Crown Jewels: Two Baseball Thoughts and One Football Thought

We've got labor discussions, Hall of Fame announcements and a prediction for Sunday.

These past few months have been a little short on things to talk about with literally no news coming out due to the lockout. I’m going to get to a couple things about that, but I feel like that is going to thaw soon, so there’ll be actual things to discuss. But the nice thing about sports is there’s always some news to trickle out here and there. And it doesn’t hurt when the local football team is on a run like the Chiefs are right now to help tide most of us over. Today, I’m just going to go through a few things around baseball that are just rattling around in my mind, so settle in.

Labor Talks Heating Up?

When the owners locked out the players for no real reason in early December, I wrote many times that there wouldn’t be any talks in December and then it would be tepid in the first part of January. I wasn’t exactly right. There was one meeting about non-core economic issues, which I actually thought was a pretty good step. No reason to get hung up on the things that should be fairly easily banged out and then you can just move forward once the big things are agreed on later.

But where I was wrong is that there was way less discussion to start the month than I anticipated and I wasn’t expecting much. But the good news is that things have started to turn. The owners made another proposal to the players a couple weeks ago and then players finally responded on Monday with their proposal. But where the optimism grows is that they met again the next day and things started to come together just a little bit.

On Monday, the players dropped their idea of altering the service time schedule, which isn’t surprising that they dropped it but I didn’t expect it to be the first thing they did. At the end of the day on Tuesday, there was some news of where the negotiations stood.

Jeff Passan @JeffPassan

Labor talks are over. Here's what happened. - MLB agreed to accept parameters of a pre-arbitration bonus pool for top 30 WAR. MLBPA seeking $105M. League offered $10M. - MLB offered minimum raise to $615K. MLBPA wants $775K. - MLB withdrew offer to change arbitration structure

I take that as good news. They’re talking rather than just throwing things out and then leaving. I want to break this down just a little bit here. The way I understand this, both sides agreed to provide a bonus pool for the 30 highest pre-arbitration WARs in a given season. The problem is that the players want that pool to be $95 million more than the league wants it to be. So that’s a problem, but also seems like a case of one side shooting way too high and one side shooting way too low.

Not having been in the negotiations, of course, I don’t know if this is a sliding scale where the top pre-arb WAR gets more than the 2nd and so on, but either way, it makes some sense to help get younger players paid more of what they deserve. There are obviously questions here. Is this total WAR or WAR/game? Is it 15 pitchers and 15 position players or just the top 30? I don’t know that it matters for manipulation if it’s total WAR or WAR/game because it’s coming out of a central fund that teams have to pay into anyway, but I honestly just don’t know what’s more fair.

Think about this, and let’s just use the Royals. Bobby Witt Jr. starts the big league season on the roster and plays 155 games. He puts up a 3.4 WAR and is very good. But MJ Melendez comes up in early June, puts up a 2.7 WAR and is even better on a per game basis. Should Witt be rewarded for playing the full season while Melendez played 93 games? I don’t know the answer at this point, but it’s worth wondering. Also, which WAR are they using? Is it Fangraphs? Baseball Reference? Baseball Prospectus? Is it a proprietary system? So many questions there.

And on the minimum salary, I think it’s interesting that the players have held steady with $775k while the owners have moved from $600k to $615k. I found myself wondering why they didn’t jump to $625k to make a very easy $700k middle ground and the conspiracy theorist in me thinks it’s intentional. This way, the owners can give up more ground than the players to get to that $700k and they can try to use that to show that they’re willing to compromise. That’s probably ridiculous, but it’s where my mind went.

Ultimately, my guess is the minimum salary ends up at $700k or so and this fund for the top-30 pre-arb guys is around $45 million. There are a lot of things to figure out, but the actual exchanging of numbers and ideas is incredibly encouraging to me.

And before I move on, can we just take a moment to laugh at Dick Monfort, the Rockies owner? In talks on Monday, he talked about how financially difficult it is to own a baseball team. Nevermind the financial valuation of his team has jumped from the purchase price of $95 million in 1992 to somewhere around $1.3 billion now or that Monfort has a net worth of somewhere around $700 million. He wasn’t at the talks on Tuesday.

(((EugeneFreedman))) @EugeneFreedman

After some additional thought, it's possible Monfort was asked not to attend yesterday's negotiation because he opened management up to greater financial disclosure under the National Labor Relations Act. Normally employers only have to furnish basic financial information in 1/

Céspedes Family BBQ @CespedesBBQ

If you can’t afford a team, then idk DONT BUY A TEAM??? I can’t afford a Ferrari and therefore I do not own one. https://t.co/sSfj3wv3RV https://t.co/9NJKaceKrB

There’s a lot to this thread on Twitter, so click it to read it all, but basically what Eugene is saying here is that Monfort may have opened up a huge can of worms that he didn’t need to open up. What a disaster they have in Denver and now maybe for the owners as a whole.

David Ortiz? That’s It?

I think Big Papi is a Hall of Famer. It makes me crazy that Edgar Martinez had to wait as long as he did to get inducted, but David Ortiz doesn’t need to pay for the past sins of voters. And many will cite the Mitchell Report from back in 2003 that named Ortiz as someone who tested positive for steroids, so why is he any different than any of the other steroid users being held out of the Hall? As it turns out, that report wasn’t especially reliable with more than a couple of false positives. The problem is they never re-tested any of them. And then Ortiz never tested positive in his career.

Did he use PEDs before? Maybe, but as I wrote a few weeks ago, if a player wasn’t suspended, we simply can’t know. Maybe that’s a naive view, but I wrote here that you start to get into dangerous territory about taking away from some and adding to others, so it just becomes far too complicated to know who to include and who to exclude to the point that you just don’t need to exclude anyone who doesn’t have definitive proof they should be excluded.

So yeah, that means Alex Rodriguez is out. Manny Ramirez is out. But then there are players like Sammy Sosa and Gary Sheffield and, yes, the big boys, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. I don’t know how you can have a baseball museum that doesn’t include players who never tested positive for anything but people not liking them. Did all or even just some of them likely use steroids? Yeah, I think we can say that we have a pretty good idea they used something. But the league never stopped them from helping them profit, so, I mean, how are they not immortalized?

The talk after the vote was revealed was that they could look ahead to other committees to put them in, but I don’t see that happening any time soon, so we’ll have to wait for Bonds to get in and it might be awhile. The same is true of Clemens. I doubt we ever see Sosa in. I don’t know. I just struggle quite a bit with the idea that these guys who were so important to the story of the game, and specifically the game coming back from the last work stoppage, not being enshrined for their careers. I’m sure plenty will disagree with that, but it’s how I feel.

Chiefs Corner

I don’t normally move away from baseball here since you’re subscribing to get my thoughts on the Royals and baseball and not the Chiefs. And I definitely don’t want to take away from Seth over at Chief in the North, who does it way better than I could ever even hope. But it’s not every day that the football team I’m assuming most of you cheer for makes to the AFC Championship Game. It is every year, but not every game. I’ve found myself totally immersed in watching NFL shows and reading analysis and I’ve noticed a fun pattern.

Early in the week, nobody could even fathom anyone beating the Chiefs, especially after the way they came back and won on Sunday. Starting on Wednesday, there seemed to be a shift where people started to say that they had a feeling Joe Burrow and the Bengals could get this win. I’m guessing by Saturday, they’ll be back to picking the Chiefs given their propensity for winning home playoff games that we never got a chance to see for, well, ever before Patrick Mahomes.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting that there hasn’t been much mentioned about the fact that Orlando Brown missed the game between these two teams in Week 17. And not only did he miss it, but he missed it by getting hurt during pregame warmups, so they had basically no time to adjust. Then Lucas Niang shifted over and he got hurt. So they had to then move Joe Thuney to left tackle for the rest of the game. Nobody is talking about it because the line still performed so well. All that said, Brown at LT and Thuney at LG is better than Thuney at LT and Allegretti at LG. So that’s big for the Chiefs.

It’s also rarely mentioned that the Week 17 matchup was the week after Travis Kelce missed with Covid and Tyreek Hill barely played with Covid. Both came back and you have to wonder if they weren’t 100 percent for that game given their results. I think the Bengals defense is better than a lot of people give them credit, but Hill and Kelce are playing at their top level right now. I’d be surprised if we see another game where they combine for 11 catches for 65 yards. I also love the way Mecole Hardman is handling the ball after he was featured in that Week 18 game against Denver with Hill mostly out with the heel injury.

None of this is to say that the Bengals can’t win this game. They’re legitimately very good. Burrow is one of the best in the NFL (though I irrationally hate the look of some of his deep passes). Joe Mixon can run. Ja’Marr Chase is obviously a problem. And if the Chiefs choose to shut him down like they did Stefon Diggs, the Bengals have Tee Higgins or Tyler Boyd or CJ Uzomah to beat them. It’s a deep roster with big-time playmakers.

There’s been so much made of the Bengals winning while being sacked nine times against the Titans. And that’s all well and good, but they won with 19 points. That’s not going to cut it against this Chiefs offense the way they’re rolling. If the Titans were able to hold on to the ball at all, we’d be talking about the Chiefs heading to Nashville, so I don’t know that the praises for winning that game are exactly what people are thinking they are. In the end, I think the Chiefs are the better team. The better team doesn’t always win, but I think they will in this case.

Prediction: Chiefs 38, Bengals 27

Thanks for humoring some football talk. Just a couple weeks to when pitchers and catchers are supposed to report.