Yost

Of Course Teams Are Going To Copy The Royals

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 […]

Garza Lohse

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 […]

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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 […]

Lohse

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 […]

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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, […]

Selig

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 […]

Melvin

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 […]