Looking more and more like a labor impasse is going to hit either sometime in 2021 or most definitely in 2022:
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Average MLB salary drops for 3rd straight year...
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The article doesn't seem to explain why, but I assume the main factor here is that teams are now less willing to give big or lengthy contracts to guys on the wrong side of 30. So guys who were once making millions of dollars at age 35 or age 36 are now making $0 at those ages, which will definitely lower average salaries!
If you were appointed as a special baseball dictator and charged with creating a salary structure for MLB that solved this problem and was tolerable to both sides, what would you do?
One obvious solution is a salary floor, which would probably force rebuilding teams to each add another older veteran or two who would otherwise be out of baseball. Another possible solution would be to make arbitration happen earlier. The other thing you could do of course is make players into free agents earlier, but this is probably significantly more skewed towards players and against teams than the other ideas."Hope...may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources...but those who stake their all upon the venture see it in its true colors only after they are ruined."
-- Thucydides
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Originally posted by HomeFish View PostThe article doesn't seem to explain why, but I assume the main factor here is that teams are now less willing to give big or lengthy contracts to guys on the wrong side of 30. So guys who were once making millions of dollars at age 35 or age 36 are now making $0 at those ages, which will definitely lower average salaries!
If you were appointed as a special baseball dictator and charged with creating a salary structure for MLB that solved this problem and was tolerable to both sides, what would you do?
One obvious solution is a salary floor, which would probably force rebuilding teams to each add another older veteran or two who would otherwise be out of baseball. Another possible solution would be to make arbitration happen earlier. The other thing you could do of course is make players into free agents earlier, but this is probably significantly more skewed towards players and against teams than the other ideas.
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Originally posted by Mohoney View Post
Make arbitration and Rule 5 eligibility arrive sooner. Make the entire minor-league process take 5 years maximum; 3 before being added to the 40-man, then 2 option years. Also, create an international draft.
(Formerly asindc.)
"I have the ultimate respect for White Sox fans. They were as miserable as the Cubs and Red Sox fans ever were but always had the good decency to keep it to themselves. And when they finally won the World Series, they celebrated without annoying every other fan in the country." Jim Caple, ESPN (January 12, 2011)
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the (bleeding) obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." — George Orwell
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Players would disagree, but I see the decline in salaries as a result of a labor system that favors the players. Teams will always look to pay as little as they can. The entire concept of Moneyball was to find cheap players who had a chance to win -- not to find a better way to win, but to find a cheap way to have a chance to win. Then they stopped being cheap and teams were paying big money for the bargain-basement analytics. Now teams are cutting expenses by going younger with fewer opportunities going to older veterans.
The reality is that when someone who isn't very good at hitting and isn't very good at fielding and doesn't pitch, i.e. Kyle Schwarber, can sign for $10 million for a season (if I read that correctly, I was wrong by the way, but don't expect the deal to work out for the Nationals unless Schwarber demonstrates some actual baseball skills), the union really has nothing to complain about.
Whatever baseball does, owners will always find a way to drive down average salaries.
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