The 5 – F*ck the Commissioner
February 5, 2018
That’s right, Fuck You Rob Manfred!! Fuck You Roger Goodell!!! Fuck Gary Bettman!! Fuck You Adam Silver (this is the mildest one because of his stance on gambling, but he still precludes high school players from directly turning pro, so he can still fuck off)!! Friends, there was a time when the Commissioner was an arbiter of sorts for the SPORT and not just a puppet with ownership’s hand up its ass directing their every move. Roger Goodell literally gets $40 Million dollars a year to carry out the Owners wishes and be damned with the game. This is why we see many parts of our favorite games broken. Baseball is our favorite game here at the 108 and baseball has a big problem with its market and with teams tanking all the damn time, and not because you have to, to win, but because they can get welfare from the big market teams, turn a profit and pretend they are rebuilding, while running out low payrolls. The 2018 “Free Agent Crisis” is all of these bad actors, actions, coming to a head. If a REAL COMMISSIONER, someone with baseball’s best interest in mind were to come along, I would write him or her an open letter, with the 5 suggestions I bring you below to help ensure that teams and ownership are properly incentivized to run their organizations for the good of the game.
5 – Inverse Draft Order – The first step in reversing all this fucking tanking is to change the way the draft is set up. No longer do the teams with 100 losses get the first pick. In this scenario, the teams with the best record to miss the playoffs, picks first….and so on. So if you have the worst record in baseball, good news, you get to pick 20th, right in front of the teams that just made the playoffs. You want to slide up in draft order, I suspect you start spending some of your MLB Welfare, or leveraging your increases in franchise value (I’m sure Goldman Sachs would happily write you some paper on that $1B franchise value) to acquire better players.
4 – Profit sharing aka MLB Welfare – No MLB welfare unless you win 70 games. Sorry small market teams, you are going to have to try and the $$ that is set aside for this shit is given in allocation to the teams that win the most down to the teams that win the least. If you are below 70 wins, guess what,
NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. STUPID. YOU’RE. SO. STUPID. (I bet you wish you had taken the Red Snapper).
3 – Realign divisions more along revenue lines – This isn’t a perfect answer, but once MLB inevitably expands again, and adopts the DH across both leagues, the AL and NL will no longer be sacred and you could realign things so that you have less disparity between high and low income teams in division, this way your unbalanced schedules actually accomplish something good, instead of making the 108ers try and think up some fresh KC Royals trivia that doesn’t involve Frank White or Willie Wilson. This will help the lower revenue teams make the playoffs if they are routinely facing off against each other 19 times per year and are lined up in divisions in which they beat out each other for division titles, not like the Pirates winning ~280 games over 3 seasons to play 3 coin flip games, they’d actually probably win a division.
2 – Larry Bird exception – Just watching the MLB Salary Cap’s (fuck that term “luxury tax”, it’s bullshit, this may be a soft cap, but teams are treating it like a hard cap, so that’s what it shall be) penalties frighten the big market teams from spending upsets me so much. I’d like to see MLB adopt what the NBA used to call the “Larry Bird exception”, which allowed teams to resign their own free agents without penalty against the salary cap, up to a designated amount. This would allow those big market teams to keep their homegrown talent for market price and also allow them to go out and get talent on the open market. Imagine that, encouraging spending to improve a team…..who’d a thunk it?
1 – Worst record penalty – Let’s put something on the line for really, really sucking…..in some soccer leagues they have what’s called relegation, which pushes teams out of the league they are in down to a lower league that won’t allow them to earn as much money or compete for the top talent. I don’t think we need to go that far, but how about the team with the worst record in MLB loses a home series in the following season? That would be a “REVENUE” shock to the system. Remember folks, we want these teams competing for marginal wins, even if those marginal wins don’t render playoff births. I think we’d all like to see teams busting it in September even if they won’t play an inning in October. That’s what baseball should be.
You got some idears that could incentivize these teams to make our game better, lay’em on me at the BookFace or the Twitters…..
– BeefLoaf
About The Author
beefloaf108
Low information White Sox Fan. Big Feet Energy ORIGINAL 108er Like Whore 2019 Opening Day #SoxMath WINNAR Mediocrity Personified