Carlos Correa, Kyle Gibson, CBA discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Well, and especially if we had better clarity, I mean, I know we got some of it in the course of the lockout and the CBA stuff, but it's like, you know, I think there are a lot of places where ownership is universally aligned across the 30 teams, but we know for a fact that there are different constituencies within the ownership group, right? And that there are teams that have been much more keen to impose limits as a way of maybe preserving their own competitive position within the industry and other teams that and not just the mets that have been interested in having slightly higher or even much higher limits so that they can sort of throw their weight around in a place where they view themselves rightly as having a competitive advantage relative to their peers. So it would be a really fast if we could get real transparency into all of those sort of machinations, it would be really, really interesting and I wonder if their owners who are looking around at the landscape now are going, all right, you guys were willing to go higher on those CBT thresholds or whatever it is. And I would imagine that part of the dread, especially for teams that are committed to being cost constrained, isn't even so much like, oh, we're missing out on Carlos Correa, right? It's the knock on effects further down the market where we are seeing sort of the Taiwan walkers of the world get four years and $72 million. And it's like, oh, I thought we were going to be able to be sort of in the market for some of these mid tier guys, but the entire market is shifting upward. And now we're seeing ourselves playing in a very different pool where it's like we have to get really excited about Kyle Gibson. Right, yeah. All right. Can I give you the cliff notes versions of my thoughts on the ball stuff? Sure. It was big news. It would have been bigger news in any other week, I think. It's a fact that the insider report from Bradford William Davis and doctor Meredith wells trapped this week amid the madness of the winter meetings that may have stolen some of the spotlight from it, but it's still got a good share of the spotlight because it's a pretty sensational report here. And just some general observations, so for anyone who didn't read it, it's all free, it's available for anyone to read. It's not paywalled. We'll link to it on the show page. And we have had both Meredith and Bradford on the show multiple times in the past. We had them on together a year ago to talk about their previous article, which was about the ball and the fact that multiple models of the baseball were in use in 2021, which was very valuable research that they did because they brought to light something that MLB had not publicly acknowledged and arguably had not even privately acknowledged the fact that two different versions of the baseball were in use in the 2021 season, a debtor ball, and a more juiced ball, and it was their reporting that got MLB to admit this and acknowledge it publicly and that we claimed that it had informed teams or the Players Association, but they were all like, huh? When did that happen? So no one seemed to know about this. And rad Manfred claimed that it was because of supply chain issues and production delays and COVID and everything, which had stymied their plans to switch over to a new model of the ball and so they had been forced to use leftover