Home Commentary And Analysis CBA Madness, Phase VI (The Next Generation)

CBA Madness, Phase VI (The Next Generation)

By
Rice Cube
-
118

I believe MLB has been stumping for a salary cap all this time, even during the press conferences in the midst of the All-Star festivities, since the last time we saw a proposal coming from the players. The latest tweet shared suggests that negotiations have been taking place in some form, as recently as today (July 21 as of this posting). I don’t have direct access to Twitter anymore but others do, so here are the images and then we’ll get into it:

In the first image above, MLBPA is pretty explicit about its commitment to maintain the current structure of the MLB Rule 4 Draft (so 20 rounds still), get the small market teams more opportunities to obtain talent, and reward success for those small market teams. I’m glad the union rejected the insane proposal to slash the draft and basically port more of talent development to colleges, which we talked about here. The whole goal is to make baseball continue to be a lucrative career choice for elite athletes, particularly those who play multiple sports (as all kids should) and have done so at a high level. I’m not sure that, after having capped the draft bonus pools and assigned hard slots to each pick, MLB will go for larger bonuses, and while there is some wiggle room for negotiations with the underslots and basically leaving seniors with no leverage out to dry, I doubt MLB allows any additional flexibility, but I like that the players are trying here. More options would make it more likely that kids choose baseball as their professional sports career in my opinion. They already allow extra pool money to go to small market clubs with those competitive balance picks, which famously the Cardinals always seem to get while the Cubs remain the only NL Central team that is not eligible (though they should try to trade for one every now and then).

There is of course the threat of a lockout, but the Forbes article shared with me and that I shared in the prior post suggests that media rights partners have safeguards against lost games that could delay MLB’s ability to negotiate new deals down the line, so that might reduce the amount of time that players are locked out. I don’t actually know what the breakeven point for games is where the owners don’t lose any money for lost games, but given baseball’s current popularity and revenue, it seems on the surface that the people who make lots of money wouldn’t want to kill that momentum, but it’s not like billionaires are known for being long-term thinkers other than trying to keep growing their imagined wealth numbers. Should they start slamming into the announced start of the 2027 season, however, the schedule is going to have even more doubleheaders than were already assigned to the Cubs and others.

As a reminder, the current CBA expires by midnight on December 2, so there are about four months left for them to keep this going or a lockout is most likely going to be imposed. Here’s hoping.

118 COMMENTS

  2. Extra bits on the draft proposals

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  3. Good stuff, RC, and that was an interesting link in the last thread about the media revenue situation in the event of a lockout.

    Also liked the various commentary about PCA’s insane catch last night. Here’s one.

    It reminded me of that homer in the ASG when Pete was mic’d up. I remember thinking it seemed like a crazy fast reaction. So I went back and analyzed the audio. There was approximately 0.2 seconds between the crack of the bat and Pete starting to say “Oh god.” FYI, it takes sound about .33 seconds to travel from the plate to where PCA was standing. He literally reacted to that homer faster than the speed of sound. (dying laughing)

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  4. andcounting,

    I thought that was slightly off, sound has a speed of about 1125 ft/s in the air so I think the decimal was misplaced (dying laughing)…but your point stands, if he was say 250ish feet away from home plate that would still be about 0.22 seconds so there’s a chance he saw the trajectory of the ball before the sound reached his ears (dying laughing)

    It brings to mind the legend that Dennis Rodman threw basketballs at rims to study angles so he could be a rebounding master, at this point PCA probably knows all the angles of swings and batted balls and trajectories and all that so that could account for his jumps and anticipation, it’s kind of hard to teach that stuff, guess he just has that instinct.

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  9. Rice Cube,

    Just a typo on the 3.3. Definitely intended .33, but the point really is that I suspect (as you suggest) he’s reading the flight of the pitch and the angle/timing of the swing before he even hears the sound. It was just too obscenely fast of a reaction. (dying laughing)

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  10. I can’t think of a player who improved their plate discipline as much as PCA has. He’s gone from horrible to well above average. Unless this is just a few months of random great plate discipline, this is probably a player who is going to win an MVP at some point in his career.

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  13. Rice Cube,

    Yeah, he’s probably the front runner at this point. That’s crazy. He just a great player if this is the new baseline for him offensively. He’s already an elite defender and this plate discipline makes him an elite offensive player.

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  15. dmick89,

    And it was not in the least bit gradual. His plate discipline was terrible, someone flipped a switch, then he turned into a human ABS. (dying laughing)

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  16. I will admit that I’m about 85% sold on PCA being *this* new patient hitter we’ve been seeing. He’s a completely different hitter. It passes the eye test. Not sure what happened, but I’ll take it.

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  17. PCA did say during one of his mic’d up moments that there is work to be done to dethrone Ohtani, just such a unicorn…made a joke about how he might have to become a reliever too

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  18. andcounting,

    It’s really weird and I’ve never seen anything like it. Took me a long time to even entertain the idea that it was real, but everything about it seems like he’s make serious adjustments to his approach.

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  19. With regards to Ohtani, at what point do the voters vote for someone other than Ohtani? Are we there yet? If it’s close, I think they vote for someone else.

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  20. dmick89,

    What he does is so unique that I feel like Pete or whoever would have to get the triple crown like when Cabrera got it over Trout that one time…not that it wasn’t deserving, but you have to either be head and shoulders above or hope that the voters get bored

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  39. Rice Cube,

    No arguments here. All the performative nationalism is probably counterproductive, especially given our current state. Some old guy once gave me crap for not participating in “God Bless America” at a Nats game and it annoyed the hell out of me.

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  42. Perkins,

    I always have mixed feelings about performative nationalism, especially at ‘internal’ sporting events like domestic leagues for all the reasons alluded to above. My parents are old lefties who refuse to cede national symbols like the flag to right-wing nationalists, though without being strident about it or anything, and when I was a kid would always have us come and at least stop what we were doing for the anthem at home for World Series games. My dad is a vet but is relatively ambivalent about his service, he doesn’t talk about it much not because it was a big deal to him but because it wasn’t, it was something he did but not something that he felt defined him in any particular way, and was just part of being an American citizen. I can’t remember off my dome if he was drafted or if he enlisted because he expected to be drafted when he graduated. He mostly did clerical work in Saigon though he did go through basic training etc and some more classical ‘soldier’-y work around base. To both of my folks (my mom was a civil servant) the flag and other symbols were and still are a symbol of the US as the positive, creed-based force for good in the world, even if it’s harder to see things that way of late, and are still worth claiming by the left even if it’s hard to do without strident nationalism. When I bought my house out here a few years ago my parents got me a flagpole in case I wanted to do the same, luckily they are some of the few folks out there where I genuinely know this wasn’t a passive aggressive move on their part (dying laughing). I’ve only flown Cubs or Badgers flags, but this year I finally did go ahead and put out a US flag, and fuck the people who choose to interpret it differently. Though to be fair, I also put a pride flag just below it, so maybe that could help them come to the right conclusions (dying laughing).

    All that said, they and I also agree, fuck off to God Bless America (dying laughing)

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  46. berselius,

    I also feel mostly ambivalent about my own service. It was a thing I wanted to do, and would have regretted not doing, but it was a different part of my life. Seeing the fall of Afghanistan a few years ago and the capture of our own government by fascists, it does feel mostly pointless.

    I appreciate the sentiment about not ceding national symbols to the chuds. On some level it’s like Michael Bolton in Office Space: “why should I change when he’s the one who sucks?” But it’s been really tough to get excited for holidays I used to enjoy, like the 4th or Veterans Day, for the past decade.

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  69. To-day’s base ball squadron

    CF PCA
    RF Suzuki
    1B Busch
    3B Bregman
    LF Happ
    2B Hoerner
    DH Ramirez
    C Kelly
    SS Swandong

    SP Boyd

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  107. berselius:
    If the Brewers can fix McCullers, lmao, the NL central might as well pack it in.

    The NL Central has been marked safe from the Brewers Fixing McCullers experiment.

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  112. I don’t see how a team with playoff aspirations can concede 20% of its remaining games by letting Jameson Taillon start. Let’s hope they can swing a deal for another good SP.

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  116. Looks like Katel Marte is on the move. Dude nuked all D-Backs posts from his instagram and unfollowed the team account. (dying laughing)

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  117. Think AC or someone broached the idea of the impending lockout affecting contracts and trades on one of the recent pods, so perhaps along with the teams mostly being bunched around “maybe contending” plus that, it’s slowing down the trade activity…but now that the draft picks are signed, perhaps it’ll pick up?

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