OT: Baseball is Back

MLB announces 60-game season for 2020; Opening Day will be July 23 or 24

At least we'll get SOME sports for the summer.

Maybe, lots to be worked out. Just because they agreed to 60 games and a start date for opening practice doesn't mean it is happening for real. Not yet.

It will be interesting to see how potential free agents use their 60 game stats against lost revenue owners to secure large new contracts or not.

If you're Mookie Betts do you settle for the sure thing LAD offer now or take a chance on what might be in store for baseball in 2021.

For 50 years, the baseball media has been telling us what a great union MLB players have. Especially, we heard how much better it is than The NFLPA. It took the coronavirus to show what a joke that narrative has been.

It turns out the MLB players’ take of industry revenues is less than the NFL’s - 38.1% ($4.1 billion in salaries (2020 non-prorated)divided by 10.7 billion in revenue (2019 total revenue)compared to 48.5% in the new CBA. Their minimum salary is lower - $563,000 compared to $610,000. The MLBPA is the most Republican of unions. It’s primary purpose is too make sure the richest players get richer. That Mookie Betts gets $350 million over ten years to bat once more a game than the 9th place hitter and have 4 balls hit to him a game while making 60 times the rookie 2nd baseman who is 75% as productive as Betts in scoring and driving in runs.

Interest in baseball is dying not only because of the horribly slow pace of the game but because it’s “star” players don’t play like stars when they even play at all being fat and happy with huge amounts of guaranteed money. Yesterday’s news that 42% of MLB players make the minimum and will be paid less than $100,00 with the 60 game schedule hopefully serves as a wake up call to everyday major leaguers who make it to The Show but don’t stick around long enough to make the big bucks in arbitration and free agency that they are the majority of their Union and should wrestle control of it from Scott Boras and the fat cat players.

Baseball needs more of it’s revenue to go to the players who earn it by playing and producing. It needs a salary cap. It needs a limit to the length of guaranteed contracts. It needs a maximum salary. Plus, it needs a pace of play that doesn’t allow a team to steal a sign and relay it the batter by banging on a garbage can between pitches.

Not a fan, but if there was ever a season for the Red Sox to come out smelling like a rose this was it.

They dodged a bullet losing the Manager right before the trainwreck.

Kenneth Sims said:

For 50 years, the baseball media has been telling us what a great union MLB players have. Especially, we heard how much better it is than The NFLPA. It took the coronavirus to show what a joke that narrative has been.

It turns out the MLB players’ take of industry revenues is less than the NFL’s - 38.1% ($4.1 billion in salaries (2020 non-prorated)divided by 10.7 billion in revenue (2019 total revenue)compared to 48.5% in the new CBA.

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I thought this was an interesting enough post to run the numbers myself, and I see a major area of disagreement. I used 2019 numbers and got 37% for baseball. Certainly close enough to your 38.1% number so as not to be a major disagreement.

The disagreement comes from your 48.5% number for the NFL. The players do not get 48.5% of NFL revenue. They only get 48.5% of certain types of NFL revenue. When I ran the numbers to determine what percentage of NFL revenue they actually get, it came out to 42%.

So 37% for MLBPA and 42% for NFLPA. Yeah, the NFLPA (as a group) gets a bigger slice of a bigger pie, but IMHO you can't ignore that fact that the NFL has over twice as many players as MLB. According to google, the MLB median and mean is $1.5M and $4.38M. The NFL median and mean are $0.86M and $2M.

(Obviously all of the above gets thrown out the window this year though)

With the rule changes they've implemented, it's not really baseball.

Wake me when there's football

"Baseball" is back??

Very skeptical about any pro sports this year...

Deus Irae said:

With the rule changes they've implemented, it's not really baseball.

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Serious question, but to what rule changes in particular are you referring?

neuronet said:

Wake me when there's football

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You might want to hibernate for a while...

captain stone said:

Serious question, but to what rule changes in particular are you referring?

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3 batter minimum
Runner at 2nd in extra innings
Suspended games


None of that is baseball (none of it really makes any sense either). Screwing the NL by imposing the DH is an abomination, but that abomination has been a part of the AL for a long time.