Open Thread #8, 2022

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The only thing new about the negotiations between players and owners is the brevity of yesterday’s meeting: 15 minutes. From SB Nation:

ESPN’s Jeff Passan has some details of the MLBPA’s proposal. The union backed off its request for salary arbitration for all players with 2+ years of service time and instead requested 80% of the players. The players also requested an increase in the pre-arb bonus pool from $100 million to $115 million. Remember the league offered just $15 million for the bonus pool in their latest offer.

USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports that the league consider’s the union’s most recent proposal of changes to the arbitration system a non-starter.

In other unhappy news, Calvin Jones has died of cancer. He was 58. He was the Dodger scout who studied and advocated signing Clayton Kershaw back in 2005-2006. Published six years ago at Bleacher Report, it’s a good story.

A couple of things about the 2006 draft: it had some very good pitchers in it. Here are the six players who went ahead of Kershaw:

  1. Luke Hochevar
  2. Greg Reynolds
  3. Evan Longoria
  4. Brad Lincoln
  5. Brandon Morrow
  6. Andrew Miller
  7. Clayton Kershaw

Then, three picks later, the Giants selected Tim Lincecum. Right after that the Diamondbacks picked Max Scherzer.

Not a bad draft, huh?

50 thoughts on “Open Thread #8, 2022”

  8. Really sucks for our Dodgers. We opened with 7 games against the bottom dwelling DBacks and Rockies. SF however avoids the Padres and Brewers.

    • Can’t disagree with No. 1, but no uniforms with elastic waistbands deserve any consideration whatsoever. They should all be moved to the trash bin and deleted immediately.

  20. Interestingly, Jason Stark has an article in today’s Athletic titled What would happen if baseball killed the shift? He finds data:

    In the big leagues, there were nearly nine times as many shifts last season as there were in 2013 … and almost 25,000 more balls were hit into a shift in 2021 than as recently as 2018.

    From former big league exec Morgan Ensberg:

    “When you have the second baseman in short right field, the amount of range that they have is so big. And the throw they have to make is still really short. So that guy really covers a lot more ground than any infielder in any other situation. By bringing that second baseman in and making sure that the second baseman’s feet are on the (infield) dirt, they no longer have that range. So the left-handed hitter really has a shot to get a base hit.”

    There’s more, but those are the big takeaways I got.

      • Apparently it is much easier for a fielder to stand where they ain’t than it is for a hitter to hit a ball where they ain’t.

    • Basically playing with four outfielders and three infielders. Furcal would have done well with his slap bunts. A player who can drive a ball is going to make a lot more money than a player that tries to hit a roller to the opposite side.

      It’s harder to score a run with two singles and a walk than it is when there is a double involved.

      I think I have finally decided that I prefer to eliminate the extreme shifts. Maybe make infielders stand in the “dirt” but not restrict where on the dirt they stand.

  21. Tom Verducci at SI has an excellent article saying the negotiators and baseball in general are missing the point by not discussing front-office efficiency hunters v. player’s desire for competition. Get rid of the shifts and start using a pitch clock, he suggests.

      • Now as I understand it, the players now want 80% of players to be arb eligible after 2 years with some sort of a performance stat to determine who those 80% are. They had said they would stop negotiating on arbitration and then came back and included this issue as part of issues to be negotiated. That is canceling a step forward and replaces it with a step backward in regard to coming up with a new contract.

        I think a rookie pitcher who pitches 150+ innings and has 80% quality starts should get more than the minimum. They could be one of the best pitchers in the Major Leagues for two or three years, get injured, only make 2% of their worth, and be out of baseball. That is wrong!

        The bonus pool should be large enough to take care of top performers in their pre-arb years. If that bonus is capped at $5MM per such player instead of a lid on the total pool, that would seem more fair. Plus, make sure it is a bonus and not a salary increase so that it has to be earned each year until arb eligible.

  26. The brevity of the meeting in and of itself is not necessarily bad news, in that the meeting was for the players to provide their counter proposal. The owners weren’t expected to react to them at the meeting itself. Meetings are now set up for next week.

    • Good question. Maybe it’s because baseball only makes them billions of dollars and not trillions?

  29. I don’t know if this has come up on this site or not, but once a week I get an email from Eternal Baseball. Eternal Baseball simulates games between each franchise, where each team’s roster is populated by that franchise’s best players.

    It makes for an interesting diversion. And it doesn’t hurt that the Dodgers are leading their division, with a couple game lead over San Fran!

    https://eternalbaseball.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=05ae25f2ea0fc90a6c6c2ba21&id=4ee8ba867a&e=835bf4b34a