Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about why the free-agent market has been both slow-moving and fairly lucrative for the players who’ve signed, the White Sox inking closer Liam Hendriks, whether the White Sox are the American League’s front runners, the latest report that the season will start on time, napping, MLB’s plans for fans in the stands, why MLB owners aren’t pursuing expansion, the league’s next broadcast contract with ESPN, a rumored extension for Fernando Tatis Jr., the legacy of the late Tommy Lasorda, and the recent direction of the podcast.

Audio intro: The Bangles, "Mixed Messages"
Audio outro: Dion, "(I Used to Be A) Brooklyn Dodger"

Link to Craig Edwards on the Hendriks signing
Link to report about the season starting
Link to report about health and safety standards
Link to expansion story
Link to Craig on MLB’s TV revenue
Link to Meg on Bradley
Link to Meg on Lind
Link to Outsports story on Lasorda
Link to Outsports on Lasorda and Minnie Miñoso
Link to New York Times story on Lasorda’s son
Link to Jay on Lasorda

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With the White Sox signing Liam Hendriks, the top option for teams looking to upgrade their bullpen is now off the market. Perhaps that will open up the floodgates for the other free-agent relievers, as nearly every would-be playoff squad is in the market for relief help. But whether it’s financially motivated or a matter of roster construction philosophy, there are a few contending teams who simply won’t be making a splashy addition to their bullpen. The Twins fall into that category.

In 2020, Minnesota’s bullpen was the unheralded strength of a division-winning team. The Twins’ relief corps was fifth in the majors by park- and league-adjusted FIP and ERA, and their relievers posted the majors’ third-best strikeout-to-walk ratio. But two of their best relievers from last year — Trevor May and Matt Wisler — have left via free agency. With their starting lineup and rotation mostly carrying over from last year, replacing them both should be a high priority.

Read the rest of this entry »

While there were plenty of good options in this year’s free-agent reliever class, with Trevor May, Brad Hand, Archie Bradley, and Blake Treinen representing the near-top tier, there was just one ace available: Liam Hendriks. That elite reliever is now off the board, with the White Sox continuing their aggressive offseason by signing the former A’s closer to a four-year deal worth $54 million. Yahoo Sports’ Tim Brown was the first with the news of the signing, and ESPN’s Jeff Passan was the first to report the unusual structure of the deal: Hendriks will be paid $39 million in the first three years, with the remaining $15 million coming either as a fourth-year team option or as a deferred buyout if the option is declined.

Read the rest of this entry »

On the heels of a year in which a record seven Hall of Famers died, the baseball world couldn’t get a full week into 2021 without losing another. Tommy Lasorda, the charismatic and voluble manager who piloted the Dodgers to four National League pennants and two championships during a run of 19 full seasons (1977-95) and two partial ones, died of cardiopulmonary arrest on January 7.

The 93-year-old Lasorda had returned home earlier in the week after being hospitalized since mid-November due to a heart condition. He had been the oldest living Hall of Famer since Red Schoendienst passed away on June 6, 2018; that title now belongs to 89-year-old Willie Mays.

For over 60 years, as stars and even Hall of Famers come and went from the Dodgers, Lasorda remained a constant. Including the final years of his professional career as a pitcher, he had been continuously employed by the team in one capacity or another since 1957, their final year in Brooklyn. He spent the past 14 years as special advisor to the chairman during the ownership tenures of Frank McCourt and Guggenheim Baseball Management. He professed a loyalty to the franchise that transcended his own mortality, a subject on which he spoke with frequency. “I bleed Dodger blue and when I die, I’m going to the big Dodger in the sky,” he often said.

As the manager of the Dodgers from September 29, 1976, when he replaced Walter Alston with four games remaining in the season, to June 24, 1996, when he suffered a heart attack and left the team in the hands of Bill Russell, Lasorda won 1,599 games, the 22nd-highest total in major league history; he’s 21st in losses (1,439, for a .526 winning percentage), and he’s the runaway leader in both categories among managers who were primarily pitchers during their playing careers. The Dodgers won seven NL West titles during his run, in 1977, ’78, ’81 (via the split-season format necessitated by the players’ strike), ’83, ’85, ’88, and ’95. They won pennants in the first three of those years, losing to the Yankees in the World Series in 1977 and ’78 before beating them in ’81; those teams were powered by the legendary Longest-Running Infield of first baseman Steve Garvey, second baseman Davey Lopes, shortstop Russell, and third baseman Ron Cey, all of whom Lasorda managed in the minors. In 1988, with an already-meager offense hamstrung by the limited availability of MVP Kirk Gibson, they upset the heavily-favored Mets in the NLCS and then the A’s in the World Series, a victory that is widely considered Lasorda’s greatest triumph.

Stylistically, Lasorda was less a tactician than an emotional leader, one who broke down the traditional walls that separated a skipper from his crew. He hugged his players, ate dinner with them, pulled pranks with them. “I brought a whole new philosophy of managing into the major leagues,” he told Steve Delsohn, author of True Blue, an oral history of the Dodgers published in 2001. “I wanted my players to know that I appreciated them. I wanted them to know that they were responsible for whether I’d even stick around or not.” Read the rest of this entry »

Mickey Tettleton was largely underrated throughout a career that spanned from 1984 to ’97. A switch-hitting catcher who blossomed after finally getting an opportunity to play full time at age 28 — this after being released by the Oakland A’s — he quietly excelled thanks to plus power and a keen eye. Playing with the Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers, and Texas Rangers, Tettleton had baseball’s third-highest walk rate (18.2%) from 1989 to ’95, a seven-year stretch where he slashed .245/.384/.474 with 185 home runs and a 133 wRC+.

There are those who took notice. In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, published in 2001, Tettleton is ranked as the 37th-best catcher of all-time. A low batting average and high strikeout numbers may have sullied his reputation with casual fans, but those who truly understand the game know better. Tettleton — a proud son of Oklahoma — provided a lot of value to his teams.

——

David Laurila: You’re from Oklahoma. Were you a big baseball fan growing up?

Mickey Tettleton: “I was. Of course, it was different back then. The one game a week was on Saturday, and you were glued to your TV to watch it. I was a huge sports fan in general — I played football and basketball growing up — and was always a big-time baseball fan.”

Laurila: Did you follow a specific team?

Tettleton: “Cincinnati was obviously very big, and their main rival was the Dodgers, who had Bill Russell at shortstop. He’s from Oklahoma. But with the Johnny Bench connection, Cincinnati was really big around here.”

Laurila: I’ve read that you were named after Mickey Mantle. Read the rest of this entry »

Consider the plight of the base stealer. In the 1980s, their role was sacrosanct. Get on base first, then cause havoc. For fans of speed and baserunning, it was a veritable golden age. Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman each stole 100 bases in three separate seasons. Since 1980, the 13 top seasons in terms of stolen bases per plate appearance were 1980 through 1992.

Alas, the scurrilous forces of math and efficiency conspired to dethrone the stolen base. As it turns out, advancing one base is less good than creating an out is bad. It’s bad enough, in fact, that you need about three successful stolen bases to make up for the downside of getting caught once. The very best thieves managed that level of efficiency, but in aggregate, the league only crested a 70% success rate once from 1980 to 1992. Steals simply weren’t advancing teams’ goal of scoring as many runs as possible.

For a time, there was a reasonable counter-argument: what if attempting a stolen base has positive value that isn’t solely contained in reaching second base? Perhaps the pitcher has steals on the brain, or the defense loses its cohesion while attempting to cover the base for a throw. It doesn’t need to add much edge to make the math add up.

In 2007, the authors of The Book took up this question. They found a large advantage to batters when a runner was on first — exactly what proponents of steals suggested. There was a big problem, however. That advantage was for all runners on first base. The faster the runner, the smaller the advantage. In addition, actually attempting a steal carried a huge hit to the batter, more than enough to offset the advantage of having a runner on base. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2014, Major League Baseball roughly doubled its national television money in deals with ESPN, FOX, and TBS that expire at the end of this season. Over the last few years, new agreements with FOX and TBS created a nearly 50% increase in annual rights fees, totaling nearly $9 billion dollars from 2022 through ’28. Understandably, the general expectation was that MLB’s new contract with ESPN would follow suit with a similar jump, securing roughly $2 billion per year in national television money alone. But the league’s dreams have been dashed: As Andrew Marchand and Joel Sherman of the New York Post reported last month, ESPN’s rights deal will be smaller than its previous agreement, with Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic adding last week that the total package will be $3.85 billion for the next seven years  — a substantial drop from the $5.6 billion over eight years that the Worldwide Leader forked over last time.

A decrease in rights fees to the tune of $150 million per year is going to raise alarm bells about the state of MLB, ESPN, and cable television on the whole. But while the decrease is cause for concern — and there are certainly some broader issues at work outside the sport — MLB still finds itself in relatively good position. To start, ESPN, FOX, and TBS will combine to pay MLB an average of $1.81 billion over seven years starting in 2022, an increase of 17% over the previous deal (and a growth in total value despite those earlier agreements being a year longer and a year from being over).

Even better for MLB, it still has rights to sell, with or without expanded playoffs. As reported by both the Post and The Athletic, the ESPN deal cuts in half the number of regular-season games broadcast by the network, essentially keeping Sunday Night Baseball and a few other marquee games as well as the Home Run Derby but ditching the majority of the weeknight games. If we assume ESPN keeps 40% of the TV rights from the previous deal and that there’s 40% more value in airing Sunday Night Baseball plus a little extra compared to the 50 or so Monday and Wednesday night games that are being let go, then the network will see a similar increase in cost as FOX and TBS.

The problem for MLB is that while those Monday and Wednesday night games do have some value, it likely won’t be as much as the $300 million or so ESPN was paying annually for them. As the Sports Business Journal has reported, FOX wasn’t interested in MLB’s asking price, and TBS (which will air a Tuesday night game starting in 2022) doesn’t want more mid-week games. To sell these games, MLB will need to lower its asking price with FOX, seek another traditional outlet like NBC or CBS (both of which have cable sports networks), or explore a streaming route like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube TV, or Hulu. Whether the league will have to settle for a fraction of ESPN’s prior price or get something close to it (or even increase it) remains to be determined.

Without accounting for those rights or potential increases due to expanded playoffs, here’s what the national television money for MLB looks like for the past 20 years as well as through the end of the 2028 season. Note that DAZN’s three-year, $300 million contract was included for 2019 only with the assumption that no payments were made last year or in 2021, which might or might not happen. All long-term deals assume a 4% annual increase over the life of the contracts.

While it is isn’t likely to happen, if no deal for more weeknight games materializes, MLB could see a drop of over $100 million from 2021 to ’22. The good news for the league is that after that, it will move closer to the same financial trajectory it has been on for the past few decades: Once the smaller package of games is sold, the last section of the graph will move up and present a more continuous increase. It will likely move even higher if MLB gets its way with expanded playoffs.

ESPN, meanwhile, isn’t likely to see much in the way of revenue reduction as a result of this change: The network has a huge roster of live sports and is maintaining its already significant investment in baseball. ESPN could possibly devote more resources to MLS, whose rights deal expires in 2022, at a considerably lesser cost than MLB and still keep similar hours of live sports on air in the summer. The ESPN/MLB relationship is still a strong one, and the league still owns a 15% share of Disney-owned BAMTech, with ESPN’s corporate overlord purchasing 75% of the tech company for more than $2.5 billion in 2016 and ’17.

In his piece, Rosenthal also notes that the Marlins and Brewers still do not have rights fees locally for 2021. That pair of teams is already at the very bottom when it comes to local television revenue, and it will be interesting to see if they re-up with Sinclair Broadcast Group, which controls both RSNs. They might not have many other options anyway. MLB could step in, given that it has the capabilities and experience to run an RSN and was interested in buying them when they were up for sale a few years ago. Liberty Media could be interested in starting up some RSNs before potentially launching their own network with Atlanta. The most likely scenario, though, is a continuation with Sinclair and an increase in rights fees that doesn’t significantly change the fortunes of the two franchises. Nor will it alter baseball’s RSN landscape as a whole: A vast majority of franchises already have long-term deals and stakes in the networks that broadcast them. Cord-cutting, increases in streaming, and hardball tactics from Sinclair that increase blackouts on those services threaten the future of the game in the long-term, but in the immediate future, Sinclair is projecting nearly a billion dollars in revenues above expenses on their RSNs despite the pandemic.

The ESPN contract doesn’t look great on its face, but it isn’t as bad as it appears. MLB will still see an increase of its rights fees in these next sets of deals, and the league has some inventory it can sell in its mid-week games. Nationally, MLB is now also insulated from a collapse in rights fees for nearly a decade. And while there are some areas of concern locally, most of the league looks to be in very good shape for the next decade. The sport still faces questions about long-term growth, particularly when it comes to attracting new fans in a more segmented video marketplace, but this lessened ESPN deal shouldn’t be of great concern for the sport.

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We’ve written many words talking about the blockbuster deal that sent Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco to the Mets, and rightly so: It’s rare for two players of such impact to be acquired by a single team in the same trade. We know that the Mets are now a better team than they would have been if not for the trade, at least if you hold onto the apparently quaint notion that bringing in superior players makes your team win games and, as a result, is desirable. But just how much better? Read the rest of this entry »