Loading ...A short trip around the interwebs on a Friday morning:
–Jamie Ramsey is bringing some love for local businesses who are Reds-crazy. I love stuff like this.
–RR asks whether Walt and Dusty would seriously consider using Wee Willy Taveras in CF again next year.
–Has Paul Daugherty ever written a column that didn’t make him look clueless?
–The Reds Community Fund has revitalized another youth field. Those guys are doing good work.
–Okay, this is admittedly pretty dumb…but it made me laugh out loud. Funny stuff.
yeah, that daugherty column is pretty clueless, not to mention depressing.
look, the new york yankees are good for baseball. i hate them but they’re good for baseball. tv ratings are up like 20% this year. the yanks have not been in the world series since 2001 and every year in that interim they have had the highest payroll in baseball. ergo, it is not a given that money buys championships. it helps but it is not the only thing. mr. daugherty seems to have forgotten that the lowly tampa bay rays were in the series only one year ago. would he have baseball ban the yankees from the world series? from even competing?
the reds have done a good job (finally) collecting some talent over the last three or four years. it is my unprofessional opinion that that talent collecting is about to pay off. do not be surprised, i say, if the reds are in wildcard contention next year. i certainly hope they are, if only to make mr. daugherty eat these particular words.
and, by the way, if mr. daugherty is looking for a “night out”, i hear the louisville bats put on a pretty good show.
Has Paul Daugherty ever written a column that didn’t make him look clueless?
Once, at least in your words:
http://redlegnation.com/2008/05/28/jay-bruce-is-not-a-savior/
I always like to remember this, though:
http://redlegnation.com/2008/03/09/firejoemorgancom-vs-paul-daugherty/
Or this, which goaded Wayne Krivsky into “thinking big” in July ‘06:
http://redlegnation.com/2006/07/12/daugherty-its-time-for-krivsky-to-think-even-bigger/
I just want to point out that in the column that drew FJM’s flack, Daugherty advocated trading Joey Votto AND Homer Bailey for Joe Blanton.
At first, I was going to send that to Daugherty, as a funny example of just how stupid he can sound sometimes. But then I realized: Daugherty probably still thinks it was a good idea, since Blanton now has 2 World Series rings and Votto has zero.
Daugherty is right in this column, baseball’s economics are broken and generations of fans are being lost outside of the major markets as a result.
Sorry Chad but Paul’s article hit the nail on the head. Baseball economics are out of whack. The Reds will never be a serious year in and year out WS contender under the present economic system. Now lets look at Indianapolis and the NFL. Here is a small market team, that until last season was in one of the smallest football venues and yet you know what, they have been one of the top 5 teams in the NFL over the past 10 years. Why? Economic balance. Yes they have a great head guy (Bill Polian) running the show, but if you remove the economic stability, they could not compete. MLB is losing fans at a scary rate, and they need to make changes.
@Chris: That FireJoeMorgan piece is brilliant. Hilarious.
Maybe Daugherty is right, maybe the Reds SHOULD trade Homer and Votto for Joe Blanton.
Yeah, in general, I’m with you, Chad, on Daugherty. I was astounded at how doggedly he held onto the idea that we HAD to have Joe Blanton, for example, because of his win totals in Oakland. Yikes…
But what’s to object to in this article? He’s right that there are GREAT payroll disparities in baseball, and he’s right usually it’s the big-money teams who are in it at the end.
Where’s the idiotic part in this article?
How in the world is Daugherty’s column clueless? He pinned the tail to the big-assed donkey.
Owners like Castellini don’t have the revenues or resources to spend with the top 5-8 markets, and it doesn’t matter who owns the teams in markets like Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh. They are resource-restricted. When the Yankees make as much in one year off their radio/TV contracts (about $70 million) as the Reds’ entire player payroll, you have only shot-in-the-dark chances at winning on a regular basis.
What Daugherty didn’t mention is the strike of 1994-’95 was all about breaking the players union to get a salary cap and broader revenue sharing, thus a system very close to the NFL. But people forget that. They screamed bloody hell about the stoppage of the game. In Cincinnati, there are still people bellyaching about the stoppage when fans should have realized the game should have been shut down for however long it took to fix the financial disparities that still exist today. Except it’s getting worse.
The window has been missed. How is that a clueless column?
Daugherty has a point, but I think he’s focusing on the wrong part of the bigger picture:
The Reds will meet as an organization soon. They will see who was in the postseason, and who was not, and how much money was spent. The numbers are so staggeringly obvious, only Bud Selig can’t see them. The teams that spend big, win big.
That’s not exactly true. Five of this season’s highest payroll clubs missed the playoffs. (This includes the Tigers, who missed them bythatmuch.) Two teams from the middle tier of payrolls made the postseason, and one team from the bottom third played into October. Three teams from that bottom tier won more games than they lost, while two from the top 10 lost more than they won.
Spending the most is not a guarantee of postseason success, although it’s a good predictor. Spending money wisely is an even better predictor. Take a look at how the Phillies were built. They drafted nine of their players, including Cole Hamels, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins. They traded other players acquired through the draft for guys like Cliff Lee, Joe Blanton and Brad Lidge, and they’ve generally avoided big-ticket free agents. Raul Ibanez, upon whom they lavished $31.5 million over three years, in the only free-agent acquisition among their five highest-paid players. The others are drafted players they extended and Lidge, whom they traded for and then extended.
The Phillies’ $113 million payroll is the game’s seventh-highest, but a significant portion of that was invested in players they drafted and developed. The Reds should begin doing this with core players like Votto and Bruce before they begin commanding the types of salaries Howard, Myers and Utley did.
The simple fact is that MLB’s competitive balance is much greater than the NFL’s.
Look at the teams that have been in the World Series and the teams that have been in the Super Bowl over the last fifteen years. Then tell me baseball is the one with the problem.
The problems that teams like the Reds, Pirates, and Royals have is that they have been run by incompetents. Sure, the extra money absolutely helps cover up mistakes, but teams that are run well are still competitive.
I say the NFL is the one with the competitive balance problem.
How well you run your organization is everything in the NFL. The crappy ones who have incompetent GMs interfering with the professionals on draft day lose because of the GM not because of the payroll.
Crappy management is a lesser factor than payroll in the MLB. It takes exceptionally good management and player development over a decade for a team like the Marlins to come along. And then to sustain that success they have to continue to beat everyone in those areas as the talent they develop is moved to high payroll teams.
A good organization in Phillie may have led to the lineup they have today, but it’s the ability to pay more in salary that has let them keep that lineup together.
The Reds are exceptional in that they are a poor team that is also being poorly managed (CoCo, Taveras et al). But even without those salaries, their window of opportunity to build a playoff team around their young talent is far shorter than a team like LA or New York.
A good organization in Phillie may have led to the lineup they have today, but it’s the ability to pay more in salary that has let them keep that lineup together.
While that may be true, organizations such as Cleveland, Oakland and Florida remain relevant by trading off their core players for valuable chips who turn into their replacements. I’m not denying that baseball has an economic imbalance, but I don’t think a salary cap — which is the typically prescribed cure — will fix the problem.
With salary caps come salary floors, and forcing smart organizations to spend their limited resources on salary at the expense of scouting and development will only create new problems in competitive balance. I’d rather see MLB adopt a worldwide draft and allow teams to trade draft picks, and I think some changes could be made to revenue sharing and the luxury tax to reign in some of the excesses.
People keep pointing to the A’s, Marlins and Twins as examples what small budgets can do. Okay, when was the last time the A’s made the world series? How about the twins? As for the marlins, what happen to those teams that did make the playoffs and won the WS? When 1 team can sign 3 major players in the offseason that 95% of the rest of the league couldn’t even talk to due to the size of the monies offered by that 1 team, you have a problem.
Also, could today’s Cincinnati Reds organization afford the 1975 team?
The linked article says the Reds can’t compete in this economic climate. That’s patently false. Teams in the Reds payroll bracket compete every single year.
The Reds haven’t been able to compete because, for most of the last fifteen years, Reds management has been thoroughly incompetent.
Sure the Yankees have an advantage, but that doesn’t absolve Reds management for responsibility for this fiasco. Whining about money is a convenient excuse, and it allows the Reds to deflect blame for the proximate cause of all this losing.
Chad has a point: Give this organization, say, three times more money and we probably would have three times the amount of lunacy in the decision making. It doesn’t matter how fast you try to fill a bucket with a gaping hole in it until you fix the leaks. The front office is flooding.
On the other hand, a big payroll minimizes the Willie Taveras issue, as it could have been buried on the bench much faster than what it was…unless it means we would have given Willie a 3 year 10 mil contract or something…..
The Yankees, Dodgers, etc. have spent a lot of money on bad contracts, but can swallow their mistakes with their revenues.
But wait Cashman turned into a genius overnite: hey let’s pay $497 million for Sabbathia, Texeira, and Burnett, on top of the $325M or whatever that ARod is guaranteed. The Reds were too stupid to think of that !
I don’t want to hear about the Indians, the A’s, the Marlins as successful franchises, they’re not.
Former Indians Sabbathia and Lee facing each other in Game 1, Victor Martinez, etc. that’s a successful farm system, not a successful franchise.
The Pirates were smart for all those years and now they’ve turned so stupid they might go another 20 years without a winning season ? Hey there’s competitive balance amd a level playing field, they’re just stupid, and every GM who takes over for them will be just as stupid.
The Phillies have made some great draft picks to form a strong core and then spent bucks on top of that to consistently contend, at least for now. It’s the only path to consistent contention for a team that’s not in NY, Boston, or LA.
I don’t want to hear about how some teams spend a lot of money and still lose. Of course you can spend a lot of money stupidly, like the Mets and Cubs have done, what does that prove ? How does that help a team that can’t spend money smartly or stupidly, because they don’t have it to spend ?
Now that I’ve had my rant, the Reds could be doing a lot better than they have. The money aspect doesn’t explain or excuse all the losing. The farm system got ruined, it seems to have recovered. And hopefully when our core of young players get their act together, Castellini gets out his checkbook and supplements that talent with well-chosen veteran talent, in the same way the Phillies have done.
You do have to spend money to make money, and the guy is not broke.
How’s that for arguing both sides ?
I agree. And when the next basic agreement is negotiated, the owners are going to be a lot more determined. They won’t get much in the way of more revenue sharing, so they’ll insist on a salary cap. The union will say no way, and there will be a work stoppage the likes of which we haven’t seen.
This has been forced by the Yankees, who are “so good for baseball.”
That plan worked wonders for the NHL.
Daugherty’s right, but he’s wrong. Revenue streams matter. A lot. But they’re NOT the reason the Reds have sucked eggs for the better part of a generation. Daugherty, and all of us who complain about how “it’s not fair,” are giving the Reds a big old excuse – one they themselves don’t really use. Bob Castellini bought into this system as it is, under this CBA, and with eyes wide open. (As Phil C said, “we wouldn’t have gotten into it if we didn’t intend to win.”)
I’m as down on baseball as I’ve ever been in my life. But it has very little to do with competitive balance. I’ve thought a lot about why I’ve watched about 10 total innings of postseason baseball. As best I can tell, it’s some combination of (in order):
1. Interminable ballgames. ENTIRELY too much strolling around the mound, batting-glove-adjusting, and pitching changes.
2. Inexplicably awful umpiring, combined with the lame-ass “mistakes are a part of the game” excuse.
3. Horrible television announcing. Cliche-ridden and conventional-wisdom-bound, the likes of Carey, Buck, and McCarver make the game damn near unwatchable.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the little bit of ball I have watched has been in my bedroom. For one, the games are still on when I go to bed around midnight. But more, there’s something goofy about the Fox feed on that TV – it nearly mutes out the announcers, while boosting the crowd noise. Quite pleasant, really. It works exactly the same for the NFL on Sundays.
I disagree. What’s good for the Yankees IS good for baseball, in an economic sense. By the same token, the game is really pretty healthy, business-wise, considering the overall economy. The evil geniuses at MLB Advanced Media are doing wonders at growing that (evenly shared) revenue stream.
Remember, these guys do (mostly) want to win, but Bud Selig’s job is to make money, and there’s no money to be made in shutting the game down. The MLBPA is stronger than the owners, and there’s zero sign of that changing.
@Chris: There are high schools that generate more TV money than the NHL. That’s why no one pays any attention to the NHL’s labor issues and revenue sharing system when talking about competitive balance and revenue sharing.
@Chris:
“What’s good for the Yankees IS good for baseball, in an economic sense.”
Is that all that matters, what’s good in the economic sense ? That’s what’s brought us baseball in November, the unbalanced schedule, two series of interleague rivalry baseball a year (which leads to teams in the same division having very different interleague schedules), etc.
I find these things a lot more annoying than pitchers strolling around the mound and bad broadcasters.
I agree with every single word of this.
I agree that the umpiring sucks. In tennis, which is all about line calls, instant replay works extremely well: fast and decisive. A displayed video screen zooms in on the point where the ball has landed, increasing the magnification until it’s obvious to everyone – the line judges, the players, the fans in the stands – that the ball was in or out. There’s no need for a single word of discussion, and it’s actually fun for the fans, who particpate in the “judgment” as much as anyone else.
Add line calls to disputed home runs. Opponents of replay have said that once you do that, more use of replay will creep in, but given the success of replay on home runs, it should. The use of replay on HRs has been a success in 3 ways:
1. Wrong calls get reversed.
2. It’s faster than the argument that would ensue without it.
3. The umpires like it. They want to make the right call, and this helps them. And it takes pressure off them – I’m sympathetic with the umpires, in terms of the pressure on them and the difficulty of what they do.
I too enjoyed the Reds’ Monster Mash Video from Red Hot Mama. Harang and BP were very well-suited for their parts.
And this is over-analysis, but Dusty Baker does have a Dr. Frankenstein side (Gene Wilder would insist you pronouce that “Frankensteen)”. That is, if you gave him some dead body parts, he can create a monster on the ball field, and play him every day.
I’m all in favor of replay (super quick review by some extra umpire in the booth — 10 seconds, they see replays on TV like we do, and then call down to the head ump) as much as possible.
But it is touchy — there are certain plays you just can’t overturn b/c the call made on the field (whether wrong or right) stops the play.
For example, on a fair-foul call, say on a grounder down the line…
–If the ump calls fair and the play continues and the batter gets a double, but then the replay ump decides it was foul, that’s fine, you just call it a strike and the batter goes back to the plate.
–But if the ump calls foul right away, everyone stops, so you can’t then look at the replay and decide it was fair and give him a double or something. (I guess you could, but then it’s an ump judgment call on how far baserunners would’ve gotten, and that seems too weird.) You either ignore that bad call, or you do a do-over. I don’t think there’s any other sensible call. (Huh… although it does now occur to me that that Mauer ball down the LF line in the playoffs this year could’ve been handled by replay just fine, but that’s only b/c the ball bounced into the stands.)
But by and large, whenever the play has played itself out fully and then stopped, I’m all in favor of replay to get it right.
These are all good points. There were grumblings after the Yankees’ off-season spending about “salary cap,” but they probably won’t push it to the brink, for the reasons you state. The Brewers’ owner has been the loudest voice of complaint.
Bud Selig has already said what he’ll push for, wrt the next basic agreement. An international players draft, similar to the amateur players draft, and a cap on the signing of players drafted in the amateur draft. I hope these things go thru, as they’ll help. I don’t think the players will resist a cap on the signing of a player who has not yet played an inning of pro baseball. A lot of MLB players are pissed off at the money these unproven kids are getting.
@Dan:
” … there are certain plays you just can’t overturn b/c the call made on the field (whether wrong or right) stops the play.”
This is true, there’s a similar issue in tennis too, but with bad calls where the play continues. For example, if a player is in the middle of a point, and a questionable call is made, they usually keep playing (if they can return the shot) instead of challenging the call, because if they stop playing and lose the challenge, they’ve lost the point.
unrelated note: I keep signing onto Redlegnation hoping to see a headline about some positive move made by the organization that will change the course we have been heading on.
Still hoping…..
What teams in the Reds payroll area have been to the playoffs say 5 out of the last 10 years? How many teams with the Reds payroll numbers have been in the world series?
Lets look at this years WS champs the Yanks. How much did they spend on their 3 key additions? How could the Reds even afforded 1 of them let along 3? How different would this years world series look if the Yankees couldn’t spend over say $150 million total on team payroll?
Yes money is not the sole determination, but when it is so out of whack as it is right now, all 32 teams are not playing on a equal playing field.
Since we’re talking about unfairness here… the most obvious unfair thing in MLB (in my opinion) is that the NL Central has 6 teams and the AL West has 4!!!
Why should the Reds start every year with 5 division opponents to beat, while Anaheim etc. all have only 3?
The NBA, NFL, and NHL all have equal-sized divisions. Why does MLB do this, and why do they get a free pass for it? NO ONE talks about it!
it really burns me up. It’s the fundamental structure of the league, and it’s patently unfair to some teams. (And the fact that the NL Central has been weak lately has nothing to do with it. The structure of the league should have NOTHING to do with relative strengths of teams, which will ebb and flow over time anyway.)
I think the reasoning is that if you had six 5-team divisions, you’d have 15 AL teams and 15 NL teams, and therefore (if all teams are playing), you’d need to have at least one interleague game going on every day.
But I really don’t see why that’s a problem. Interleague games don’t have to happen all at the same time.
Is anyone with me on this? Doesn’t this seem unfair, and fixable?
Move Houston to the AL West. Done.
@Travis G.: Thank you. I’m on board.
Or Milwaukee to the AL Central (they’ve been an AL team before) and KC to the AL West.
This just doesn’t seem hard…
I think MLB would contract a team before they would have interleague play everyday.
@Chris:
It’s such a simple question, but the answer is quite prolific. As a rhetorical question, I’ve got to give you kudos.
@Drew Nelson: No chance. They’d have to contract TWO teams to fix the problem, and how would the players association sign off on losing 50 jobs like that?
I think more likely we live w/ the imbalance until they add 2 teams to get to 32, and then we’ll get the NFL setup — 8 divisions of 4 teams each.
Anyway… I just don’t see why interleague is such a sacred cow. This is fixable right now.
I completely concur, as you may have gathered from one of my comments above. And you probably meant it as a rhetorical question, but in any case I mentioned there that the Yankees spent $497M in guaranteed contracts for their 3 star off-season acquisitions.
PS to my previous post. And that was in an off-season with a recession going on. The best Bobby Abreu could do was a 1 year $5M contract with the Angels. He was originally looking for 3 years at $48 M.
I don’t see two cities getting expansion franchises in my lifetime. Where would you have teams? Thinking of other professional league cities… Charlotte, Sacramento, Nashville/Memphis, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Portland, San Jose, New Orleans, Salt Lake City… Montreal, again?
Many of these cities have AAA affiliates. Many probably couldn’t support another stadium. I just don’t see these markets growing enough to support another professional franchise given the current economic structure. If you went to a cap of some sort, maybe you could increase ownership potential.
Additionally, look at the talent pool right now. It’s limited enough as it is. I think this is the max teams MLB could hope to see.
Contracting teams is a far more likely scenario. I think you’d see either of the two FL teams contracted before two new teams came into the league.
Lets say there was a present salary cap/floor in place, and say it is $75 million for the floor and $150 for the ceiling. Teams can go over the $150 if the monies are going to players already in their system/team, but can not sign or trade for no new players to put’s them over that ceiling. If something like that was in place how different would the WS look this year?
Having a floor is a good idea, there’s enough revenue sharing for that. The NL team would probably still be the Phillies. In the AL, it’s just impossible to say, it would be an alternate reality.
@David: My knee jerk guess on cities for expansion MLB teams would be Charlotte and Las Vegas. This is based on nothing – just a guess.
As for contraction, I repeat my original question… How and why would the players association ever go for that? That would be volunteering to lose 50 very high-paying jobs to players. (Plus a lot of regular working joes would be out of work, not that the players association is looking out for that, but cities themselves would do all they can to resist that.)
I really don’t see contraction ever happening. Even the NHL hasn’t contracted teams, have they? And they’re in (as far as I know) a LOT more trouble than MLB is.
No less than 12 teams would have to spend MORE money on salary to meet that $75mil floor in a salary cap. The Marlins would have to double their salary spending. The Pirates would have to put up over $25mil. Obviously those owners would have to decide if that was something they could commit to on an annual basis. What did $75mil get the Reds? Willy Taveras and a box of toothpicks.
Yeah, piggybacking on what Matt WI said… I do not think this problem has a simple solution.
Your idea sounds simple and clean, Drew, but I think what you’d get is a slightly weakened Yankee team at the top end, and 6 or 8 teams at the bottom end nearing bankruptcy and possibly considering lawsuits against MLB for forcing them to spend themselves into oblivion.
You’d probably also have those low-end teams laying off tons of “regular people” and pinching pennies all over the place just so they could go out and sign, say, Mark Grudzielanek or I don’t know, insert name of mediocre overpriced free agent who can’t get a job w/ the big boys here… just so they could get above the salary floor.
Anyway… I’m not saying we shouldn’t be thinking about this at all. It has merit. (It does stink that owners do actually have the option of collecting their revenue sharing checks and just sticking them in the bank and running out a bargain basement team.) But fixing this problem is going to be complicated, I think.
How many teams in the NFL, NBA or NHL went bankrupt? MLB teams wouldn’t have to spend $150 million, but would have to at least spend $75 and I am sorry there is no reason why any team can’t afford 75 million payroll.
I don’t insist that $75 M is a good number for the floor, but like Drew’s concept of having a ceiling and a floor. The initial floor would have to be lower than $75M. And the initial ceiling would have to be higher than $150M, or the players’ union would never go along. Not that they’ll go along with a salary cap anyway.
It is time for the owners to well get a pair and stand up to the players union. They need to say this is what it’s going to be, either agree to it or go to work in the independent leagues (which pay real well) or some other place. The owners need to see what is in the best interest of baseball and stop this decline before it’s to late.
@pinson343: To my understanding, there are financial formulas used to determine a cap floor and ceiling, so it’s not as though they draw the numbers out of the air. From what I’ve read, your floor is actually pretty accurate.
How many teams in the NFL, NBA or NHL went bankrupt? When is the last time the Grizzlies, the Coyotes (and hockey teams we don’t even remember exist), the Lions, Browns, Chiefs, Clippers were a legit threat to win their respective championships?
The owners need to see what is in the best interest of baseball and stop this decline before it’s to late. Too late for what? Rehtorically speaking, why is competitve balance a birth right for Cincinnati Reds fans?
@pinson343: FYI, Pinson, I don’t mean to attribute the itallics to you, I know they aren’t your comments. Two seperate items in that post.