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Dave Cameron Signs Manny Machado for ~$300MM/10 years


ramssuperbowl99

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47 minutes ago, ttitansfan4life said:

So why didn’t he just stay with the Orioles if he doesn’t care about winning? He’s definitely not winning in San Diego. Orioles must’ve not been willing to come close to that contract with notoriously how cheap they are.

They've got 10-12 top 100 prospects that they can trade off to start adding pieces.  Part of the Astros team was homegrown- some from before the tanking, many during the tanking- but a good portion of their players were acquired either as free agents, or using prospects as capital to add players.  Plus, you have the Giants on a downward trend, the Diamondbacks selling out to rebuild and the Rockies potentially a season or less from the same, so they have only the Dodgers to compete with over the next few seasons.  This is the perfect move for them to make. 

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6 minutes ago, mse326 said:

1. It is not a government protected monopoly. It just isn't forbidden by anti trust law. There is a big difference. Government protected happens when the government itself is giving exclusive rights (like to Comcast in the Philly area). Monopolies are not by themselves illegal. Only by statute. Not covering them is not protecting them.
2. The exemption is overstated. All the other leagues don't have exemptions and all deal with the same issues. In fact the MLB Players Union has historically still been the strongest of the players unions.
3. There can be monopolies in a free market. In fact there almost certainly would be. Only government prohibition can really prevent it. 
4. There is nothing prohibiting a new baseball league to form other than economic considerations. 
5. Why should employees be able to come together for more negotiating power but not a company? You can't just limit it base on size. So if you say they can't then even small businesses can't.
6. Collective bargaining is exactly the process that unions want. Just because the union didn't do as good as they may have wanted doesn't change that.

I don't think we disagree (except for point 1, which I would argue isn't a practical difference). When I say, "the players got screwed", the long from version of that is that the players expected front offices to continue to pay for past performance in the FA market in exchange for the massive discount in labor they got in the first 7 years of service time, and teams didn't mention that they would just stop doing that". Obviously the teams can bargain.

Honestly what I would want is a return to normalcy. Baseball free agency made a lot of people wealthy with the same 50/50 split that basically every other sports league has. I haven't seen anyone on this forum arguing for a more player-friendly deal that that, you're welcome to provide links if they have been. If teams are insistent that they want to pay for future performance, fine, bump the minimum MLB wage to the point that players are getting their 50%. I don't particularly care when players get their take, or even how the develop the system. As long as they get paid, I'm good, and I think that's the general consensus from people who are upset at the owner treatment of the players.

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2 hours ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

I don't think we disagree (except for point 1, which I would argue isn't a practical difference). When I say, "the players got screwed", the long from version of that is that the players expected front offices to continue to pay for past performance in the FA market in exchange for the massive discount in labor they got in the first 7 years of service time, and teams didn't mention that they would just stop doing that". Obviously the teams can bargain.

Honestly what I would want is a return to normalcy. Baseball free agency made a lot of people wealthy with the same 50/50 split that basically every other sports league has. I haven't seen anyone on this forum arguing for a more player-friendly deal that that, you're welcome to provide links if they have been. If teams are insistent that they want to pay for future performance, fine, bump the minimum MLB wage to the point that players are getting their 50%. I don't particularly care when players get their take, or even how the develop the system. As long as they get paid, I'm good, and I think that's the general consensus from people who are upset at the owner treatment of the players.

I guess my question is did the expect it because that had been what was happening or because that was actually a kind of gentlemen's agreement. If the former then I have no sympathy for them; it's ridiculous to just assume things will remain the same. If the latter then they are flat out stupid to take their word.

I have always thought 6 years was way too long for FA so I'm all for reducing that. I'd do away with arbitration and make it 3. To get it I'd even relent to a right of refusal for the team on the first FA contract but no penalty to the team trying to sign if they don't match (essentially give the team the right to keep their asset but don't depress what the player can get on the open market salary wise).

The thing is salaries at the top got so out of hand. Even this $30 million is absurd. For sake of argument let's assume the average payroll is $180 million a year (luxury tax is a little over $200 so that isn't really low balling players if it was set right). WAR assumes a team of replacement players wins 48 games. The average win total for a playoff team is about 93 wins. So to be in the playoffs only (not necessarily one of the best teams) the players need to contribute 45 wins. Machado is making 1/6th of the payroll so if salaries are right (I know you'll come back with cheap players pre-FA and you'd be right but I already addressed that above) he needs to be worth 7.5 WAR/year to really earn it. He has never even topped 6.6 fWAR and only one 7rWAR. So he is being paid to outproduce his best to date and make that his average. Yet that is what people expected him to make, and ultimately got. So even in a depressed climate he is still overpaid based on what he is contributing on the field. (As an aside that also mean a win is really only worth $4M rather than the near $8M that has been spent)

There is also debate about the revenue share they are getting (see https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/2/21/17035624/mlb-revenue-sharing-owners-players-free-agency-rob-manfred). Without knowing revenue, all we get is speculation, it's hard to know. But also quite frankly I'm OK if they don't 50% because they aren't taking the risks. All financial risk comes from the teams. Generally the person that takes more risk should get more reward. Contracts are also fixed so if revenue expectations aren't met it isn't like the players under contract don't get what they bargained for. So even to do 50% teams are going to rightly err on the side of caution which will frequently mean that players only end up with 45-48%. None of that seems unfair to me.

What has changed is that people and players just keep expecting salaries to grow, but they were growing at an unsustainable level. Now that teams realize that and are cutting back people think that trend is the norm or what should be rather than acknowledging the may were too high in the past. Ultimately I quite honestly think this comes down in general to people right now siding against the rich in general. And even though players a rich they are only millionaires not billionaires so it's the owners in the wrong.

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13 minutes ago, mse326 said:

What has changed is that people and players just keep expecting salaries to grow, but they were growing at an unsustainable level. Now that teams realize that and are cutting back people think that trend is the norm or what should be rather than acknowledging the may were too high in the past. Ultimately I quite honestly think this comes down in general to people right now siding against the rich in general. And even though players a rich they are only millionaires not billionaires so it's the owners in the wrong.

Nah. People almost never side with the players. What they don't like is the perception that the owners are colluding.

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Just now, jrry32 said:

Nah. People almost never side with the players. What they don't like is the perception that the owners are colluding.

I don't agree about the never, but that isn't worth argument.

Where does the perception come from? The only thing that has happened is salaries not growing at the same rate and correcting salary offers to be more in line with what they are producing. There is no actual evidence of collusion. You know that collusion requires actual agreement between the parties. Is there any evidence at all of that? I haven't seen any. The perception is people seeing the payments and just assuming collusion. That, imo, only makes sense if there is already a bias against the owners. Otherwise there is no reason to jump to malice.

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3 minutes ago, mse326 said:

I don't agree about the never, but that isn't worth argument.

Where does the perception come from? The only thing that has happened is salaries not growing at the same rate and correcting salary offers to be more in line with what they are producing. There is no actual evidence of collusion. You know that collusion requires actual agreement between the parties. Is there any evidence at all of that? I haven't seen any. The perception is people seeing the payments and just assuming collusion. That, imo, only makes sense if there is already a bias against the owners. Otherwise there is no reason to jump to malice.

I'll respond to the rest of your post later, but the fact that historically we had somewhere around 6 teams handle arbitration as "file and trial" and this year that went up to all 30 isn't direct evidence of collusion, but is strong, indirect evidence.

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3 minutes ago, mse326 said:

I don't agree about the never, but that isn't worth argument.

Where does the perception come from? The only thing that has happened is salaries not growing at the same rate and correcting salary offers to be more in line with what they are producing. There is no actual evidence of collusion. You know that collusion requires actual agreement between the parties. Is there any evidence at all of that? I haven't seen any. The perception is people seeing the payments and just assuming collusion. That, imo, only makes sense if there is already a bias against the owners. Otherwise there is no reason to jump to malice.

The perception is based on how the market is compared to how it was. Kind of like how people thought the safety market in the NFL this past off-season was quite fishy or how people thought Kaepernick not being able to find a job was fishy.

Don't even try to blame bias. That's beyond a stretch. It's a rational belief based on what we're all observing. Conscious parallelism is possible, but it is hard to believe. 

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1 minute ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

I'll respond to the rest of your post later, but the fact that historically we had somewhere around 6 teams handle arbitration as "file and trial" and this year that went up to all 30 isn't direct evidence of collusion, but is strong, indirect evidence.

Why is that evidence of collusion? If the player is closer in their salary demand based on history, since that is what arbitration goes by, then it is in the teams interest not to do that. Given that arbitration still works on the inflated history of the past and doesn't correct itself "file and trial" doesn't make sense as a collusion strategy.

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Just now, mse326 said:

Why is that evidence of collusion? If the player is closer in their salary demand based on history, since that is what arbitration goes by, then it is in the teams interest not to do that. Given that arbitration still works on the inflated history of the past and doesn't correct itself "file and trial" doesn't make sense as a collusion strategy.

...are you serious?

We have had historically 5 to 7 teams year over year go file and trial. And now overnight it becomes all 30* (note that the Rockies settled with Arenado after), and you're asking why someone might consider that evidence that teams are talking about their player negotiation strategy to one another? 

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1 minute ago, jrry32 said:

The perception is based on how the market is compared to how it was. Kind of like how people thought the safety market in the NFL this past off-season was quite fishy or how people thought Kaepernick not being able to find a job was fishy.

Don't even try to blame bias. That's beyond a stretch. It's a rational belief based on what we're all observing. Conscious parallelism is possible, but it is hard to believe. 

There is two parts to collusion though. The agreement and then the resulting decrease. Essentially you're saying just because we seeing what can/would happen IF there was collusion that likely means there is collusion. That makes no sense logically. Particularly when there are other reasons that the same result would happen without collusion. People are choosing their perception of the cause with no evidence. There is evidence though that these lower contract offers are more in line with the value the players provide and that previous contracts were absurdly high/bad. And yet people still choose the perception as the one with no evidence instead of the one with evidence. How do you explain that without bias.

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6 minutes ago, jrry32 said:

The perception is based on how the market is compared to how it was. Kind of like how people thought the safety market in the NFL this past off-season was quite fishy or how people thought Kaepernick not being able to find a job was fishy.

Don't even try to blame bias. That's beyond a stretch. It's a rational belief based on what we're all observing. Conscious parallelism is possible, but it is hard to believe. 

Do we know that the MLB are "colluding" in that they're having secret meetings or whatever? No. It is possible that all 30 teams have become aware that a strike is imminent and have independently decided to drastically reduce player compensation as a way to harden against the upcoming strike and give themselves a better initial negotiating position. 

But there are 2 things that are just reality:

  1. The players' share of revenue has sharply declined
  2. The players' share of revenue is about 20% lower than any other major sport

As a baseball fan, that bothers me. There is nothing about the game that has changed since I have started watching it that has made the relative value of the players go down, or the owners risk go up (the opposite is true of the latter, in fact), but yet it's the owners suddenly seizing the lion's share of the profits. There's nothing bias about being concerned about that.

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Just now, ramssuperbowl99 said:

...are you serious?

We have had historically 5 to 7 teams year over year go file and trial. And now overnight it becomes all 30* (note that the Rockies settled with Arenado after), and you're asking why someone might consider that evidence that teams are talking about their player negotiation strategy to one another? 

How does file and trial help the teams IF they are trying to decrease salaries? It doesn't is the answer. "File and trial" in it of itself is neutral but when the arbitration baselines are based on historical awards and teams now want to lower that it would tend to make it more player friendly in terms of award.

Historically (not about this in particular) it is not unusual for a small number of people to try something and then after some time a large number to change to that after they see it is working.

Also talking about strategy (e.g. why we think this is best strategy) is not the same as collusion (e.g. we should all do this to lower strategy so doe we all agree?).

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9 minutes ago, mse326 said:

There is two parts to collusion though. The agreement and then the resulting decrease. Essentially you're saying just because we seeing what can/would happen IF there was collusion that likely means there is collusion. That makes no sense logically. Particularly when there are other reasons that the same result would happen without collusion. People are choosing their perception of the cause with no evidence. There is evidence though that these lower contract offers are more in line with the value the players provide and that previous contracts were absurdly high/bad. And yet people still choose the perception as the one with no evidence instead of the one with evidence. How do you explain that without bias.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense logically. If you find a body with a gunshot to the head, you're going to assume murder. Now, maybe that person killed himself, and somebody took the gun from the scene. But that doesn't make it illogical to assume murder. You also keep claiming people have no evidence. That is inaccurate. People have circumstantial evidence. They lack direct evidence.

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