Miggy's Little Helper

There is clearly blame there. At this point, you cannot use Duffey against premier power hitters. Period. Once LeMahieu reached base, it should have been Smith. And if not Smith, literally anyone else. Maybe he (or any other reliever) gets beat, but at least you’re using someone that has a chance of keeping the ball down. Duffey hangs breaking balls every single outing.

Can anyone think of a worse group of batters in Judge/Rizzo/Stanton for Duffey to face? A hang-it-and-bang-it waiting to happen.

Rocco special.

Rocco’s rules: cannot use prime relievers close and late when losing.

If that was to Judge or Stanton, would have been. Got lucky.

To be clear, Wolfson claimed Joe Ryan is ready to go. But our beloved Perpetual Manager of the Year (Hallowed Be His Name) believes he needs a rehab start. So, he’d rather have Sands get lit up and go 2IP rather than get a pitch count limited Ryan through 4ish. To say that’s suboptimal is an insult to definition of suboptimal.

Gotta love Rocco bringing in Thielbar here. Has there ever been a manager that plays to lose the game more than Rocco? He gives up in every close game that we are trailing.

As a labor lawyer, it always seemed that this was the likely result at any initial deadline for negotiations (be it a lockout at season start or strike on the brink of the playoffs). Failure to reach an agreement was likely a baked-in consequence of the starting negotiating positions combined with a relationship that is less than "okay" (to be charitable). Although I understand the frustrations, welcome to labor negotiations--they aren't pretty. We'll get there at some point in the next several weeks to months, but this is how it is designed to work. In baseball, given the resources on both sides, it's about imposing some level of pain on the other in order to get to agreement (again, a product of a fraught relationship). As a baseball fan, I for one am happy that we have a lockout and are seeing this playout before a season starts. Without the lockout, we'd almost certainly just push this down the road to the brink of the playoffs--at which point we'd see the players walk off the job. I leave it up to you as to which of these scenarios, long term, is better for baseball. We'd all prefer option C, an agreement and opening day. But that was basically never in the cards. So we move on to the next best option.

The problem with tonight is clearly that WE DID have the bullpen to close it out. It didn't take a genius to figure out how to get the last nine outs from some combination of Perez, Harper, May, and Hildy. If Perez, May, and Hildy were considered off limits tonight, it's going to be a long year and perhaps the FO should've have thought about signing one of the four hundred thousand 7/8/9 relievers available.

It could result in a drop in productivity. Or he'll be a clone of Mark Buerhle. Excellent soft-tossing lefties have always existed and, even in the age of velocity, some of them can and will continue to thrive. Given his track record, I'd be willing to bet that Keuchel is far more likely to be Mark Buerhle than Tommy Milone. I'd be willing to take up to 4 years if the price was right. 3/$50-55M would seem reasonable given the market. A steal, really, for a team that is staring into the abyss when it comes to starting pitching depth.

Uh, in a word, no. Since when is every feature of capitalism resulting in labor making gains against capital now called "socialism"? Sorry your beloved market economy did a number on your expectation for perpetually low ticket prices to watch the top 750 baseball players on a planet of 7,500,000,000 ply their trade.

The players are not going to give up guaranteed contracts. They'd pool their money with a different group of billionaires and start their own baseball league before agreeing to non-guaranteed contracts. That being said, non-guaranteed contracts would change free agency, but I'm not sure it'd be good for small market teams. What small market teams "save" in being able to cut underperforming players, they'd lose in bonus and contract size. I mean, how much do you think Harper could get on a 5 year deal right now? 40M per? The Twins would never be in on a guy that's 1/3 or their total payroll--not even for 5 years.

From what I understand, there's no way to verify each team's revenue. We can calculate payroll, of course. From what I can gather, the revenue numbers are about: Revenue 2010 - 6.14B 2011 - 6.36B 2012 - 6.81B 2013 - 7.1B 2014 - 7.86B 2015 - 8.39B 2016 - 9.03B 2017 - 9.46B 2018 - 10.3B Payroll is: 2010 - 2.91B 2011 - 3.0B 2012 - 3.15B 2013 - 3.35B 2014 - 3.63B 2015 - 3.9B 2016 - 4.07B 2017 - 4.25B 2018 - 4.22B 2019 - SPOTRAC NUMBER - Currently 3.78B I agree we don't know the whole story behind the numbers. It's rough and can be misleading. These numbers indicate revenue is up about 68% since 2010 and payroll is up 46%. Take that for what you will. Regardless of actual numbers, the players union will look at these numbers and be mighty skeptical of owners--rightfully so.

I forgot about the part where the players are just supposed to shut up and be happy while team revenue and profit increase at a faster rate than player pay.

If you represent the players, isn't the obvious response, "Okay, you want to let basic economics dictate pay? Deal. The players get market wages from day 1. No team control. Pure free agency." The owners obviously balk and now "basic economics" is out the window as a framework for agreement. The whole point of a collective bargaining agreement is that the parties get to play with what you've termed the "economic laws of nature."