And, here's an extended version of my answer there.
As I told him, MLB Trade Rumors had a "betting window" open, in early January if I recall. I picked March 29 as the date for a settlement.
That's as the owners have said a settlement must be made by the end of the month to avoid delays to a full spring training and start of the regular season. The start of spring training was already postponed last week, and any further postponement will mean a delayed regular season, if everybody wants a full regular season.
Update: Owners said this afternoon if there's no settlement by Monday, regular season games will be cancelled and NOT made up. Players say if that happens? No expanded playoffs, period.
Now, I'm wondering if that wasn't too early for Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina to lead the pitchers and catchers, let alone position players like Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado.
On the issues? I think both sides have room for major compromise.
My tentative ideas for how it should be solved are that the teams need to go higher on the lux tax, and ideally, ditch arbitration entirely. They also agree to greater revenue sharing.
In turn, the players agree to a salary scale at least vaguely similar to the NBA, or NFL, a real team salary floor as well as lux-tax ceiling and a couple of other things. By what I mean on at least vaguely similar to the NBA or NFL, there's a rookie salary scale, then a second contract scale, then in the NBA, a third contract scale, etc. The NBA is less flexible in some ways, but also has guarantees for Rookie of the Year, MVP, etc., as shown with new contracts for players like Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid. However, it's also got a cap. It would be hard to implement a full-on version of this in MLB. Ditto for the NFL. As the desert Cardinals and the threatening to revert to Mistake by the Lake Browns show with Kyler Murray and Baker Mayfield, especially, the dead weight of quarterback salaries makes the tiers beyond rookie contracts tough to negotiate at times, even without NBA-type baked-in guarantees.
Back to the calendar. If I am right on that date? We're talking about May 1 for start of season, even with abbreviating the season. ...
That will lead to other problems. The longer this goes on, there will be additional battles over how many games to squeeze in, who "eats" how much on games that are cut, the possibility of extending the season, the possibility of everybody eating all the missed games in exchange for another one-off eight-teams per league playoffs and more.
And, as for whether Phat Albert Pujols should be part of the team, whenever the season starts? That's the subject of another blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment