Shelton

Once the city connects happened, it was already over. We can hope these are limited to west coast road game that start at 10pm eastern.

I think I saw the deferral schedule for both reported somewhere yesterday. Valdez had a relative low salary this year, higher next year, the signing bonus was being paid starting a few years from now. And verlander’s deferral was also reported as 2 million this year and 11 million starting in 2030. That’s just from memory but there is at least some detail out there. How MLB is going to value each of these is a different story, but there might be enough information out there to at least estimate. I am pretty confident that whatever it is, the team is well aware of the limit, and will stay under.

Speak for yourself, hater.

Yes, that is what I was saying was nice. Over the course of the year for 20 bucks per month you would get all three teams. Seems like you won’t be able to manage that now that the tigers will likely be offered directly for that same rate. If they can manage to provide the wings and pistons in the winter months for a total of 20 dollars, then whatever April overlap occurs won’t be all that noticeable. But I bet both wings and pistons packages, however they are provided, will cost more than 20 total when you combine them.

I will never understand the idea that a ball in play is required to qualify as action. Who doesn’t love the art of pitching?

Well, you don’t need to worry about the FDS anymore when it comes to the tigers. FDS via Amazon prime has been a nice option for me. Easy to add and then immediately cancel and let it expire after a month, and then re-add the next time I need to. It will be a bummer to potentially lose out on that option, and to have multiple teams available for 20 bucks a month. It’s not going to be a huge factor during baseball season, but I liked being able to have pistons or wings available basically every night. I’m currently not subscribed because wings aren’t playing games and the pistons are ending up on their share of national broadcasts. I think you can get away with 20 bucks a month for local baseball in the summer given the volume of games. It will be interesting to see what the cost is for the equivalent of pistons.tv or redwings.tv next season, because I doubt many will fork over 40 bucks a month total to watch both teams. For me personally, I have the follow g services currently. But my household also has media interests outside of sports. Peacock (part of xfinity internet subscription) Apple TV+ (part of Apple family bundle of services) Prime (gotta have that instant shipping; the shows/movies are nice) HBO via prime channels (includes TBS/TNT/etc sports) Paramount via prime channels (includes CBS, and various soccer coverage) ESPN/Disney/Hulu bundle including ESPN unlimited (includes all games carried by ESPN/ABC sources) At the moment, no access to Fox channels or related sports channels like BTN, or FDS. Also no access to USA network and its handful of EPL games. Fox and its related channels are easily added/dropped when needed via prime. But I’m not gonna add YouTube/sling/directv just to get USA when I can add/drop Fox for like 15 bucks a month on demand It’s kind of like playing a game to add/drop the above.

It’s 20 bucks per month for the guardians.tv, and I’m sure it will be the same for the tigers. Hard to say whether it will be part of directv stream or fubo. Probably directv stream. Fubo is acting as if they are in sundown mode so I doubt they agree to carry the new feed. I do think there is a chance it becomes available on YouTube tv. But if it does it will probably have an added fee (like Fubo had its regional sports fee that they didn’t advertise but was part of the final monthly cost). Personally, I’m happy that it will probably integrate well with mlb.tv, which I will also have, and now I won’t have to exit the app to watch the tigers.

It was ferndale

Yes I understand how that works. Why did you delete the rest of the passage that effectively said to ignore the passage you cited in the case of special accomplishments. That sentence can be interpreted to say service time doesn’t matter. I’m inclined to believe the arbitrators in Skubal’s case read it that way. Otherwise it’s hard to see how Skubal’s arbitration-restricted value could have exceeded 25.5. I think it’s great for Skubal and very interesting going forward. In the case of skenes, a hypothetical rookie of the year followed by back to back Cy Young awards sure like a special circumstance that removes the restriction of comparisons being limited to common service time.

This is what I read: The arbitration panel shall, except for a Player with five or more years of Major League service, give particular attention, for comparative salary pur-poses, to the contracts of Players with Major League service not exceeding one annual service group above the Player's annual service group. This shall not limit the ability of a Player or his representative, because of special accomplishment, to argue the 20 equal relevance of salaries of Players without regard to service, and the arbitration panel shall give whatever weight to such argument as is deemed appropriate.

If Skenes win a Cy this year, and heads into his first arbitration year, the language of the current CBA appears to indicate that he could demand and win 32 million.

What a fascinating case. I think each side had good arguments to support their view, and on a three judge panel with fairly flexible guidance, anything can happen. I’m specifically interested in the precedent set here. The fact that nothing like this had happened before was relevant, but it’s also true that a player having the specific attributes that Skubal had was never presented to a panel. Most of the preceding cases for big money were settlements. Credit to Skubal and Boras for risking millions argue their position.

If you have Apple News+, which often is included when you buy a new device or have a family bundle or the like with music/tv/etc, baseball prospectus is one of the publications included. It also has the freep and detnews. Only realized this recently.

Everything?

::raises hand::

This right here is the perfect illustration for why the tigers were never going to trade Skubal for the oft-mentioned “three top prospects” this offseason. Everyone that likes to dabble in speculation and hypothetical deals that the tigers could have made, have at it. You can safely say that the tigers could have traded Skubal for this return right here. If you want to replace Sproat with Tong and make it straight up for Skubal with no RP attachment, I’ll allow it (although that could still be pushing it). We now know what a win-now team like the Mets is willing to give up in return for one year of a Cy Young caliber SP and a decent RP (and 2027 comp pick). I wonder how many folks would prefer the two prospects. The Brewers won 97 games last year and have World Series aspirations no different than the tigers, and they preferred the prospects. There are two big differences that I see. First, the brewers were starting from a stronger position and could more afford to lose the Cy young caliber SP. Second, their cache of top prospects wasn’t as good as the tigers.

I’m a big fan of this Stormin guy.

Doesn’t really matter, but I think they switched to file and trial late in Avila’s tenure. Of course, because no one wants to go to “trial,” we never actually got to the point of “filing” with anyone until Mize last year. I think it’s a good system, personally.

As you said, you’d have to know what the internal/external alternatives were, as well as the cost of the external alternatives. No one knows this except Scott Harris and his team. But the comment about hurting the team implies that he took the current team and then made a move that reduced its effectiveness relative to what it was before the move. So, comments regarding whether he hurt the team or not, to me, can only be relative to existing team, not to hypothetical other moves that maybe could have been made instead that would have been better at similar or nominally higher cost. So, as for the internal options, that’s also hard to identify. And the knock-on effects of using those internal options in place of those two guys (ignoring finnegan) is also hard to identify. The easiest argument for the “hurt the team by the moves” position is that Montero and melton would have been better used in those slots. However, I don’t think melton was an option. Maybe that’s deserving of criticism but I think he had an innings cap and they needed to stretch that. But ignoring that, and just saying use melton, then you’ve got to replace melton innings with whatever worst bullpen/aaa arm wasn’t used. Same with Montero. And it’s not like melton and Montero would have been locks to perform better. To me, it’s a toss up. I can’t prove it either way, but neither can anyone else. In my opinion it is not as simple as pointing to poor performance by two specific guys and declaring that it hurt the team. To be clear, I am not disputing that these two guys performed poorly over the course of their short tigers tenure. There are a lot of other players you can point to that also failed during that period. But the tigers needed innings to get to the end of the season. I don’t think they had them in reserve. They didn’t need much more than that. Indeed, it turns out that all they needed was a tranch of fairly bad innings! Finally, both Paddack and Morton ultimately pitched worse for the tigers than they had for their prior team. I don’t think anyone really expects to get a substantially different performance over the final two months relative to the prior four months. Even then, Morton started off pretty strong for the tigers, following a couple strong months for the orioles. From June through August he threw 80 innings with a low 4 era. There was little evidence as we entered September that Scott Harris’s decision to add Morton a month earlier had made the team worse, especially given that we needed dem innings. Similarly, Chris paddack was a 1 war pitcher for the twins at the time of the trade. Nothing amazing, but an easy 4/5 starter. He gave us 30 innings in his first 6 starts, gave up too many homers in a couple starts, but we did go 4-2 in those games. So, that’s why I take issue with the idea that Scott Harris made moves that hurt the team. I think it misses the point of those moves, and relies too heavily on hindsight and vibes due to the September collapse by almost everyone wearing the uniform. This was a long explanation to your question. I regret the length. Short answer is that I don’t think it’s a given that the internal options would have been better and that we would have finished with more wins had we not made the trades.

Good point, please go back and edit your posts to say that Harris made the team better in August and worse in September and did just enough to reach the playoffs for the second year running. We wouldn’t want to leave anything out.

See, that’s the rub, and I don’t disagree. However, it’s easy to say he should have just “made a better move.” Could have acquired a better pitcher than Paddack or Morton? Surely. But at what cost? And even if we had (at some unknown cost), to what benefit? Would it have been enough to have clinched a bye? I’m not so sure. Would we have made it to the ALCS or WS? Also hard to say, but probably not. Maybe Skubal should have performed “better” in his game 2 and game 5 ALDS starts. I think one problem we likely ran into is that to get a “better” pitcher in that trade market, Harris probably would have had to move Kevin, Max C, Bryce, Josue, or Melton. I know folks want to keep creating deals involving max anderson and hao-yu Lee, but you can’t make other teams like your mid-tier prospects more than another team’s mid-tier prospects. There is a long list of hypothetical moves ai think Harris should have made, but I’m not so sure that’s a list with any basis in reality. I’m glad he didn’t trade any of the big 5 to add a 1-2% increase in reaching a particular round of the postseason.

What about Finnegan? Logic also dictates that you have to consider who else would have had to have been in their position in those starts, and who would have had to backfill if they weren’t there. The point is that just because the team performed worse doesn’t mean he made the team worse, which is a point being made repeatedly in here. With the buffer they had, merely limiting the damage is still a positive relative to the baseline. Let’s not forget that they also struggled on each side of the all-star break, so it’s not like they had some well-oiled machine that he threw a wrench into by adding Charlie Morton.

I think you are selling him a bit short here. He did that, sure. He also took over an organization full of “Avila guys” that was pretty terrible. Meadows and Dingler were close to non-prospects. But your point is very good. Taking Avila’s chicken **** and making chicken salad is not just something that happens. But, beyond that, he added Vierling and McKinstry and Holton, each of whom played a big role in the 2024 success. Trey Sweeney was very good over his six week stint in 2024 and was a big reason they made the comeback they did, and we don’t have him if Scotty hadn’t signed Jack and flipped him.

Seems like if his moves at a certain point in time caused the team to become worse, they would have become worse at that point in time. Maybe his moves kept them from being 12-16 in August instead. Maybe not every high variance set of results needs to have a distinct cause assigned.

Scott Harris’s deadline moves were so bad last year that he caused them to lose 12 games in August. They won 16 games in August just to spite him.