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That idea must be buried so deep in that post that I re-read it and still can't find it in there. 😅

I did not say anything like "people with a conscious are rooting for the players".

My mistake, I thought you were talking about Torkelson and Greene.

Good thing, because we will definitely need them to get plate reps in Toledo.

It's too bad we don't have access to the other board anymore, but toward the end there I think I'd posted that had Miggy had not hit a wall after 2016, when he already had 78.2 offensive WAR, that had he had a gradual decline, he could have ended up close to the top 20 of all time (around Eddie Mathews and Mike Schmidt), but instead he's going to end up around 40th, which is where he is right now, around Al Kaline. Kaline was a great hitter, there can be no doubt, but when you start talking about THE greatest hitters in history, you will get around to Matthews and Schmidt fairly quickly, but you have to go a lot farther down the list to get to Kaline, and unfortunately, it's going to be that way for Miggy's legacy, too. Five years ago today, we wouldn't have thought that about MIggy.

That's true for guys like Torkelson and Greene, for sure. I wonder how many 40-man roster players who have played less than a year in the majors got at least $1 million in either draft or international signing bonus? Seems like it would take a lot of legwork to get that one.

OK, then I don't know what you were trying to put across.

That's probably true of established stars who have made millions already, although a high percentage of the 1,200 guys forced to stop work by the lockout aren't on that yacht. Some have yet to play their first big league game, and many others were big leaguers for only a few games or few weeks or something. It's kind of hard for those guys to sock away a lot of money on just a few weeks of $22,000 a week plus whatever their minor league salary is. People don't have to feel sorry for them, since they made the choice to do what they're doing for a living, just like people don't have to feel sorry for any of us if our employers lock us out. But it's not as though all these players are on vacation and living it up on easy street. Not true for a lot of them.

Isaac Paredes was up on the Tigers roster for 42 days, which works out to about $133,000 in salary. That's considerably less than $630,000 a year. So, I don't think this example is working as hard for you and you think it is.

We could say that technically, each side in every negotiation is out to get as much as possible. That doesn’t mean that each side’s position is equally reasonable for both parties coming into it.

Interesting. I would never have thought you would have taken that position.

Maybe he would have and maybe he wouldn’t have, but Stafford did ask to get out of Dodge, which I don’t see as much better.

I think it’s pretty clear by now that Baseball is not negotiating in good faith. First of all, they are hardly countering Players’ proposals at all. The CBT, which acts as a de facto salary cap and is a key force that has reduced overall player comp as a percentage of total revenues, is a clear example of this. It was $210 million in 2021. The owners previous offer was 214-214-214-216-220 over the next five seasons. The players countered with 245 to 260 over the next five years, in order to open up the ability for teams to spend to win. The owners countered yesterday with 214-214-216-218-222. If Baseball had met Players halfway they might have agreed and moved on to the next item. Instead Baseball gave mere inches and had to know it was going to be seen as the nearly nothing it was. Of course Players rejected it: it would create the same drag on player comp that it was in the last CBA. Secondly, the owners are using high-profile but low-impact changes as their proof to the fans that the players are being the obstructionists. Baseball is working toward making fans believe that the universal DH and expanded playoffs are going to end up in an economic windfall for players, when in reality such an increase would be concentrated with only a lucky few while the majority of their union base, the evolving majority of which are low-tenured minimum wagers, remain unaffected. Of course, Baseball has most of the leverage because most owners’ businesses can withstand a canceled season, since their team is such a small part of their empire, while the game is the sole source of revenue for most players. So Baseball doesn’t really have to meet Players halfway. I think most of us would like the see Players get a much fairer shake from the new CBA, but I think we’ve gotten to the point where we have to ask ourselves: would we be OK with seeing games canceled so players can be happier with their labor deal when they come back to the game? Or would we rather see games go on as scheduled, played by discontented players who felt forced to accept a suboptimal deal and continue to resent the game they play for the next several years? A lot of fans will smirk at the idea that “millionaires” could be such malcontents and end up siding with the owners on it, as planned. But this can be an ethical quandary for a conscientious fan who’d like to see the best of everything in the game accrue to all parties.

The players might go for that, but the owners goal is to give up as close to nothing as possible, so that maintains the divide between them.

If new car capacity is greater than the new car market.

At least you didn’t call them fascist.

Right, not his fault, he just happened to be the great white hope they know.

Seriously, tho, lol at your half-assed attempt at getting "liberals" here to change their opinion of the disastrous trucker strike, which has cost the economy some $50 million dollars in lost wages stemming from productivity losses, by trying to tell us that you have liberal friends and that every one of them supports those truckers. You need to do a lot better than that.

Stop! You're killing me!

Which is one of Monarrez's complaints, although I think there's been a lot of lovey dovey Stafford articles in the Detroit media. It's true his article dumps a bit harder on the Lions than Stafford, although Monarrez does basically hang a shift in the entire franchise's fortunes on his failure to spot Calvin over the middle in that 2015 playoff loss. And he clearly has contempt for Stafford's lippy wife, not completely unjustified I believe. I don't follow the Lions nearly as closely as I do the Tigers, but the difference in the way they ushered Calvin and Barry out the door versus the way they sent off Stafford with kisses and bouquets got by me completely, and is a fairly damning indictment of the Lions as far as I can tell.

Calors Monarrez at the Freep is not a fan.

They may not care about Ukrainians, but they do care about pissing off liberals who they believe want to defend Ukraine, and really, isn’t that the crux of that biscuit?

Gibson’s career has one silly, weird aspect to it: he had a career WAR of 38.4, with three seasons over 5.0 (including a 6.5), along with one league MVP award—yet he never made even a single All-Star team. Only two players in the All-Star era had a higher WAR without making a squad, and one of them was one of Gibson’s teammates on the 1993 Tigers! You know who I’m talking about …

Frank Beckmann was one of the voices of my young adulthood. His is one of those voices that is imprinted in my brain such that I can replay it pretty faithfully. His wife was quoted in the Detroit News, I think, yesterday, as saying he probably wouldn’t make it to Monday. That’s a very unusual thing to read in the media, that the relative of someone says they are going to die in the next couple of days. I can’t recall when I last saw something like that. Godspeed to him and his family.