The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Jayson Stark is off his nut

This is great. Stark wrote this whole long article detailing many of the ways in which teams exploit baseball’s current equality-enforcement systems, and then reaches the most unreal, indecipherable conclusion that is humanly imaginable. I’ll link the article at the end, because the title’s a spoiler, and I’d rather you get the buildup and then the crazy-man reveal as I’m sure God intended them to be read. Buckle up!

If you live in Pittsburgh or South Florida, you’ve probably gotten so used to blaming The System for all your team’s problems, there’s an excellent chance you never noticed something every fan of these two "small-market" operations should know:

What’s that? That the Marlins won the World Series in 1997 and 2003? That they contend every single year? Or is it that the Pirates’ problems have nothing to do with the Yankees’ payroll and everything to do with their ownership and front-office consisting entirely of barbary apes?

Your team collected more money this season — before it ever sold one ticket — than it spent on its entire major league payroll. In fact, it collected more than it spent on its major league payroll and its player-development system combined.

Well, yeah. Revenue sharing and the luxury tax are jokes. Mainly they’re excuses for small-market owners to line their own pockets at the expense of the big dogs while still doing exactly the same things they’d be doing anyhow. This is news? It’s been going on as long as these systems have been in place. Systems and exploitation of systems go hand-in-hand there, Jayson.

Just a few days ago, everybody’s favorite agent threw baseball’s pooh-bahs into a serious froth. All it took was Boras telling the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo that some teams are collecting $80 million to $90 million from Major League Baseball just in revenue sharing and central-fund welfare — and essentially stuffing much of it in their mattresses. Well, not quite.

Not that there weren’t some shreds of truth in there someplace. But we’ve run those figures past all sorts of people who ought to know. None of them thinks that particular number adds up.

I have no particular comment on this section; I just included it here because you need to remember it for later. It’s important. Because just two lines later in the article, Stark says this:

If we just use the raw numbers, it appears that at least 10 teams collected $90 million-plus this year before they opened their ticket windows, let one car into their parking lots or sold one slice of pizza.

So. What happened here? Stark jumps up Boras’ ass for his figure of $80M – $90M gained by revenue-sharing. Then he himself arrives at the figure of $90M+ for revenue-sharing plus local TV. So how much is local TV worth? According to Jayson Stark:

We know that 29 of the 30 teams make at least $15 million a year in local broadcast money, and no team rakes in under $12 million.

Ignore the fact that that is probably the very weirdest way he could have phrased that. Let’s just note that $90M+, minus $15M for local TV, amounts to $75M+. Which is, fundamentally, exactly what Boras said in the first place.

Jayson Stark, for nitpicking at the difference between $75M+ and $80M, you are a very weird man.

Central fund (includes national TV, radio, Internet, licensing, merchandising, marketing, MLB International money): Each team, from the Marlins to the Yankees, gets the same central-fund payout. And that check comes to slightly over $30 million per team if you deduct the $10 million in pension and operations fees, or just over $40 million if you don’t.

Fun fact: if you deduct the $5M ops fee and the $5M pension fee from the central fund payout, you can indeed make revenue sharing look a good deal smaller than it actually is. This, it turns out, is the key to Stark’s entire anti-Boras screed: he wants to subtract the fees from the revenue sharing and call it only $65M+. Or, in short: he’s splitting odd, semantic hairs for no discernible reason. Jayson Stark, you are a very weird man.

Even if you ignore the regularly scheduled Boras conspiracy theories, most agents make no secret of the fact that they believe baseball is exaggerating its financial throes in a $6 billion industry.

This. This right here… this is adorable. Jayson Stark apparently listens to agents when they tell him that baseball could afford to pay their clients — and, therefore, the agents themselves — more money than it’s letting on. I absolutely love how apparently it’s only Scott Boras who makes up "conspiracy theories" — none of those other agents would ever stretch the truth to try to get more money! Agents said it, so it must be true!

If you think that’s good, wait until later, when he starts believing the union negotiator:

Are there teams that collect more money before they sell a ticket than they spend on their major league payroll? MLB’s chief labor negotiator, Rob Manfred, doesn’t dispute that. What he vociferously disputes is the meaning of those figures.

I find it stunning and unbelievable that the guy whose job it is to placate the MLBPA would say that players maybe aren’t being wronged! That means it’s true.

"When you evaluate a baseball team," Manfred said, "you need to understand that these teams have expenses in addition to the 25-man roster on the field."

This is the only occurrence in this whole long article about how teams spend their money of anybody mentioning that teams have expenses other than player payroll. The only occurrence. Unfortunately, Manfred appears to lose his way shortly thereafter, because then he says this:

"They have multimillion-dollar benefit costs. They have the cost of paying 15 players on the [40-man] major league roster who are not in the big leagues.

"They have the cost of their player-development system, which averages $15 million [per team] a year. They have the cost of acquiring [amateur] players through the [June] draft and internationally, which averages $9 million [per team] a year. So for anybody to take a club’s revenues and say that 60 percent should go to major league payroll, that’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of this business."

Oh, Rob. Oh, Rob, Rob, Rob. You’re still just talking about player salaries, you know that? Not one mention of facilites upkeep, support staff, executive salaries, scouting costs, marketing… anything. Nor any mention of that fact that, if you were interested in truth and not in stirring the public outcry pot, this is where you’d put those $10M in fees. Added on here, not subtracted weirdly from the central fund.

So what do we do about it all? Well, we can’t solve all of this. But we do have an idea that has gotten great reviews wherever we’ve floated it. So …

Get ready. You’re about to head off the crazy cliff into nonsense-valley.

Our final conclusion: Don’t just tax the Yankees.

Let’s get back to where this column began. If this sport has problems, they don’t begin and end with the Yankees.

At least the Yankees take the revenue they generate and plow it back into their franchise. At least the Yankees finance more than just their own little $215 million baseball team. They also pay $150 million a year (in luxury taxes and revenue sharing) to help finance everybody else’s baseball teams, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Those are the rules. That’s the system. And that system gives the Yankees a choice — to roar beyond the payroll threshold and pay an extra 40 percent in luxury taxes for doing it. But if they do, they understand both the upside and the downside of that choice.

So our idea is: Why not extend the same choice to the teams that opt not to spend what other teams spend?

If the Marlins, Pirates or Padres think it’s unnecessary to spend $70 million or $80 million — or even $50 million — on their big league payroll, hey, no problem.

Just tax them for it. That’s all.

Tax the smaller teams for not spending enough money. That’s your idea. I… fuck the heck are you talking about? First of all, you’re assuming, in the face of that last dude you quoted telling you otherwise, that every team could afford to spend your arbitrarily-determined amount of money on player salary. Fuck, Jayson, do you even read your own article? The one dude you interviewed for this thing — or, at least, the one dude you told us about — flat-out told you your idea is nonsense, and you printed that quote, and then you steamed on ahead anyhow. That’s just looney-tunes, man.

A few years back, during a previous labor negotiation, MLB proposed a minimum payroll, which we believe this sport needs. It was the union that rejected it, for philosophical reasons. We think that was a mistake, but nobody asked us.

Which is for the best, since you’re a lunatic. Who has arbitrarily started referring to himself in the plural. You need to lie down, Jayson?

So why not impose the same sort of tax on teams with payrolls below some minimum threshold, exactly the way baseball taxes teams like the Yankees that spend over the maximum threshold?

Because it’s insane and stupid? That’s a reason. Oh, here’s another reason: because it wouldn’t fucking work. According to your madcap numbers above, a team with a $47M payroll, like the Pirates, is unable to compete due to poor finances, but a team with a $50M payroll would be fine? What? Seriously, Jayson. How does forcing them to spend $50M, or $70M, or whatever the fuck meaningfully close the gap between the low-payroll teams and the high-payroll teams, chief among which spent $215M on player payroll this year? It fucking doesn’t is how. Your system would accomplish absolutely nothing except shitting on teams that legitimately can’t afford your arbitrary cutoff. Since they’ll be taxed, they need to take that into account in their finances, which means they can spend even less on player salaries. Which means those poor teams you plan to help by taxing them hard will be fucked even more. Good plan, Jayson!

And, by the way, what happens to all that tax money? Don’t say you’ll hand it out to richer teams that didn’t have to pay the poverty tax. Because that’s even stupider than the previous stupidest thing ever said: the rest of this article.

How would it work? Well, we hear teams argue constantly that sometimes, the only way to get better is to blow up their roster and start over. So we’d allow for that.

First time a team goes under the threshold — and we’ll let the owners and the union figure out whether that "minimum" should be $60 million or $80 million or something in between — we’d impose no tax. None.

But if a team stayed below that "minimum" for a second year in a row, we’d tax it at 20 percent for every dollar below the threshold. The third straight year, that tax rate would grow to 30 percent. And for every year afterward, it would be 40 percent.

Good system! I don’t see any way it could be exploited. Oh, also, Jayson? I guess you’re kind of ignorant and bad at math, but 40 percent of the Marlins’ 2009 budget shortfall — assuming your apparent new minimum-allowed number of $60M (which is not the same as the $50M you said in that other paragraph, but that’s fine) — is $9,278,602.40 You would tax the Marlins nine million dollars for being poor? Fuck the heck? That’s twenty-five percent of their entire payroll. Good plan, fuckhead!

Incidentally, if we choose the $80M payroll floor, then the Marlins pay an astonishing $17,278,602.40, which is just under half of their payroll. That’ll larn ’em, Jayson!

Clearly what would happen under your "system" is that the Marlins would sink their payroll completely under the sea — like, 40 league-minimum salaries — and save the remaining money to sign $60M of one-year free-agent contracts for the next year and avoid the spiraling death of your insane tax burden, which grows every year they have to pay it. This would, of course, completely destroy the Marlins, a team which has won the World Series twice since 1997, since they’d never be able to keep any player for more than one year and wouldn’t have the luxury of being selective about the free agents they do pick up. Good job saving baseball from a problem you made up, Jayson!

Would we solve all this sport’s problems with that tax? Heck, no. There still wouldn’t be enough pitching, for one thing. And owners and agents would still find whole new reasons to be suspicious of each other.

There would be plenty of pitching, because about twelve teams would go out of business.

But it’s one small step toward fixing a broken system. And who knows? Maybe it might even inspire everyone else to take one giant leap toward repairing the rest of it.

That’s true. Maybe the rest of the teams would get sick of this nonsense and take up football instead.

After that self-gratifying line, Stark begins talking about free agents. The very first thing he talks about is the Cubs potentially trading Milton Bradley for Eric Byrnes, which made me so angry I smashed my computer with a mallet.


November 20th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

Two last things that bug me about Mass Effect

Okay, last two. I promise.

The first one’s about the game’s alignment system — there are a few points in the game where it’s just entirely out of whack. The most notable is during a particular side-quest, when you have to deal with a blackmailer. If you elect to scare him into leaving the lady alone by threatening to kill him, you get evil points. That’s fine; makes sense. Where it gets weird is that if instead of threatening to kill him you just outright do kill him, you get good points. Am I the only one that doesn’t make any sense to?

The second one is such a big thing, but, at the same time, such a complete nitpick that I’ve been hedging on whether or not to post it. But, hell with it. Here’s the deal. There’s a major plot point in the game that hinges entirely on the people of the galaxy not knowing anything about the Keepers or the inner workings of the Citadel. It’s quite literally the case that if anybody ever studies these subjects, this whole sweeping plan will come to absolutely nothing. It is imperative for the success of this plan that nobody ever learns about the Keepers and the Citadel.

The people of the galaxy live on the Citadel. Where the keepers are. It is the absolute centre of galactic civilisation. This was also part of the same plan. And all races of the galaxy — the humans, the asari, the salarians, the turians, the volus, the elcor, the hanar, on and on and on — are united in their abject lack of intellectual curiosity as to the nature and function of the giant space station they live on and the mysterious bug creatures that maintain it.

I’m sorry, but that is completely unreasonable. I won’t speak for asari and such, but I’ve met me two or three humans in my day, and if there’s one thing I can say about humans it’s that they are curious about the nature of things almost to a fault. One of the very earliest pursuits in human history was the study of the Earth — what it is, how it operates, what its purpose is. We study even the tiniest and least significant of the creatures around us, trying to understand everything we can about their role in the cosmos. I refuse to believe that the humans — to say nothing of all these other species — never, in all the time they’ve lived on the Citadel, even so much as bothered to figure out the architecture.

Especially since the game’s setup relies upon the idea that all these different species previously discovered other, similar pieces of alien technology and investigated them to find out how they work. That’s what united the races of the galaxy in the first place.


November 20th, 2009 Posted by | Games | no comments