2024 ATL Thread - Hader to Astros - 5/$95M

[Matches Malone]

I wonder what team with 1/4 of the payroll will beat them in the playoffs on their way to the WS?

[MVP2110]

Lol of course

[MickeyDavis]

Fortunately it's a summer sport. Lots of other stuff to do as I have less interest each year.

[VooDoo7]

Baseball is done. The whole Ohtani deferring bullshat did it...

[humanrefutation]

That's an insane number to pay for someone who has never thrown a pitch in the MLB.

[Ron Swanson]

Don't even care if they don't win the WS. This is such an absolutely embarrassing look for a major North American sport. Nothing's ever gonna change until the have-not owners band together and demand at least a soft salary cap.

[jute2003]

MLB has always teetered on the edge with its unbalanced payroll bull. If the gap is gonna explode and **** like this is the new norm...it could be the tipping point that blows up interest from the non big markets. The league will either adjust and re-balance or baseball will just fade.

[WeekapaugGroove]

I think it eventually bites them in the ass but the stars all congregating to a few big markets is viewed as a feature and not a bug of the current system.

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[coolhandluke121]

Minority opinion here, but as long as they keep instituting more and more random playoff formats every few years, the smaller markets will still have a chance to win titles. Cynically, it's kind of the best of both worlds for MLB - rake in revenue from the big markets all season long, but without losing the small markets completely because everyone in the playoffs still has a puncher's chance. Granted, they might get some repeats of the 2023 playoff ratings, but there will still almost always be enough premier franchises advancing in the playoffs to keep that from happening too often.

[JayMKE]

I haven't "loved" the sport in a long time, its hard to even work up much emotion over it anymore I'm just turned off and disinterested.

[MickeyDavis]

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[ReasonablySober]

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[MickeyDavis]

Montas to the Reds

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[Mtsportsfan]

Don't even care if they don't win the WS. This is such an absolutely embarrassing look for a major North American sport. Nothing's ever gonna change until the have-not owners band together and demand at least a soft salary cap.

Personally I hope large pay roll teams win it every year , and interest start to wane because most fans believe their team is just a farm system for large market teams and MLB will be forced to put some sorta cap (and floor) because interest is way down ! Baseball is just flat out stupid with the way pay rolls are!

[Kerb Hohl]

Don't even care if they don't win the WS. This is such an absolutely embarrassing look for a major North American sport. Nothing's ever gonna change until the have-not owners band together and demand at least a soft salary cap.

Personally I hope large pay roll teams win it every year , and interest start to wane because most fans believe their team is just a farm system for large market teams and MLB will be forced to put some sorta cap (and floor) because interest is way down ! Baseball is just flat out stupid with the way pay rolls are!

Also...there kind of is a soft salary cap with the luxury tax. It's making teams like the Padres to a quick spin around and it did things like push the Red Sox into dealing Mookie Betts because they had jammed themselves up with so many other big contracts, signing Mookie to a mega-deal meant every dollar they spent would cost $1.50 for 5 years after.

The problem is whichever other big market team resets their tax just scoops up the leftovers of that situation.

[WeekapaugGroove]

They took different paths to get there but MLB and college football are in the same spot with obvious competitive balance issues but not a ton of motivation to fix it.

They cater to their biggest markets and then rely on natural forces to scrape by with the rest of their leagues. In College football you have alumni who are going to watch their teams no matter what. In MLB you have 162 games so some regional network will always pay to fill air and people will go to games for tailgating and simply something to do in the summer when there no other sports.

I think it eventually catches up with them both with slowly erroding fan bases but that's not a given.

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[coolhandluke121]

They took different paths to get there but MLB and college football are in the same spot with obvious competitive balance issues but not a ton of motivation to fix it.

I think one difference between CFB and MLB is that there are almost advantages to not being able to pay such huge salaries. I understand why everyone is in such a rush to condemn the system for favoring big markets so much, but sometimes I almost feel sorry for their fans because you know their team is under so much pressure to hand out irresponsible contracts that it works against them.

A team like the Brewers, Rays, or A's, on the other hand, can justify trading their best players in the last year or two of team control, which is actually often the right move despite the short-term pain. Even the Dodgers started their current run by hiring Friedman from the Rays and developing much more of their own talent, instead of constantly signing/acquiring terrible contracts like Kemp, Ethier, Adrian Gonzalez, Crawford, etc. Trying to trade for Braun was arguably the last gasp of that misguided era, and the Brewers did them a huge favor by botching the deal.

I'm not remotely saying this evens it out completely - of course it's always better to have more resources in a vacuum - but it seems that the richest teams are so likely to spend irresponsibly that it's almost a relief knowing the Brewers are only going to sign a Yelich deal once every 8 years or so. Now, if they ever change arbitration and make it so younger players actually have to be paid what they're worth earlier, then that would be a completely different story, but as it stands, I just don't think paying free agent market value to stars is as big of an advantage as it's made out to be.

[Kerb Hohl]

They took different paths to get there but MLB and college football are in the same spot with obvious competitive balance issues but not a ton of motivation to fix it.

I think one difference between CFB and MLB is that there are almost advantages to not being able to pay such huge salaries. I understand why everyone is in such a rush to condemn the system for favoring big markets so much, but sometimes I almost feel sorry for their fans because you know their team is under so much pressure to hand out irresponsible contracts that it works against them.

A team like the Brewers, Rays, or A's, on the other hand, can justify trading their best players in the last year or two of team control, which is actually often the right move despite the short-term pain. Even the Dodgers started their current run by hiring Friedman from the Rays and developing much more of their own talent, instead of constantly signing/acquiring terrible contracts like Kemp, Ethier, Adrian Gonzalez, Crawford, etc. Trying to trade for Braun was arguably the last gasp of that misguided era, and the Brewers did them a huge favor by botching the deal.

I'm not remotely saying this evens it out completely - of course it's always better to have more resources in a vacuum - but it seems that the richest teams are so likely to spend irresponsibly that it's almost a relief knowing the Brewers are only going to sign a Yelich deal once every 8 years or so. Now, if they ever change arbitration and make it so younger players actually have to be paid what they're worth earlier, then that would be a completely different story, but as it stands, I just don't think paying free agent market value to stars is as big of an advantage as it's made out to be.

Where I have landed at in the past year or two, as somebody who rolls my eyes as hard as one possibly can at, "just build the team for the playoffs" when the Brewers or a different team gets bounced from the incredibly random playoffs...is that there is maybe a slight edge and it is this:

There are like 10 big markets spending big on a given year. 5 or 6 of them are on the "good" side of bad contracts. Not like the Cubs the last 5 years basically sleeping off the back end of their WS run.

IF you hit the jackpot on your signings like the Phillies recently and IF they are all healthy and playing well and IF they are all on the early end of those deals/in their primes, you generally have a slight leg up over the teams that are getting there most years with a deep 40-man roster/platoons like the Brewers. And the Phillies still didn't win. But your elite players should have a leg up on the Brewers who got to the playoffs by playing perfect with analytics on some journeyman reliever that they found his slider is devastating to righties or something.

[Kerb Hohl]

But since we are on this and my favorite example to always bring up about most fans not knowing how this works.

Does anyone remember like 3 years ago when all of the legacy Cubs guys were finishing up their contracts? And casual fans abound used their favorite line - that ownership was "cheap ****" to not keep the World Series boys together? As a rival fan, it was infuriating that they didn't have a stupid management group that listened to this stuff (like the Yankees have recently) and have Bryant, Rizzo, Baez, Contreras locked up for $500 million through their 30s.

You'd basically have to have a guy that is Cohen rich come in and pay insane luxury tax all while basically cutting those guys so they don't waste a 40-man roster spot over the next few years or they'd have like 5 more years of garbage to wade through.

[ReasonablySober]

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Jesus.