that will be because they paid their homegrown players more to stick around through a year or two of FA, not because they went toe-to-toe against the Yankees in the bidding for Gerrit Cole.

The teams that compete for $100M do so because they employ cutting edge analytics which offset the otherwise insurmountable gap in payroll.  Put another way--would you rather have $200 a week to spend on groceries for a family of 4, or $100?  Now how about if I told you that if you choose $200, you can only shop regular price items at Byerly's, but if you choose $100 you can use coupons and shop anywhere you want, while also getting an e-mail blast of everything that's on sale, and where?  Minus the analytics, you would never be able to get as much food for $100 as you could for $200--the same thing holds true for payroll.

It's risk reward. The average team making the World Series has a payroll of $130MM over the past decade or so. A team paying $200MM can make more mistakes so they can be more aggressive than a team with a $100MM or $150MM payroll. Risks don't always pan out. $100MM is enough to be competitive in baseball.

[Cap'n Piranha]

2 hours ago, bean5302 said:

It's risk reward. The average team making the World Series has a payroll of $130MM over the past decade or so. A team paying $200MM can make more mistakes so they can be more aggressive than a team with a $100MM or $150MM payroll. Risks don't always pan out. $100MM is enough to be competitive in baseball.

This is true, and of course $100M is enough to be competitive in baseball--because of analytics.  It has levelled the playing field in a way that didn't exist 20 years ago, where a team like the Rays can more or less match the Yankees on non-payroll spending, and then run a low payroll to offset that.  

[Brock Beauchamp]

18 hours ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

This is true, and of course $100M is enough to be competitive in baseball--because of analytics.  It has levelled the playing field in a way that didn't exist 20 years ago, where a team like the Rays can more or less match the Yankees on non-payroll spending, and then run a low payroll to offset that.  

I don't think this is true. The Twins were essentially the Rays in the 2000s. If a team is simply smarter and better at finding and developing players than everybody else, that team will do more with less money. That has always been the case in baseball, the only thing that has changed is how teams are smarter. While the Twins were being smart and good without analytics, the A's were being smart and good with analytics. 

[Cap'n Piranha]

On 3/5/2022 at 8:22 AM, Brock Beauchamp said:

I don't think this is true. The Twins were essentially the Rays in the 2000s. If a team is simply smarter and better at finding and developing players than everybody else, that team will do more with less money. That has always been the case in baseball, the only thing that has changed is how teams are smarter. While the Twins were being smart and good without analytics, the A's were being smart and good with analytics. 

I'm much more inclined to think the 2001-2006 Twins were fortunate with the passel of prospects they accumulated while being awful for essentially 7 straight years (1993-1999), than that they were smart and good.  Look at the paucity of small market teams that made the playoffs in 2001-2006--other than the A's and Twins, you had the Marlins once and the Padres twice.

Going further though, this sort of reinforces my point--there are too many smart teams these days, and they are all smart through analytics.  There will never again be another team that can compete through getting fortunate, or drafting in the top 5 for 5 straight years.  Analytics has been a great leveller of the playing field in the sense that any team can now compete.  Money is less important (although still important), so the best thing that can happen for the league is to correct the inclination to lean completely into analytical rebuilding.  The only way that happens is by making it so all teams can compete relatively equally in free agency.

[Brock Beauchamp]

35 minutes ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

I'm much more inclined to think the 2001-2006 Twins were fortunate with the passel of prospects they accumulated while being awful for essentially 7 straight years (1993-1999), than that they were smart and good.  Look at the paucity of small market teams that made the playoffs in 2001-2006--other than the A's and Twins, you had the Marlins once and the Padres twice.

Going further though, this sort of reinforces my point--there are too many smart teams these days, and they are all smart through analytics.  There will never again be another team that can compete through getting fortunate, or drafting in the top 5 for 5 straight years.  Analytics has been a great leveller of the playing field in the sense that any team can now compete.  Money is less important (although still important), so the best thing that can happen for the league is to correct the inclination to lean completely into analytical rebuilding.  The only way that happens is by making it so all teams can compete relatively equally in free agency.

I think you're downplaying how good Ryan & Co were at identifying talent during that first stretch. They routinely won trades, often pretty spectacularly, and they drafted and signed well. They didn't accidentally fall into developing good pitchers with such regularity, even if their "pitch to contact" mantra ran its course to diminishing effect as time wore on.

But I agree any attempt to replicate that success without analytics would result in spectacular failure in today's game.

[bean5302]

40 minutes ago, Cap'n Piranha said:

I'm much more inclined to think the 2001-2006 Twins were fortunate with the passel of prospects they accumulated while being awful for essentially 7 straight years (1993-1999), than that they were smart and good.  Look at the paucity of small market teams that made the playoffs in 2001-2006--other than the A's and Twins, you had the Marlins once and the Padres twice.

Going further though, this sort of reinforces my point--there are too many smart teams these days, and they are all smart through analytics.  There will never again be another team that can compete through getting fortunate, or drafting in the top 5 for 5 straight years.  Analytics has been a great leveller of the playing field in the sense that any team can now compete.  Money is less important (although still important), so the best thing that can happen for the league is to correct the inclination to lean completely into analytical rebuilding.  The only way that happens is by making it so all teams can compete relatively equally in free agency.

So you're saying every team which is terrible is destined to be successful. If that's the case, we don't have anything to worry about from a competitive balance standpoint. Everything will just work itself out naturally. Good teams will become terrible and terrible teams will become good.

Let's look at your very SSS example of 2001-2006. There are 8 teams of the 30 which make the playoffs back then. I'm not sure what you mean about small market? Bottom 10? Bottom 15? We'll say bottom 10. Statistically, if everything was linear, you'd expect 16 of the 48 playoff teams to be small market, mid market and large market each.

Unfortunately, just looking at 2001 off the bat, you missed Cleveland and Arizona already as small market teams. 

2001 = 3/8 small revenue (Cleveland, Oakland, Arizona)
2002 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, Arizona)
2003 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, Florida)
2004 = 1/8 small revenue (Minnesota)
2005 = 1/8 small revenue (San Diego)
2006 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, San Diego)
Total? 14 small revenue teams... pretty much exactly what a statistical parity would look like. Of course, I don't think making the playoffs is as important as making/winning the World Series and I think there would be some bigger discrepancies there, but the argument has never been all teams need exactly the same revenue to compete. Just that some teams abuse the revenue sharing system and don't try to win and some teams have a relevant advantage because they can dramatically outspend other teams.

[Brock Beauchamp]

18 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

2001 = 3/8 small revenue (Cleveland, Oakland, Arizona)
2002 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, Arizona)
2003 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, Florida)
2004 = 1/8 small revenue (Minnesota)
2005 = 1/8 small revenue (San Diego)
2006 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, San Diego)

The problem I see right off the bat is that it appears you're applying 2022 definitions of revenue to the past.

Cleveland and Arizona were big spenders 20 years ago, both were top ten in payrolls.

[old nurse]

35 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

The problem I see right off the bat is that it appears you're applying 2022 definitions of revenue to the past.

Cleveland and Arizona were big spenders 20 years ago, both were top ten in payrolls.

They were also league average in revenue

[BD57]

On 3/3/2022 at 9:30 AM, Brock Beauchamp said:

The real, permanent fix for baseball needs to come from ownership, as the players have zero control over it: the revenue disparity between teams.

In a situation where the Dodgers are receiving $250m from television and the Brewers are receiving $40m, literally every other fix is a band-aid working around the elephant in the room that everyone refuses to acknowledge.

If the owners shared revenue for the good of the sport and its competitive balance, the fix involving the players becomes incredibly easy:

Give the players 50% of revenue, set a cap and floor, and let players sort it out amongst themselves. Let them dictate how much the base salary is, how much arbitration is worth, how quickly it happens, all of which would be decided with the knowledge that any significant increases to the salary of young players comes at the expense of veterans.

All broadcast revenue - radio  (national, satellite & local) & TV (local, regional & national) - should go into a 'common pot.' 

The Yankees Yes Network money comes from the Yankees having someone to play - without the opponent, there's no game, without the game, there's no money.   All broadcast income should go into the pot & be split equally.

There's an obvious question of "How far do you go with this?"   Income derived from home attendance?   Income derived from Jersey sales?  

Equalize revenues, find out who does the best job locating & developing players.

[Doctor Gast]

Not only am I not satisfied with what not being settled (CB tax and minimium salary), I'm not satisfied with what is settled (except universal DH). Pitch clock and larger 2B are ok but petty; shift ban is anti baseball, the spirit of baseball is adjusting to your opponent. Here we are rewarding players that are unable to adjust. If there's a clock on the pitcher, to be fair there should be a clock on the hitter also to speed up the game. The rule that I'd like to see (Robo Ump) got rejected. Traditional umps although want to be fair they tend to favor big name players & teams. 

The focus should be settling the minimium salary by both parties. They should leave the CB tax alone, it's there for a reason. It's there to keep big market teams from signing all the big name players, to try to keep the game  competitive. It looks like the owners will get their 14 team play-off games, so the owners are getting more $. The veterans who want something out the CBA  should be paid by the owners more $ for the play-off games and leave CB tax alone. A minimium payroll on the bottom teams could be implimented to help out those veteran players.

These negociations has nothing to do with fairness and well being for the sport. Only a power struggle amongs the greedy

[Cap'n Piranha]

18 hours ago, bean5302 said:

So you're saying every team which is terrible is destined to be successful. If that's the case, we don't have anything to worry about from a competitive balance standpoint. Everything will just work itself out naturally. Good teams will become terrible and terrible teams will become good.

Let's look at your very SSS example of 2001-2006. There are 8 teams of the 30 which make the playoffs back then. I'm not sure what you mean about small market? Bottom 10? Bottom 15? We'll say bottom 10. Statistically, if everything was linear, you'd expect 16 of the 48 playoff teams to be small market, mid market and large market each.

Unfortunately, just looking at 2001 off the bat, you missed Cleveland and Arizona already as small market teams. 

2001 = 3/8 small revenue (Cleveland, Oakland, Arizona)
2002 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, Arizona)
2003 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, Florida)
2004 = 1/8 small revenue (Minnesota)
2005 = 1/8 small revenue (San Diego)
2006 = 3/8 small revenue (Minnesota, Oakland, San Diego)
Total? 14 small revenue teams... pretty much exactly what a statistical parity would look like. Of course, I don't think making the playoffs is as important as making/winning the World Series and I think there would be some bigger discrepancies there, but the argument has never been all teams need exactly the same revenue to compete. Just that some teams abuse the revenue sharing system and don't try to win and some teams have a relevant advantage because they can dramatically outspend other teams.

I said the Twins were fortunate with their passel of prospects, which implies that just being terrible and amassing prospects will not be a surefire path to success.

As has been pointed out by others, in 2001, Cleveland was 5th in payroll, and Arizona 8th.  In 2002, Arizona rose to 4th.  In fact, if we use the (somewhat crude) breakout of high payroll, mid payroll, and small payroll as 1-10, 11-20, and 21-30, the Twins became mid-payroll in 2003, meaning that out of the 48 teams that made the playoffs in 2001-2006, the breakout is as follows:

• 2001--5-2-1
• 2002--4-2-2
• 2003--4-2-2
• 2004--6-2-0
• 2005--5-3-0
• 2006--3-4-1

So the breakdown ends up being 27-15-6, so 56% high payroll, 31% mid-payroll, 13% low payroll.  Put another way, 45% of high payroll teams made the playoffs (27/60), 25% of mid-payroll teams (15/60), and 10% of low payroll teams (6/60).  In fact, other than the A's, only 2 other organization in the low payroll group made the playoffs--Florida 1x, and the Twins 1x (who immediately after making the playoffs stopped being low payroll).  This demonstrates just how much better from an analytical standpoint the A's were than everyone else in the early 2000's.

[bean5302]

18 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

The problem I see right off the bat is that it appears you're applying 2022 definitions of revenue to the past.

Cleveland and Arizona were big spenders 20 years ago, both were top ten in payrolls.

Is this top 10 revenue is this top 10 payroll or is this top 10 in market size? Smaller revenue/market/spending teams who are performing well typically have a burst in revenue and often take advantage of that by overspending to try and keep playoff runs alive. It's a bit of a catch-22.

[bean5302]

15 hours ago, BD57 said:

All broadcast revenue - radio  (national, satellite & local) & TV (local, regional & national) - should go into a 'common pot.' 

The Yankees Yes Network money comes from the Yankees having someone to play - without the opponent, there's no game, without the game, there's no money.   All broadcast income should go into the pot & be split equally.

There's an obvious question of "How far do you go with this?"   Income derived from home attendance?   Income derived from Jersey sales?  

Equalize revenues, find out who does the best job locating & developing players.

Player salaries should go to construction workers because without a stadium to play in, players wouldn't have a field to play on.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Just now, bean5302 said:

Is this top 10 revenue is this top 10 payroll or is this top 10 in market size? Smaller revenue/market/spending teams who are performing well typically have a burst in revenue and often take advantage of that by overspending to try and keep playoff runs alive. It's a bit of a catch-22.

I don't have revenue numbers but around that time, Cleveland had an absurd sold-out streak going so their revenue was probably very high. I also know the Diamondbacks were similarly popular, having just won a World Series and had feel-good vibes throughout that region. And Phoenix is a very large metro.

[Otto von Ballpark]

On 3/8/2022 at 1:02 PM, Brock Beauchamp said:

I don't have revenue numbers but around that time, Cleveland had an absurd sold-out streak going so their revenue was probably very high. I also know the Diamondbacks were similarly popular, having just won a World Series and had feel-good vibes throughout that region. And Phoenix is a very large metro.

Here's the Forbes baseball list for the 2000 season, showing Cleveland ranking 5th in revenue:

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Daily/Issues/2001/09/12/Ratings-Research/Forbes-00-MLB-Valuations-Have-NY-State-Of-Mind.aspx

Of course, the revenue spread has continued exploding since then -- ranking #5 in 2000 isn't the same as ranking #5 now.

[Otto von Ballpark]

Interesting nugget: Cleveland actually sold shares in the team in the late 1990s, and therefore had to disclose some of their financials publicly. You can read a run-down in Terry Pluto's book on the club here:

Dealing: The Cleveland Indians' New Ballgame by Terry Pluto (Google Books excerpt)

Pluto makes the argument that owner Dick Jacobs got out at the right time by selling in 2000, but of course franchise values have continued exploding.

[Richie the Rally Goat]

On 3/7/2022 at 5:47 PM, Brock Beauchamp said:

I think you're downplaying how good Ryan & Co were at identifying talent during that first stretch. They routinely won trades, often pretty spectacularly, and they drafted and signed well. They didn't accidentally fall into developing good pitchers with such regularity, even if their "pitch to contact" mantra ran its course to diminishing effect as time wore on.

But I agree any attempt to replicate that success without analytics would result in spectacular failure in today's game.

Analytics meant something different then. They won with the analytics of the day and then got conservative because they didn’t understand their competitive advantage and it was overtaken by newer and more robust techniques of data collection and analysis.

 

as for whether this is the “right CBA”… it gets us MLB baseball again, so… YUP it’s the right one for now!

[Brock Beauchamp]

So much news today it's hard to keep track. Manfred announced reporters will return to clubhouses, which is a pretty big deal for journalists.

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2022/03/manfred-reporters-will-have-clubhouse-access-in-2022.html

[DJL44]

Quote

In 1995 and 1996 (the last years before the competitive balance tax) the top five MLB payrolls were a combined 2.4 times and 2.5 times greater than the lowest five, respectively.

In 2010, the gap was 3.3 times.

In 2021, the gap was 3.8 times.

In MLB, 48% of all clubs' local revenue is placed into a pot and split evenly among all 30 teams. That number was estimated to be $118 million per team per year in 2018, plus another $91 million for each club from national TV and other deals.

Yet, few teams will consider spending up to the CBT threshold level, which is now $230 million. Only nine have ever exceeded it.

Baseball's new CBA is already failing the spirit of competition | theScore.com

So every team gets $230M in shared revenue but only 15 teams look like they'll spend even half of that on player payroll. This is true even with 12 playoff spots.

The gap in payroll isn't because the big spenders are spending more. The luxury tax is flattening payroll at the top of the scale. The gap is because the small teams aren't spending at all.

The Twins options are try to win, spend $150M or so on a competitive team and make $90M in profit or try to lose, spend $45M and make $180M. It is roughly twice as profitable for the Twins to intentionally suck as it is to go for it. They appear to be splitting it in half, try to put a mediocre team on the field for $100M, hope that they get lucky enough with the young pitching to be the 6th best team in the American League and expanded playoffs gives them a windfall that gets them closer to $170M in profit. If they don't make the playoffs at least they'll still sell tickets in August if the team is .500 and less than 5 games behind the final Wildcard spot.

BTW the 12 team playoffs with the top 4 teams getting a bye made it a HUGE advantage to be one of the top 4 teams. That doubles the likelihood of a World Series appearance compared to the #5/6 team and guarantees a 7 game divisional series instead of a 3 game wildcard series.

[Mike Sixel]

Both Oakland and Cincy were pretty good before their sales. Cincy would have made the playoffs last year under the new rules, I believe. They are getting Greene for their rotation....for a small number, they could have added a bat or two and a RP or two and been projected for 90 wins. Instead, they sold off.

No way this is the right CBA. 

[DJL44]

On 3/9/2022 at 4:41 PM, Otto von Ballpark said:

Of course, the revenue spread has continued exploding since then -- ranking #5 in 2000 isn't the same as ranking #5 now.

I'm not sure this is true. The payroll gap has exploded but revenues, since so much revenue is shared, have probably narrowed.

[Otto von Ballpark]

29 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

I'm not sure this is true. The payroll gap has exploded but revenues, since so much revenue is shared, have probably narrowed.

I think the revenue gap has grown too.

In 2000, #5 estimated revenue was $142.9 mil, and the median was $101.8 mil.

In 2019, #5 estimated revenue was $445 mil, and the median was $280.5 mil.