2019-2020 MLB Offseason Thread

[The_Admiral]

We're never going to see major-league teams contracted short of ecological catastrophe making highly populated regions of the United States uninhabitable, which, hey, doesn't rule out taking care of the Miami Marlins after all.

[rams80]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

Playoffs should absolutely not be democratised. Rather, they need to be elitised.

 

The point is that the regular season is the first round of the overall championship competition, and the winners of that round are the divisional champions. All other teams have lost in that round, and merit disqualification from further participation.

 

If each team played the exact same slate of foes the exact same number of times, you might have a point.

[oldschoolvikings]

14 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

Playoffs should absolutely not be democratised. Rather, they need to be elitised.

 

The point is that the regular season is the first round of the overall championship competition, and the winners of that round are the divisional champions. All other teams have lost in that round, and merit disqualification from further participation.

 

The problem with considering the regular season to be the first round of a championship competition, is that this particular competition goes on and on well after most of the teams competing have been long eliminated. And then those teams expect their fans to still care and spend money to watch the team hobble along to a depressing finish and sell their best players to some team that still matters. I guess if you're a fan in New York, you just consider this to be the natural order of things and probably can't understand why someone in, oh say, Kansas City wouldn't see the beauty of it, but there you go.

 

I get being stubborn about the purity of the game and the way it's always been and such, but if you love baseball you'd think you might be interested in it's long term health. Keeping more fans interested longer would be a good thing.

[Digby]

I tend to think that structure of the season is not as big a turnoff for fans as the 3.5 hour games, the inherent dullness of Three True Outcomes, the substantial proportion of teams that aren't even trying to put out a competitive product, and the constant parade of real-or-perceived moral scandals.

[Sport]

11 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

A fair proposal, but I’d make the slight adjustment of going by record regardless of division. Seed division winners at the top, but that’s probably because they’d have the two best records. 

 

I'm only on board if everyone's schedule is the same and that at point you might as well just not have divisions. The biggest problem with the wildcard now is not that it exists, but that it's contested between teams who play different schedules making it inherently unfavorable to someone. 

 

Divisions were invented so that geographical neighbors could play more often and cut down on travel costs. That's less of a concern now than it was in dicketty-six, but if we're going to continue to have divisional-heavy schedules then we need to use a playoff format that doesn't create races between teams playing different schedules. 

 

I like Admiral's plan because it's the closest we'd ever be able to get back to the pre-wildcard LCS formats. 

[dont care]

1 hour ago, Sport said:

 

I'm only on board if everyone's schedule is the same and that at point you might as well just not have divisions. The biggest problem with the wildcard now is not that it exists, but that it's contested between teams who play different schedules making it inherently unfavorable to someone. 

 

Divisions were invented so that geographical neighbors could play more often and cut down on travel costs. That's less of a concern now than it was in dicketty-six, but if we're going to continue to have divisional-heavy schedules then we need to use a playoff format that doesn't create races between teams playing different schedules. 

 

I like Admiral's plan because it's the closest we'd ever be able to get back to the pre-wildcard LCS formats. 

When you’re playing 164 games the small differences in schedule are insignificant.

[pmoehrin]

2 hours ago, Digby said:

I tend to think that structure of the season is not as big a turnoff for fans as the 3.5 hour games, the inherent dullness of Three True Outcomes, the substantial proportion of teams that aren't even trying to put out a competitive product, and the constant parade of real-or-perceived moral scandals.

 

The biggest turnoff with baseball for me is the start times of playoff games, and its been my biggest complaint about the sport for the last decade now.

 

You have a disproportionate amount of baseball fans that live on the East Coast. This is the viewing demo they should be catering to the most, and every year the time zone gets the middle finger from MLB with start times.

 

Remember that big Howie Kendrick grand slam that put the Nats over the Dodgers in game 5 of the NLDS? It was probably the most significant moment in Nats team history up to that point, and most fans in D.C. missed it because it happened just after midnight on a Wednesday when 2/3rds of the city is asleep. How do you expect to create fans when you're forcing them to miss out on big moments like that?

 

With every other sport, I pay more attention to the playoffs than I do the regular season. Baseball is the only sport where the opposite is true because the games are on so late. My attitude towards the proposed playoff format changes is baseball can do whatever they want with it at this point. It's just more games that I won't bother tuning into because I'm in bed by 11 PM.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

2 hours ago, Digby said:

I tend to think that structure of the season is not as big a turnoff for fans as the 3.5 hour games, the inherent dullness of Three True Outcomes, the substantial proportion of teams that aren't even trying to put out a competitive product, and the constant parade of real-or-perceived moral scandals.

 

I left baseball as a fan because of how MLB treated the Expos, and I stay resolute as a non-fan because of how cynical the sport has become. NBA gets a lot of critique for turning the sport over to stat nerds, but MLB has been on that train for a long time -- such to the point that three quarters of the league simply doesn't try year over year.

 

For a league with publicly funded stadiums, there really ought to be competitive expectations. While injuries do happen, each team should be required to make a good faith effort to field a competitive team. And should your franchise have a losing record over an extended period of time, MLB should look at penalties like fines, forced ownership change, or contraction.

[AustinFromBoston]

This Astros press conference is a :censored:ing disaster. It basically confirms not only the sign stealing, but the buzzer story as well. 

[Sport]

5 minutes ago, dont care said:

When you’re playing 164 games the small differences in schedule are insignificant.

 

Completely not true. If the difference between making the wildcard comes down to 1 or 2 games and one team got to play an historically bad team 19 times while the other only played them 6 then that's inherently unfair. If teams are competing for the same playoff spot they should play the same schedule. Not sure how that's objectionable. 

[tgvyhn]

20 minutes ago, AustinFromBoston said:

This Astros press conference is a :censored:ing disaster. It basically confirms not only the sign stealing, but the buzzer story as well. 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

14 hours ago, rams80 said:

15 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

The point is that the regular season is the first round of the overall championship competition, and the winners of that round are the divisional champions. All other teams have lost in that round, and merit disqualification from further participation.

 

If each team played the exact same slate of foes the exact same number of times, you might have a point.

 

A playoff format involving only divisional champions does not require that every team play the same schedule.  The divisional champions would not even be seeded relative to one another; home-field advantage in each playoff series would rotate, as it did in the 1969-1993 format.

With a 32-team alignment, split into four four-team divisions per league, the scheduling works out perfectly: each team would play its three divisional rivals 14 times (42 games) and the 12 teams from the other three divisions in the league 10 times a piece (120 games), for a total of 162 games (with no interleague play).

 

 

3 hours ago, oldschoolvikings said:

The problem with considering the regular season to be the first round of a championship competition, is that this particular competition goes on and on well after most of the teams competing have been long eliminated. And then those team expect their fans to still care and spend money to watch the team hobble along to a depressing finish and sell their best players to some team that still matters. I guess if you're a fan in New York, you just consider this to be the natural order of things and probably can't understand why someone in, oh say, Kansas City wouldn't see the beauty of it, but there you go.

 

Please note that I became a Yankee fan during the "Lean Years" between the pennants of 1964 and 1976, when the idea of the Yankees coming in first was not only not the natural order of things, but was in fact hard to imagine.  What's more, as an adult I experienced the drought between the pennant of 1981 and the World Championship of 1996, a period which was even longer than the Lean Years, and which also included the team's second-ever last-place finish in 1990.  While the team was nice enough to play me out by winning the 1996 World Series, I must emphasise that its subsequent titles mean nothing to me.

So the idea that a fan can be emotionally invested in his/her team only if that team is contending is foreign to me.  I would of course prefer that my team win.  But, if it cannot come in first, then coming in second is better than coming in third, and coming in third is better than coming in fourth, and so on.  There is always something to play for, and always something for a fan to root for.

 

 

3 hours ago, oldschoolvikings said:

I get being stubborn about the purity of the game and the way it's always been and such, but if you love baseball you'd think you might be interested in [its] long term health. Keeping more fans interested longer would be a good thing.

 

What I dislike about Major League Baseball — indeed, what killed my interest in it — is its striving to be just like the other sports, as expressed by interleague play and bloated playoffs.  Baseball used to have a feel that was qualitatively different to those of other sports; a big part of that different feel was the pennant race, and the idea that only the first-place team was going to advance.  As a fan I really dug that.  And I certainly watched plenty of games after my team had for all practical purposes been eliminated from contention; for a baseball fan (perhaps unique amongst all sports' fans), the season has meaning for its own sake.

So I can say that I'd like it if baseball could still be something that I could connect with emotionally, even if that means that the sport would have to acknowledge itself as a niche phenomenon (albeit a rather large one), rather than keeping up the "national pastime" pretense and trying to appeal to other types of sports fans. I would not care one bit that baseball is not as popular as football, just as long it still seemed cool to me by maintaining its worthwhile traditions.

[Sport]

I don't like the idea of 8 divisions because it increases the likelihood of wild variances from group to group. You see it happen in the NFL often, but they need that many divisions because their schedule is so short.

 

4 divisions of 8, which is what's happening in the NHL and proving to be a pretty good/fun system (the playoff format be damned) is the right move. It's close to what baseball had before 95, and the more teams you have in a division the less likely it is that you'd get lopsided results in one division over the other.

[dont care]

God altuve’s and Jim Cranes were ridiculous. ”we don’t believe the sign stealing impacted the games” “but doesn’t knowing what you are getting pitched an advantage” “well yea but we don’t believe it GREATLY impacted the game”, Altuve’s was even worse “no we didn’t use a buzzer and the MLB investigated and didn’t find it so it must not have happened and if you believe it did then you don’t believe the MLB” that’s not how it works if you hide it from the MLB of course they won’t find it. I doubt it’s like sewn into the jersey dum dum.

[FiddySicks]

I still think this whole trash can banging/buzzer wearing thing is about as overblown as it can possibly be. That being said? I’m with AFB. What an absolute DISASTER this whole thing has turned into, and the Astros have only made it so so SO much worse for themselves every single step of the way. 

 

And why the hell was Dusty Baker even there? He just came aboard three weeks ago! 

[SFGiants58]

6 hours ago, AustinFromBoston said:

This Astros press conference is a :censored:ing disaster. It basically confirms not only the sign stealing, but the buzzer story as well. 

So yeah, it’s the sports equivalent of this:

 

Honestly, doing it like the above video may have been the better choice! Sob stories and excuse-making are the best option.

[dfwabel]

6 hours ago, AustinFromBoston said:

This Astros press conference is a :censored:ing disaster. It basically confirms not only the sign stealing, but the buzzer story as well. 

Every player was told to wait so that Crane and Astros PR (and possibly a crisis manager or three) would tell them what to say so that they'd all be on one page. That one page was essentially a printer's test pattern of characters.  Did anybody listen?  If I was in Astros PR, I'd look for another job.  If I were a crisis manager, I'd gone to the bar nearest to my gate at Orlando Airport (MCO) and drank until my flight out was boarding.  And if I was Jim Crane, I'd think about not paying said crisis manager(s).

 

Gotta love Bregman with his shout out to Astros fans for the cheap pop back home. 

 

Dusty Baker should have checked his phone's banking app to make sure that the first check got wired.

[AustinFromBoston]

28 minutes ago, FiddySicks said:

And why the hell was Dusty Baker even there? He just came aboard three weeks ago! 

I feel so bad for Dusty being thrown to the wolves like that. 

He doesn't deserve that. 

[dont care]

7 minutes ago, dfwabel said:

Every player was told to wait so that Crane and Astros PR (and possibly a crisis manager or three) would tell them what to say so that they'd all be on one page. That one page was essentially a printer's test pattern of characters.  Did anybody listen?  If I was in Astros PR, I'd look for another job.  If I were a crisis manager, I'd gone to the bar nearest to my gate at Orlando Airport (MCO) and drank until my flight out was boarding.  And if I was Jim Crane, I'd think about not paying said crisis manager(s).

 

Gotta love Bregman with his shout out to Astros fans for the cheap pop back home. 

 

Dusty Baker should have checked his phone's banking app to make sure that the first check got wired.

You must have missed the video of the astros PR guy running through some bushes To get out of there after giving his statement. 
https://mobile.twitter.com/SavageBoston/status/1227965089841602561?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-2690853321606961188.ampproject.net%2F2002112037430%2Fframe.html

[dfwabel]

24 minutes ago, dont care said:

You must have missed the video of the astros PR guy running through some bushes To get out of there after giving his statement. 
https://mobile.twitter.com/SavageBoston/status/1227965089841602561?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-2690853321606961188.ampproject.net%2F2002112037430%2Fframe.html

I truly did