Last year’s Cardinals were successful. Thanks to a solid rotation, a good bullpen, and excellent defense and baserunning, St. Louis won the division and advanced to the NLCS. The Cardinals’ main weakness was at the plate, where they were mostly average. Excluding pitchers, the team’s wRC+ for the season was 100, and ranked 14th in the game. The team’s outfield was no exception; the group put up an identical 100 wRC+, which ranked 17th among major league outfields, with their 7.0 WAR occupying that same ranking. Despite allowing Marcell Ozuna to leave in free agency and trading Randy Arozarena and José Martínez to the Rays, the team still has a glut of outfielders competing for roles this spring. They have quantity and they might have quality as well, but sorting out playing time could be a mess.

The Cardinals have three players who accumulated at least 100 plate appearances in the outfield last season. Here’s how those players performed:

That trio probably doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Fowler had a bounce-back season, but with an average batting line and most of his time spent in a corner outfield spot, he was slightly below average overall and turns 34 years old before Opening Day. Bader saw his walk rate improve, but hitting in the eighth spot the majority of the time probably helps account for some of that uptick, and might have made Bader too passive. His overall numbers against righties last season were in line with his breakout 2018 at about 10% below league average, but his numbers against lefties plummeted, unusual given he has hit well against them his entire career, including in the minors. Despite Bader’s weak year at the plate, his fantastic defense makes him an above-average player. As for O’Neill, he struggled mightily as a pinch hitter last season; he put up a slightly above-average line as an outfielder and a 116 wRC+ in July in more regular starting duty before he injured his wrist. Given his somewhat inconsistent minor league history — sometimes crushing, sometimes hitting closer to average — it’s fair to say we still don’t know much about O’Neill’s abilities as a hitter against major league pitcher or how he might fare given extended playing time.

So the incumbents, if you want to call them that, consist of an aging, should-be fourth outfielder, a glove-first center fielder, and a 24-year-old with a lot of power and strikeouts who may or may not be capable of starting at an average to above-average level. The outfield situation is emblematic of an offseason that seems to have passed St. Louis by. The Cardinals do have other outfield options in camp, including one of the better prospects in baseball, Dylan Carlson. Here are the 2020 projection for Carlson and a few other options who are in the mix:

Projections aren’t perfect, but they don’t paint a sunny picture for the Cardinals’ outfield. One of the better projected players is Tommy Edman, and he is a better fit on the infield; he’s likely to be more of a super-utility player this season, which would take him out of a starting role. While Lane Thomas, Austin Dean, and Justin Williams are in the mix for roster spots, Thomas has put up mostly average numbers in Triple-A, Dean is a 26-year-old with defensive issues, and Williams hasn’t been able to put the ball in the air consistently. That leaves four starters for three spots.

Bader plays center field so well, it’s tough to see him not getting the starting spot out there. While O’Neill, Fowler, and Carlson have all shown some ability to play center, those days are mostly behind Fowler, O’Neill has been a corner outfielder for most of his career between the majors and minors, and Carlson might not be a center fielder long-term, as Eric Longenhagen noted in his prospect write-up when he placed Carlson 39th on this year’s Top 100:

Carlson is an average runner and a large dude for a 20-year-old. His instincts in center field are okay, but not good enough to overcome long speed that typically falls short at the position. Because of where we have his arm strength graded, we think he fits in left field or at first base.

So if we put Bader in center at least most of the time, there are two starting spot for Carlson, Fowler, and O’Neill. The projections say Carlson is the better outfielder of the three, and his prospect status indicates his ceiling is probably higher as well. There are going to be some service time considerations; Carlson could be held down in the minors for a few weeks to gain an extra year of service time, though that’s not a tactic that has been used by the Cardinals in the past. Carlson is not yet on the 40-man roster, but that’s an obstacle easily overcome.

A neutral evaluation of the three players would give Carlson one of the remaining corner spots, creating a toss-up between O’Neill and Fowler. While spring stats aren’t indicative of talent level (given the small sample size of plate appearances and the potential disparity in opponents’ skill levels), it should be noted that none of the play so far this spring has served to change the order of the projections, with O’Neill and Carlson producing and Fowler not. It’s reasonable for the Cardinals to want to actually see what they might have in O’Neill; while perhaps less reasonable to play Fowler due to his contract status, it is something that teams do all the time. It’s possible those two factors might be enough to keep Carlson in the minors.

Carlson isn’t a sure thing, but his projections make him out to be a clear rung ahead of the other potential outfielders. The “path of least resistance” so often used by the Cardinals would put the veteran in one corner outfield spot and the young, but uncertain talent already on the 40-man ahead of a top prospect with a high floor. But the Cardinals as a team already have a pretty high floor. It’s the ceiling that is in issue. If the club is going to beat their 82-win projection this season, the outfield provides the biggest opportunity. The outfielder with the lowest ceiling also makes the most money. Dexter Fowler would make a solid fourth outfielder for the Cardinals as the team looks to see just how good a young outfield of Bader, O’Neill, and Carlson could be, but that’s a tough conversation to have with a veteran whose been starting for more than a decade. It’s a bit messy, but in order for the Cardinals to see what they have, they have to play the most promising players who project to have the best performance.

As consumers have been given more and more entertainment options, their choices have become more fragmented when choosing what to watch and how to spend their time. Cable television took away the absolute dominance of network television, and due to its ubiquity, viewing options for most Americans were readily available and universal. Whether someone preferred to watch sports, home and garden shows, Mad Men, cable news, or Friends re-runs, all were available, and the customers of one preference subsidized the viewing habits of the others in a cable bundle. (This is the third piece in this series with first one covering MLB’s prior reliance on national television money, and the second one on MLB’s massive rise in revenues since the strike).

That bundled philosophy is still strong, and even newer streaming entrants to the market like Sling, Hulu, and YouTubeTV stuck with the bundle. However, as HBO, Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon Prime begin to siphon off customers, and with NBC joining the fray as well, the bundle is threatened. While the solution to the slow dwindling of cable subscribers is not readily apparent for content producers and providers, it’s representative of the difficult decisions Major League Baseball faces with their television contracts, their attendance, and their ability to bring in new fans. Unfortunately, MLB seems to be focused on short-term gains at the potential expense of the long-term health of the sport.

As streaming services grow in popularity, MLB is well-positioned with their technology and their reach. In 2017, MLB.TV was the fourth-biggest OTT service, behind only Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, and ahead of HBO Now, which reportedly had close to five million subscribers at the time. MLB has the ability to serve fans with a streaming-only option and keep or maintain revenue levels even if every team were to lose their cable television contracts tomorrow. If we assume there are around five million customers paying $120 per year for MLB.TV, and teams receive $1.8 billion under their local RSN contracts, they would need just 12 million customers nationally who were willing to pay $200 a year to sustain revenues before considering advertising that mostly goes to cable companies right now. The problem with that plan is that it denies access to close to 100 million potential or actual fans who were able to watch the teams on their standard cable package. Long-term, that’s an awful idea if the goal is to create new fans. Read the rest of this entry »

Generally speaking, exactly how much money baseball teams make on an annual basis isn’t public knowledge. We can take a look at the sale of MLB franchises and know that when they are sold, teams generally make 8% annually after accounting for inflation. Profits are more difficult to decipher because owners don’t want to disclose just how much money they make, though they are sometimes quick to trumpet an operating loss. The absence of many owners claiming losses is arguably deafening, but in addition to that silence, the publicly traded Braves report their revenues every year. Over the last two seasons, they have provided Liberty Media with nearly $150 million in profits.

Baseball ownership hasn’t traditionally been an avenue for massive yearly profits. In 2001, MLB self-reported unaudited numbers to Congress after MLB’s antitrust exemption was threatened. They had announced that two franchises might be contracted, and that drew the ire of the elected representatives in Washington. It’s fair to take these numbers with a grain of salt, but on average, teams lost around $5 million per year from 1996-2001. MLB did not have a great television contract during that time, but revenues have skyrocketed since then, with significantly better TV deals (both locally and nationally) along with increases in attendance and ticket prices.

Even so, when Liberty Media purchased the Braves in 2007, it wasn’t necessarily an expectation that the club would turn a profit every year, at least according to Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei a year ago. It was that lack of profits that made many speculate that Liberty wouldn’t be holding on to the Braves for a long period of time, but they’ve had a change in philosophy, with huge profits affecting their previous strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

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Television money draws a lot of attention when it comes to MLB’s finances, in part because the national revenues are easily identifiable. But the big driver of baseball revenue since the strike hasn’t been national television. Instead, local television deals and brand new stadiums with capacity for significantly more fans (and many highly priced tickets) have helped MLB revenues soar. Baseball’s national television deals have certainly gotten bigger, but getting fans to the ballpark has been more important to the bottom line over the last few decades. Baseball’s increasingly diverse streams of revenue have even reached to land deals surrounding ballparks, and helped create a financially strong industry in which one bad television deal won’t topple the sport and lead to a strike and lockout, as it did in 1994 (covered in Part I). However, MLB must be careful not to head back in that direction, and current trends are less than promising. In the second part of this series, we’ll look at how MLB has grown into an industry that generates nearly $11 billion per year in revenue, with a valuation above $50 billion.

While the 60s, 70s, or 80s (or whichever era you grew up in) were probably the halcyon days of the sport, you wouldn’t know by looking at attendance figures. In the 1980s, average attendance was roughly 22,000 fans per game and tickets were about six bucks a piece (around $14 after inflation). In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $25 million per team per year. Over the last decade, attendance is up to 30,000 per game, one-third more what it was in the 80s (a topic that is often overlooked when examining the health of the sport), and ticket prices have averaged around $29 per ticket in that time. For an average team, that’s $70 million per year, an 180% increase over the 1980s even after accounting for inflation. Even with that increase, gate receipts account for somewhere between 20% and 45% of revenue, depending on the team. Helping to fuel those increases, almost every major league team has received a brand new, publicly funded stadium to bring more fans to games at considerably higher prices. In the last 30 years, national television money has doubled after inflation, but gate money has grown nearly twice as fast.

Local television revenue has grown just as fast as gate revenues and provided teams with a windfall of cash over the past 20 years, necessitating revenue sharing as the disparity between the biggest and smallest baseball markets have grown. The massive cable television deals, coupled with notable failures in Houston and Los Angeles, have caused speculation about a cable bubble as carriers lose subscribers and become reticent to pay big per subscriber fees for niche channels. Read the rest of this entry »

When massive television dollars from broadcast giants ABC, CBS, and NBC stopped flowing directly into baseball owners’ pockets 25 years ago, the downturn in revenue helped to cause a strike that the sport took years to recover from. In the earlier part of this decade, a similar specter loomed in the form of a cable bubble, the bursting of which threatened to take away the millions that teams receive to broadcast local games on Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) like the Yankees’ YES Network or the Cardinals’ Fox Sports Midwest. Due to a diversification of revenue, an emphasis on developing streaming technology with a impact felt beyond the sport, and an increasing number of bidders, both traditional and non-traditional, that want to broadcast baseball games, Major League Baseball has been able to avoid a bubble similar to the one that severely damaged the sport 25 years ago. But, as exemplified by the recent Sinclair acquisitions of RSNs and the Blue Jays’ decision to remove Canadian access to their games on MLB.TV, a short-sighted approach could undo their victory in the long-term.

First, how we got here.

In 1988, CBS won the right to broadcast Major League Baseball’s marquee events, including the All-Star Game and World Series, beginning in the 1990 season. The network would spend $1.08 billion over the following four years for those games, reportedly beating the offers of rival networks ABC and NBC by as much as $400 million. While the deal was massive in its size, its importance was outweighed by a smaller but more significant deal signed the same year.

One concern with CBS’ new deal was the dramatic decrease in the number of regular season games broadcast nationally, moving from more than 30 games per season down to just 12 beginning in 1990. Commissioner Peter Ueberoth laughed off those concerns, noting teams’ ability to sell local broadcast rights. Around the same time as the CBS deal, the New York Yankees announced one such deal:

The prime example was the recent sale of television rights by the Yankees, who will collect $500 million over a 12-year period from the Madison Square Garden cable network for as many as 150 games a season by 1991. The 12 others are reserved for the national television package, now owned by CBS. The Yankees thereby became the first baseball team to award its local broadcast package entirely to cable television, which could set the pattern for other teams in the future.

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I think it’s fair to say that the city of Cleveland has an image problem. I don’t know how far back this issue goes, but they’ve been late-night joke fodder for as long as I can remember. I suppose flyover country plus rust belt plus the depiction of the city and baseball team in the movie Major League adds up to a less-than-stellar perception of the city. That attitude often transfers over to the baseball club, particularly in terms of what the team can and cannot do when it comes to spending. This perception is central to the debate about whether the Cleveland baseball club can afford a massive contract extension for Francisco Lindor. However, perception isn’t always reality.

There are two principal arguments against Cleveland offering a big contract to Lindor. The first is that Cleveland is too small of a market with meager revenues, and signing Lindor would push payroll too high. The second is an offshoot of the first: If Cleveland were to sign Lindor to a huge contract, they would have their ability to compete constrained because Lindor would cost too much to keep payroll in line with typical levels. Both arguments are worth exploring.

Last season, Forbes ranked Cleveland 25th among franchises for valuation purposes at $1.15 billion. Twenty-fifth place feels pretty close to 30th, and it’s true that Cleveland’s valuation by Forbes was just $150 million higher than the last-place Marlins. It’s also true that Cleveland is closer to 18th-ranked Arizona Diamondbacks than they are to Miami. Cleveland’s market certainly isn’t the biggest in baseball, but it has close to the same number of households as Denver and is significantly ahead of places like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, San Diego, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. It’s not just market size and valuation where Cleveland is closer to a middle-of-the-pack team than a cellar-dweller. Read the rest of this entry »

Assuming he doesn’t get traded, Kris Bryant appears to be David Ross‘ choice as leadoff hitter this season. It’s not a secret that the Cubs have struggled to find a leadoff man since they let Dexter Fowler walk in free agency after their 2016 championship season. Last year, the Cubs’ .294 on-base percentage and 77 wRC+ from the leadoff spot were the worst in baseball.

Over the last three seasons, nine players have taken at least 50 plate appearances from the leadoff spot.

Some of these are small samples, and while we know Jason Heyward isn’t a player who would put up a 44 wRC+ with more playing time, we also know he probably isn’t going to be much more than average with the bat. Given the importance of the leadoff spot, average shouldn’t be good enough for a contending team. Ian Happ was a little above average, but his .319 OBP leaves something to be desired. Even the .333 OBP he put up in limited time overall last year isn’t great. Daniel Murphy was only with the club for a few months. Kyle Schwarber’s career .339 OBP screams pretty good but not start-the-game-off great, and being below-average against lefties means he couldn’t do it every day. Read the rest of this entry »

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Yesterday I took a look at team payrolls, offseason spending, and the outlook for MLB spending on players as a whole compared to the last few years. Today we’ll take a look at one portion of team payrolls most teams would rather avoid. No organization wants to be paying players to play for other teams or to sit in the minors or to simply be out of the game, at least in the abstract. At some point though, teams will kick in money for a trade because the overall savings can be utilized elsewhere, the prospect return is slightly better, or because there is better use of a roster spot. Those payments become dead money.

As in past years, I’ve defined dead money as generally any money a team is paying out to a player who no longer appears on their 40-man roster. There are three types of dead money:

1. Money paid to players who have been released. Those players are free to sign with other teams, but the team releasing the player still owes the money remaining on the contract.
2. Money paid to other teams as compensation for players who have been traded. Generally, we see teams cover a portion of a contract to receive a better return in trade.
3. Money paid to players who are still in the organization but who have been removed from the 40-man roster. Any team could have claimed these players if they were willing to take on the contract, and the player probably could have elected fee agency, but then he would forfeit his right to the guaranteed money.

Here are the teams with the most money on their current payrolls going somewhere other than their roster. Read the rest of this entry »