Shelton

Baseball feels uniquely situated to rarely provide satisfaction to a certain subset of fans. If you win 90 games, that’s basically going 9-7 over every 16 game stretch if you tried to flatten it out. Talk radio will call that basically .500. Never getting into a rhythm. If you get off to a quick start and get 18 games above .500 after two months, then play .500, talk radio will complain about being a .500 team since June 1. Why didn’t they do more at the deadline? Start off slow and then come back? They won in spite of management. Imagine how they good they could have been if they hadn’t thrown away the first two months.

Yep. Call it what you want, but it is what it is.

Relative to the current 12-team system that includes conference championship games, a 24-team system without auto bids or conference championship games feels like an improvement. I would assume 8 byes and 16 teams playing in the first round at campus sites during the first week of December in place of conference championship games. A 9-24 matchup is likely to be more interesting than the current 5-12 (who is a true 20ish ranked team). A second set of campus site games in the round of 16, giving the top 8 seeds all a home game and a true 1-16 matchup feels ok. The toothpaste is out of the tube with the current system. Eliminating auto bids (which won’t eliminate the good group of five teams), and replacing meaningless conference championship games in the first week of December doesn’t seem so bad.

A few notes: Skubal as a 5+ service time service player is not unique. Nearly every player to reach their final year of arbitration is a 5+ service time player. This is not some secret provision that makes him special. Why is it a story? Because Boras told his media cronies and they ate it up. The reason it’s rarely cited is that it has minimal persuasive value. Slubal is in his third year of arbitration. Not his fourth. That David price contract was a fourth year arbitration award. In Price’s third year he made 14. He went 4-10-14-19.7 over his four arb years. Juan soto’s record of 31 was also a fourth year arbitration contract. Soto went 8-17-23-31. Corbin Burnes was a three year arb guy. Had won a Cy young. Was coming off multiple star appearances. Received cy young votes multiple years in a row. His three arb salaries were 6-10-15. Now he’s getting 31 from free agency. The suggestion from Skubal/boras is that his arbitration salaries should be 4-10-32. A 22 million dollar raise. A 200+% raise. Skubal is a fantastic pitcher Second best in baseball at the moment. But he’s not a unicorn. He’s not the first tier 1 SP or ace or whatever label you want to use. He’s not the first player coming off a cy young. There was one just last year named Tarik Skubal that got over a 100% raise from his prior 4 million dollar salary. For Skubal and Boras to prevail, they would need to convince an objective and trained neutral arbitration panel that Skubal is so unique that his fair series of arbitration salaries would be at least 4-10-26. Is there a chance? The panel is human so anything is possible. But they are also huge nerds and they are going to love Scotty Harris.

My belief is that Skubal and boras are operating outside of any reasonable bounds here, and they are doing it precisely to push their narrative and make it into a story. I think it’s a calculated risk that they believe will pay off down the line. We all know boras is very skilled at this type of thing. But I don’t think it’s necessarily going to work before a three person panel of arbitrators from the AAA (American Arbitration Association).

For someone not motivated to change people’s minds on this topic, you sure are spending a lot of words trying to change people’s minds, Chas!

Yeah, I think passan got a bit out over his skis when he focused on that wrinkle. It’s true for almost every final year arb guy after all.

Yeah, I don’t think the ability to use non-arb comps in the party’s remarks has as much of an effect as it would seem. It’s still a fact that Cole’s contract was a FA contract and Skenes is pre-arb. The ability to mention these non-arb deals doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be given substantial weight. It might move the needle slightly one way or the other, but the Skenes comp (or hunter brown for that matter, or any number of pre-FA cy young winners) are just as relevant. There is a lot of evidence out there, and I think the majority of it is going to point to a value below the 25.5MM midpoint needed for a tigers win.

It’s a fascinating case and I love it. What I don’t love is that the narrative machine is already humming. Tony Paul last night was like “the tigers think that Skubal is worth only 4 million more than Cobb.” I really like how we will have the Cobb contract to reference for years to come.

Doesn’t matter. It’s the value that they use in the comp.

I think this was a very aggressive and strategic number by the tigers, knowing that boras and Skubal would almost surely submit 32 to beat the Soto number. It might work.

I’m sure it been said before but that’s not how it works. Their job is to pick the salary that is closest to the “true” arbitration value. So if they look at all the comps, such as Price (pitcher; a decade ago) and Soto (position player; highest arb contract), etc, and they say Tarik should get 25 (a huge raise from his last salary and the highest ever for a pitcher), then they must choose the tigers 19 million contract (6 million difference) over skubal’s 32 million contract (7 million difference).

Or, they had a highly improbably series of results occur, and Harris’s moves actually helped them avoid the missing the playoffs entirely. See, there are facts, and then there hypotheticals that cannot be proven. The facts are that Harris made certain moves, the tigers finished with a certain number wins, and they finished behind Cleveland and ahead of Houston. The effect of moves made and not made is impossible to say, by you, me, or anyone else. It’s also a fact that the front office has more information than fans. That’s not really up for debate. That doesn’t mean that the front office can predict the future. I recall quite a few folks not being happy with the acquisition of Paddack, but I can’t say I remember anyone saying it was going to cost them their division lead.

It’s a fine line between defending a move and supporting a move. But regardless, I think it’s important to be careful with hindsight, and it’s also important to avoid complaining about hypothetical deals that were not made. Anyway, I doubt there were May people that necessarily supported the move for Cobb, Paddack, or Morton. However, none of these moves cost them much of anything. In that regard, I think you can defend them. It’s easy to point to Cobb and the 15 million, but more than anything this illustrates to me that there isn’t a hard budget or cost cap imposed by ownership. The deadline trades further illustrate this, in view of all of the dead money taken on in these deals. With specific reference to Cobb now, this was an early signing that was clearly made to bring in a guy to compete for a 5th SP spot and provide some bulk inning beyond that. Jack Flaherty was not yet signed and was unlikely to be signed. Had Jack been under contract, I doubt Cobb or another guy like him would have been signed. This was a minor deal and they didn’t allow it to stop them from adding Flaherty. This is the defense of this move, while not necessarily supporting it. Paddack and Morton are different. I think they were mostly interested in just making it to the end of the season and they needed innings. Neither were going to pitch in the playoffs. The cost was nothing. The alternatives would not have been better. There were better pitchers available of course, but without knowing what the demand was, it’s very difficult to say with any certainty whether another deal would have been preferable. That said, I do think they expected more from paddack. I don’t think they expected more than a #5 starter, but they probably hoped he would be able to stick in the rotation. Morton was simply added to eat up some innings. So, it’s fair to say the Paddack deal was a mistake. But I also think it is defensible.

Yes, lunatics.

Seems like most folks feel the team could do even just a little bit better if only the manager or GM used this one neat trick. I wish it were possible to truly get a feel for how tigers fans feel relative to fans of other teams. Because to me, it sure seems like the vast majority of tigers fans are ****ing lunatics. And I don’t feel like it’s just a matter of proximity bias, because I don’t get the same sense from Lions fans, M fans, or Wings fans. The Pistons only have 13 fans, but for the most part seem pretty chill.

I wonder what else Benetti would do under this potential NBC deal. Would he end up in a Tirico-light gig, working the Sunday night games and occasional other NBC-related broadcasts? They have NBA now. I assume this would mean the end of his NFL and college football duties that he did for Fox. Seems like the NBC stuff might fit better and have less overlap than what he currently has via FOX.

Super weird biff poggi appreciation. I find it kind of gross for folks to claim they knew all along how rotten everything was. It’s fine that he is being forthright during his mandated news conferences I guess. But he also doesn’t need to go on garbage podcasts and talk ****. Anyway, good riddance, biff. And good riddance to everyone else.

Our beat writers and bloggers might be the worst in the majors. I can’t think of a single one that is even remotely good. For the record, Stavenhagen sucks as much as the rest. He’s just so damn vanilla it’s hard to muster up sufficient vitriol for it to register. Petzold may have exceeded McCosky in my hack index. Probably because he continued to associate with sportz for as long as he did, and now he’s a callow facsimile of his mentor.

The teams are below it because they do the necessary accounting and restructuring to make the numbers add up to a number that is below the cap. Then the next year the cap goes up againand everyone restructures again to the extent necessary and uses other creative accounting and, surprise, they all end up under the cap. The NFL cap is not a hard cap. There are numerous ways to get around it. It’s not stopping dynastic teams from staying together and getting their players paid. All that said, I firmly believe that MLB teams are not forced to allow guys to walk or to trade them due to an inability to pay them. I think owners like to make as much money as possible, and they don’t want to take money from their bottom line to pay for 30 year old free agents that might provide a couple marginal wins.

Nah, the difference is that from a competitive standpoint it typically doesn’t pay to sign baseball stars on the downside of their career, which is not the same as keeping your franchise QB. This conversation arose out of the cap discussion. The NFL cap is fake. The baseball luxury tax cap is also fake. The teams operating below the tax threshold are also more than flush with cash and could spend if it made sense. NFL teams let guys walk, too. We can agree to disagree here, but I think in all but a few self-inflicted cases the decisions to let players leave in baseball is not due to an inability to pay them and still make loads of money. And the next time an NFL team has to let a player walk due to cap concerns will be a first.

I don’t believe this is objectively true. Who are the most importantly players that were not able to be signed by their team? The Angels could have signed Shohei. They did sign Trout. The tigers can sign Skubal. They did sign Cabrera and Verlander. The padres/nationals/yankees could have signed Soto. They did sign tatis, and even cronineworth (lol). The brewers could have signed Burnes. The cubs could sign Tucker. The Astros could have, too. Even the rays and A’s could do so if they weren’t content to continue sucking off the teat of public money and revenue sharing. Even the pirates will be able to sign skenes if they choose to. Whether a team chooses to or not is a different question. Similarly, whether a player himself chooses to stay or decides to move to the coast is a different question. Baseball does seem weirdly unique in that their executives seem hell bent on winning some sort of efficiency challenge or playing the game on hard mode. Scott Harris could flip the switch to easy mode and just sign Alex Bergman and be done with the offseason and starting printing the mobile-only digital playoff tickets. But that might cut into wenceel’s playing time. At any rate, its extremely hard to compare because the two leagues share very little in common.

Not sure where the discussion is currently but just want to go on the record that Al Avila deserves basically zero credit for anything good that has happened to the tigers over the past few years. He’s terrible and no amount of 3 WAR seasons from Riley Greene is going to change that.

I’m not sure the NFL cap actually does anything

Yeah, I know. We all know. And I’m saying trading Skubal would be the most cowardly move a Detroit GM has ever made and nothing will matter after doing so. Eat Arby’s.