Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

Mariners blasting away, Casper Wells not going quietly, triple off right field fence. Short quick swing. Seager with a bomb.

Jon Garland had a good two innings with very good command, pitched out of problems, could be a steal of tremendous proportions. Taijuan Walker got scuffed up in his second inning of work, for a bomb and some hits and walks. Lost command of everything as his emotions took over, but reigned it in and got out of the inning.

The wins do not translate necessarily to real season wins unfortunately, but when you have so much more talent than the year before it is indeed promising.

When a kid gets a $10,000 raise and is making over $500k a year, it is hard to raise umbrage, in a county with significant unemployment already and staring at cuts at the principal employer, when a young player gets screwed by his team, as did Mike Trout with the Angels. He may be the best player in baseball right now and the least paid. When he is able to move, he’ll probably remember this.

There are lots of things to read about why this happens and it’s complicated so let’s try to describe it so that you can get your arms around it.

The Major League Players Union and MLB entered into an agreement, employer to union that has heavily directed the proceeds towards labor, i.e. the players, to players who have been in the major leagues for six years or more. Players are under club control for their first three full years and are paid around $500k per year. For year for through six they can go through an arbitration process. Things improve during those years, especially if you are good. If you are average you get to know the country. Teams like the Yankees and Red Sox and Phillies just sign older free agents and or trade for them. The Angels are like that too.

Technically baseball has a labor monopoly, which is called a monopsony. The player’s union manipulated mlb into screwing young and new players, because the older players pay most of the union dues. High school and college kids get absolutely screwed by this. American kids carry the water for college’s and select teams and have done so for years. It is not a new feeling.

The Ms have a couple of guys approaching free agency in Morse and Morales and a gaggle of guys who’s contracts are over this fall. Most of you know that and are sick of hearing it.

The team that follows a process such as the Rays or even the Cardinals seeks to have a bunch of really good players in years 1-6 and only a few past that. The Rays have a very, very low payroll. The Cardinals not so low but not much beyond Ms now, but they let guys with monster potential salaries go. The Rays let them all go and keep rolling young guys in and competing.

The Mariners with the Felix deal seemingly are thinking they could be like the Cardinals. Or with all the one year oldsters which the Rays have done year to year. Time will tell. Even with Felix’s new deal, the Ms payroll at year end will be very low.

Dave Sims was chastising me for my March madness, that is liking the team and I said there is more talent here this March since March of 1990, overall. The thing about this year is that the initial roster probably will not have a lot of the really promising players, but they’re coming this year, so it should be good and make for a fun summer.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 4th, 2013 at 2:56 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.