MLB Off-Topic

[Majingir]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Quick poll... Salary cap in baseball? Benefitial or Harmful?

Sent from my J8170 using Operation Sports mobile app

I'd say no to a hard cap, but have a minimum and maximum soft cap.

Just throwing out numbers, but let's say 165M is the cap ceiling. Anything over, and the teams must pay a luxury tax (the more consecutive years you're over, the worse the penalty), with all the money going to the teams who haven't been penalized within the last 2 years.

The cap floor is 82.5m(aka 50% of whatever the ceiling is). If you're under that number, you don't get any money that's dished out from the taxes (this gives cheaper owners incentive to spend. If you seriously can't spend money, why do you deserve getting free money or owning a team?)

Players on the IL don't count towards the cap (similar to the NHL Long Term Injured Reserved cap rules). You get penalized per total days over the cap. So if season is 187 days and you're over the cap for 90 days, you get taxed for the 90 days,but since you weren't over the cap for majority of the season, you don't count as a tax offender for the full season (therefore, next season you start a clean slate all over again).

So if season is 187 days and cap is 165m, you can spend on average of 882k a day without going over the cap (so a 10m player counts as just under 53.5k a day).

[Master Live 013]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Well, this past season only 1 team, the Pirates, had a payroll of less than 82M (76M) and 16 teams had a payroll of 165M or more. So under your proposal the players would lose money. And there is already a luxury tax, that's goes higher for repeat offenders, which already acts as a soft cap.





https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=916516930

[Majingir]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Well, this past season only 1 team, the Pirates, had a payroll of less than 82M (76M) and 16 teams had a payroll of 165M or more. So under your proposal the players would lose money. And there is already a luxury tax, that's goes higher for repeat offenders, which already acts as a soft cap.





https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=916516930

I was using 2019 numbers for mine. But I guess 200m would be a better number to use. It goes up each year obviously.

But the fact that my suggestion isn't too far off from MLBs current system is a good thing. A combination of NHL and MLBs salary system would be nice.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Why would that be nice?

[Chip Douglass]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Debates about a salary cap are inextricably tied with questions about parity, and the salient fact is that the MLB has more parity than any of the 3 major US pro sports leagues.

From a competitive balance standpoint, the game only really has a Yankee dominance problem....and that hasn't been much of an issue since 2000.

[Majingir]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Why would that be nice?

Both seem fairly straight forward and both leagues have more parity than the NBA and NFL.

To this day I still don't fully understand NBAs salary cap structure.

[steelerfan]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

It's not all about competitive balance. An inability for small market teams to keep stars in their city is terrible for the game. Knowing that the Yankees, Dodgers or Red Sox will almost certainly buy any star your team ever has kills interest in the game.

[Chip Douglass]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

With the flood of TV money in the MLB in recent years, I'd be willing to bet that the payroll disparities between the Yankees/Dodgers of the world and the small-market teams has shrunk, if anything.

There's also been a noticeable shift away from pricey free agent signings and toward drafting/developing among the big-market teams, too, since teams realize how insanely valuable young, good, cost-controlled players are.

Aside from Betts, the Dodgers right now built almost their entire roster either through homegrown talent - Kershaw, Seager, Bellinger, Buehler, Smith, May, Gonsolin, and Jansen were all drafted - or bargain basement free agent signings - Muncy, Turner.

[KSUowls]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

So, I have a bunch of points of why I think the sport needs one, but I'm still hesitant on a hard cap. There definitely needs to be some kind of rework, maybe a stricter luxury cap.

Though things have normalized a bit in the last 2 or 3 years, we are still in a situation where the team with the highest payroll is still more than 60% higher than a mid market team. This is after we went through a stretch of 10-15 years where that gap at the top was more than double that of the median payroll.

In terms of parity it's hard to compare the different sports. The NBA has a salary cap and very little parity, but that is due to the impact that 1 player can have on the game. All teams have equal opportunity to get one of those superstars, but unless you have them then you're not winning. With the nature of the sport, the only way that they could truly create parity is to enforce a cap that would be so restrictive that there could only be 1 star on any team.

Parity in the NFL is tied to the QB. If you have one of the 10 best QBs then you're always going to be at least kind of good, and if you don't have one of those then you're always going to be looking for your guy. The salary cap ensures that there is a limited window where a team with one of those top QB's can overwhelm the competition though, because as soon as it's pay day for the QB then you become limited with the rest of the roster (which ties into a point about baseball later on).

With baseball, there is more game to game parity, but there is a very strong correlation with long term success and payroll disparity. It's no secret why Boston and NY have dominated the AL East for the last 25 years or why the Dodgers and Giants have dominated the AL West since 2008. The Cards and Cubs have been in the top half of payroll every year since 2000 whereas the the rest of the NL Central has generally been in the bottom half, and those two teams account for 15 of the last 20 division champions. There are of course exceptions to this like the Rays always finding a way to be competitive or how the Angels can never seem to put things together despite always having one of the highest payrolls. In most instances, payroll disparity equals a competitive advantage though.

Even with the emphasis on developing players in recent years, the financial flexibility of some markets just creates inequities in the sport. Because those teams can not only develop their own players like everyone else, but then they can fill in the roster where needed. Just to use the Dodgers as an example, most of their core were drafted and developed by the team, but they have been able to afford to keep some of those players who are beyond their controllable years (Kershaw/Jansen), meaning they didn't need to replace them with newly drafted players. They were even able to do so without losing the ability to bring in additional pieces. They were one of only a handful of teams who could afford to bring in a superstar from the outside like Betts, and on top of re-signing their own guys and bringing in a superstar they still have money left over for B level supplemental pieces that would be expensive acquisitions elsewhere. It was mentioned that Justin Turner was a bargain basement free agency signing, but he's still a $20m player (unadjusted for 2020). For context, there were only 34 players in 2019 with that kind of salary (Justin just missed the cut last year at $19m).

This also leads to a point of fan interest. Obviously it can't be very fun knowing that your team goes into every season with 1 hand tied behind its back financially. So, that's already bad for the sport when a segment of the league's fans know that their team won't be competitive. Another point though, maybe even worse than losing for a fan, is seeing a favorite player leave for another team. If your team sucks then you at least want to have someone who is fun to watch and root for on your team (especially for younger kids this sport needs). It's hard to get attached to a player when you know he's going to be traded or leave in free agency in a few years.

[Chip Douglass]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Turner was initially signed to a minor league deal after the 2013 season, revamped his swing and raked from 2014-16, then parlayed that into a 4/64 contract. For a guy who accumulated ~12 WAR over those seasons (and he wasn't even an every-day player for the first two of them), that's a pretty generous hometown discount. He could have easily parlayed that into a $100M+ contract somewhere else, but didn't. Same thing with Jansen, who's said on the record that some teams offered him more money than the Dodgers but gave them a discount because he wanted to win a ring in LA. Could also throw in Chris Taylor here, who has been a pretty valuable piece for us since 2017 after he was a reclamation project acquired from Seattle and re-signed with us very cheaply.

I think the luxury tax serves as a pretty solid deterrent against overly extravagant spending spurges, too. The Dodgers were forced to let Zack Greinke walk a few years ago because they were repeat violators of the luxury tax threshold in the early Guggenheim years and effectively had to pay 50% extra if they wanted to re-sign him.

[Master Live 013]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

BREAKING: Steve Cohen's @Mets bid was approved by @MLB's ownership committee, all but assuring the hedge fund titan will get the team, sources say.https://t.co/HyQPrUIAco#SportsBiz // #Mets // #MLBPlayoffs // #WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/Jj4dqP734u
— Scott Soshnick (@soshnick) October 20, 2020

********

[Jr.]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

I think a hard cap at the bottom is more necessary than one at the top. I agree that the luxury tax has done a pretty good job of deterring big market teams from getting every FA, but there needs to be a reason for teams at the bottom to spend more to compete, instead of competing being secondary to the bottom line.

[Jhack99]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

BREAKING: Steve Cohen's @Mets bid was approved by @MLB's ownership committee, all but assuring the hedge fund titan will get the team, sources say.https://t.co/HyQPrUIAco#SportsBiz // #Mets // #MLBPlayoffs // #WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/Jj4dqP734u
— Scott Soshnick (@soshnick) October 20, 2020

********

Still needs the owners voting, which is said to take place soon after the WS.

Sent from my SM-G930P using Operation Sports mobile app

[KSUowls]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Dodgers have definitely done a good job at identifying guys who can contribute from elsewhere, but at this point Turner is still a $20m player. When he was originally signed the Dodgers had Adrian Gonzalez, Hanley Ramirez, Josh Beckett, etc, from the outside filling those those dollars. Turner and Jansen may have taken discounts to stay with LA, but most teams don't have the luxury of fitting those guys in, even at a discount, while also paying $140m (whatever the number is) for all of the other good players.

Basically my point was that you don't get to a nearly $200m (not just LA) payroll every year just by being good at the draft and picking up cheap guys off the street.

[Jhack99]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Padres catcher Luis Campusano was arrested in Georgia on Saturday on felony marijuana possession charges, Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. Campusano had 79 grams of marijuana in his car when police pulled him over around 5 a.m., per the police report. He could face up to 10 years in prison

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2020/10/luis-campusano-charged-with-felony-marijuana-possession.html

Sent from my SM-G930P using Operation Sports mobile app