For Baseball, TV is Broken

Last week Ken Rosenthal had a piece up on The Athletic site about the major reduction in rights fees for the new contract between ESPN and Major League Baseball. The numbers are significant, with MLB revenues from the deal expected to go down from about $700 million a year to about $550 million. Sadly, one thing that won't be affected is ESPN's awful Sunday night baseball package, which will continue to take games away from Sunday afternoon and move them to the evening and, at least in the case of the Mets, replace a really good broadcast with a pretty awful one.

Watching Paint Dry

The holidays are past us now, and I really do expect that we'll be seeing some free agents signings in the next couple of weeks. Then again, I thought that things were going to pick up after the non-tender deadline back at the beginning of December, and that just didn't happen. Perhaps there's no real sense of urgency for MLB teams who are betting on some sort of delay for the 2021 season. Or, another possible reason for the slowness that's been bandied about is that player agents are unhappy with the small number of teams that are interested in their clients and keep hoping that some teams will reconsider and jump into the bidding. That would certainly make sense on their part. Whatever the cause, this hot stove season is moving slower than my friend Tony does when he's reaching for his wallet, and trust me, that's pretty damn slow. At times I've seen cobwebs form between his hand and his pocket during this maneuver.

Embracing the Pressure

Now that we've left 2020 behind, I hope that some of the players and teams resolve to not let January be as boring as December was, and that the hot stove season can finally live up to its name. The only sparks of excitement so far have been courtesy of the San Diego Padres, who have made themselves into one of the best teams in baseball by building a very deep farm system and being aggressive using it. For all of the deserved credit that the Rays get for making their voodoo work, it's good to see a team in a relatively small market like San Diego making a bold and aggressive push in a much different way to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West. 

Mets Still Searching for the Right Leader

Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark had a piece in The Athletic today about the difficulties that the Mets and Phillies are encountering in their respective searches for a truly great candidate to lead their organizations. Teams that already have highly regarded executives are holding onto them, as is the case with the Brewers and David Stearns. Now that Theo Epstein has stepped down from his job with the Cubs, there are sure to be rumors connecting him to the Mets and Phillies jobs. However, Epstein indicates pretty strongly that he's not going to be working for anyone else this year:

Baseball's Uncertain Future, and How It Might Affect the Mets

There was a piece by Evan Drellich in The Athletic last week that caught my eye, but in all of the excitement surrounding Steve Cohen's final approval by MLB owners, I wasn't able to get around to writing about it. The current CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) between MLB and the Players Association is set to expire after the upcoming 2021 baseball season. It's been a long time since the last strike/lockout in 1994-1995, but those of us who lived through it still remember it vividly and dread the potential for a repeat of that event. The ugly negotiations that preceded this season were a red flag that a quarter of a century of avoiding those stoppages is very much in jeopardy this time around. And how cruel would that be to all baseball lovers, even more so to Mets fans like us who have waited so long for a regime change for our club?

Dollars and Sense

There's no doubt that this current pandemic has hit Major League Baseball clubs where it hurts the most, a swift kick directly into their bottom line. Playing the majority of this season without fans has made an impact on the money coming in, while pandemic protocols have increased expenses. Most of the clubs have made huge layoffs which they say were necessary to offset losses, although the opaqueness of their bookkeeping shields their true financial health from the rest of the world.