The Dishwasher (a baseball blog)

Pretty good I hear

They got Whataburger?

Not shedding lol

Zach Eflin back in his 2023 form for 10 million dollars

Yeah firing him after the collapse to end the 24 season would have felt much more justified than scapegoating him for 2025

I don’t think we know how much standing up took place behind the scenes

At the end of the day the team underperformed because they were set up to fail by the front office and Hyde took the fall

I’m shedding any tears for him but that’s what happened

I don’t think Elias had more of a say in the lineup than what’s normal for a GM, he let Manso set very different lineups from Hyde and it sounds like Alby isn’t going to be as platoon heavy as Hyde was

Hyde was just like that

He didn’t get any credit from me tell you that much

Like what was he supposed to do to stop Charlie Morton and Kyle Gibson from vomiting all over themselves for the entire month of April

I was not a big Brandon Hyde fan the last couple seasons but he did get completely screwed by the front office sending him into the season with high expectations and one of the worst rotations in the league

Cano: back

If I was an opposing pitcher I simply wouldn’t throw my 92 mph fastball right down the middle vs Vance Honeycutt

Boomsauce

Also comparing any league to the NFL is a bad idea

They play a 17 games season

Baseball would be a lot more random if they only played 17 games it’s never going to be the same!

The finals every year for a decade.

Are those leagues better balanced than MLB who just have their first repeat champion since 2000?

I think not

This is my point about a salary cap not having much to do with competive balance

A lot of people mention other leagues with caps having better competitive balance but do they?

In the NFL the 2 teams have won the AFC 10 times in the last 12 years

In the NBA whoever had LeBron James went to…

That would appear to be the case

Some of it for sure but I think a lot of it is just “I want my favorite team the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series and they’re not likely to do so while the Dodgers are outspending everyone so I don’t care if it’s fair to the players I want things evened out” kind of mentality

lol thanks I wasn’t planning on having so much to say but alas

It would have been a bad contract for whoever signed it but that’s not Cedric problem now is it

Players reaching free agency while still in their physical prime would be huge

It’s one of the only things that would be worth even considering trading for a salary cap

Like Eric said though not sure how you get the veterans to agree to something that benefits them zero

I think about how much money Cedric Mullins would have made if he hit free agency after 2022.

He would have been 27, hed put up 10+ WAR over the previous 2 seasons

He would have gotten a bag

Instead by the time he hits the open market he’s a 30 year old centerfielder and he gets a 1 year deal

This is an interesting idea. Too many teams have figured out that most of a players productive years are before free agency and aren’t participating in free agency if players hit free agency after 4 years the Guardians/Brewers style of team building that is truly detrimental to player would go away

Piece of the pie in the upcoming TV deal

People are going to be very disappointed when the cap gets put in and poverty teams stay bad and the rich teams stay good

Im sure that a cap would go a long way towards helping some of these teams financially but my main point is that they’ve convinced a lot of people that they want to implement a cap to fix the perceived competitive balance issues and the real reason is that they want to make sure they get the biggest

I wasn’t born when the things you’re talking about happened so perhaps my use of “never” was hyperbolic BUT the union has kept a cap off the table for the most part up until recently and now the idea has picked up a lot of steam over the last couple years

Once the cap is in place the Pirates and the Twins will still be second tier teams and the only real change will be that a smaller percentage of league revenue will flow toward the players

That’s kind of my point. The owner’s primary motivation in pushing this is that they want to decrease what they’re expected to pay players

They’re laundering this desire to pay players less through the fans desire for competitive balance

Things that are sneaky

These people have a lot of resources and they’re not an honest group

If a group of billionaires want public opinion to sway and then it sways I tend to believe they did something to cause the sway

That’s just what I can see. The other reason I attribute opinion swaying this way to the owners is because it’s what they want. Rob Manfred toured clubhouses last year trying to convince players a cap would benefit them

If they’re willing to obvious about what they want they’ll be willing to do…