gehringer_2

That aspect doesn't worry me so much. Even if he is disconnecting mentally from a *future* with Detroit, if he is angling for a record setting deal, he is going to be driven to perform in the '26 *present* to get it.

If it's true that Skubal/Boras didn't even make a pre-arb counter offer to the Tigers, to me that means they already look at any contractural relationship with the. Tigers as being in the rear view mirror.

yeah - Pretty good when your old management takes Brady, then a generation later it turns over and your new management picks Maye, another big drop back passer who is already at top of the stat sheets in his 2nd yr.

One of Elmer's stronger games tonight - not only mixing up a little to defend his mates, but a good number of take-aways. Reimer not going to keep his new gig very long if he keeps dropping low enough for guys to shoot over his shoulder like the Wings did.

Right. The actual comparison is 6-7 War from Skubal in '26 plus whatever the comp pick turns into in the future, vs the value of 2 or 3 other prospects, which in total still have an excellent chance of giving you less than 6-7 total over any future. If you were a bad team where 6-7 isn't going to get you anything in '26, then take future, but if you are a good enough team that the 6-7 wins gets you to the playoffs and thus a shot at the WS, take the wins and the pick and let the future further out sort itself out.

I don't know how I could trust it for things when about which I didn't already have a feel for whether it was right or wrong. One thing I have to get used to is that it seems to assume people don't ask questions accurately, because even when you give specific multiple criteria with conjunction ('and'), it seems to ignore that on the first pass and you have go back and repeat, that you want do want a list of things with X AND Y properties, not a list of things with X OR Y properties.

that's gonna hurt.

I think they should just close all the airports in FLA right away. (assuming Edman has a car to get out.......😉)

Are we seeing not enough 'game management'...... or too much? 🤔

That degree is 'Communications' to you, buddy.

right - and also the ratios involved are so huge. If you are working for Amalgamated Widget, and the guy in the next cubicle doing a similar job gets a bigger raise then you do, it's not likely to be to 30x what you are making like it is between a future HOF player in his rookie yr versus a washed up unproductive player that got lucky like Cobb.

any player in the MLB who is worried about himself or other guys being paid what they are actually worth in the years they are worth it is going to be having a very hard time emotionally. I'm sure any pro baseball player who hasn't already lost his mind over it has made his peace with the fact that what guys are being paid at any given time in MLB has almost nothing to do with how much they are contributing to the team or whether the guys he sees when he looks down the dugout bench are being paid for more or less 'value' to the club than he is.

I suppose there is no need to 'fix' as long as one understands what it's actually telling you (nor not telling you! ;))

at least the reason he isn't going to class is a good one.

too big a loophole. They are out of my channel selector.

yeah - he absolutely no authority to do this. And I would guess the networks will push back, not out of principle, but because they know no-body wants to watch Army-Navy and they don't want to lose the revenue.

IIRC, Rusty couldn't run a lick.

WAR is sort of cruel to 1Bs. He was over 2 OWar in '23 and '25 but got pulled down by DWar numbers, which we've talked about a lot for 1Bs. It's just a place where in my view the stat is detached from reality. Torkelson's play at 1B is does not cost the Tigers wins or negate his offense. He is simply not a bad 1B and whatever his dWAR thinks it is capturing, I don't care about it (e.g I'm not asking him to play SS!) and I'm willing to bet the analysis the Tigers use internally doesn't either.

signing bonuses are the end around non-guaranteed contracts, they are still counted as salary in cap calcs. Teams can move money around and into different years (and into the future were the cap is higher) to make room for players short term, but the same total eventually gets paid to players collectively. If anything, what people regard as teams cheating or using loopholes, is actually a strength in the way the system allows teams to have some roster flexibility, and still pay the correct amount of total salaries for a given year. And it's the players that are largely in control when it comes to restructuring. And it's mostly worked, you don't hear either side in football worrying about a future strike.

I don't know about 700 (which is what the cube root would give for 350M, but the US House should be expanded to at least 500 - and that requires nothing but an act of Congress. But the real problem with representation is the Senate and that's a tougher nut to crack.

If you 'incentivize' longer starts, you'll just destroy more arms. It's not the players, it's the game.

The NFL doesn't really have a cap, it has a budget the teams must spend on players, if they end up under budget on salaries, they have to make it up in payments to the NLFPA but they have to be within about 90% in direct player payments. So on every team, the players get the the negotiated cut of the team revenue. It's not really a cap or a floor, it's the player piece of team revenue. That is pretty close to an ideal construct for a sports league. MLB can't get anywhere near there for dozens of reasons, but the 1st prerequisite to moving toward balanced team salary is balanced team revenue. Taking about caps and floors seems pretty pointless to me when it doesn't address the fundamental issue, which is team income inequality. Only movement in that direction, even if incremental, begins to rationalize the MLB system. As Buddha pointed out, a cap added to any thing like the current system (i.e.absent real structural revenue reform) simply benefits the richest teams even more. I suppose you could say that if they institute a meaningful floor, that means they have to institute some additional revenue sharing, otherwise a meaningful floor is an impossibility. But that is exactly why a meaningful floor is really unlikely!

yeah - maybe something like that. BTW - what happened with Tony Clark? There seemed to be some kind of controversy brewing a few months ago but seems to have blown over? A weakened union leadership with a self-preservation agenda becomes a wild card also.

TBH, I don't think the small market teams want a cap either because any cap that emerged would almost certainly benefit the richest teams the most, unless those owners are just dumb - which is also possible! I do think the players are going to push hard to reduce years of control, and I think you could get odd bedfellows between the players and the rich teams both being in favor (even if those owners would never admit it in public) but the majority of owners being opposed.

God was using Times Roman because Calibri is too woke and 10 were all that would fit and still be legible to nomads with no bifocals. Everybody knows that.