MLB 2023

[gunnar hendershow]

Probably a bad sign when the first thing he was asked to do was trade away a once-in-a-lifetime franchise cornerstone.

[Lowerdeck]

Quote

"Per a major league source familiar with the situation, just before the 2022 trade deadline - and a few weeks after Chris Sale had broken his finger in his second outing of the season - a team approached Bloom about dealing for the lefty," Bradford wrote. "The acquiring club was agreeing to take on all of the money left on Sale's contract (2 1/2 seasons of more than $50 million), while sending some semblance of players. The Red Sox wanted better players than were offered and no deal was done."

Oh man.  If it was me, I probably would have taken a box of baseballs to get rid of that albatross contract.

[gunnar hendershow]

Ohtani's locker is empty and he's on IL for the rest of the season. Thus likely ending his Angels career, which was truly wasted by the dumpster fire organization.

https://twitter.com/CodifyBaseball/status/1703109831320904156?s=20

[gunnar hendershow]

The Rays are set to announce a new stadium deal in downtown St. Pete.

So not Tampa, and they might wind up with similar attendance issues, but the saga is over with and they're in the Tampa Bay region for many more years.

I assume now that this and the A's are resolved it'll be time for expansion to 32 to rev up. 

[Meacon Keaton]

Enjoy paying for the new stadium you never asked for, St. Pete. 

[gunnar hendershow]

6 hours ago, Meacon Keaton said:

Enjoy paying for the new stadium you never asked for, St. Pete. 

It's funny that after years of this, they take a deal to build a 30k seat stadium in the same place that directly contributed to their attendance issues solely because it was the best deal.

At least it's good for all the retired Yankee fans who live in Pinellas County, the real winners.

[gunnar hendershow]

Playoff tickets acquired!!

[Maxx]

The Rays stadium rendering looks like they just modernized Tropicana.

[gunnar hendershow]

15 minutes ago, Maxx said:

The Rays stadium rendering looks like they just modernized Tropicana.

It's so funny. They learned no lessons. They being St. Pete who are giving them a ton of money for a stadium nobody will still attend games at.

[gunnar hendershow]

https://twitter.com/jonmorosi/status/1704673513376764293?s=20

Would really take a 1-5 run against the Rays or something for Toronto to miss out on the postseason I think.

[Your Mom]

Still hoping we can sneak into the playoffs. This run lately has been garbage though and it's lucky everyone else is playing badly and we have been able to hold onto the last WC spot for now

[Toe]

1 hour ago, gunnar hendershow said:

https://twitter.com/jonmorosi/status/1704673513376764293?s=20

Would really take a 1-5 run against the Rays or something for Toronto to miss out on the postseason I think.

But it's the Rays - they always screw the Jays. 

[The Lusophone]

How it started:

Spoiler

How it's going;

Spoiler

 

[gunnar hendershow]

I believe the other NY team can be officially eliminated today too. Yankees will definitely be back sooner than I think their fans think, even if their prospects are a tad over hyped they always do a great job adding the mid-level veteran FAs who can contribute.

[The Buscher]

It’s funny to me seeing people laughing up the Mets’ playoff elimination as if their fans haven’t known since mid to late May that the team was overhyped.  When they were losing series after series to some of the worst teams in baseball it was a pretty clear sign.  The real death knell was June 8th though.  Swept by the Braves in humiliating fashion and didn’t look like they even played in the same league.

This year is the least amount of baseball I’ve watched since…2002 or 2003 maybe?  I’ve seen worse Mets teams but  those were teams you knew would be bad and you could just have fun watching no pressure baseball.  To have this kind of a letdown just made me not want to watch at all.

I’m glad Cohen was willing to eat the dead money and just turn it into buying a farm system.  Don’t expect the team to be good in 2024 either but who knows what the offseason will bring.

In hindsight though I should’ve slammed the under bets on the Mets as soon as Diaz got that fluky WBC injury.  Should’ve been the sign right there that the whole season was cursed.

[Meacon Keaton]

People are laughing because you all thought Daddy Cohen was going to swoop in and buy a championship and not only did that not happen, but they completely poo'd the bed after their very first big-spender off-season. When you spend $400 million to finish fourth in the division, people are going to laugh. Just like they're laughing at us for spending $300 million to finish fourth (and have one of the worst offenses in the league and possibly the worst Yankee offense I've seen in my 30+ years of watching them).

[The Buscher]

I never thought Cohen would buy a championship and drove me crazy to hear fans act like it was a given that he was just gonna sign everyone and make the late late 90s-2000s Yankees teams blush.  Really any fans who think that's even something you can do nowadays haven't been paying attention to the last 20 years of baseball.  You should be able to buy yourself a playoff spot which at the end of the day is all you can ask for as playoffs are a crapshoot, but as seen this year it blew up spectacularly for multiple teams.

The Mets' farm was shit when Cohen took over so really the only way they could've hoped to contend while waiting to build that up was to sign old but productive dudes to short-term deals.  Worked last year, failed miserably this year and so it goes.  I'm just glad the losses were cut.  To ever seriously reach Cohen's stated goal of being the East Coast Dodgers aka perennial contenders who can spend whenever they need to or go out and get what they need, you need a farm and development system that produces guys regularly.  He used his money to help jumpstart the operation but they've got a ways to go and they've fired tons of development guys ahead of David Sterns coming in, so it'll take some time for Stearns to rebuild things.

The same fans who are convinced Cohen will just spend like crazy again until he wins a title are convinced he'll dole out two-way player money to get Ohtani to come here even though he'll only DH in 2024 and I don't see it.  Everyone close to Ohtani says the same thing - his #1 goal is to win a title, even if it means relocating and/or taking less money.  Cohen/Stearns/Eppler would have to do a massive sell job to convince him he could win here even after this shit season.  If he's not a Dodger I'll be stunned.  I expect Stearns to ease up the spending aside from maybe an Alonso extension or maybe Yamamoto as the one "splash" free agent signing they'll pursue because he'd be a long-term commitment.

[The Buscher]

Brooks Robinson has passed away  

[gunnar hendershow]

A life very well lived. Was inescapable around Baltimore for just about my entire life. Few athletes have gotten more send-offs and thank yous from the hometown fans.

[The Buscher]

Not that Padres fans needed another reason to want Preller fired but it sounds like he's mismanaged the team's finances to such a degree that they actually will be forced to cut payroll next year because they're violating MLB's debt limit rules. That's only happened a couple of times in baseball history, most recently when the league took the Dodgers away from McCourt.

Sounds like they'll have to reduce their payroll down to about $200 million next year (true payroll, not CBT). They've got a bunch of guys hitting free agency, most notably Snell and Hader, and of course they can always work with players to push out earnings in restructures if they want. But Juan Soto's gonna get way north of $30 million in his final year of arbitration and there's a real argument his agent could make that he should get $40 million.

Rumor is Soto's expressed a desire to go back to the east coast, AKA he might be tough for them to re-sign even at his asking price. So now the question is do the Padres explore what they might be able to get for a 1-year rental of Soto, in doing so it would greatly reduce their payroll and give them some wiggle room to make other moves. Or do they keep Soto and try to make one last run of it.