Rates & Barrels - An Attempt to Find Solutions in the Negotiations for a New CBA

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Eno, Britt & DVR make an attempt to "solve" some of the issues pending in the ongoing negotiations toward a new CBA. Will the players' 'War Chest' help speed up the process of reaching an agreement? How likely is a significant bump to league minimum salaries? Can the players end up with a faster path to reach free agency? If the luxury tax threshold is raised and penalties are reduced, will the teams willing to spend the most gain an advantage? Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow Britt on Twitter: @Britt_Ghiroli Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Wednesday, December 8th. Derek Van Ryper, Britt Giroli, Eno Saris here with you on this Wednesday. This is the episode in which we attempt to I'm your host, Tyler Kriper. You can be a fatalist about it and talk about how awful the fight is, which is awful, and it could take a long time. Or you could actually be more solutions-oriented, and since it's only a Wednesday and we're all in a good mood, we're going to take the latter route. We're going to try and be optimists. We're going to try and help fix these problems or at least come to some kind of estimate as to where some of the biggest sticking points are actually going to be resolved. Now, sometimes the universe gives us a little gift, and this is one of those days because we set this topic up, well, we talked about it at the end of last week, but I put it on the rundown on Tuesday night, and I woke up on Wednesday morning to a Kent Rosenthal article

that was basically, let's fix the CBA, and it was step-by-step, the big issues, and he included some of his solutions. So that kind of works as a good outline for this particular topic in a lot of ways. But before we go into Ken's piece and put his ideas out there with our own ideas, the thing that came up at the end of last week that's still blowing my mind, Britt, is the idea that the players have this war chest.

And the more I've thought about it, the more I hope and think that it's more for leverage to move negotiations along than a thing that they'd actually want to use. It's a good thing to have, and it gives them some protection. But my hope is that it's just a way of showing the owners, hey, look, you don't need to drag this out. We've got this in our back pocket. So let's actually get this thing going and come together for something that actually works. Now, you know way more about this than I do because I didn't even know it existed at the end of last week. Am I reading what that tool is designed to be correctly? Is this the thing that you don't really ever want to have to use, but you're willing to use if you need to use it? Well, I think what its main purpose is,

is to keep the players together as one. Because as this drags out, guys who are making the minimum versus guys like Max Scherzer, you're going to see some dissension, right? And that's what the union knows they can't have. They need all these guys to stay strong, all're going to see some dissension, right? And that's what the union knows they can't have. They need all these guys to stay strong, all of them to kind of toe the line. So I agree with you. They don't want to use this war chest. Scherzer spoke about how they have it. They hope that they can use it on something else down the road, but they made it big and they made sure that it's stocked up so that guys who start to get nervous if we're in January, February about when they're going to get paid next know that this exists. And so they can feel better, more confident, more comfortable trusting

this small subcommittee of players and the players union. So I think it helps like you were saying, but I think its main purpose is to keep the players unionized and keep them unified in one goal because we talk about players versus owners, but it's important to remember that a lot of players aren't making the kind of money that these guys at the top or these guys that are on the subcommittee for the union are making. So there's a lot of differences and opinions just within the players, as I'm sure there are some within the owners, except at the owner level, they're all billionaires. I mean, maybe some have more money than others, but we're really splitting hairs here. Um, this league has so many guys making the minimum that I think they had to

do this because they needed to make sure that everybody stood their ground. Um, if this gets ugly and if this gets late. Yeah. I think the unity thing cannot be underestimated because even when you look at the different proposals that are put out there and the different languages out there, I think there's a lot of language and proposals that's designed to kind of like try to create fissures. When they have something in there,

when the players have something in there saying, let's reduce or eliminate revenue sharing. That's I think there's a little bit of a that's designed to, like, let the Yankees do whatever they want. But it also is it also puts a wedge between the Yankees and the Mariners or the Yankees and the Rays when it comes to, you know, will they all vote the same way? Will they all think the same way? Will they all think the same way? And I think there's other proposals that come from, you know, ownership that is the same way. If there's a proposal about coming to free agency at 30 or 29 and a half, it's something we've heard, right? Like that is actually designed to speak to the ones that became free agents. That's designed to speak to Aaron Judge,

who would be a free agent a year earlier. But do you know how many people get to free agency? Not that many. It's less than half. And so I think that the war chest speaks to the more than half of the players that are on the minimum salary. By my estimation, it was 54%. In 2019, the union said 63%.

That's a lot of people who are on the minimum salary. And yes, $500,000 is a lot, but if you sort of bank on the $500,000 and then it's not there, then getting a few thousand to make rent and to maybe pay your local gym that you're working out at or wherever, that sort of deal will be a big deal. And it'll keep the rank and file in order. And then the last thing I wanted to say about that is that the way that the voting goes, and I've had to confirm this because I didn't actually know this myself until recently, we were all trying to become experts on this stuff, is that the veteran subcommittee and the player reps are the only people that vote on the proposal.

And so you basically, you hope that they are communicating well with their players that they represent. You hope that the union is communicating well with everybody and keep them on board. But in the end, the vote comes down to the veteran subcommittee and the player reps. And so this war chest, like you said, is a way to say to the guys who don't even have like a physical vote in the process to be like, hey, no, we've got your back. And that's why I think it's so important. You see this language even with Max Scherzer. You know, he comes out and he says, you know, it's really important for us to get younger players played better. I think that's amazing.

And then some people say, well, it's easy for you to say you just signed a huge contract. No, it's actually easier for him to say, I made it, so can you. It's a lot easier for him to say. And you need the guys who make a ton of money, who are on the veteran subcommittee, who are in the leadership, you need them to care about the minimum guys. And I think sometimes in the past, they haven't as much. Right. I think there's a prevailing attitude. I think this is in all sports in some ways where it's like, well, I went through this, so you can go through this too. And that probably applies to minor league pay, right? We grounded out, We had three roommates. We slept on mattresses on the floor. We rode those bus rides, and now we made it. It's like, well, at a certain point, you have to realize that cycle will never end if the people who made it through don't acknowledge how terrible it is and then use their power to actually fix it, right? That applies within the major league salary structure, but it also applies to the minor leaguers.

I still feel like the minor league issues are not even really on the table here. It still feels like those are being cast aside. For me, when I think about what's going to be the biggest sticking point of all, I don't know if the minimum salary is actually going to be the thing that hangs this up necessarily. I think that's something that the players are going to get. It's pretty clear. Every CBA, there's a big jump in minimum salary. Right. So I think that's very realistic. I think in Ken's article, there is a jump in minimum salary every CBA.

Yeah. Ken's idea was up to 800K. Again, I think people look at that number and say this is absurd. But the 500K, I was talking to a guy yesterday who was kind of talking about how they get taxed in every single city they play in. Did you guys know that? Yeah. They get entertainer tax in every city they go. Oh, on top of income tax.

On top of regular income tax. It would be like you. It would be like traveling when I traveled as a beat writer, me having to fill out tax forms for every state I went to as a beat writer. So they end up owing more than the average person. They have the agent fees. They have the clubhouse fees that they have to deal with every year. And then they are in that really high tax bracket. And most of the time they are sole providers. So that 500 becomes 200 very quickly. Still a lot of money. But when you're talking about just being the head of household, because most of the time, wives, girlfriends, fiancees can't physically work because of their jobs. You're also traveling a lot. Yeah. Somebody has to take care of the kids.

I'm hyping you. Keep going. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. I need the support. No, you're just now getting into not as much money. So 800 to me becomes like 500, right? So now we're getting in more of what they should probably be making. And everyone still says, well, this is absurd. Well, look at the sports profits. And I think you have a story that's going to delve into more of the numbers, right? It hasn't correlated with the profits, right? The minor league salary hasn't gone up as much as the sport. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's a couple of things I think of. First on the tax thing, it's really interesting.

There was a piece that came out that said about how the ownership uses their teams as tax havens, basically. And they write off when they spend like a billion dollars to buy a team or whatever. They write that off in perpetuity. So Mike, who's it? Ballmer. What's his first name? The Clippers owner? Steve Ballmer.

Steve Ballmer pays an effective tax under 10%. LeBron James paid an effective tax rate last year, 40%, because he doesn't have a team to write off. Anyway, that's just tax rules, but it does have something to do with how these players get taxed pretty highly. The other thing I think of is the minimum salary is is tied to this is what you were alluding to the minimum taxes is uh the minimum salary is tied to the cpi which is uh the inflation rate so it is supposed to go up with inflation so that means it goes up every year sort of three percent or whatever

baseball now compared to the last cBA has is, you know, the overall revenues are around 11 billion. And in the last CBA, it was like 7 billion. So baseball profits are like going up at a sort of 40 50%. You know, you know, even like, you know, close to 100%, like almost doubling. whereas, you know, the minimum is just going up three percent every year. So you just see this like you see this big sort of widening of the gaps. And that's why every CBA there's a new there's a new minimum. The one thing I would say, though, is that I think it's the most important issue in this because 60 percent of the players deal with this. Right. And and I think it's the most important issue in this because 60% of the players deal with this. And I think it might shift a little bit of the power in terms of,

would I sign Jed Lowry next year for one and three to be my DH or to be whatever? Or would I depend on three minor leaguers and be like, one of these guys is going to be as good as Jed Lowry? Well, what if each of those minor leaguers costs a million dollars? Would you pay the one in three to make sure you had it? Or would you take three shots

at a million dollar player? See, the math starts to change a little bit. And so I think it will favor some older veterans that are more projectable than sort of taking a shot in the dark on prospects if they're each going to cost a million when they get to the big leagues. So I do think the minimum matters that way.

I think the minimum matters just in paying more than 60% of the player pool. The one thing I would say is I did the math and it's a 200, like if you double the minimum, which no one's really talking about, but let's say you just did that and you made it like a million, it's a $200 million expenditure for the owners.

Split 30 ways. Divided by 30, which is what? Hold on. Right. I mean, it's doable, but it's the biggest nut that anyone's talking about. Okay, so it's 6.6 million per team. Yeah.

That's very little. And disproportionately for the cheaper teams. Yeah, but aren't we talking about how much more money and profits they made? The $4 billion divided by 30?

Sure, sure, sure. No, I'm not saying that it's not... I'm saying it's doable and they should do it. And I have a piece coming out tomorrow where there are things

they can give the owners that can pay for it. So patches, for example, on the jersey could be worth $8 million to each team on average. Ding. Boom. You paid for it. That worked. Right.

We done. We're done. The one thing that I have in this piece that's coming out tomorrow is I tried to put a dollar sign on the expanded playoffs, on the patches, on the eliminating a year of arbitration, on the NLDH, on the doubling the minimum. And the amazing thing was when I added all those five issues up, it netted out to zero. You'd have to give all the money from patches to ownership, which players may not want to do. And there's some assumptions about how much a postseason TV game is worth to baseball. But I did the math as best I could, and it all netted out. So the one thing I think that they're not going to get

is the free agency quicker. No, I agree. I agree with you. You're saying it's a non-starter for owners and it just seems like. I think it's a non-starter for owners. And I also think that players don't realize, and I had this idea, and I haven't heard anybody really talk about this. Cable subscriptions are down, right?

They're going to continue to go down. These RSNs that were once cash cows for these baseball teams are going to lose money. They're going to continue to go down. Sinclair might go bankrupt. That right there is going to affect the money that they can give to free agents. It's going to affect the money that they have for teams. It's just going to affect a lot of things. And I don't think the players really understand the ramifications of that long term.

But I know the owners do. I mean, ESPN, I think has like 80 million subscribers right now, and they're projected in the next five years to be at 50 million. So we're talking about like a serious decline that we're going to still see. And these RSNs, which used to be like, oh, get your own RSN, now you can print money. It's not going to be the case right now until they figure out some kind of solution. So that's like an important, I think, maybe perspective because we always hear from the player side and I am pro player, but I do think you have to look at it from the other perspective as well.

And I thought that was a really important financial thing that's really under discussed. Yeah. There is one big change though. I'm totally with you. The Sinclair issue is a big roadblock. Hangs over every sport but it actually might be the kind of thing that pushes baseball or enables the league to finally get around the blackout issues like obviously they have more control than they would lead on but i think it is complicated because those are all individual contracts

with those rsns right like that's That's a big legal mess to untangle. If the RSNs have to go away because Sinclair goes bankrupt, maybe you start fresh. Maybe you have a better version of MLB TV. Maybe you have a new partner like Amazon swoop in and say, hey, we're in the sports business now. We just got Thursday Night Football. Now we're going to have baseball too. And there's a big pile of money that comes in from Amazon. The other variable that wasn't there at the last CBA, sports betting. It's huge. And it's going to keep growing. It's going to continue to become legal in a greater number of states. That's going to generate a ton of money for the league as well. So I think they

can fairly easily offset those losses or those changes because of revenue streams that weren't previously there. But it's definitely the kind of thing that creates some short-term instability or uncertainty on the owner's side that, at the very least, it's leveraged at the table somehow or it's brought into the conversation regardless of how problematic it actually is in the grand scheme of things. I think a lot of, again, we saw this in the shortened season. The shortened season was the sky is falling. We didn't make as much money. Claims of losses, right? The same kind of thing can happen with the RSNs, even though we all know we can sit back and go,

but what about the next 10 years? The next 10 years are still extremely bright as far as the amount of money that you're going to make. I think we're at a better point as far as what the players know and what they've figured out about how everything works to where they can't lose in this negotiation the way they've lost in the last two. It can't be this bad. It can't be this bad. The free agency thing is interesting because I think some of the quotes and letters and things that come out of this, like everything Manfred has released as a statement is just like, it feels like parody. And then people write parody off of it.

And then you're like, yeah, this really is pretty bad. Why do they even try to argue at this point that it's some kind of crisis for the game that players change teams? We love that. What just happened before this lockout? Players were going all over the places. We had signings. We had trades. We love signings and trades. I think there's this overcorrection sometimes where people are like, oh, we just want players to stay in one place forever.

No, no. We want the stars to stay, like the homegrown stars. If we're a fan of a team, we want those players to stay forever, right? Rays fans want Wander Franco to be a Ray forever. But that doesn't happen. Even for the best of the best stars, that hasn't been happening for years. Even Ryan Braun was an outlier in Milwaukee. And if it weren't for that PED suspension, maybe he would have been a Dodger for the last few years of his career, right? Maybe his appeal to other teams would have been greater.

So I just think it's weird that they, that the ownership side of this has tried to make players changing teams, like some kind of issue when I think more fans like it than dislike it because it creates a lot of excitement. The possibility of getting new players, making your team better is more exciting than gridlock and everyone just staying in the same place. Yeah. And I think the only way to keep like Kutch a pirate for longer for, as an example, is wage suppression. You know, uh, I don't, I don't think there's a really great way to keep him on the team. You know, the whole restricted free agency, that sort of deal,

I think that only really works in the NBA because they have a cap and because they have a floor. And I don't know that it necessarily would work in our situation. Because I just don't think that, like, if they went back to the Pirates, you know, I think the Pirates would never equal that amount, right? Who signed Kutch out of the— Yeah, they traded him to the Giants. That's right, he was in the Giants for a little bit.

He got traded to the Yankees, and then he signed with the Phillies. Okay. But let's say he just signed with the Phillies. There's no way the Pirates would have matched that. They would have let him go. And then you're just talking about the sort of qualifying offer nonsense. So one thing that I do want to react to is it is funny that you talk about these Manfred comments and then Clark says drastic, Manfred says extreme.

There's all this sort of we're parsing these public statements from these figures. sort of we're parsing these public statements from these figures. The one thing that it does point to that I do get a sense of is that there is vitriol. Like there is like an emotional gap between these two. And I think the players feel like they need to win something. So there's going to be some line drawn in the sand somewhere. I don't know what it'll be. And then I've seen other people say,

like if they only get to come away with $800 million minimum salary and expanded playoffs, that'll be a loss. I don't know, man, that's, that's a big jump. That's the biggest jump ever in the,

in the history of the, of the minimum salary. So, you know, I think, I think I would focus all my efforts on the minimum salary myself. Really? See, I would focus all my efforts on the minimum salary myself. Really? See, I would focus all my efforts on fixing the draft because nothing fixes the competitive integrity of the sport faster than fixing the draft.

Like, if you ask me, I think the two biggest things, and players have said that these are the two biggest things, are the salary and also getting teams to try. So, I disagree. You know, I think if they got those two things that you said, they would consider it a failure. They need to fix the competitive integrity of the game. They can't just have players make 800 grand and think that everything is fine, the sport is fixed now. And I thought Ken had a really good point in his article about how,

okay, maybe we don't get rid of revenue sharing because the league won't agree to it. And it is unfortunate for teams that are using that money and trying but maybe we have stringent rules on how they can use that money right they shouldn't let the orioles pocket 50 million dollars that needs to go directly into payroll right you should you have your payroll should be at least as high as the revenue sharing you keep brought in revenue sharing plus the money they make from MLB.com. So now you're talking about pretty much every payroll is $100 million. I like that too because you're getting a salary floor

without calling it a salary floor. Yes. So I thought that to me, those to me are the two biggest things. If the players get that, they should just be like, let's shake on it, we're good. Not fight so much over the free agency stuff. I think if they get the minimum salary and they fixed the competitive balance somehow, the integrity of the game and stop the tanking, I think wouldn't we all feel pretty good about that on this panel? I think that would create also some incentive to compete because

let's say your payroll has to be a hundred million. That means you have to buy some free agents. And that means the money you'll be making comes from the gate and your local TV. Well, local TV is tough to negotiate, but gate, now all of a sudden, gate is really more important. Like making tickets sold more important is good because that would mean that people

would try to be more competitive because the only way to reliably get more gate receipts is to actually try and win. That's the only thing we've been able to prove. So, yes. All right. I can I can dig it. And what I like about that, too, is that you you can throw different proposals at each other and it's not obvious that they cost anybody money, that they cost the owners more money specifically, you know, and it could be a wedge issue between the poor and rich owners. So it's definitely something, you know, if you don't do it that way, then maybe you do it with draft incentives. That's where you started, right? Draft incentives or change the draft pick compensation in, in the luxury tax implications that just take the draft pick stuff out,

you know, you know, do, do find some way to like, to, to stop tanking. I, I'm,

I'm with you. I'm just focused on that. I see that 60% on the minimum. And I'm like, that's, that's my laser focus. I think the draft, like trying to,

trying to fix it through the draft, it is part of a bigger solution. I don't like that the worst team in the league that isn't trying to put a winning product on the field right now creates the best path for the first overall pick. So whether that's a lottery or a different system entirely where the first non-playoff team like backing up for a second expanded playoff seems like it's almost a certainty at this point like i'm in my mind i'm operating

like we're gonna have 14 teams in the playoffs the details of that is really important because of what we're talking about right because if it's just everyone's in and you know there's a first round that sucks then everyone's gonna try and be an 84 win team yes so you know there needs to be a big weight on winning your division buys barely getting in needs to be tough like you need to be on the road entirely when you right have that opening series a whole home series or i like the idea of the uh of the top wild card choosing their opponent you know i like that sort of stuff i love that just from like a like a schoolyard standpoint where it's like i can't wait to like write that article too like who should the you know who should they pick yankees get to

the postseason like we want the twins because we destroy them every year and the one year the twins are finally gonna punch the yankees back and win one it's gonna be amazing right like how great would it be if you got picked by the number one wildcard team you beat them you're like amazing and it's great tv like they could do a whole special where they do the selection where You got picked by the number one wildcard team. You beat them. You're like, amazing. And it's great TV. Like they could do a whole special where they do the selection, where they, the team,

the two wildcard teams pick or whatever. And you're like, I don't know. It could be fun. But yeah, I think, I think the, the salary stuff's important, but I think the game has to be better.

Like the collective bargaining agreement, they're trying to make the game better each time in theory. Right. They're trying to sweeten the deal for each side, but should try if we're not going to fix any rules then we better fix the tanking and they already said they're not fixing rules i there's a there's a couple things that i think are definitely going to happen this that i don't think most people think would improve the game so we're already going to be down which is expanded playoffs and patches on jerseys like those are already in. That's already happening.

That's going to happen in every... It's already happened in the NBA. I think it's happened in hockey, at least in the preseason I've seen it in hockey. I've seen it in practice jerseys for the NFL. That's coming everywhere. I mean, the world's sport, soccer, football, as it's called in the world, right across the chest. If you don't know the crest, you know Yokohama Tire Corporation is Chelsea.

It's just embedded in your head that that's who they are now, right? So traditionalists out there are screaming right now. They're walking their dogs. They're in their cars like, what are you guys doing? Look, it's coming. A Mr. Clean patch or whatever

is coming on everybody's jersey. Just accept that. That is part of the reality. This is a fight about money and to generate more money to keep everybody happy, you need some new ways to make that happen. This is one of them. If this actually gets us baseball, if this actually does raise the minimum salary, if this is the kind of thing that eventually gets more money to the minor leaguers, please put a patch on the jersey. I can see through it. I'll be okay. Trust me. It's not the end of the world. I think the other fight here is with the floor and the luxury tax. And I think the luxury tax is a cap. It's not called a cap, but it functions as a cap. Let's just say we do have a salary floor, however realistic that is. Let's say we have a floor and it's a hundred million per team based on the criteria we were talking about earlier. There are some pretty clear indicators that that's what teams will just have readily available. It goes back into payroll. If you can't get rid of the luxury tax completely, how much do you want to soften it? How much do you

want to let Steve Cohen come in and just buy all the players he wants? From a pro labor standpoint, my mind is great, awesome. Let him run a $400 million payroll. What do I care? Does that create as much of a competitive disadvantage as people might fear? Because I would argue that you can spend a whole lot of money and screw it up. There are plenty of teams that run bloated payrolls relative to other teams that don't have on-field success. I'm looking at you, Angels, looking right at you. So I don't see it as that much of a problem. I think the fear would be you create situations like you have in other leagues, like soccer, another good example, where teams spend,

like the big, big, rich teams spend a fortune and everybody else is trying to play catch up. Maybe you create that scenario, but part of what fixes that is that 14 team playoff. Like if you're putting 14 teams in the playoffs, eventually you're expanding to 32. You're still sitting right around half the teams getting in. Okay. Like, so the Mets, the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Cubs, those teams spend a lot more than everybody else. Are they going to win a lot more than everybody else? My lean is actually no.

I agree. I think you have to raise the luxury tax and like Ken wrote, soften the penalties because you still have revenue sharing. To me, you have to do something with that. As for the floor, it's never going to get agreed upon by the owners. And also the players aren't huge fans of the floor.

Because if you look at the salary floor, it doesn't actually incentivize teams to spend money in a measured way. It just incentivizes them to sign like one old aging veteran and then still do whatever they want with their roster just to hit the minimum um so the floor actually uh labor people feel this way too doesn't actually incentivize teams to try i think they have to find other ways to do that um but the luxury tax you're right it's a cap it's absolutely a cap and there are no in i don't have a problem with steve cohen or other teams flying through Baseball is the best at having different champions over the last, what, like, dozen years? So the parity in the game is there.

I don't think it's going to go away if you all of a sudden make it a little bit less harsh for teams that hit that luxury tax. Because it is now really being treated as, like, a stop. Can't go past this number, right? We see teams do it all the time. I think only two teams went above it this year. Is that right? Dodgers and the Padres? You can't have only two teams spending at that level.

That seems way more problematic. So I agree with you. I think you have to do something there, like maybe get rid of some of the penalties associated with it because it's not making the game better. It's just giving the owners a reason to say we have to stop here king of waffles looks like he's looking something up on the internet uh i'm just trying to get some numbers about uh revenue sharing um and how much some certain teams come in i saw one that said the pirates took 118 million in in 2018 uh but i'm looking at a different piece that says that it seems more

plausible about uh revenue sharing giving like the rays and the marlins about 40 million do you know how much the mlb.com money is i think it's around 50 million or was a few years ago okay so if that's the case then we're talking about uh you know like maybe a 90 million dollar floor maybe 100 million dollar floor four but it would be four specific teams but the orioles are on that list uh the pirates are on that list and um uh they were all in the bottom three last year. So the Pirates spent $34 million last year on payroll. That should not be allowed. They probably brought in around

$40 million in revenue sharing, according to this. I'm looking at the Captain's Blog piece from 2020. They brought in $40 million in revenue sharing, plus MLB.com. That means before they sold a single ticket or whatever, they brought in like $60 million or $40 million of revenue sharing plus MLB.com, that means before they sold a single ticket or whatever, they brought in like $60 million or $50 million.

Hmm. Yeah. I wonder where that money went. Plus their RSN money. Right. Whatever they get there. Plus the jersey sales. Orioles.

All that stuff. Orioles at $29 million. The Guardians at $29 million last year. Oh, this is this year. Let me. It's just like where the guardians at 29 million last year oh this is this year let me it's just like an oh where they're at right now it's just sort of embarrassing in my mind like you shouldn't be allowed to own a team if you can't spend 100 million dollars on your payroll right which in a in a in a like in a vacuum like a standalone statement it's like wow that sounds like a lot no no no like read that proublica piece that you know I was talking about earlier.

Understand how much money they actually have to work with and it is actually a very small sort of request. Okay, well, last year the Pirates were 54 and the Orioles were 42. Still pocketing millions. Look at the Orioles payroll in like 14. They spent a lot of money.

And so now, they're a great example now their payroll is really low and everyone's like well they're rebuilding well that's fine but is this 50 million that they're saving every year is that gonna go towards payroll are they gonna all of a sudden spend another 200 million one year no they might go up to 100 million oh and you know what's also not gonna happen is ticket i mean ticket prices might go down just because they're bad and nobody wants to go but it has nothing to do like paying money that's a big trope that is out there is that you know if the players cost more money the ticket prices will go up and i i don't think that's the case i think that uh the the price of the ticket that you buy to go to a game depends almost

entirely on you on your demographics like demographics. They know everything about you and they've figured out how much you would pay. You know what I mean? So we haven't found any ability to prove that a high price free agent drives ticket demand. And so therefore, if there's no link there, then your demand won't change for that ticket and so it'll only depend on how much money you have uh how good the team is whatever their inputs

are but you know i don't think one of their inputs is how expensive the players are they're they're figuring out exactly how much you would spend on a ticket so in nfl it's a different beast but each team gets 252 million dollars for national TV money before anything. So their TV money pays for their salaries. So the tickets, everything else is just gravy, right? So in baseball, I know it's crazy. And they still can't get people to go to FedEx field to see the Washington football team. I wouldn't go could you could give me free tickets i would i you guys should i do a radio show in dc a couple nights a week and that was the whole debate is so why can't you lower ticket prices because it's literally just extra money for them right they are not paying

for player salaries from your tickets it's the same thing in baseball we just determined that each team gets about 90 to 100 million gets that money what about that's just given to them now if they're spending less than that on their payroll then all that ticket stuff is gravy what about the money the club generates are all these clubs gen operating at losses every year maybe on their taxes but certainly not in the real life so again your ticket prices these tickets what you're you're not funding player salaries when you go to a game. We are not doing that. They're already being funded by these revenue sharings.

Yeah, that's another good point. Revenue sharing, national TV deal, local TV deal. Most of these teams don't need the ticket. And I think that makes sense, too, if you're running a business, to not depend on the most volatile thing. TV money is locked in for 10 years at a time. All these national sharing deals, they're locked in. So what you want to do is be near break-even before you sell a ticket. And then the profit is how many tickets you sold.

I mean, it makes sense from a nerd angle, but that also tells you why the player prices don't really matter to your ticket price. So all of this is to say, so kind of recapping the things that we think we're going to see, the likely compromises going through the Ken piece, the luxury tax, we think the tax is going to go up, but it's not going to go away. And maybe the penalties for going into the luxury tax will be less harsh. So more room to operate, good for the players. Less harsh penalties, maybe a more, I guess, a greater appetite in season, especially if you have a contending team to push extra chips in because you're not paying as much of a penalty per dollar for going over. That seems likely to happen to both of you? Okay. As long as it stays in place, yeah. I think

there will be changes to the luxury tax. I agree. And then the revenue sharing, Ken had, keep the formula the same, but require recipients to spend a major league payroll. This effectively replaces the salary floor, right? We're saying that you have this known quantity of revenue coming in from TV and MLB.com. And even if it's not written expressly as here's 100 million you have to spend, it's these things that you're going to get have to go back into player salaries.

And then other ways teams make money aren't factored into that calculation and people are you know players are better off and then you're not committing to an actual number is that how that lands do the rays and the yankees both like the like both equally like and hate these proposals yeah it's kind of the the sniff test right for for teams being on board right the rays so the rays are like okay so now i gotta spend more money thanks Yeah, it's kind of the sniff test, right, for teams being on board, right? So the Rays are like, okay, so now I got to spend more money. Thanks.

And you've just allowed the Yankees to spend more money. So the Yankees like it. The Yankees like it. I think they just like it. I don't think Hal Steinbrenner wants to spend more money on payroll because he's a classic. My excuses go out the window. There's as much pressure there to spend as much as you can as there is anywhere. He doesn't do it. Here's the thing. It's like the teams can't really, they're fighting over money, right?

This instance, telling teams, you need to use the revenue sharing money for this. They can't really complain about. It's not like costing them money. It's just allocating those funds to what they were meant to do that teams have kind of, it was just too broad. It was like they had to somehow improve the organization. So now they're just basically saying, you need to improve the big league team with that money. So to me, it's hard for them to say that this is somehow negatively going to impact their economics when this is money they already have. I think the other question here is, how much does tanking and rebuilding hurt you as a team? How much does that hurt your brand? How much does that hurt from the bottom line perspective? Because if you run it lean payroll

wise, you're still churning a profit. It seems like the answer is not that much. You lose a lot of fans though. It's hard to get the fans back. You actually have to win for a few years before the fans start coming back. It gets into a question of how effective was your rebuild. The Astros tank to what they

are now looks like more of an outlier. That doesn't look like a recipe that every organization is going to follow with success. There are some teams that tore it down and will stay broken indefinitely. I think of the Rangers. The Rangers kind of did a little bit of a tank, you know, at first with Daniels. And then they got to a point where the players came together. And then they took a step back and started over, right?

The kids have been a little bit of a perpetual rebuild in Texas. Yeah, but they had those World Series appearances. Yeah, they're a little more up and down, I would say. They weren't just big drop and then now finally coming out. I think the Orioles, for obvious reasons, have followed that Houston model. Is it actually going to have a payoff like that? That's a Cubs one was really interesting because they got the world series, but I'm not a Cubs fan,

so I can't speak for all Cubs fans, but I will say that I'm like that. I'm like, if they hadn't won that world series, I would be like, that was an unsuccessful rebuild. Well, okay.

So here's the main unsuccessful tank. So the problem now is that tanking doesn't work anymore i talked to a bunch of people at the jam meetings about this um it doesn't work anymore because teams don't trade away prospects like they used to like they did when the astros were rebuilding so you can't you can't keep tanking and only get like some good draft picks yourself but unless you supplement that with other people's prospects so they all come up at the same time to create this good team um it just doesn't happen so i believe jed hoyer has talked about this also the more people tank the more people tank the more people are going

for that number one pick so you're not as likely to get the number one pick if there's five teams tanking now all of a sudden you got the five pick and the five pick is not as good as the number one pick like there's a pretty big draft but yeah so tanking just Now all of a sudden you've got the five pick, and the five pick is not as good as the number one pick. Yeah, depending on the draft. But yeah, so tanking just isn't feasible anymore. So that's another reason why they need to fix the draft, in my opinion, is that clubs are always going to be rebuilding to some extent. If the Pirates win, they're going to win differently than the Yankees, the way they're going to win, right?

But the tanking cycle is not good for the game and it just doesn't work anymore. When was the last tank? We talked about the Astros. That was a while ago now. What was the last really successful tank job that produced like a consistent winner? Everyone points to the Astros.

That's it. And they spend now. They got good and spend. Jim Crane doesn't want to rebuild ever again. He said this year at the World Series we're all in a big group that the window is never going to close while I'm here. He's not eager to

like some teams are, we win, now we're going to tank and tear it all down again. This was like a one-time only tank thing for them. Maybe. It looks like they'll let Korea go and so they'll get cheaper. But they're not tanking and rebuilding right yeah i gotta follow up on something you've said a couple times brit fixing the draft like what for what does that look like to you like what is how do you fix it i mean

i think it's it's very difficult to just build an entire system effectively like if even if you like are we leveling the playing field in terms of where the top picks go? Are we disincentivizing tanking directly like we said earlier? What is your fix for the draft? I think you draft lottery it, but you also weigh the team who didn't make the playoffs.

The teams who just missed the playoffs have better chances to draft higher. I also think you have to give some kind of extra weight to small market teams, uh, when it comes down to it. Like if the Rays were on the outside looking in and they were the first team and then the Yankees were there, I think the Rays in some extent, maybe get an extra draft pick. I think you have to do something you can't do away with the small market, big market thing. There are still some significant hurdles to winning as a

small market team, and they are going to need the draft more than the big market teams. But you have to find a way to get teams to stop the race to the bottom. And I think you do that by a draft lottery that really takes away the whole, well, if we're the worst team, we can just keep picking number one. We can keep getting the Adley Rushmans. That's not a feasible strategy. It's not good for baseball, at least. But the one thing that I don't like about the first one

missing is a lot of times it would be the Yankees, and all of a sudden, will you incentivize the Yankees to miss the playoffs? Would the Yankees fans be happy missing the playoffs to get a draft pick? It's not going to fly. Again, I think we're talking about a lottery scenario, where the

first team that didn't make it has the best chance of getting the first pick, but doesn't necessarily get the first like the first team that didn't make it has the best chance of getting the first pick but doesn't necessarily get the first pick and i think you know brit i think you're saying you want to keep the competitive balance draft picks or even tweak that system to maybe push more in the direction of of smaller clubs right i mean that that's effectively what you're saying that's how i would do it and again like you know i don't think teams that just missed the playoffs their fan bases are going to be comforted by the fact that they now have a high draft pick. A lot of these fan bases.

They're going to be like... Because they were in the winning cycle. They thought, you know, yeah. Well, I mean, the way that you put it with sort of the lottery ball, that you get more balls for certain things, I kind of, okay, I get that. You know, like you get more balls if you're, you get a couple more balls if you're a small market team,

you maybe get an extra ball. Like you can kind of almost treat it like that. Like you get a ball for being the top playoff misser. You get a ball if you're a revenue sharing, you get an extra ball if you're a revenue sharing team, you know? And then we do descending amount of balls based on worst record. But these little, the. But the ball themselves, just another chance, can then become this incentive. How fun would that be to watch?

Rob Manfred picking out the ping pong balls for even the teammates. You've got to have Mike Petriello up there explaining why the Rays got 18 balls. I mean, I like it. They need someone with charisma to be in charge of it. Because that field, I mean, I like game shows. I think that's a game show kind of thing. You need a charming, very charismatic person to pull the ping pong balls. Well, you got to have the commish come up and play the, like,

I'm with the- Right, sure, yeah. You could have the monotone commission announcement. Then you got to have the nerd being like, well, they got this one for the eight, right? And they were the first ones out and they were revenue sharing, so they got... But you do need, like, the Dickie Vitale,

like, doing the actual tumbling, right? You need a hype person. Maybe you could get the guy that does the auctions on Storage Wars. It's great, baby! The number one pick goes to so free agency we think is gridlocked still going to be six years can we get to be tweaked where the bs of holding a player in the minors for 11 days goes away can we just like round that off

like it's still six years the free agency but a day equals a year yeah so bobby witt jr can come up on opening day if you reason. If he weren't ready or if he got hurt in spring training and he came up in August, it's a year. A day equals a year. You spend one day in the big leagues, you've reached a year. Can we tweak it that way if we're going to keep it at six years or do you think that's a non-starter?

I think Ken proposed that. I don't know about the issue there. What if you have a prospect who comes up, isn't very good, you send him back down for most of the year, now he's got a year of big league service time? Then you lose a whole year. Time is

working against these players. Peak age is younger than we thought, and if you aren't going to let guys get to free agency after a shorter duration, a smaller number of years, at least take away this goofy little game we play. A guy who's big league ready should play in the big leagues. That's good for everybody.

Why not? I get that. But on the flip side, like I said, what about a guy who comes up, isn't very good, then spends the year in the minors because he's not very good? Now he's going to reach it. Still got a year. I mean, I think one of the dumbest stories I ever wrote

was that the Rangers were practicing manipulation on Willie Calhoun. It turns out the defense wasn't actually that good. Yeah, I think he kind of needed more time in the final leagues. I don't know if this is imploding. What if they made free agency? What if they were like, okay, free agency can be six years or whatever, or X amount of games played, which gets rid of the manipulation by days? I don't know. Does that make sense?

A guy who has played X amount of games in the big leagues is also a free agent, even if he only had five years big league service time. You could add extra paths to reach it. Like you have the current system, but you also have faster tracks for guys that are playing more. Maybe that could replace Super 2. Like you could say Super 2 is not actually that effective,

but if you are playing regularly over five years, you hit, I don't know, 700 games or whatever that number is for a hitter, and maybe it's 125 games for a pitcher or something. You gotta, you gotta find some way to balance this out though, because relievers versus starters becomes a different issue, but maybe there is some other way.

I just, I don't think there's any other sport in the world. Maybe I'm completely blanking somewhere where you wouldn't put your best player on the field as soon as possible. Like that seems fundamentally flawed. You can't tell me that front offices are sitting there like, yeah, we want to wait 11 days before we use this guy. They do it because they get the guy for the extra year.

Take away that carrot. Everyone plays their actual best player when they think that player is ready. I think that's what it comes back to for me. You're right, Britt. You could be 100% wrong. Bobby Witt Jr. could be on the opening day roster and he could be awful for the first month and they could have to send him down.

At the same time, I don't know if you want to say that he has to be up all year to get a full year of service time because if they do the up and down game and they can do it based on games or do it based on days the way they currently do,

it takes them eight years to get the free agency instead of the six that it's on days the way they currently do it takes them eight years to get the free agency instead of the six that it's supposed to take if they play that game and i just think the more we can do to to cut through that clutter and create a system where teams are playing their best players as much as they possibly can that's generally good for just the well-being of the game and obviously it's good for the players. I think there's an obvious solution. And I think, I,

I think that everyone hates it. So maybe it's an okay solution. Start your, start the service time clock when they're drafted. So obviously the players would have to give a few more years. The big problem with that is high school versus college guys. Now you're going to impact who they take because it takes much longer for high school guys to come up.

So now you're placing the high school guys at a disadvantage. So you're changing fundamentally team stress strategies. Are we making this worse? This is actually really hard. I mean, that's what I think that's what happens. I think what's happens. It's like,

there's all these implications and all these things, but that's that. I mean mean that just without the details, just that concept of starting service time when you're drafted, I think would be ideal. You know what I mean? In terms of like incentives to getting them to the big leagues. Because you only have them for a certain amount of time. If they're ready, you want them to be big leagues. you can sign guys to extensions though hold hold on a minute though like everybody this is this

goes back to people leaving yes if you draft a player and you've got let's say let's say it's seven years we put the number regardless of whether you're a high school player what if you make it nine for high school and seven for for for college they would come out about the same time and to free as the team that drafted that player you could still extend that player it's not just this inevitability that the player is going to leave like you at this that fear of the player is going to leave it's like in free extend them if you shorten it up extend them if they're good extend them pay them you want to keep them they're good players you want to keep them. They're good players. You want to keep good players. Just do it. I think if you did 9 and 7, the average college player gets drafted at 21, 22, right?

21 would be a free agent around 30. It's too late. And may play more often. You'd have some extra arbitration years. And those arbitration years pay okay. They pay a lot better than the minimum. So if they only had three years minimum, a lot of those three years minimum would be replacing minor league years

when they're making like $20,000. They'd all be suddenly making $700,000. Anything you do with the draft. I think the owners would like this. Anything you do with the draft is crazy. Okay, so say you fill out your draft. And then the late round picks, teams are just taking high school guys instead of college guys because they want the extra.

Yes. Because they have them for nine. So maybe the creme de la creme guys, the college guys who are really ready will still go because they're like, oh, we're not worried about that. He's going to be ready in a couple of years. But now you're sending a bunch of high schoolers to make $20,000 a year in Modesto or whatever. The issue is, is like, so as you guys know, I did that big story about the trade. Like, should there be a deadline? There shouldn't be for all these different reasons.

And I think it was, it was Hein Blum who said, no matter what rule you do, you have to remember that there's 30 really competitive GMs and freedom offices that are going to find loopholes. Yeah, loopholes. Poking holes at it. We're kind of smart. These people are really smart. They're going to find people. As soon as the CBA comes out, there's just going to be groups of people in think tanks

wondering how they can make this CBA work for them. So I don't know. We sit here and we throw ideas out that seem fine, but then you wonder what the ramifications are. And then even really smart people like might not consider what happens like three or four years down the line you know like they're they're unintended side effects you know and he needs tommy john surgery now you're now you're real now you're maybe not gonna draft that guy at all because now he's wasting those years of the

eligibility clock is ticking what if a guy needs two tommy johns so any college player with any injury yeah like what if he needs two tommy john surgeries is he gonna just end up being a free agent even though he's barely at any time in the mind like minor leagues yeah it would incentivize them to figure out the injury thing too right i mean what can you do about tommy john yeah yeah we're creating more of that problem in the current system, which is really unfortunate. But anything that gets players to free agency faster is good for the players, right? Good for labor. The sooner you hit the open market, the better.

And a third rail for the owners. Yeah, I just think they would be like, nope, we can't do that. I mean, their public proposals go the opposite way. Oh, no, they're not going to be free agents until they're 30. Get out of here with that. Think about that contract that Whit Merrifield signed a couple years ago. He signed that because he had no leverage. He wasn't going to see free agency for four or five more years the time that he signed it,

and he was already in his late 20s. That's a horrible situation. You don't want players to end up there. If he had got to the big leagues at 24 or 25 or 22 or 23, if he got there faster, I mean, again, this is a total straw man sort of argument. But that's a pretty extreme example, but that's a bad outcome for a player. It's better than most players who come in as late as he did. That being said, it's not a good outcome overall. One thing I was surprised about, though, I keep coming back to this.

The minimum is so big for me because when I looked at how many people were affected by changing the minimum, it was 54%. When I looked at how many people were affected by axing the last year of arbitration and making them free agents in that year, it was 54%, which is 5%. Yeah. That's why I think it's kind of a it's not a silly argument it's a legitimate argument by them but it's also like a waste of time and energy in my opinion because it's like the one percent right it's like fighting for the top one percent they

already these people are already going to i mean what percent of them you know are going to eventually become free agents probably pretty high right If they make it that far, they're probably... If they make the third, yeah, if they make it the third year, but only 54 last year. It's not that many. Right. Well, there's a lot of patents. There's extensions, there are non-tenders, there's all these different paths. Yeah.

So those guys, yes, your point is those guys would get paid anyway. Yes. When I look through that, that's very interesting because the 54 that I look through, I would say about 50 of them will go on to to be like legitimate free agents. There's like four like relievers that made a million dollars in their last year and are kind of injured and you don't know if they'll get another deal. There was a few of those. But I think even, you know, I would count Heath. I think Heath Hembree was like that that where he's like a third or fourth year arbitration made a million dollars I think he'll get another deal

so I don't know it was mostly guys who make free agent anyway so I'm laser focused on the minimum in the NBA 3% of the NBA is on the minimum in the NHL it's like 18% In the NBA, 3% of the NBA is on the minimum. Yeah. In the NHL, it's like 18%.

Yeah. No, I agree. I think that and trying to incentivize competition, in my mind, are the two biggies. And if the players get those, then they just kind of quit while they're ahead. Yeah, because if they keep attacking arbitration and and the owners just keep saying it's ridiculous then like a lot of those you know last year if they could cut a year of the minimum now that would be a big deal because there's cascading effects right if you only had two years of the minimum and then you start getting into arbitration that that's a big

deal but um i think that would be i don't think that's a tan that might be worth fighting for though that might that might be one of the bigger sticking points is, yeah, okay, the years of control, you still get six, but it's two and four instead of three and three for everyone, not just for the Super 2 players. Because then you start doing better a lot faster. I do think anything that puts some pressure on teams to make a decision sooner about a long-term deal, that's going to open up more opportunities for players as well. But most of those deals seem pretty team-friendly. Yeah, but if a player hits the open market, there are more bidders looming, right? So it's going to incentivize a better offer. You're a little closer, right?

If you're doing better along the way, you can possibly wait that extra year before hitting free agency. So I think that does bring the quality of those long-term extensions up a little bit. But there's also a competitive balance aspect to this, right? If you do cut the minimum salary a year, what I found was among the players that get to the third year of arbitration, the top half in spenders, right right had an average of sort of three to four per team right and then uh the bottom 10 or so had an average of maybe less than zero like less than one yeah like somewhere between zero and one yeah so if you cut that that means they're going to be trading andrew mccutcheon faster yes that was going to be my counterpoint too and also

like our team's gonna want to go even younger because okay the zero to two guys are cheap once they hit that yeah they'll still they'll still focus in on those here too right and if it's like and if they keep it down to like 500 000 or 600 000 then 600 000 the first two years in the third year uh he's gonna jump already to millions and millions and then then the fourth year, you know, like, so you can't even, the Rays would just start, you know, start teams that are all rookies, which they always do anyway. I mean, in a perfect scenario, which is utopian and we're not going to get there, you're arbitration eligible once you're in the big leagues. Like there's a minimum salary when you arrive, but then now you're going to arbitration. You're eligible for that right away.

So when you come up as a 21-year-old rookie and you almost win the MVP award, oh, guess what? You're going to get paid $20 million in arbitration next year. And eventually that system after a few years goes away and they have to extend you. At least then. I think that's a little bit like other sports, right? Like if you think about the rookie contract scale, you come in, if you're a first pick pick you get a decent amount of money in other teams you know here's the issue with that though arbitration the money never goes down so say you have that mvp year and you make all that money and then you're not very good teams are stuck

paying you around that amount that's the thing with arbitration is that these guys are always making more money even if they have worse years right this is why ownership would be opposed to a little too yeah i would be i think that's a crazy idea that's a little too like teams can't all of a sudden now the race can't afford wander wander franco because he's good they can't afford him that's the whole point like that's but under your system he gets paid from the jump so them being smart enough to draft him and and stuff all that goes away the whole point of being a good drafting team is you can have young cheap talent so under your system they can't do that anymore but The whole point of being a good drafting team is you can have young, cheap talent. So under your system, they can't do that anymore.

But the whole point of a drafting system should be getting the best players. And the whole point of any system of compensating people for work should be paying the best people the most money. That's the ultimate goal. Again, it's utopian. It's not going to happen quite like that. But if you think about this from the big picture perspective, who should get paid in the long run? Young players should get paid while they can get paid. Juan Soto should be a top 10 player based on salary right now, and he's not. That's just how it should be. He's not. That's just how it should be. And instead, we're trying to play this game where is he going to get the extension? Is he going to reach free agency and get the first $500 million deal? We play these sorts of games, but the goal ultimately should be how do we get him compensated like the player he is faster?

That to me is the bigger problem that they're probably trying to solve or should try to solve. That to me is the bigger problem that they're probably trying to solve or should try to solve. But I don't know. I don't think they're going to get anywhere near this utopian thing that I'm throwing out there. No, I agree with that. But paying them from the jump, I think all of a sudden now you have teams that just can't afford to be good ever. Like there goes the raise. Yeah, I'm trying to think now of other sports. So like, you know, how do you win in Milwaukee?

Well, you get Giannis, right? It doesn't matter much you pay giannis because there's a salary cap right and so now you just need to rearrange the the chairs around giannis because you've got yourself a superstar yes so if the nationals had soto and they were basketball everyone have to pay the pay the same amount but they'd be ahead of everybody because they got Soto. Yes. And it wouldn't matter how much they paid Soto. It's just they got him.

But you'd need a cap. So under this utopian system Derek wants, you would need a salary cap. You have it. You have the luxury tax. You've got an effective cap. But you need a real actual salary cap so that... With a floor probably too.

So that it's... Yeah, that would be the only way. That's the way these other sports do it. Also, in the NBA, you need one or two superstars to be a good team. Baseball doesn't work like that. And baseball also has a much bigger draft than anyone else. They're paying millions

to these bonus kids that are in Able and AA and AAA. The money is just allocated a little differently. Yeah. The structure of the sport is stupid. That is what this conversation has led me to believe. This was supposed to be like 25 minutes of the episode and it turned into the entire episode. I feel like there could be more.

I think it's fascinating. I don't like it as much as talking about baseball, but it is talking about what like what have we talked about in this how do you win at baseball uh you know what what are the structures what are the incentives to these rules that we're discussing what are the rules cost to the players what the rules cost the rule changes cost to the owners i mean i think it is fascinating stuff i think there's more to to come honestly like i hopefully uh the piece that I have coming out this week will engender some more discussion. And we can, I think it's okay.

Like, what do you guys think? Was that, it wasn't pulling teeth, was it? No, it went for an hour. We never even got to any other topics. I was going to talk about the Mets and A's manager stuff. But we can save that for another time. They didn't, neither of them have hired a manager so that's fine but finally like I realized two days ago or yesterday

that there were no candidates have been released for the A's so I spent all day working up a list and finally got a little bit of a list together I think they're gonna hire and it's mostly mostly internal right I'll say internal I think Katsi's gonna be the guy once they lost their bench coach to San Diego, Christensen,

is that how you say it, Eno? One thing that's kind of interesting about the A's is when I did that, oh, we haven't written that piece yet. But I looked at, for this piece that's coming up, about the best job in baseball, when I was doing some research of that, I looked at average tenure by position and by organization. And the A's, I think they had the highest average tenure of any role, you know, in their organization as an organization. So they

keep their guys like, you know, the people like Darren Bush has been with the organization for like 15 years. Scott Emerson, their pitching coach has been with the organization for like 15 years yeah uh scott emerson their pitching coach has been with the organization for like 13 years so i think that is an order that's already a big sort of check mark for the internal candidates which are darren bush mark kotze and was there another internal uh yes it was their bullpen coach because bush is their hitting coach, right? Yeah. Let me check my Twitter feed. Over like a Joe Espada and like a, what is it, Matt Quattaro, right? My Tampa Bay, the bench coach. Who was one of the guys who I reported I was going to interview? Well, Espada and Quattaro come up every year.

A lot of opens, yeah. I'm surprised they haven't gotten an offer. I am, too. I put Espada in one of my pieces, I think, three years ago. And everybody who works with him in Houston says Espada's amazing. Why does it feel like Mark Kotze already is the new manager of the A's? Like, that just makes sense in my head. Like, A's manager, Mark Kotze.

Yeah, okay. That works. I think so, too. Marcus Jensen is the other one. Who's he with? Oakland. I think he's their bullpen. Oh, Jensen.

Okay. Right? Is he bullpen or something? Will Venable is another one, the Red Sox bench coach who'spen. Oh, Jensen. Okay. Is he bullpen or something? Will Venables, another one of the Red Sox bench coach who's interviewing. Oh, I love him. I put him on my list. He gets interviews, but I don't... I haven't heard him as a finalist ever.

Yeah. Espada, I think, would be great. The Mets to me just scream like we don't need a first-time manager after they had vicky calloway and um luis rojas that didn't work out right no i mean i think that that makes sense from uh one line i wasn't sure about in your piece was uh about well you said that the mets have made the effort to uh become among the high among the best teams in analytics or whatever

um i just don't know if they're there yet. So I don't know. I don't know what that means. If you're not really the most analytical team, maybe you don't get a manager that's all about analytics. Well, they have 26 people. You get kind of an old school manager. They have 26 people.

They do. So to me, are you just going to pay 26 people to do nothing? Like, no, of course not i think you know one of the big things about buck is people think he's not analytical somebody actually texted me yesterday that's known him forever that said back in 1985 buck was asking for the stat pack uh from house sports that had to get faxed over 20 pages of stats the guy like loves info which i also find to be true i think the knocks on him and analytics aren't entirely fair when the orioles didn't have an analytics department

there was nobody to ignore i would love to see him in that now do i know he's going to embrace them no i'm not sure do i know it i don't think anyone is sure but i think it's really unfair to say that he didn't embrace them in baltimore when they literally had no department they had like one singular analyst and one thing i think is really important uh is either giving uh people in that role autonomy or the appearance of autonomy and so uh i think that in i think in this case like show Walter sort of brings with himself autonomy. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, this is the guy that,

you know, like I, I can't go talk to Wilpon around. Hopefully I can't go complain to Cohen around bucks, you know, around buck. If I do buck will tear me a new one. Right.

And that's, that's a, that's one of the biggest things i had uh in the piece about aj preller was that like him having a direct line to all these people under the people he'd hired creates this like oh i can just go talk to aj if you know i don't like what what tingler's telling me i i think there might be something to like putting showalter and been like, you talk to Showalter. The buck stops here, literally. Yes. Well, I think we made

Derek 20 minutes late for his meeting. That's out. That's not happening. I have declined the invite and the show has gone on without me there. So this show can go on a bit longer if you want. Do you want to talk about some non-CBA stuff? I had other questions. I had mailbag questions we could answer if you guys want to hang around for a bit longer if you want. Do you want to talk about some non-CBA stuff? I had other questions.

I had mailbag questions we could answer if you guys want to hang around for a bit. No, we've been gone for a while. Let's keep those for next week. Mailbag, see what sort of new news comes sparkling up and maybe some more CBA. Well, if I said that the question you sent us was on the rundown for Wednesday, I lied accidentally, not by design. So that is now on the rundown for Monday. Next Wednesday. Or next Wednesday. They just roll over.

That's the trick. That's the good thing about a rundown. Sometimes you can just roll it over to the next day. If you want to keep reading about the CBA and everything else going on in sports, get a subscription to The Athletic, 33% off the first year at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels. Check out that Ken Rosenthal piece that we were talking about. Check out Britt's piece about Buck Showalter and the fit with the Mets.

And look, I think this is what we're going to get for news for a while. Managerial stuff, coaching changes, and minor league deals. So questions are definitely welcomed. You can send those at ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com. If you prefer emails on Twitter, she's at underscore Jerole. He is at Inoceros, and I am at DerekVanRiper. If you're still watching us on YouTube after nearly 70 minutes of CBA talk, you are a saint. Please be sure to barrel up on the Like button.

That is going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Monday. Thanks for listening.