they have the fifth highest payroll in mlb. the mets spend plenty of money, they just spend it badly.
lol no. check out longoria's contract sometime. or zobrist's. also see price, david and hellickson, jeremy. they are going to be competitive for a long ****ing time.

No the Rays will always be competitive as long as they have that management in place. In fact, the Rays are perfect evidence of how much everyone is overreacting.

They're a very small market team in the AL East, literally the worst case scenario for a franchise's success. Yet here they are with a recent WS appearance and currently have the best team in baseball and the best core in baseball. They will be very good for a very long time.

You can name 20+ teams in the NBA who have no chance at a title in the next 5-10 years, you can't say the same about baseball.

The Twins have managed to be competitive every year with small payrolls too. Though this year with the new stadium they kinda balled out and spent nearly 100M!

Your turn to strawman. The disparity in title likelihood between the leagues has nothing to do with the financial system.

So? Why is it unfair that an MLB team can't compete and fair that an NBA team can't? I thought the crux of the problem is that it is too difficult for some teams to compete...

Shouldn't something be done to make teams in the NBA more competitive? Why not?

Yeah they've been a medium payroll team for awhile now and they jumped up to def. above average this season.

The NBA hurdles aren't financial in nature. It's simply a situation where the top 5 or 6 players in the league have such a hugely disproportionate impact on wins and losses. There's really no solution other than a hard cap with no salary max and no guaranteed contracts, which obv isn't going to happen.

Regardless of that fact it's still more unfair than the MLB, and no superstar in the NBA is going to want to stay in a small market, so they're hurt even more. Where is the outrage? The NBA's financial structure leads their small market teams to go busto, at least in the MLB a small market team can compete and make a solid profit.


You can either argue that

A) teams need to have an equal chance of winning

or

B) I don't like that this other person has more money than me


People who argue A aren't consistent with their argument, and people who argue B I scoff at

There's a metaphor here somewhere..

2. Chris Denorfia hits an inside-the-park home run (7) on a ground ball through the hole at shortstop. Tony Gwynn scores. None out.

lol i have to see this

It was actually down the 3rd base line and then Podsednik butchered and it rolled out to the wall in left.

Podsednik being Manny?

that sounds a lot less awesome. ****ing gameday getting my hopes up.

Podsednik is such a spaz in the OF. I feel like he does something ******ed out there every game I see him in.

omfg this

Meh, I don't really care for a salary cap in MLB, but there is so much wrong in this post.

Query:

Which word is used more often in this thread:

"baseball"

or

"strawman"

???

Fwiw while the Rays might be the best in baseball this year, it's become very trendy to say they're going to be good for many years to come with a great young core etc. But, I don't know if it's necessarily true. They have a ton of potential, but the only hitter I'd really count on being great going forward is longoria. Zobrist is relatively old for a guy who's only had one good season and this year he's been considerably worse. Upton's been a steady disappointment ever since his breakout in 07. Crawford and Pena are free agents.

I do like their pitching, but pitching by nature is much more unreliable and unpredictable than hitting. I guess what I'm saying is, while I could see the Rays still being elite in 3-4 years, I could also see them being pretty bad.

To change topic for a moment I was watching Lincecum earlier and noticed he totally changed his delivery from the windup, now bringing his glove overhead. Did anyone else notice this? Is this a recent thing or old news? Phildo?

The Rays draft order history:

1999 - 1st pick
2000 - 6th pick
2001 - 3rd pick
2002 - 2nd pick
2003 - 1st pick
2004 - 4th pick
2005 - 8th pick
2006 - 3rd pick
2007 - 1st pick
2008 - 1st pick
2009 - 30th pick
2010 - 17th pick


If I drafted in those slots from 1999 to 2008, I'd like to think by 2010 I could win some ballgames too.

now do the royals and the pirates
yeah, it's new since his previous start vs the dodgers.

Royals

1999 - 7th
2000 - 4th
2001 - 9th
2002 - 6th
2003 - 5th
2004 - 14th
2005 - 2nd
2006 - 1st
2007 - 2nd
2008 - 3rd
2009 - 12th
2010 - 4th


Pirates

1999 - 8th
2000 - 19th
2001 - 8th
2002 - 1st
2003 - 8th
2004 - 11th
2005 - 11th
2006 - 4th
2007 - 4th
2008 - 2nd
2009 - 4th
2010 - 2nd

so average draft position of 6.4 for the rays, 5.75 for the royals and 6.1 for the pirates. and one team is one of the two best in baseball and the others are two of the worst.

i did just 04-09 because it seemed more relevant and got 7.8 for the rays, 5.7 for the 6 for the pirates. it's probably even better to drop 09 which will make the rays the lowest but it's still 3.4 vs 4.2 vs 4.4. it should be pretty obvious that a team needs more than good draft picks to succeed.
this is kind of confusing. he started doing it 7/31 vs the dodgers.

Jesus I hadn't noticed how bad that was before.

Royals draft from 1999 on literally goes

fail
fail
fail
Greinke
fail
Butler
fail
fail
fail
abortion

and same for the Pirates only substitute in McCutchen and Alvarez. Its so bad I think an investigation should be conducted to see if they were throwing the draft on purpose.

Looking at the Pirates closer tho, Neal Huntington looks like he's really started to turn things around.

From Baseball America -

What I wish Melvin would do, from a post I made on brewerfan.net like 4 days ago -

It's pretty disingenuous when anti-yankees haters argue nonsense, but pro big market people counter with this. You'd have to be dumb to contend that small market teams can't make up some/all of the difference with good management. But that's not the argument, or at least it shouldn't be. It's, all else equal, big payrolls are a large competitive advantage. I don't think I'm overstating much saying that the Mets and Royal have roughly equivalently dismal management, but the Mets, at least recently, always have a much more competitive team. Even adjusting for league differences, there's a solid reason for that.

The Yankees have an undeniably huge competitive advantage with payroll. Along with the Red Sox, Mets, Tigers, Dodgers...

I'd like to hear these inconsistencies.

I will note that I do think the Yankees are great for baseball economically. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not content with just saying big markets have an advantage and that's that.