Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1327: Marginal Wince

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about good and bad news for much-traveled pitcher Oliver Drake, the Dodgers’ signing of A.J. Pollock and the team’s perplexing offseason plan and lack of NL West competition, the Cubs’ signing of Brad Brach, and a report about the 10-day DL and the rules about optioning players to the […]

What were the words I meant to say before she left When I could see her breath lead where she was going to Maybe I should just let it be And maybe it will all come back to me. Sing O January, O January. Hello and welcome to episode 1327 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I feel like I actually messed that up.

I don't know what's in my head now. I think it was fine. It's probably fine. You get the point. Effectively Wild, here we are. Hi, Ben. How are you? I'm doing okay.

Hi. So we're going to be joined later in this episode. I think all of our episodes, for the most part, are guest episodes now, except for when we say we're going to do emails, and we actually do do emails but today we'll be joined by neil demas a long time writer for uh about the business of baseball you might be familiar with the book field of schemes which has now been out for this is going on its 21st year of publication so that is ridiculous but we're going to be talking to him about you know owners baseball finance all the things that everybody's talking about right now in the absence of bryce harper and manny machado knows he wrote

an article at deadspin on january 14th that talked about how there is a much simpler explanation for what's going on than just owner collusion so we're gonna have a fun conversation with him for about 48 minutes but before we get to that i will point out to you ben that williams estudio struck out one time in game two of the championship in Venezuela, and we can talk about something else now. Yeah, well, we also have news about our other player we talk about a lot more than everyone else talks about, Oliver

Drake. I don't know whether this is good news or bad news for Drake. It's mixed news, but he is not on the move for once, so Oliver Drake cleared waivers. He was, remember, designated for assignment by the Rays last week for the second time this offseason. But this time he passed their waivers and he accepted an outright assignment to AAA. So on the plus side, he is still in the Rays organization.

He does not have to go elsewhere. On the downside, he is in a now and will probably start the season in the minors if he starts the season with the race it's really too soon to count on that happening but i don't know pluses and minuses yeah it's probably everyone is probably relieved because it's sort of like oliver drake was given a demotion but at least there's stability in it so i would imagine he's his mentality probably hasn't changed he figures he was going to have to go to camp and pitch well enough to open some eyes regardless because if not he was just going to get designated for assignment again and you know he was probably going to pass

this point of the winter teams want their rosters pretty sad and even it had the rays waited until the end of spring training and then decided well we were going to designate him for assignment anyway he would have cleared waivers then because everybody designates a lot of players for assignment at the end of spring training. There's just a lot of players available. So it's nice that maybe now after an offseason of uncertainty, Oliver Drake has a pretty good idea where he will be reporting to for spring training. So even though he probably hasn't made a move yet, probably been hanging out in massachusetts for the entirety of the winter he can at least now start to plan and he's going to go to what is it port charlotte port charlotte i think is what it is that's where tampa big place yeah well so there's also some

news about some really notable players not just notable on this podcast and before we talk to neil about teams not spending we can talk about a couple players they spent on at least some amount. So the headline news is that the Dodgers signed AJ Pollock, one of the top free agents available. This comes just two days after my colleague Zach Cram wrote an article for the Ringer with the scathing headline, there's no excuse for the Dodgers disappointing offseason. So obviously the Dodgers read that and thought, oh boy, we better do something to improve our disappointing offseason. And then they went and signed AJ Pollock for $55 million from 2019 to 2022. That is four years, but then there's also a player option that would take it to $5 million more with a buyout. So it's really, I suppose, $60 million over four years,

which I guess is maybe a little less than was forecasted for him at the start of the offseason. I don't recall, but not by as dramatic an amount as we have seen lately. So I think there are a couple things we could talk about here. A, what does it tell us about the Dodgers' plan? Because the Dodgers' disappointingseason had in fact been pretty Perplexing up to this point In that I guess it still is

Because they traded Yasiel Puig And then they signed AJ Pollock Which seems like sort of a lateral move And everyone was wondering if they would sign Bryce Harper obviously they didn't do that They haven't gone to get Corey Kluber or some other starter They've been connected to. So

that's one question. What does this say about the Dodgers offseason? And second question is just how good is AJ Pollock? Because he has been very good at times and he has also been hurt a lot. I would think that there is, there's one excuse for the Dodgers quiet offseason, or I guess I should say two. The second excuse being we'll wait until the offseason is over because there's still a lot of stuff that has to be done. But the other excuse is that the dodgers are not facing pressure from behind and now i understand that of course last year they won only one more game than the rockies did but you know they also had a better run differential than the rockies by 159 the dodgers were very clearly better team than the rockies last season even though they just eked out the

division title the diamondbacks have gotten worse. They traded Paul Goldschmidt. The Padres aren't ready yet. The Giants aren't very good. The Dodgers came into the offseason in a situation where, yeah, they lost a few players, but they were also getting back Corey Seager, who's one of the best players in baseball. And the Rockies are fine,

but I don't think a whole lot of people look at the Rockies and think that team is going to push the Dodgers. So the Dodgers came into the offseason in a situation kind of similar to the Indians, who, you know, the Twins are fine and they've gotten a little better in the offseason, but I don't think anyone would look at the Twins and think that team is going to push the Indians from second place and challenge for first. And so the Dodgers just haven't been incentivized very strongly to try to get better, which I know sounds ridiculous because, you know, they're not just trying to win their division, they're trying to win

a World Series. But I think the Dodgers would know better than anyone that winning a World Series requires a lot of luck, requires a lot of things to go right. You can only do so much to strengthen your standing to win a World Series before the season begins. And so, if anything, I'm not saying that it's good that they were so inactive, but the people should be thankful that they at least signed AJ Pollock because they just were not incentivized to do something big. And AJ Pollock is now signed. It won't say

this way, but he signed the biggest contract given to a position player of the offseason so far. Yeah, that's right. Probably not for long, but still. And yeah, you're right. The other teams behind the Dodgers, I mean, they haven't done very much this offseason either. The Rockies haven't really made major moves. They signed Daniel Murphy, but they also lost a couple of free agents like LeMahieu and Adovino. And then the Diamondbacks, of course, traded Paul Goldschmidt, which maybe will benefit

them in the long run, but probably not for 2019. So yeah, not a lot of pressure there. But what do you think about the idea that they traded Puig for a player who is just sort of equivalent, but is also making a good deal of money and maybe is less dependable in certain ways? I don't know. Is this an upgrade over Puig? Is there an advantage to having Pollock on this contract as opposed to Puig on a shorter term deal? Well, even independent of whatever consideration there are of having someone like Yasiel Puig or someone who is specifically Yasiel Puig on the active roster, I think we all understand that Puig has had his difficulties with Los Angeles.

Maybe they were just over having to handle him and and like put up with with his personality i don't know it could be the alceo puig became incredibly popular and easy to be around even independent of all of those considerations not only was puig going into his walk here and pollock is the dodgers now for at least the next four years but when they traded puig they also got two prospects they were able to bolster their farm system which isn't a is not a ton they didn't get like their top two new prospects in the farm system or anything, but they got two guys who were relatively high. They were within the Reds' top 15 prospects.

And so even if they did make a lateral move in losing Puig and adding Pollock, that's not a lateral move because they signed an equivalent at least player and added to the farm system, which is, of course, what the Dodgers want to do to do that's just how you churn that is how you maintain a pretty good farm system so i don't know if they traded puig because they wanted to clear all the money and that was just part of it if they traded him for the prospect or if they traded him because they just ran out of patience and putting up with yasiel puig but they're not in a worse position and below the major league roster they're in better shape now, and I know no one cares about this except the teams themselves, but as Jeff Passan pointed out, for luxury tax purposes, this deal is treated as a five-year, $60 million one. So that means that it's only a $12 million a year hit for the luxury tax of the Dodgers.

Again, nobody cares except for the Dodgers themselves, but they care about it quite a bit. So in that sense, it's a good deal for Pollock. And as Jeff also pointed out, the Diamondbacks get an extra pick here because this deal was for more than $50 million. So they get a comp pick in the coming draft, and they have the most draft dollars in 2019. They also have a lot of early picks, so this is an opportunity for them to get better quickly. You could question why they let Pollock walk, and they traded Goldschmidt, and they lost Corbin. I mean, they're going to be a lot worse, presumably, because of those subtractions. But they also get these picks, and they got a lot back for Goldschmidt.

So you can sort of see what they're doing and their team that had spent quite a bit in recent years as well. So how good is Pollock? You just wrote about him. So I assume you've considered this question more than I have. We've seen him be excellent, I guess, in the same year that Bryce Harper was excellent, but it's been a while since then. He's good. He's not. When you look at 2015 AJ Pollock, when he was very, very good, and versus 2018 AJ Pollock, of course, he's now four years older. But his exit velocity hasn't really dropped at all.

He strikes out more often, but he also hits the ball in the air more. So his contact was worse, but his quality of contact was better in 2018 he's a little bit slower like they're all the just incremental little negatives so he's not quite as good as he was in 2015 but in terms of the skill set it's mostly intact he's still a good outfield defender he was according to stat casts outs above average last season he was plus six outs in roughly two-thirds of a year and so when AJ Pollock is healthy he's still good he's probably a three or four win player above a above replacement but of course when you talk about AJ Pollock or anyone like that fans will will dunk all over the reporters by saying oh yeah sure he's good but he's gonna be in the DL like he's always going to be injured you can't call count on AJ

Pollock to be in the lineup which it's true the last three years he's averaged 79 games a season, which is not very many. There's more than twice as many games in a baseball season, in case you don't know as listeners. But you look at the things that have sidelined A.J. Pollock. And in 2017, he strained a groin. And, you know, a strained groin, that could be a recurring thing. Maybe he wasn't in good enough shape. I don't know. Strained groin is something that raised the eyebrow.

But in 2016, he missed almost the entire season because he fractured his elbow sliding. And in 2018, he hit the disabled list because he broke his thumb trying to make a diving catch. I know maybe he has like weaker bones or something than other players, but that seems like a hell of a leap. He's missed significant time in the past eight years or nine years of his career because of fractures. He's fractured his elbow twice, got a fractured hand from hit by pitch, and he's fractured his thumb diving. He's had a hit by pitch fracture, two diving fractures, and a sliding fracture.

The only other real injury in there was that strained groin, which that's just a one-off. So I look at AJ Pollock and say, yeah, to this point, he has been injury prone. I do not think that he is an injury prone person. So that is of less concern to me than you'd think just based on his games played all right anything else on Pollock or the Dodgers well I guess almost immediately

after the Dodgers signed Pollock there was talk that they're in pursuit of JT Real Bodo and you could say that maybe the Dodgers offseason is starting to come together now because when by signing Pollock the Dodgers have threatened now the playing time of either Jack Peterson or Alex Verdugo if not both and so there is now excess they could make another move there they've been linked to Real Muda for a while they could do that if you really wanted to go crazy and I don't think this is true but I will say that even though they signed Pollock it seems to take them out of the running for Bryce Harper they could still do the Bryce Harper thing if they wanted you could trade just hear me out.

I know this is rosturbation. They could trade Jock Peterson for whatever they're going to trade him for. He's not that good of a player. He's got two years left of team control. And, you know, maybe they package Verdugo to go get JT Real Moto. And, yeah, that would push the Dodgers past the luxury tax or the competitive balance tax. But I don't know why the Dodgers care so much about the competitive balance tax anyway. It's a franchise that's valued at $3 dollars and then you have pollock and center you have harper in right field you have rail moto at catcher all

of a sudden you have a super team you have one of the best teams in recent memory and that's within the dodgers capability it would just require them to actually make the investment in bryce harper if they decided that's something they were going to do, because they could get Real Muto without too much trouble. They have the resources, but also Harper is not entirely out of play here. Got to keep pace with the Giants who just added Drew Pomerantz. Really pushing the Dodgers there. So yeah, the only other big signing, well, it's not really a big signing, is the Cubs adding Brad Brock.

That's what you're bringing up? sorry i don't know this is it's been a whole thing with the cubs this offseason about what they can and can't afford and if they're gonna sign a reliever they have to move money and they had to pick up the cole hamels option and all this stuff about money and ownership in this conversation we're all tired of but it certainly did not take much money to sign Brad Brock, who signed for one year and $3 million. And Brock was really good for the Orioles for about four years or so, and then was not so great, at least in the first half of 2018. But then he looked better down the stretch with the Braves.

So, you know know he's pretty good probably and the Cubs could use a little bullpen help so there you go I don't know how much there is to say about Brad Brock these days and don't forget that Hunter Strickland signed with the Mariners as long as we're talking about tiny contracts signed by players whose names people know he is going to a team Jeff Passan had reported think on on wednesday that we were about to see just like a string of one year reliever contracts as people as it seems just scoured what was left on the market so that's what we're seeing and as is the case with any reliever who's been in the major leagues recently it's pretty easy to see a case of how that reliever could be good and it's pretty

easy to not so like brad brock is a little bit like looking at drew pomeran's right you think well 2017 good players 2018 yeah but it's how much it's only one year ago so yeah i mean the cubs need some bullpen help especially because brandon morrow i think is is going to miss the first month of the season yeah that's what i got i can't go at length on uh on brad brock yeah well in dodgers adjacent news there was a report from the AP that Major League Baseball has about taking advantage of the 10-day DL and maybe also rotating relievers in at the back of the bullpen, just making the 10-day DL kind of a place to give guys a breather as much as it is an actual spot for injured players. So this has not actually happened.

It's just a proposal that, according to an anonymous source, MLB made. I don't know what to make of this. It's hard for me to tell whether the 10-day DL has been a net negative for baseball. As this article mentioned, the number of DL placements has increased from 563 in 2016 to 702 in 2017, and then again to 737 last year, which sounds bad, and yet on the other hand, that's sort of the 10-day DL working as designed to a certain extent, because you would think that you would put more guys on the DL if they only have to miss 10 days instead of 15 days, and I'm sure there are cases where it has been good and helpful for teams to be able to DL players who are

hurt enough not to play for that period of time, but not so hurt that you would want to put them on the 15-day DL and then you don't have to carry a useless player for a certain stretch of time. So I don't know. It's hard for me to assess. I think that some teams probably have abused this and have just put guys on who aren't hurt. On the other hand, it's kind of hard to tell like when pitchers aren't hurt or are hurt because they're kind of always hurt or actively hurting

themselves and so if you give them some time off in the middle of the season maybe it helps prevent an injury even if they're not actively suffering from one now the, the option time, increasing that from 10 days to 15 days, that sounds like a positive on the surface, just because you would have fewer guys on that AAA carousel where they're just bouncing back and forth and back and forth. And we all kind of find that annoying because you never know who's actually on teams anymore. And there are just hundreds of relievers who are all faceless and anonymous. So maybe that would curb that behavior to a certain extent. Yeah, when I read the article, I briefly considered trying to think through all the implications. And then when, I mean, it's already a little difficult because it's complex.

There are a lot of competing influences here. But then when I saw that it was just a proposal and nothing that's been agreed to, I thought, I can put this off. I don't need to consider and i mean it would also in a large sense especially with the dlb going back to where we were just uh just a few years ago but i think the the explanation in the article is that this is a means by which baseball is trying to increase offense and i guess they want to increase offense by having their pitchers be less fresh is the only way, it's the only explanation I can come up with. Or fewer relievers per game because you don't have as many guys to burn. You know you can't just bring up a guy from AAA the next day,

so maybe you leave a guy in a little longer instead of bringing in a fresh guy who's also throwing 100. I do wonder how much having five extra days that you have to spend in the minors is going to matter, especially because this isn't going to end DL manipulation. Players are still going to hit the DL when they're not really hurt. It's just another five days as opposed to just 10. So it's still going to happen. And I don't know, teams tend to have a number of relievers who have options who just kind of are on the shuttle.

So you can still kind of cycle through them. But again, we don't have great data for this every team behaves differently and this is we talked a lot the other day about how uh the model for the incentive structure for journalism is broken right now but like this is just not something that one would be strongly incentivized to research uh like there's every reason for for teams in the league to know what's going on but from my perspective i'm not going to put in the work i'm not going to try to figure out exactly what this would do how things would change people aren't interested enough so i wish that i had quick answers that i could just deliver rapid fire right now but i don't and i know that i'm not going to

look them up so maybe after this is published people in baseball will reach out and tell us the answers and then we could say those anonymously but for now i don't know it's a proposal it's one of several proposals the pitch clock is going to be a proposal again and somewhere by the what is it eve of or sunset of spring training i don't know when these things have to be finalized but somewhere in the next couple months we will have an idea of what's going to be different, what's actually going to be Different in 2019 Alright, well I think we need Baseball to come back or the season Preview series to start because It seems like we're talking about baseball

Economics every day, seems like We all are and yet we have Almost three years to go until The CPA is expired So buckle in and get Used to it, I guess. So we will take a quick break and we will be right back with Neil DeMoss to talk about why it may be rational

for teams not to spend and why that's probably bad for baseball. And I guess I missed my opportunity to have some wordplay. We were talking about Brad Brock and I could have talked about someone who had a bad back. And that was Carlos Correa,

who said that his back is in, quote, perfect condition. Perfect condition. If you want to see a sexy athletic back, there is no greater back in the world than that belonging to Carlos Correa, whose back gave out on him just last season. All right. Well, we will be right back.

We're in it for the money. We're in it for the money. We're in it for the money. We're in it for the money. We're in it for the money. We've been talking a lot, surprisingly a lot, maybe not surprisingly a lot, about owners and team finances and the slow market. This seems to be the thing that we're doing now in January. And just the other week, I came across an article I was close to the Deadspin titled Baseball Doesn't Need Collusion to Turn Off the Hot Stove.

And that article was written by Neil DeMoss, who asked to be introduced as the leader of the free universe, but also he's a writer for Deadspin. Other sites, he's the co-author of the book Field of Schemes about ballpark construction. Neil, hello, How are you doing? I'm fine. I'm busy with all this free universe stuff, but I figured I'd take time for you guys. The free universe isn't shut down?

Well, the free universe is actually really small right now because the unfree universe has taken over most of it, so it's not as much work as it used to be. So let's talk collusion or the absence thereof. Collusion, of course, is to turn into something of a buzzword over the past 12 to 14 months. And you lay out an argument for why you think that there's a much simpler explanation. But I guess let's just start with that. What do you think is the much simpler explanation for why the baseball market is acting as it is, as opposed to all the owners acting in concert because they don't want to pay anybody any money? All right. So the simpler explanation is, as simple explanations often are, somewhat complicated.

But I tried to, in the article, talk readers through it, and I think I can do it pretty quickly here. Basically, there are two reasons why team owners spend money, right? Or even two reasons why team owners own teams in the first place. Two reasons why team owners own teams in the first place. One is to get rings, and the other is to earn money, right? To make a profit. So, you know, signing players to win games and get rings is always going to be one incentive.

But at the same time, owners are always going to have in the back of their heads, if I'm going to drop $30 million a year on this guy, right, I should at least be getting something back in terms of new revenues somewhat equivalent to that, right? Or at least more if I'm spending $30 million on Bryce Harper than if I spend, you know, $3 million or $1 million on some other guy who hasn't hit arbitration yet. So what's changed in recent years is that that incentive, the amount of new revenue that you get from having a good player, from winning more games, has gone down, right? So you've had a couple things. Revenue sharing has increased. The amount of money that goes through the central fund that is shared by all teams like, you know, internet streaming revenue, things like that has gone up.

And the upshot is that you just, you know, from signing a player, you don't earn as much new money as you might have 20 years ago. You're still earning plenty of money overall, but it's checks that you're getting one way or another. It doesn't matter whether or not you have good players and win or win games so we've kind of arrived at this point where the ideal scenario for a team owner if you want to earn money is to be the marlins right is to spend absolutely nothing and just wait as the revenue sharing checks come in and the central fund money comes in and you know you're not going to win any games you're not going to sell any tickets but in terms of maximizing your profits you're going to do way better than if you go out there and sign a whole bunch of players and especially way better than if you sign a whole bunch of

players and then wind up losing in the first round of the postseason which is what happens with most teams yeah and i was on hang up and Listen earlier this week, and I was making a similar sort of argument. And Josh Levine, one of the hosts said, well, wait a minute, if everyone is just making money hand over fist, and doesn't that mean that owners should be spending on players because owners want to win and they want to get that attention and acclaim in their local markets and be the hero of the city and all of that. Is there anything to that or is it purely just it's a business and these are business owners and for the most part, they're just not going to spend unless they're making money?

Yeah, I mean it's nice to think that if you're rolling in dough, you should be spending in order to share some of that with your workers. But, you know, as we've seen from history, that doesn't always work that way, right? You can be making tons and tons of money as a robber baron running coal mines, but if the way to make even more tons of money is to pay your coal miners the absolute minimum possible and keep all the profits to yourself, of course you're going to do that. And, you know, it's why we ended up with unions in the first place was because the owners of businesses do not necessarily have an incentive to take all their windfall profits and share it with their workers. So I think that's what we're seeing here now.

And I think, you know, we're definitely going to see this raised again in the next CBA talks for 2021. But for the interim, again, you do have this disconnect between the league is rolling in dough, but it's the kind of dough that nobody particularly has incentive to spend. I would say that we've seen this before, and the model that we've seen this before is called football, right? Where also most of the money is shared, and it doesn't matter a huge amount whether or not, for your revenues, whether or not your team does well. And that combined with a league where the value of a valuable player

isn't all that high because for various reasons, including that careers are pretty short, it's really enabled the owners to hold the line on salaries in football to a degree that they never could in baseball. And baseball's heading a little bit in that direction. It's not anywhere near there yet, but it's headed that way. So if you have teams whose revenues are less connected to attendance than ever before, and therefore less connected to winning than ever before, one of the realities is if every single team tried as hard as possible, or if every single team tried at 50% of what was possible, there would be the same number of wins to go around.

There would still be a championship. There would still be playoffs and good teams and bad teams, etc. But if revenues are just less tied to actual success on the field, is there a way to incentivize owners through any means to put more into the product? Or what is the union to do? I mean, well, there's a couple things, right? One is incentivizing particular owners, right? Because like you said, somebody is going to win the World Series every year. And if your goal is to make sure that every team is actually trying to win the World Series, then that's really more an issue of, you know, trying to avoid this team's, I don't want to say tanking, but, you know, sort of like taking turns and saying like, oh, you know, there's other teams in our division that are better than us. We'll just sit it out the next couple of years and we'll

try and win once it's our turn, which is, you know, doesn't make for a great sports excitement. In terms of what the union can do to incentivize owners to just, you know, spend more on salaries. Yeah. There's a bunch of things that they can do. I mean, you could tweak revenue sharing to get it to the point where, you know, the Yankees are keeping more of their money again, which has the upside that if the Yankees are keeping more of their money, they're way more likely to want to spend it on players because, you know, they're going to keep the revenue that they make. But on the other hand, if the Yankees are keeping more of their money, then we're back

in that same area we were 20, 30 years ago, where the Yankees are, youes are able to outspend all the other teams, whether it's Royals or whoever. The other thing you can do, which I've seen suggested, is change the sort of two or three tier salary structure we have right now, right? Where one of the things that team owners are taking advantage of is to be able to say, you know what, if we've got a free agent here who's 31, 32 years old, he's asking for a lot of money, we can get 80, 90% of that performance with some guy who is, you know, either arbitration eligible or not even arbitration eligible. We'll take a spin on that because, you know, again, even if it's not as sure a thing, it's going to be just so much cheaper. And that's the deal, you know, the bargain that the players agreed to was we're going to restrict free agency to players over six years of service time.

And everybody else gets paid a lower rate. And, you know, for pre-armed players, a way lower rate. And I think the owners and the GMs are learning how to exploit that. And I think the owners and the GMs are learning how to exploit that. And, you know, if I were advising the union, I would certainly say to them, man, the first thing you got to do is figure out a way to increase salaries for the younger players, right? Because right now, a lot of teams are really taking the strategy of forget anybody, you know, who's been in the league for more than six years.

You know, we'll just keep player service time down, keeping the Myers as long as we can, pay them as little as possible for six years, and then dump them and get somebody else younger. And obviously, Tony Clark has taken a lot of blame because all of this has kind of come to a head on his watch. But do you think that's fair? Did he do things or fail to do things that have contributed to this or caused this? Or did he kind of inherit a ticking time bomb that already had this possibility for exploitation built in, but teams were just not taking advantage of it? I think it's a little of both. I think that clearly a lot of this, you know, the changes in revenue sharing and the luxury tax and things like that go back way before Tony Clark's time as

head of the Players Association. On the other hand, there have been CBA renegotiations, you know, under, you know, under Clark that where it hasn't been addressed. And I think it's been very easy for the union and for the owners for that matter, to kind of say, well, you know, rising tide is lifting all boats and everybody's making lots of money and salaries keep going up and profits keep going up. So, you know, let's not shake things up too much. Everybody seems happy. And now we're starting to see the point where, you know, revenues are still expanding, but they may not be expanding forever.

You know, the cable bubble is not going to keep expanding forever. And, you know, you're not going to reinvent the Internet all of a sudden again and suddenly have all that streaming revenue, you know, come in on top of itself. So I think that, you know, and the owners and the GMs have gotten smarter. So I think that now is the point at which the players are suddenly sort of realizing, oh, geez, you know, maybe we should have paid attention to this, you know, five or 10 or 20 years ago instead of waiting until, you know, it started coming back to bite us. So speaking of whether or not revenues are going to continue to go up, one of the possible problems that we're seeing in the market right now is that you could have a team that might

say, okay, if we go sign Bryce Harper, maybe now we're going to be losing $25 or $30 million in a year. But even if a team is losing $25 or $30 million in a year, we are still seeing the actual franchise values of those teams going up independent of whatever their operating losses are in a given season. So what would you say to an owner or some group of owners who point to, here's what our loss is year over year, if the franchise value is still seemingly forever on the rise. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I don't think any teams are losing $25, $30 million a year. Or if some do occasionally one year, it's not a consistent thing.

I think, you know, the vast majority of teams are turning an operating profit, even before talking about, you know, the whole value of the franchise going up and the fact that, you know, even if you were to lose money year after year, you would probably make it back as soon as you sell the team just because, you know, you're owning such a rare commodity. But, you know, so I think that that as an argument, oh, you know, we're losing money or not making very much money is kind of specious. But at the same time, you know, I'm not going to tell owners you guys would make more money by spending $25, $30 million on this player because you're not going to, right? It's almost just a moral argument on two levels, right? on two levels, right? One is you owe it to your players if you're getting all these windfall profits to share a little bit of it with them

instead of low-balling them on contracts. And the other would be you owe it to your fans, right? You're not just running a widget factory here. You're running a baseball team. And supposedly the reason you got into this is to try and win games for your fans. And it's kind of obnoxious to go out there and say, well, you know, come out and buy tickets to our team. You know, we're going to try and, you know, bring you a championship.

And then when it's time to actually spend money to try and buy a championship, say, well, you know, now it's a business. So, you know, you can't really blame us for not going out and getting a center fielder for you. And in your Deadspin piece, you link to an article that you had written on the subject of marginal wins and marginal dollars back in 2007. And I know this is something that Nate Silver used to write about too at BP and maybe Doug Pappas. And this was something that was covered at sabermetric sites like, hey, there is a win curve and here's where it makes sense to spend and here's where it doesn't make sense to, and here's where you're actually making money for the money that you're spending. So all of this was sort of pointed out on sabermetric sites before teams really started to act on it. So do you think there is a cause and effect relationship there, just in the same way that teams have taken the lead from those sites when it comes to evaluating players and have hired lots of analysts from those sites to evaluate players for them, that there is a similar learning that has gone on in the economic realm? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, having teams having more information, right, enables them to value players more accurately, both in terms of how many games they're going to win for them, but also in terms of how much income they're going to generate for them. And, you know, on the one hand, that is a

perfectly good and rational thing. And, you know, you want businesses to have good information in terms of how to run their day-to-day business operations. But on the other hand, it also gives the owners more leverage over the players, right? Because they know how to maximize their profits and minimize their costs. You know, it's a little bit like looking at something like outsourcing or offshoring, right? In businesses overall, right? The ability to have this global economy where you can figure out, you know, who, how to get, you know, your workers for the least possible price and for the most value is on the one hand, you know, a rational business plan. But the effect of it is you wind up, you know, seeing the, the owners have a lot more leverage over, over the workers. And,, traditionally, the way that workers get leverage back when owners, whether it's

of baseball teams or of telemarketing companies, is to go out there and say, OK, well, we're going to use our collective power to say, you can't play us off against each other, right? You can't say, we have somebody cheaper in Bangalore to do the job, or alternatively, you know, we have a cheaper guy in AAA to do the job, so therefore, you know, we're not going to pay you. And I think that's what the union's job is at this point, is to say, okay, fine, great, you got us. You know, you figured out a way to, again, collude without colluding, right? To have a systematic effect that reduces salaries without having to sit there and everybody call each other and say, hey, I won't bid on your players if you

don't bid on mine. So fine, you won this round, but our job as a union is to make sure that we get a fair cut of the money that's coming into this industry. And ultimately, without us, collectively, you're not going to have any product to sell. So I think that's the conversation that is going to and needs to happen going into the next CBA. And it's going to be a tough one, you know, because I think the owners, rightly so, are going to say, hey, you guys agreed to this. And, you know, it's not like we're trying, you know, we're sitting and conniving to try and figure out how to cheat you out of money. This is just the system we all agreed to. And why are you suddenly saying it's not working? Going back to one question, because I probably should have asked

to follow up to what I brought up. Of course, we've seen franchise values skyrocket. I don't know if there's a clear example. You look at the Dodgers bought in 2004 for $371 million. Then they were bought in 2012 for $2 billion. They're currently, I think, valued by Forbes at a little above $3 billion, maybe exactly $3 billion. So we have seen over the past 10, 15, 20 years, these franchise values just take off. But as you said, you know, you can't reinvent the internet and there exists the cable bubble and all those other considerations. So do you foresee these increases slowing down? It's tough to say with sale prices, because with revenues, I think I could definitely

predict that the revenue increases are going to start to slow down. The problem with sale prices is that so much of it has to do not just with how much revenue your team is bringing in, but with supply and demand. And the supply of pro sports teams is not significantly going up, unless you count soccer, in which case it's going up like crazy. But if you don't want to own a soccer team, you want to own something in the traditional big four sports leagues. There are only so many teams out there. And the demand is going up tremendously, because I don't know if you guys have noticed, but we have a lot more billionaires in this country than we used to. And outside this country who are interested in owning US sports teams. So a lot of the increase in team franchise value has to do with the fact that there are a lot of people out there with

money to burn who want to be sports team owners and, you know, they're willing to pay whatever is necessary. So I don't know if that's going to change. You know, that's going to have a lot more to do with how the global economy goes and how sort of global and U.S. inequality rates change. You know, ask me if, you know, let's talk again once we figure out whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to be president in another 12 years. And maybe then we'll have a better sense of what's going to happen to franchise values. Yeah. Well, I've seen the suggestion from some people that if the smart thing is to zig when everyone else zags and all the other owners are saying that I'm not going to spend because of marginal revenue in dollars

and everyone's counting their pennies, then maybe it makes sense for one team, one owner to say, no, I am going to spend and I'm going to get these guys maybe for more than other people are willing to pay but less than I would have had to pay 10 years ago. Is there anything to that idea that when no one is spending, then the one person who spends gets some disproportionate benefit or not really? Because we do know that there is some playoff bonus that if you appear in the playoffs, if you win the World Series, there are extra revenue bonuses you can derive from that. So there's some incentive to actually have a good team, financially speaking. You know, I mean, the example of that this offseason appears to be, and I cannot believe

that I am saying this, the Mets, right? Speaking as a Mets fan, I have never in my life, I think, been in a position where, you know, the Mets are being held up as the example of, you know, spending smart when everybody else is refusing to spend. And I think that, you know, other teams can see that. everybody else is refusing to spend. And I think that, you know, other teams can see that. And I think we're going to continue to see that even more as you see some of the bargain deals, right, that come up, you know, towards the end of the offseason, right? You know, who's going to sign Dallas Keuchel and Mike Moustakas and all those guys who are going to be sitting around, you know,

hoping for contracts as the season gets closer. And probably will be a lot of a lot of good good bargains you know the equivalence of the of the jd martinez deal last year that said you know it's a bargain in terms of being able to get wins at a value price but is it really going to generate additional income right are the mets going to generate additional income, right? Are the Mets going to earn back the, I forget whatever it was they gave to Jed Lowry, you know, it's like $10 million a year or $12 million a year. And it's a, you know, it's a great value deal for them, probably. But are they going to earn that back on additional ticket sales

and additional money that they make if they get to the playoffs of the World Series? You know, all the numbers that I've crunched say no. You know, they would have to get extraordinarily lucky, you know, basically win the World Series just as the result of Jed Lowry and then, you know, have it turn into some huge attendance bump, not just this year, but next year as well, where everyone's excited to come out and, you know, raise the World Series banner and things like that. And, you know, again, for most teams,

that's not going to happen. You know, even if a team builds the best possible team this year, you know, it's baseball and you can easily get knocked out in the first round just by having, you know, one or two bad pitching performances. So in terms of a sound investment and, you know, trying to get a return on your investment, you know, trying to be the team that zigs rather than zags probably doesn't make sense. In terms of trying to win your division, you know, it's a great move. And I think if my guess is correct, probably all the GMs out there right now are sitting around and thinking, man, you know, we want to be the ones to swoop in at the end of March and scoop up a couple of these players who are still available. Because there's a certain point where as the price gets lower and lower and lower, it's hard to pass up some of these deals.

One of the things – we didn't have a lot of information on what it costs, but I've heard it proposed not by owners. I don't talk to owners. I don't know if anybody talks to owners, but I've heard it said by team people. And I think that Ben's research for his current book would bear this out, that teams have recently been doing a lot more investing in tech, not only just hiring more people in the front office when there are caps on international spending and draft spending and a soft cap on even free agent spending. Teams have to, they try to put their money somewhere and they've been investing more in technology and in staffing out. There's just been astronomically

more hires, I feel like, every offseason than there used to be. Have you been able to see any figures at all in terms of what teams might be investing in these sort of off the field areas? And do you think that there's any real conceivable way that by knowing that information, it would at least help to alleviate some of the conversation or concern of how spending on players is seemingly stagnated? I mean, obviously, you know, spending on tech and spending on researchers has gone up. But, you know, as I think, probably, you know, you guys know as well as I do, researchers and sabermetricians are cheap right certainly compared to short stops so you can fill an entire office with those people

and it's still not going to come anywhere close to what you'd have to spend on players which is you know what makes it a good investment again because you have this three-tier salary system if you can find a way of identifying a guy in AAA or AA who can slot in and replace the guy you would have to pay 10, 15, $20 million to, to re-sign as a free agent, you know, that's a tremendous bang for your buck. So, you know, yeah, I think, I think clearly that's had an effect, but, you know, we're back to that issue of having more information and more ways to evaluate players. And again, I don't want to condemn the owners for doing that. I just think that when the consequence is that the owners are keeping more money and the players are getting less, that's when you have to go back to the bargaining table and figure out, OK, how are we going to remedy this?

when you have to go back to the bargaining table and figure out, okay, how are we going to remedy this? You mentioned in your article the example of the NFL's 1987 player strike where the league just put together scab teams and the network showed them and it didn't really seem to hurt the bottom line all that much. And you wrote that the NFL is probably the best example of a league where players are nearly interchangeable and that that instance sort of broke the power of the NFL Players Association. This is sort of what Bill James got in some hot water for appearing to tweet earlier this offseason when he suggested that, you know, the game is what we're watching. We're watching for the teams and our loyalties.

And over a certain amount of time, we would just forget the players and the players are kind of interchangeable, at least more so. But why do you think baseball is more resistant than football to that? Why is the idea of a scab team in baseball less viable than it might be in football? There's a couple of things. One is obviously the players are literally less anonymous in baseball where you can actually see their faces on TV, right? You know, I mean, you turn on'd notice the difference if you would say, hey, who's that, you know, who are those unfamiliar names on the jerseys? But you have to squint, right? Whereas if you had scab baseball and, you know, literally didn't know who any of the players were, it would just be a lot more immediately apparent. And again, also, I think football, just careers are so short that you're used to just, you know, teams churning through players. So, you know, if you're in a coma for two seasons and you wake up and turn on your favorite football team, you know, you're not going to recognize any of the names anyway, right? Half the players are in a coma for two seasons.

going for two years because you were playing football. But in baseball, you'll turn it on and you might not recognize some of the players who are on your team, but you at least say, hey, that guy, I remember him, he was on the A's or whatever. So there's a little bit of a difference there. But I don't think it's really been tested in baseball the same way it has been in football. And we did have the sort of brief attempt at scab teams during the early 95, the spring training. We haven't really seen it tested in the regular season. And I don't know, you know, I mean, right now, baseball is fairly anonymous, way more anonymous, I think, than it has been at any time in the past. Right. I mean, I don't know how many baseball players are extremely well known by the general public i've seen plenty of people argue that probably the most famous baseball player right now is tim tebow which is a terrifying

thought but you know if uh you know for most casual fans if they turned on two games and instead of you know whatever jose altuve or some of the other you know stars who most casual fans, if they turned on two games and instead of, you know, whatever, Jose Altuve or some of the other, you know, stars who they probably don't know anyway, because they only tune in just for the playoffs. There were a bunch of other names and they, would they actually notice the difference? I don't know. And again, I don't know that that means that, you know, owners should be allowed to just go and run scab teams you know on the grounds that well the fans don't really ultimately won't care but i you know definitely think that it's something that the players have to be concerned about it was something that back of their minds

and you know probably should be doing more to publicize themselves because you know honestly i think baseball is more rooting for laundry than it used to be. And I think that's something that baseball needs to figure out how to remedy, because there's still plenty of interesting characters in baseball. But I don't know that's necessarily translated into, you know, the fan base being able to identify them. There was, we talked about the Padres in a recent podcast. There's an article in the San Diego Union Tribune where the Padres said that they were opening their books and trying to explain exactly all the different ways in which they've refinanced some debt and how they're going to, they're lined up to do some more spending down the road, et cetera. Anyway, the Padres have had

some low payrolls in recent years. The article is trying to explain why that was and what they're trying to do. And in talking about the Padres, we also talked to a Padres fan who has a podcast, and we talked to him about his understanding of the article going line by line. And a question that I asked him and that I will also pose to you is if you're a fan of a team, and you think that ownership isn't serious enough about winning, they're not reinvesting enough, they're just not trying hard enough to have a competitive team on the field. winning. They're not reinvesting enough. They're just not trying hard enough to have a competitive team on the field. In what way do you think that it would be most effective to try to hold the owners accountable? Because of course, if you say, well, we're going to boycott the team,

we're not going to pay for tickets, we're not going to watch, we're not going to buy merchandise, then there's also a certain risk that goes into that, right? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that bugged me about that story about the Padres trying to, you know, being able to refinance their debt and therefore having more money to spend is that it completely misunderstands exactly what we were talking about at the top of the show, which is that how much money teams have to spend ultimately comes down to how much money they're going to get back from investing in it, right? I mean, the owners of the Padres are not, you know, so living paycheck to paycheck that they literally can't afford to go out and sign players, even if they do have debt that they have to pay off, right? And if they were going to be able to sign a bunch of players and it would translate into ticket sales and championships and souvenir sales and all of that, then they could go and do that

as an investment. So it kind of bugged me a little bit to see like, oh, you know, we refinanced our debts. So therefore we can, we now have, have money freed up. Again, nobody who owns a professional sports franchise is so tight for liquid cash that that has to be an issue. In terms of what fans can do, it's really difficult, right? Because, you know, I mean, we've seen it in the past where like when leagues go on strike or have lockouts or something like that, and fans try and say, we're not going to, you know, there's no possible way that we're ever going to come back because, you know, we're just, you know, going to boycott the games. You know, it's not like there's any other real alternatives, right? It's not like

you can say, if the Padres don't spend on payroll, we're going to go become a fan of the other team in San Diego, right? Because there is no other team in San Diego. So, you know, I almost feel like you need to do something like have an escrow account, you know, or like the things that we have back in the day when I was in college, and this is going to date me, but, you know, when I was in college and this is going to date me, but you know, when I was in college and we would be encouraging people to, you know, alumni to put money in an escrow account that would only go to the college if it divested from South Africa, right? You almost want to do something like that. Like say, okay, we've got all these season ticket deposits.

We're going to collect them and we're going to pull all this money and you can have it as soon as you get some players. And maybe then that might be an incentive, but it's a little bit hard to organize. Yeah. Most of the feedback that I saw to that Padres conversation we had was positive, but I did see one listener in the Facebook group who said it sort of bummed him out to hear our guest talking about that because he thought that at some point either you just resign yourself to being a fan that has bad ownership and whatever you can't do that much about it so you're just gonna enjoy it if you can or just forget about baseball and find some other hobby that brings you more joy instead of just fixating on the faults of the current ownership

group and why they're not doing this and they're not doing that and staying away from the ballpark and doing line by line readings of what the ownership group claims. And you as a Mets fan are surely familiar with this phenomenon of rooting for a team while simultaneously maybe being displeased about how it's run. So how do you balance those two things? displeased about how it's run. So how do you balance those two things? Is it just that the baseball is always outweighing the displeasure of the ownership, at least slightly? And as long as there's just more joy coming to you from the games than there is anti-joy coming to you from everything else that you will keep following and expressing your displeasure? Yeah, I mean, I also have a history as a Knicks fan. So I think I'm very used to the concept that rooting for the team is not the same as rooting for the owner, right? And you need to kind of

keep this disconnect. I'm going to wear the jersey and I'm going to wear the gear and I'm going to emotionally associate myself with this team, but that doesn't take away from the fact and I'm going to, you know, emotionally associate myself with this team. But that doesn't take away from the fact that I think the people actually running it are, you know, a bunch of money-garbing morons. And, you know, I think this is something that more and more fans of more and more teams are going to have to deal with, especially in baseball, especially as we see, again, kind of this dynamic of teams almost taking turns in trying to compete. I have no inside information in terms of why the Padres are talking about spending this year. But if I had to guess, it probably has less to do with refinancing their debt and more to do with

the fact that the NL West is more up for grabs than it's been in a really long time, right? The Diamondbacks are dismantling the rockies are you know probably dismantling if they were ever really mantled in the first place the dodgers just cleared a whole bunch of payroll that they're now spending on i guess aj pollock but that's you know they they they easily could just have one bad season and then suddenly uh and then suddenly anybody can win that whereas you know a couple ago, it was reasonable for the Padres to say, well, you know, we could increase our payroll a whole lot. We're still going to finish fourth. So, you know, I mean, again, speaking as a Mets fan, you know, five years ago, I was thinking, well, you know, we've just got to wait through the bad times.

And then our young pitcher is going to get good. And then that'll be the time that, you know, it'll, you know, it will finally pay off all those years of suffering. And then it paid off like one or maybe two years. And then there was more years of suffering and I was prepared for more years of suffering. And then this winter happened and now it looks like we're going to have maybe a year or two that might be exciting. And then after that, I completely expect that, you know, the pitching is all going to be allowed to leave as free agents and you know the new free agents like lowry and ramos will be allowed to depart and we'll be back in a rebuilding mode again and it's just kind of what you you sort of

have to sign up for as a sports fan right is that um all all success is fleeting um all payoff for your fandom um is is extremely time limited and i don't know you know maybe you could almost look at it as a well let's spread the wealth around right everybody gets to be independent race for a couple years every decade and then it's somebody else's turn um except for the marlins it's never the marlins turn but they don't have any fans anyway so it really doesn't matter you know know, I don't know. That feels a little bit excessively cynical to me. I still, you know, as a fan, I still feel like every team should be trying to win every year

or at least, you know, build to win every year. But I don't know. Maybe that's just something we can't expect anymore. Maybe, you know, fandom is just about kind of, you know, riding the crest of the troughs and being like, well, if it sucks to be a fan right now, maybe five years from now it won't. So I think a common trope that's out there right now is that anywhere between a third to a half of baseball teams, or if they're not tanking, they're at least not, quote, trying to win. That keeps coming up. That seems to be like the talking point. There aren't enough

teams trying to win. And in the same way that team revenue has been sort of increasingly decoupled from team success on the well, you know, these teams were fine, if not even better than fine. The A's made the playoffs, for God's sake, while spending very, very little. So do you think that trying to win or the idea that teams aren't trying to win is misleading? Because it seems like it is not entirely telling the truth of what's happening in the market right now. Yeah, I mean, everybody wants to win, right? You know, I mean, if Derek Jeter could put all those faceless bodies in Marlins uniforms on the field and they won 100 games, he would be thrilled, right? And occasionally it does happen, right?

Occasionally you stumble into a whole bunch of good young players and have a cost-effective team. But that's what we're talking about, right? We're talking about not trying to win. We're talking about not spending to win. And, you know, again, I think there are a lot of rational economic reasons for that. You know, going back again to the sort of marginal revenue that you bring in from each additional win, one of the things that's very clear is that wins are much more valuable

once you're above 500, right? Basically once you're within smelling distance of a pennant raise or a wildcard spot. So if you're going to win, if you think you're going to win 80 games, it makes some sense to spend to try and win 90 games. And if you think you're going to win 90 games, it makes a lot of sense to try and spend to win 100 games, right? Because that's the difference between, you know, being the Rays and being the Yankees or the Red Sox. But if you think you're going to win 70 games, there is no benefit at all to becoming an 80-win team, right?

You might as well win 50 games. You might as well finish a record number of games out of first place as win like 75 78 games the fans and you know are not going to care one way or another either way it's not a it's not an interesting season for them so i think again teams with more data are realizing oh you know if we're not going to be anything anywhere close to a postseason spot, we might as well just sell off all the spare parts and, you know, hope to become the Astros in a few years.

The problem, of course, is that becoming the Astros is no easier than becoming the Yankees, right? You know, winning games by not spending money and investing in young talent can work, and winning games by signing a whole bunch of expensive free agents can work, but they can also fail. So, you know, again, you've got these third of the teams that seem to be just trying to skate by and figure, OK, well, we'll win games later on once once, you know, we can do it with young players and maybe a couple of free agents here and there. You know, they're not all going to be successes.

You know, some of them are going to be the Astros and some of them are going to be the twins. Sam and I had you on this podcast exactly 1000 episodes ago, episode 327. And at the time we were talking about the Braves proposed new ballpark, now their actual new ballpark, and public financing for stadiums. And that was more than five years ago. And that was, of course, years after your book, Field of Schemes, came out. And I think one of the things we asked you was, why is it taking so long for awareness of how bad these deals generally are for local communities to spread? Why aren't people catching on?

So it's been another five years. Have people caught on? This is loosely related, I guess, to what we've been talking about, but not entirely unrelated, because when teams get publicly funded ballparks and then they turn around and don't spend on players, it seems like even more of a betrayal. I mean, I guess a little bit people are catching on. I feel like, you know, when I would talk 25 years ago about the, you know, how spending public money on sports stadiums was, you know, a complete waste, people would tend to be a little bit more surprised, whereas now I will more often hear, oh yeah, sure, everybody knows that. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be really putting a huge

dent in public spending on sports stadiums, right? I mean, we just had the city of Phoenix vote to spend $168 million in public money on renovations for a new arena for the Suns, which is significantly more than a lot of other teams have been able to get for what amounts to really just a 15-year lease extension. And in baseball, you know, we're seeing a little bit of a lull since the Braves stadium, mostly because the Rays and the A's are beating their heads against the same problems they've been beating their heads against for a long time.

But, you know, the Diamondbacks want a new stadium, and, you know, I keep waiting for the blue jays to demand one um i know they have reasons why they haven't but uh you know the white socks stadium is getting kind of old i don't expect that the the tide had to have turned by any means again because it's just it's worth so much money to these team owners you know you can you know battle it out for years and years and years and spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying for stadium money. But if you're getting hundreds of millions of dollars in return, again, that's a good return on investment. We're just back to the incentives of the game, right? It's not just about baseball team owners all being, you know, greedy.

Sure, they are and might be, but it's just about the fact that you would be stupid not to. You know, if you are a team owner and you're seeing all your fellow team owners get hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and, you know, be able to either pocket that or pour that back into the business, you know, of course you're going to ask for that. And you're going to come back and ask for it year after year after year, because you know that Jeffrey Loria did it with the Marlins and Karl Polat did it with the Twins, and it may have taken them 10 years to get the money, but eventually they got the money. So again, I think we're hitting a little bit of a lull, but I would be very surprised if the A's and the Rays don't get some sort of new stadium deals in the near future if it doesn't involve some sort of public money or public land giveaways or tax

credits or something like that just because again it's such an ingrained part of the business model that you know I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon but you know on the other hand my book's been out for you know our book's been out for over 20 years now and the website's still going. So maybe we're starting to have a little bit of an effect. And maybe if the Rays don't get a stadium down where they are,

then they're just going to move up here to Portland, Oregon, and it would be wonderful for me. But the last thing I wanted to ask you, there's been a conversation in Anaheim because the Angels and owner Artie Moreno want some renovations to their ballpark, which granted is shown its age, but there's been an ongoing conversation with the city over who's going to pay for it. And there's been a conversation of,

well, if Moreno is going to pay for the renovations himself, then he would then be given the rights to all the parking lots around the stadium. And does that seem like, given that I think the parking lots around the stadium have been valued at something north of, I think, $250 million, or at least the property around the stadium, does that feel like kind of maybe a developing trend where maybe moving forward, owners will figure, well, the public is caught on to the fact that we can fund our own stadium construction, but at least this is like a sort of a workaround, a way for us to get that money and still say that we privately finance the new ballpark? Absolutely. You know, I think when, man, almost 25 years ago now, when Joanna Kagan and I first started looking into this stuff, you could, as a sports team owner, walk into the state legislature and say, I need a new stadium. Can I have a check for $300 million? And it would at least get taken seriously.

Now, the one thing that has changed is there's a bit of a backlash to that. So you have to, you know, hide the subsidy a little bit more. So you say, well, we're not asking for money. We're asking for land that we can develop. Or we're asking for tax breaks. Or we're asking for, you know, money from this revenue stream that was set up for our last stadium that maybe would have gone back to the city if we paid off the old stadium and didn't build a new one. But whatever, you've been spending it on the old stadium, paying off the old stadium.

So if you give it to us now, it's no big deal. And I think we're seeing much, much more of that and of those kinds of hidden costs. And I think we're seeing much, much more of that and of those kinds of hidden costs. Judith Grant Long, who is a researcher at the University of Michigan, has been looking at this over years and decades now, has found that the one consistent thing is that the amount of these hidden costs, again, whether it's free land or tax breaks or things like that, has continued to rise over time. I think the last time she looked at it, it was something like 40% above what the headline cost was of public stadium costs. And that was a few years ago now. So I'm sure the next time she comes out with numbers,

it will be even higher than that. So yeah, I'm watching that Angel situation very closely because the old mayor of Anaheim, Tom Tate, shot that down very quickly and said, we're not gonna give you $250 million worth of land for a renovation that's going to cost you $150 million. But the new mayor who just replaced him seems more amenable to it. And, you know, it's a situation where the city of Anaheim has an awful lot of leverage because the value of the Angels is that they're in that LA market and there don't seem to be a lot of other cities in, you know, greater LA that want to throw a whole

lot of money in the stadium for the Angels. So they're in a good position to, you know, cut a hard bargain with Artie Moreno, but I don't know if they're going to do it. Well, I can't say that I'm thrilled that I've had to end up caring about the business of baseball, but for as long as I have paid attention to the business of baseball, I have necessity because I have to know what's going on. You have always been one of the first people that I've gone through. So, Neil, I very much appreciate you making the time to come on and talk to us today. Thank you.

And I'm not sure I really wanted to be in the business of business baseball either, but it certainly does. You know, as someone whose first published work was a letter to the editor of the Daily News praying that the Yankees, because I was at that point a Yankee fan, did not move to New Jersey. Even if it, you know, seeing how the sausages are made has helped me understand and come to grips a little bit more with, you know, some of what felt like sort of random unfairness of our sport. some of what felt like sort of random unfairness of, of our sport. And it's, it's not random unfairness. It's very, very unrandom and, and, you know, organized unfairness.

All right. That will do it for today. And for this week, thanks to you all for listening. And thanks to those of you who are supporting the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild signing up and pledging some small monthly amount to ensure that we can keep yammering about baseball indefinitely. The following five listeners are among that number, Frank Crandall, Daniel Moorhead, Tyler Duncan, Aaron Roth, and Chuck Ruther. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild,

and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine. It comes out late this spring. Go get it now. Juice our pre-order numbers. Get us on the bestseller list. Jeff is traveling early next week, so we will see. We may record a little bit later in the week than usual, but I think we have some fun plans. So have a wonderful weekend, and we will talk to you then. And it still hides in my own mind As my western eyes As my western eyes

As my western eyes Western, I sleep tight