Jerry Crasnick posted an article at ESPN on Friday suggesting that teams won’t be copying the Royals‘ free-swinging, contact-oriented team constructed around solid defense and a strong bullpen, rather than around middle-of-the-order sluggers and ace-level starting pitchers. There’s a perfectly good reason for that: most teams don’t play in cavernous parks like Kauffman Stadium that encourage contact […]
Author: Jack Moore
Who Does Free Agent Compensation Help?
Ever since free agency reared its head in 1975, baseball’s owners (particularly the cheap ones) have demanded compensation for their departing talent. The 1981 strike was, in part, driven by player resistance to a system of free-agent compensation in which the owners would “receive a player of similar value,” which would effectively kill the free-agent […]
Baseball’s Revenue Sharing Fails in Theory and in Practice
The logic behind revenue-sharing programs is easy to follow. In a post-free-agency world, team payroll is a huge predictor of team success, but budgets are limited by things outside of a team’s control, like market size and stadium situations. Revenue sharing, then, allows those teams who can’t match up financially with the big boys to […]
The Minnesota Small-Market Con
While I may disagree with Bud Selig’s arguments regarding small-market franchises and what needs to be done to support them, there is no argument against Milwaukee’s position as a small market. With 882,210 television homes in its media market, per Nielsen, only Cincinnati (868,900) is a smaller major-league market. Milwaukee ranks 35th and Cincinnati ranks […]
Bud Selig’s Coalition Takes Aim
Major League Baseball did not establish its revenue-sharing program without a fight. It took until the 1996 collective bargaining agreement, the first signed after the contentious 1994-95 strike, and that plan was gradually implemented. The current plan, in which 34 percent of all “net local revenue” from all 30 major-league teams is subject to redistribution, […]
Bud Selig vs. The World
Over the past 30 years, no single person has made more noise about the plight of small-market teams than Milwaukee’s own Bud Selig. Whether as baseball’s commissioner or the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, Selig has acted as a small-market evangelist, preaching the impending doom of Major League Baseball should the game’s economic system not […]
Why We Need To Examine Small Market Rhetoric
Milwaukee is a small market. It ranks 35th in the nation by television market size, just behind Cincinnati and just ahead of that famously booming metropolitan area, Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson in South Carolina. No city in Major League Baseball serves a smaller potential fanbase, and more importantly, no Major League city has a smaller base of cable […]
Top Brewers Storylines of 2015: Stearns In, Melvin Out
The number one story here at Baseball Prospectus Milwaukee has been the reorganization of the front office in the wake of the Brewers’ dreadful 2015. On September 21st, general manager Doug Melvin transitioned to an advisory role within the organization and made way for a new GM, David Stearns, formerly the assistant general manager for […]
Who Does Revenue Sharing Really Help?
A couple weeks ago here at BP Milwaukee, I discussed various reports that indicated owners were angry about the Arizona Diamondbacks spending $206 million — including, by the estimates of the owners, a good chunk of money Arizona received in revenue sharing — on their megadeal with Zack Greinke. ESPN’s Jayson Stark even went so […]
Adam Lind and the Robbery of Rebuilding
It’s understandable to feel a little bit underwhelmed with the Adam Lind trade, in which the Brewers received three raw minor-league pitchers, Daniel Missaki, Carlos Herrera, and Freddy Peralta — all teenage right-handers. Lind was going to be one of the best hitters in the Brewers lineup again in 2016 if he stuck around. Meanwhile, […]