On the state of MLB's lockout
Plus Blue Jays news, notes, links, and more!
Welcome to the dog days of winter. MLB’s lockout continues to grind along with no end in sight, but there has at least been some positive news of late. The two sides are talking.
What exactly are they talking about it? Why are we here? What else has happened Blue-Jays-wise in the days since my last post? Let’s talk about it!
⚾ But first let me take a second to try to earn a living. Because if you’d like to receive an immediate email every single time I post something on the site, or would like to upgrade to a paid membership in order to support what I do and help keep these posts free for everybody, you can do all that with just a couple of clicks and I would be eternally grateful to you if you did! ⚾
In a work of astonishing cynicism back on December 2nd, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred put his name to “A letter to baseball fans” in which he defended the “defensive lockout” he had been “forced” to impose after the expiry of the collective bargaining agreement between the league’s owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association the previous day.
“We are taking this step now because it accelerates the urgency for an agreement with as much runway as possible to avoid doing damage to the 2022 season,” his PR team hilariously wrote at the time.
This was necessary, the letter claimed, because the union's “vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive” and because “from the beginning, the MLBPA has been unwilling to move from their starting position, compromise, or collaborate on solutions.”
A day before Manfred imposed the lockout, the league had come to the negotiating table in Dallas and, according to head union negotiator Bruce Meyer (per Evan Drellich of the Athletic), “proposed to make a proposal.” They would only do so, however, if the union “would in advance agree to drop a number of key demands before seeing what was in their proposal."
“The league has consistently said on revenue sharing, they will not change it, period,” Meyer told Drellich. “There’s a whole list of topics that they told us they will not negotiate. They will not agree, for example, to expand salary arb eligibility. They will not agree to any path for any player to achieve free agency earlier. They will not agree to anything that would allow players to have additional ways to get service time to combat service-time manipulation. They told us on all those things, they will not agree.”
That meeting lasted just seven minutes, and despite the pronouncement about urgency in Manfred's letter, the league continued to stall on reopening talks about core economic issues in the weeks to follow. Drellich reported in mid-December that no talks would take place between the two sides until January. Those finally happened last week.
Plenty of points were discussed between the two sides last Thursday, as have been detailed by reporters like Drellich and Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson Smith, but little progress was made. The good news in that is that the lack of movement was hardly unexpected — especially given that that the league appeared to give away their drag-it-out playbook while negotiating the details of the post-lockdown restart back in May and June of 2020.1
The union may still file a grievance over the league’s actions at that time, alleging that MLB didn’t make a good faith effort to play as many games in 2020 as possible (which they were obligated to do by the terms the “March agreement”). Fast forward to today and once again a last-minute deal to start the season on time seems the only optimistic scenario, though the owners may well be comfortable waiting even longer.
There are many layers to the current negotiations, most of them about money. I think a good place to get into them is exactly where Meyer did more than six weeks ago when the lockout began: the league’s outright refusal to budge on revenue sharing.
During the downtime between the start of the lockout and last week’s negotiations the league was busy working on a potential rights deal with Apple that will eventually provide millions in extra revenue to be shared among teams. If completed, the deal will give the tech giant the ability to stream select Monday and Wednesday regular season MLB games, and will add a yet-to-be-reported amount to the $1.76 billion already due to be raked in by the league through deals with ESPN, TBS, and FOX in 2022 (provided the full schedule of games is played) and beyond. Teams split this money evenly, and Apple's deal will likely push the total US national TV dollars received by each team to over $60 million per season going forward.
There are also hundreds of millions of dollars being exchanged between teams — other than in 2020, when this process was paused due to the pandemic — under the terms of MLB’s revenue sharing agreement.
Every year each team puts 48% of their net local revenue2 into a common pool which is then distributed evenly across the league. Last March Drellich reported that in 2019, the biggest recipient, the Marlins, netted $70 million through this process. He also noted that, according to his sources, the Rays are “are usually in the $50-$60 million range.” On the flip side, the team that lost the most via this system in 2019, the Dodgers, reportedly paid out $90 million.
You start to understand why revenue sharing was the first thing mentioned by Meyer in his litany of complaints about the league’s stubbornness once you start putting some of these numbers together. The Rays are supposedly getting $50 to $60 million per year from that pool. They’re getting about as much from “national revenues” like those big TV contracts. Plus, they get to keep the other 52% of their own net local revenue — a figure that, if you believe Forbes’ 2019 estimate of $112 million, would have amounted to around $60 million as well.
MLB ownership is complex3, so it would be an oversimplification to simply add up those numbers and suggest that’s precisely what the Rays were working with. But it certainly looks like they receive a whole lot more than they’ve been paying out. Cot’s estimates that the Rays’ payrolls for Competitive Balance Tax purposes (i.e. their full, year-end 40-man payroll plus approximately $15 million for player benefits, which include health insurance, transportation, meal money, etc.) have been at about $90 million in each of the last three seasons. In other words, their “don’t ever pay players market rates” business model appears to be working out very well for them. Though even that apparently isn’t enough.4
You could do similar calculations with teams like the Marlins, the Guardians, Reds, Royals, A’s, and Pirates. In fact, the union has an ongoing grievance against the Marlins, A’s, Pirates, and Rays for not reinvesting enough of their revenue sharing payouts into payroll, as is stipulated by the CBA, which states that “each Club shall use its revenue sharing receipts … in an effort to improve its performance on the field.”
The league claims it has fears about the players’ demands altering “competitive balance,” but what that appears to really mean is that the status quo works exceptionally well for them. Even the worst teams are incredibly lucrative in this setup, and if revenue sharing was restructured — if the high-revenue teams got to keep more of what they make, and the lower-revenue ones were left more to their own devices — unexpected teams may be impelled to spend more and pocket less.
Blue Jays fans should understand this concept well. When a new CBA was agreed upon in November 2011, one of the new wrinkles was that over the course of the agreement, which ran from 2012 through the end of 2016, teams in the league’s 15 largest markets5 gradually became ineligible to receive revenue sharing dollars. The Jays were one of those clubs and, I don’t think coincidentally, their $119 million opening day payroll in 2013 marked the first time they had ever been allowed to go beyond $100 million. In the five years following 2013 the Jays' opening day payroll averaged $145 million. In the five years prior to 2013 it had averaged just $82 million.
Back here in 2022, the league appears to be united in their refusal to discuss changes to the revenue sharing formula, but the players are probably smart to keep poking at that potential fissure between the powerful teams that pay in heftily and those that they subsidize. However, as it one of the league’s many third rails, the players have been forced to try find other, more creative and incremental ways to achieve their goals. Those goals include disincentivizing tanking, getting young players paid more and sooner than they currently do, and otherwise undermining the loopholes and instruments of the CBA that for too long have been weaponized against them.
As Marc Normandin, who has done an outstanding job of covering baseball’s labour issues for various outlets in recent years, pointed out in his latest, the union isn’t even making especially large demands here. After getting into Jomboy Media’s bothsidesing of the lockout earlier in the week, and Jomboy’s unfortunate choice to use his rather large platform to “spread misinformation about how player representation even works in bargaining and within the union,” Normandin digressed:
“I don’t want to linger on this specific bit for too long, lest Jomboy claim I’m bullying him with group-think or whatever, but I have to bring it up, because Twitter’s @baseballgaloot made an excellent point while refuting Jomboy’s both sides bullshit: these proposals that the PA made that are supposedly also at fault for the current situation include things such as “the second smallest jump in the league minimum for a new CBA.” The PA isn’t being unreasonable with their minimum salary ask, just because the league is trying to force them into a situation that barely addresses a significant issue with player compensation.”
Yes, the league minimum is a more than the vast majority of us will ever take home in a year — or ten! — and that sometimes makes it difficult for fans to get behind the players in these fights. But exploitation is exploitation, even on such a large scale. In 2019 the league made $10.7 billion in revenue. There are 1,200 members of the union. That’s $8.9 million in revenue for every player in just that one year, and the majority of those players weren’t even arbitration eligible.
On that happy note, here are some specific highlights from what was reported after the latest round of talks.
“Yeah it'd really suck if all the teams that receive revenue-sharing checks and pocket them had to use them to retain good players instead,” quipped Normandin. And he is, of course, correct.
Teams that are choosing not to spend aren’t getting blindsided by their top players reaching free agency. We talk about this potential every winter and heading into every single trade deadline. Constantly trying to figure out which low-rent outfits might be willing to give up their best players for prospects just to save a buck is part of being a baseball fan in 2022. The rare times these cheapjack teams lose top players in free agency it’s because they’re choosing not to make competitive offers. That’s why Marcus Semien ended up with the Blue Jays in 2021. A few years earlier, that’s why David Price ended up leaving the Blue Jays for the Red Sox.
Even if not every team can compete with the dollars that the Dodgers or Yankees can offer on every single player, they have years to sign their best players to extensions and plenty of opportunities to trade them for prospects if they’re unwilling to do so — as the Twins did last summer with José Berríos.
In other words, the system incentivizes players to accept team-friendly deals that buy out some of the most lucrative potential free agent years in the sport, or it allows their teams to hit reset and save a boatload on payroll during a rebuild. The idea that the league’s opposition to this has anything to do with small markets losing star players is an absurd and cynical attempt to tug at the heartstrings of those who still erroneously believe small market teams are in any way in trouble in a league that’s awash with cash.
“Corey Seager left Los Angeles for a last-place team that's probably at best third in its own local market literally a month ago,” tweeted Jon Taylor of FanGraphs. “These owner arguments and concerns don't reflect any version of the reality we live in.”
This one is just flat out funny. Eugene Freedman, a union lawyer who occasionally writes (and, more frequently, tweets) about labour relations in baseball hit the nail on the head: “Let's let baseball writers determine who can't be manipulated and if we don't manipulate them, we'll let other writers decide to reward their teams. It's mind boggling how they could come up with this and then present it and ultimately publicize it.”
He added that, much like the proposal floated several weeks ago to do away with arbitration and reward players with three-plus years of service based on wins above replacement, “this looks to outsource payment of players to third parties, rather than negotiations between the players' agent and team management or arbitration, which encourages negotiations. It's another attempt to eliminate the market aspect in wages.”
Of course, this more succinct take was pretty great, too:
I especially like this one because it’s always worth remembering that service time manipulation really isn’t just “smart business.” There’s a reason team executives go so far out of their way to never admit that they’re holding a prospect down in order to push his free agency back a year. They’re not allowed to do that!
Rob Silver of the Launch Angle podcast also made a good point on this. “This is sorta gross if you think about it for 12 seconds: young baseball players are dramatically underpaid — that’s how the entire system is set up. So if a young player does really well and helps his team, his reward? A chance for his team to get a new underpaid player. Huzzah!”
Worth also noting is that, under this setup, the MVP, Cy Young, or Rookie of the Year vote-earning player would still be making the league minimum!
Hey, and if MLB had its way, there’d be little movement on salaries at the top of the market, either! It was also reported, by the Associated Press, that the players have asked to raise the competitive balance tax threshold from the current $210 million to $245 million. The league has countered by offering to raise it to just $214 million.
This is one of MLB’s best instruments for keeping money out of the players’ pockets, so naturally they’re going to fight hard to keep it close to current levels. According to the CBT payroll estimates at Cot's, the Red Sox, Yankees, Astros, Mets, and Phillies all stayed under the luxury tax by $4 million or less in 2021. Only the Dodgers ($285 million) and the small market Padres ($216 million) are estimated to have gone over the threshold.
It's not quite a salary cap, but it's certainly just about as effective in curbing the spending of the big market teams — and this was in a year in which past big spenders like the Cubs, Tigers, Nationals, and Giants, all took a step back, payroll-wise. The Blue Jays have said that even pushing payroll to just below the threshold isn’t something they’ve thought about. The Yankees, it’s worth noting, had an opening day payroll of $208 million all the way back in 2005. It’s collusion by another mechanism, really.
In another tweet from Ben, he says that “if MLB implements a draft lottery there's been talk of limiting the number of successive years a team would be lottery-eligible to three. Would dissuade teams from extended tanking efforts.”
This one makes sense, though it’s really just a half measure. In his piece on the talks at Sportsnet, Ben reports that the union has proposed an eight-team draft lottery, while the owners have countered with one involving three teams. Given that tanking is, in reality, much more a financial strategy than it is a draft strategy, I’m not sure this would change teams’ behaviour significantly.
There are proposals out there that could, though — and with the added bonus of making some tedious September games between also-rans a little more interesting. There’s the idea of awarding the top pick to the best team that doesn’t make the playoffs. There’s one I’ve seen that would award it to the team that picks up the most wins after being mathematically eliminated from the playoff race. There are probably others, too.
Here is one that I think is absolutely going to happen, though I agree with Ben that the players should be careful in how they play this card. Those massive US national TV contracts are powered largely by playoff TV revenue. Those are the big events for the TV networks. That’s when most people are watching. So expanding the number of playoff games is something the owners are obviously going to be pushing hard for. The players will need to get some pretty big concessions for giving this up.
What I hope also happens is that they at least find a way to preserve the value of regular season success. For example, in Japan’s Climax Series, the teams that finish second and third in each league begin with a best-of-three series. The winners of that round move on to six-game series' with the teams that finished with the best record in each league, in which the play-in winner starts a game down.
That’s probably a bit of a drastic change for MLB, especially considering the traditionalists will understandably be upset by the move to a 14-team playoff (or hopefully just a 12-team one), but there is actually a path for some good and fun things to come out of this lockout. For now, though, all we’re getting is the usual bickering and the league grandstanding in order to preserve a very team-friendly status quo.
Talks will resume on Monday, with the players expected to counter the league’s latest proposals.
News! Notes! Links!
• The most talked-about Jays thing of late, I think, would be Shi Davidi’s recent Big Read for Sportsnet, which looks at the high stakes decisions they’ll have to make on long-term extensions for Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, and which makes the case that the team needs to act sooner than later. Agreed!
• Elsewhere at Sportsnet, my Blue Jays Happy Hour co-host, Nick Ashbourne, looked at the relatively brief Jays career of one-time GBOAT Scott Rolen, and how it strengthens his Hall of Fame case. Meanwhile, Benny Fresh takes a look at some of the weaknesses on the Jays’ roster as it stands, and how to potentially solve them.
• The “international free agent” signing period has recently opened up (it’s shifted from June to January the last two years because of the 2020 pandemic), and the Jays have announced all kinds of signings. On Friday, three youngsters from Mexico were officially made members of the club, earlier in the week the team announced the signing of 18 players, and there are others still — for example, Cuban catcher Maikel Miñoso, who is indeed related to the great Minnie Miñoso, and Faruk de la Cruz, another catcher, who is from the Dominican and is listed among Jays signees in a piece by Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com.
• The main subject of Sanchez’s piece is Venezuelan catcher Luis Meza, who is the most highly touted of this new crop of Jays prospects. Meza was the only of these players to receive a bonus in excess of $1 million, pulling in $2.05 million. He was the number 11 international prospect according to Baseball America, and also number 33 per MLB Pipeline.
Shi Davidi provided a good, succinct scouting report:
• Meza is, of course, also just 17. Which is weird! MLB’s methods of Latin American talent acquisition are really quite grotesque, and Maria Torres and Ken Rosenthal produced an excellent piece this week on the corruption of this system. Worth a read.
• More prospect stuff, as Baseball Prospectus released their top 101 this week. They’re maybe a little lighter on the Jays’ system than some of the other sites, but still have them with four players on the list. Top prospect Gabriel Moreno comes in at number 22, while the other three — Jordan Groshans, Orelvis Martinez, and Nate Pearson — are on the back half of the list.
• Or, actually, maybe BP isn’t even that light. Baseball America only has three Jays prospects on its just-released top 100. Moreno is better in their estimation than BP’s, though, as he checks in at number seven.
• OK, apologies for a quick navel-gazing aside here, but I saw two Jays sites that did entire posts on the BP and BA lists, neither of which actually linked back to the source content. That’s not just lazy, it’s shitty. If you’re piggybacking off of someone else’s work at minimum you’ve got to give them a link. Jesus.
• Great stuff from SI’s Jays reporter Mitch Bannon, who checks in on last summer’s top Blue Jays draft pick, Gunnar Hoglund.
• Another of the next wave of Blue Jays arms was profiled recently as a breakout candidate at MiLB.com: Adam Kloffenstein. Don’t hassle the Kloff!
• R.J. Anderson of CBS Sports also takes a look at the top Jays prospects, and comes in hot with Hoglund in the number three position!
• Elsewhere at CBS Sports, Matt Snyder gives his candidates for the next Hall of Famer for each team in the majors, and does Blue Jays fans a solid in the process. He figures Fred McGriff is — finally! — going to make it via the Today’s Game ballot this December, but because he’s also the candidate for the Braves and Rays, Snyder takes a moment to give some love to Dave Stieb’s Hall of Fame credentials. Love it! Next up: Jimmy Key! And David Cone! (Yes, this is @JoshuaHowsam bait. But he’s not wrong!)
• MLB.com’s prospect gurus recently took a look back at their breakout prospect choices a year ago, and it turns out they did quite well by choosing Orelvis Martinez as the Blue Jays prospect who would be considerably more talked-about by now.
• Moving away from prospect stuff, the Blue Jays made a bit of history recently, announcing that they had hired Jamie Viera of Georgetown, Ontario, to be a minor league hitting coach. She will be the first woman to coach in the organization. Over at the Athletic, my friend and former colleague, Kaitlyn McGrath, provided an excellent profile of her this week.
• Viera’s hiring happened around the same time that the Yankees announced that Rachel Balkovec will be the manager of their Low-A affiliate, the Tampa Tarpons. This makes her the first woman to manage an affiliated pro team. In an illuminating thread, SABR's Scott Bush notes that one of the reasons these changes in hiring practices have taken so damn long is the fact that the creation of women's locker rooms for coaches and umpires had been a longstanding issue between MLB and their minor league affiliates before MLB's takeover of the minor leagues last year. Because of "cost and the inability to monetize the investment, MiLB was very resistant to the idea its clubs should bear the burden of these facilities upgrades," he writes. Thanks, capitalism!
• Another one from Kaitlyn also featured Oakland beat writer Melissa Lockard, as the two tried to find a path for a trade between the Jays and A’s that would see third baseman Matt Chapman and starter Sean Manaea land in Toronto.
• Sticking with the site that shitcanned me, Ken Rosenthal has one on former Blue Jays third base coach Brian Butterfield, who was always beloved in Toronto but may not be held in such high esteem by many after this one gets out. Butterfield remains unemployed heading into 2022 after leaving the Angels following last season. He’s had interest from the Mets since his old friend Buck Showalter agreed to be manager there, but those talks went nowhere because Butterfield isn’t vaccinated and refuses to get one. Woof.
• Some interesting changes at Rogers, as Jordan Banks has been replaced as the head of its Sports & Media division, which includes the Blue Jays. He'll be replaced by Colette Watson, who returns to the company after leaving in 2019 to head Canada's public affairs channel, CPAC. YYZ Sports Media suggests that Watson has a reputation for staff cuts, which would be a shame for all kinds of reasons, though not necessarily impactful on the Blue Jays. They also speculate that this could be a jumping off point for Edward Rogers' plan to spin the Jays and Rogers’ 37.5% stake in MLSE into a separate company. (At the very least tangentially related, MLSE is apparently looking for a new new president and CEO.)
• I mentioned Eugene Freedman in the top part of this post, and wouldn’t you know, he showed up this week on Mike Wilner’s Deep Left Field podcast for the Toronto Star. Also joining Mike this week, the great Devon Travis! Definitely worth a listen.
• Speaking of Showalter, his former team, the Baltimore Orioles, will be moving the left field fence back at Camden Yards starting in 2022. I’m not sure if this is more because GM Mike Elias can’t develop a pitching staff to save his life, or because he wants to cut down on the number of home runs Ryan Mountcastle hits in order to suppress his salary going forward. Either way, fuck the Orioles. (It also looks dumb and someone is inevitably going to get hurt on the chain link fence.)
“The video game thing it reminds me of is Doom enemy closets,” replied Nathan Bernhardt. “The old fence opens up to reveal 30 Luke Scotts wandering around, infighting, throwing baseballs at you when they notice you're there, etc.” Lmao.
• “Unless Shapiro and Atkins are effectively held accountable for their past decision-making, these rare opportunities (to make the playoffs) will continue to be squandered,” says a line from a recent Jays Journal piece that’s not only hilariously wrong (easy there Woodward and Bernstein!) but also seriously out of place in the year 2022 after the season the Jays had and the challenges they faced. The five worst moves the front office made last year are dwarfed by the incredible wins that were the Ray and Semien signings. Obviously. Ahh, but this content mill requires grist!
• Two old friends retired from the game of baseball over the last couple of weeks. One, Francisco Liriano, made an incredibly significant impact on the Jays on the field over last half decade, having pitched his ass off on his way to helping the 2016 team make the playoffs, then a year later getting traded for eventual two-time Silver Slugger winner Teoscar Hernández.
The other made less of an impact on the field, but nonetheless was a huge part of the experience of being a Blue Jays fan in the nascent days of social media. Travis Snider was drafted 14th overall for the Jays in 2006, meaning he had been in the organization a little over six months when I started Drunk Jays Fans. Heading into the 2009 season, he was the number six prospect in the sport according to Baseball America, and number five for Baseball Prospectus. Rushed to the majors in what many saw as a desperate attempt by then-GM J.P. Ricciardi to show some fruits from his beleaguered farm system, Snider spent his first three big league seasons unable to lock down a spot in Cito Gaston's outfield. Adam Lind played more innings in left field than Snider in 2008 and 2009, and Fred Lewis did so in 2010. It was a frustrating time for a young generation that suddenly felt like prospect experts, and harkened back to the difficult end of Cito's first tenure with the Jays, and his jerking-around of Shawn Green.
The veteran manager knew more than we did, it turned out. A pre-breakout, 28-year-old José Bautista got more opportunities to play in 2009 than the 21-year-old Snider did, and their two careers diverged from there. Snider struggled to get on base in 2010, and in 2011 was send down to the minors when Brett Lawrie was called up for the first time. A year later he finished second to Eric Thames in a spring training position battle, and later was ignominiously dealt to the Pirates for Brad Lincoln in the middle of a game in Seattle. Hug watches would never be the same.
That's just a small recap of a Blue Jays career that really set the template for modern fandom. We watched his minor league numbers, knew his story of personal loss, banged the table for call-ups, knew his Twitter name (Lunchboxhero45) by heart, made “meats don’t clash” an unforgettable catch phrase, and watched with rapt attention for the kid who slashed .344/.386/.516 in his first taste of Triple-A to explode on big league pitching the way that he had in the minors. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite happen that way. But it didn’t make him and his career any less memorable for those of us who were there, hanging off of every pitch.
Fortunately, Snider has brought his typically great perspective into retirement with him, as underlined by the heartfelt thread announcing that his playing days were over.
Godspeed, Travis. I can’t believe how old we all are.
• Lastly, it’s been a week, but it’s not like anything about the offseason has changed since then, so have a listen to my recent appearance on Tall Can Audio, in which Matt Robinson and I had a really fun and lengthy chat about all things Blue Jays.
⚾ Be sure to follow me on Twitter // Follow the Batflip on Facebook // Want to support without going through Substack? You could always send cash to stoeten@gmail.com on Paypal or via Interac e-Transfer. I assure you I won’t say no. ⚾
Rather than coming to a quick agreement to get more games in (which would have required more salary payments), or on terms that would have ceded any ground to the union, during that process the league appeared to want to run out the clock so that Manfred could unilaterally impose a schedule — as was his right to do under the “March agreement” that set out terms for negotiating the eventual restart of the league. For example, though negotiations began on May 12th, 2020, it wasn’t until June 1 that the league agreed that they would pay players full prorated shares of their salaries without demanding any extra cuts. It was at that point that the league began to push for a schedule in the neighbourhood of 50 games, despite having proposed an 82-game season (with a sliding salary scale) on May 26. The players’ most recent proposal at the time was for a 114-game season.
Per a great revenue sharing explainer from Bless You Boys, net local revenue is comprised of local TV money, gate receipts, concessions, merchandise, parking, and sponsorships, with things like stadium debt and operating expenses deducted.
Last March, Sheryl Ring of Beyond the Box Score provided an outstanding look into some of the accounting mechanisms — and loopholes — that often go missing in discussions of this subject. An excellent piece from ProPublica published last summer explored how billionaire sports owners exploit some of these loopholes.
On Thursday it was reported by Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times that MLB has killed the Rays’ plan to play home games in both Tampa and Montreal. That scheme would ideally for the Rays have led to a new Florida stadium with minimal cost to ownership, largely because it wouldn’t have required a retractable roof, but also because the team for years has been trying to extract public money for the venture, and because the Montreal backers would have funded the stadium in that city. A split season with Montreal would have also meant new, lucrative local TV rights contracts in both English and in French.
Drellich, back when he was with the Boston Herald, wrote about how "market rank disqualification" worked, and changed between the 2012-2016 CBA and the 2017-2021 CBA. "The formula is based on something called market score, which is essentially the relationship of the market to the average MLB market based on population, income and cable households," he explained. The Blue Jays, in other words, in wealthy Toronto with massive cable coverage, won't be eligible for revenue sharing dollars ever again.
The Tampa Tarpons??!! Really? Never heard of the team before but I bet everyone calls them the Tampons. 😄