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I agree with everything in bold here.

And no matter how many times you repeat that it isn't true, that isn't true. While the CBT number appears to serve as a restraint on the highest-spending teams in the technical, it helps keep the market lower because it defines the limit for how much a top-of-the-market team will pay for talent. It helps every other team by setting the market for them. Even the least-spending teams benefit from this. They want to keep the CBT low not because they're afraid it's going to make them lose—they're already comfortable with the losing. It's spending more for the losing that they're trying to avoid.

I'm not an expert at football or basketball, but as far as baseball owners are concerned they, as with business owners, are responding to the incentives being offered. The revenue streams in baseball are so varied and lucrative that a team can choose to spend very little on talent, essentially choosing to punt on competing, and still make healthy profits and, as importantly, substantial capital appreciation. That's the thing that's constraining spending among so many teams: they don't have to spend or compete to make money. Is that unique to baseball versus football or basketball? Not sure. Not all 30 teams respond to those incentives in exactly the same way to not spend, since they're not automatons. The Yankees must spend because spending/competing/winning is their historical brand. Dodgers are motivated to spend because they want to dominate this era of the sport in a unique way. Mets want to spend because of their superfan owner. Those guys will spend around the cap, whether it's 210 or 260. But limited-window teams have to choose whether to compete by spending to get talent to keep up with the leaders in their division. They absolutely would like to compete, but they don't want to spend too much money to do so. That's why they want the smaller cap. That way, they can save money on competing, which suppresses free agent comp potential. And suppressing FA comp keeps the market lower for arb-eligible players as well, since high salaries set the overall market, and all that helps keep spending down even for the Pirates and Orioles when it's time for them to pony up for their arb-eligibles.

The CBT as a soft cap doesn’t address competitive disparity—only overall spend. I don’t see how it is in a fan’s interest in competitive balance to keep spending down across the board. Richer teams have overtly worked to avoid going over the cap especially in recent seasons. It doesn’t necessarily follow that higher levels will necessarily create disparity, because that would require open-window playoff contenders to give up trying to compete with the three big spenders for talent, ceding all top talent only to them, in order to maintain payroll integrity or whatever Orwell would call it. If a team’s window opens up next year and they want to get that guy who will put them over the top, they either need to go get him and pay what the market dictates, or else risk not optimizing the window they’ve waited so long to open. And once they spend for those guys, that creates the baseline for eh other free agents in the market and, just as importantly, the arb-eligible players, whom all 30 teams eventually have to pay. That’s what teams want to avoid: having to pay for those boats lifted by the rising tide.

And just because conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong doesn’t mean that once you refer to conventional wisdom in a debate, it’s automatically wrong. 😁

Sure, teams will spend when they are competitive. What they want with as low a CBA as possible is for the entire compensation framework to be suppressed so that when they do have to spend, it will fall within a lower range, because they want it to be cheaper to compete.

Players’ competitive balance argument is not rooted in CBT, because they don’t see it as the source of the imbalance. They see the CBT as suppressing salaries for those making more than the minimum, anyone who’s due for free agency or arb paychecks. Players see the environment that encourages flat out tanking as being the competitive problem: organizations that purposely field poor teams and yet are still profitable because of all the TV revenue, technology revenue, licensing and merchandising revenue, real estate development revenue, gambling revenue and revenue sharing. There’s no penalty for fielding bad team after bad team. The players are trying to change that through changes to the draft itself, changes to draft eligibility e.g. penalizing consecutive 90-loss season, changes in free agent compensation, and the like.

It’s a vote for more revenue sharing only if all the teams spend the exact same amount if the CBT is 200 as they would if it’s 250. They don’t. They spend less. Why should the Yankees and Dodgers and Mets continually subsidize teams that would rather pocket money than spend on talent? CBT is widely accepted as being a de facto salary cap suppressing overall payrolls. It’s why the players want higher CBTs.

If higher penalties are attached to this offer, it’s DOA. Looks like a setup.

So, asking for a friend, mind you, but, just how does one obtain one of them there man-made working female robots?

Also, if Ukraine were to give in to Russian demands now, which amounts to give us what we want and in exchange we'll stop overtly bombing you, which is a terrible bargain, the peace would be only temporary, because they'd surely simply regroup and came back harder next month or next year, whenever it would be. Also, in the meantime, covert efforts against Ukraine would be ramped up as well. The offer is a no win as it stands. In any event, I believe the point of the offer is to be on the record as being for peace. Not that it's fooling anybody, but maybe it's a necessary precondition to engage a certain patron for support (你好, 中华人民共和国).

That's why I wish Biden had addressed the Russian people during SOTU.

Wrong.

Baseball wants far higher taxes for going over the CBT limit, a much smaller arb bonus pool than Players’ current $80MM, and for Players to get the hell out of the way when Baseball makes whatever rules changes it wants. Kind of like negotiating with a car dealer: sure, I’ll lower the price by $1,000, but I’m gonna give you $1,500 less for the trade-in.

This kind of post is why Bunker thinks you’re the biggest threat to America.

Personally, I don’t think you need to know the first thing about firearms to want to keep them from being so freely available that they kill 45,000 Americans every year.

Many people in this country also believe the earth is flat and that the well-documented Holocaust never happened.

Unserious.

A little bit on the lighter side ... "Servant of the People", a comedy starring ... Volodymyr Zelenskyy! This is legitimately funny!

Interesting newsletter from Mark Simon of SIS earlier this week about a system developed to simulate minor league batted ball data to fashion a Statcast equivalent as a way of projecting performance at the major league level, and as top prospects, Tork and Greene are analyzed. The takeaway appears to be that Tork's numbers were in lines with their "Synthetic Statcast" equivalents, but that maybe Greene overachieved just a bit. They are looking only as prospects expected to start in the minor leagues, since they are not on their org's 40-man rosters. ********************* In 2018, SIS built a machine-learning model, Synthetic Statcast, that was trained using actual MLB Statcast data and SIS internally-collected batted ball data to simulate exit velocity, launch angle and more for MLB players back to 2010, as well as for the minor leagues, NPB (Japan), and KBO (Korea). The result is a unique perspective on quality of contact for players across levels and how those players measure up to MLB standards. Let’s look at a few of the top minor league prospects through the prism of that data. For now, we’ll focus on those not on 40-man rosters at the moment, meaning that they should be playing in the minor leagues come April. ... Our data also allows us to construct expected batting averages and slugging percentages on balls in play based on where balls are hit and how hard they’re hit. We can then compare a player's actual batting average and slugging percentage on balls in play (BABIP and SLGBIP) to their expected numbers (xBABIP and xSLGBIP) ... The Tigers have the next-highest ranked prospects among position players not currently on a 40-man roster in corner infielder Spencer Torkelson (No. 4) and outfielder Riley Greene (No. 5). Torkelson played at three minor league levels last season, finishing with 40 games in Triple-A. Overall, he hit .267 with a .935 OPS (brought down a little bit by hitting .238 with an .881 OPS at Toledo, his final stop). Torkelson’s .359 BABIP was a near-match for his .365 xBABIP and his .731 SLGBIP wasn’t far from his .714 xSLGBIP. Torkelson’s 90.1 MPH average exit velocity and 18.7 degree average launch angle are about the same numbers that Mookie Betts posted in MLB last season (90.3 and 18.9). Greene split time between Double-A and Triple-A last season and handled the latter better than Torkelson did. Between the two levels, he hit .301/.387/.534 with 24 home runs. However, Greene did overachieve a bit, particularly in slugging. His .775 SLGBIP was 104 points higher than his .671 xSLGBIP. His 89.6 MPH average exit velocity and 8.9 degree average launch angle were a close match to Marlins infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s MLB numbers last season (90.2 and 9.0).

I actually think it would work better for the batter. As things stand, the pitcher can wait as long as he wants, and who knows how long that's going to be? Only the pitcher, because he's in total control of the timing. With a pitch clock, the batter knows the pitcher is on a timer, so he better knows when to expect the ball to be thrown, and can better mentally prepare for that. You know who else is going to like the pitch clock? Fielders.

I'm not so sure Vlad sees what's happening as mistakes, just yet. The failures of the cannon fodder brigades he sent in as ground forces may be giving him the pretext he needs to go nuclear on Ukraine. I'm thinking he's relishing the idea so that he can join America in the drop-a-nuke-on-another-country club. After all, look how well America did after nuking Japan in 1945? 🤷🏼‍♂️ I don't know. Who knows what that guy is thinking. But I wouldn't necessarily assume a conventional reaction by Putin to anything that's happened so far.

What they need at first base is a safety base extending beyond the foul line for the batter-runner to touch, so as to remove basically any opportunity for a player collision or spike mishap on ground ball plays there. Like so: