A Boy Named Seo

I wondered if Steve would try to get Lindor or Pete or Kodai or Mr. Met over to dinner or on facetime or something. My worry is probably the same as every other fan of every team who's in on this guy. All of the competitors are great markets to play and live in, and all the owners are seemingly ready to splash big cash, but the longer this thing drags out and the price inches upward (I guess it's already a slam dunk that it will hit $300M), the Mets are the most likely to still be there, right? I don't see LA dropping out any time soon, but with Shohei and Glasnow, that's already like $70M and this guy would push their tax hit to over $100M on just 3 guys. I know they can, but I don't know if they will? I'm sure the Giants and Blue Jays and Phillies and even the Yankees have a line they won't cross for this guy. I bet Steve does, too, but what could it be? It's not like Roki Sasaki will be any cheaper when he's posted, and you figure every team who loses on Yamamoto will be immediately eyeing Sasaki next. Many words to say very little. Signed, Anxious in Albuquerque

That was fun to read. And your sig was a perfectly emphatic end to it.

The finest accounting firm in the greater Queens area.

I think if I were Yamamoto, it would've been pretty impactful if Mookie and Freddie and Shohei showed up to my pitch meeting.

Stearns got demoted to GM already? Sad.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: James Naismith never demanded that the game of basketball have only one tournament a year. From the league's point of view its turning a weakness (low ratings and excitement until Christmas) into a potential strength ,(a new "tentpole" it can market and sell for big bucks to a streaming service and better compete with nfl/college fb). Disruption to the schedule was pretty minimal. Two games for each team were scheduled based on the results. And only the finalists play an 83rd game. So if you didn't care about the tournament it didn't cost you anything as a fan. If you don't want to believe the ratings were better I dont know how to convince you but fans apparently tuned in. LeBron vs Russel is irrelevant and nobody is saying that based on this. Yeah I agree with all of this. I'm an NBA fan, NBA package subscriber and have a social media that has algorithm'd itself around NBA content and the IST was super popular amongst fans. Some players didn't get it (Terrence Mann on my fav team said he didn't understand it at all) and Spider Mitchell didn't like the point differential for tie-breakers, but confusion or dislike was not the majority (or loudest) opinion, in my circles anyway. And it did what Silver wanted it to do. Give fans a reason to be excited and tune in when teams were ramping up their starters minutes and managing load even load management isn't allowed wink wink. Sounds like they want to give the winner of the IST an automatic entry into the playoffs next year, which is cool, IMO.

"Keymaster or I Gozer" -Bill Murray, probably

6 years, $113M to the Giants. Dayummmmm

Edgy MD wrote: Strange that, like Diaz, it happened under ordinary, non-contact use. Sort of, anyhow. It's an injury associated with soccer, and the break-and-stop maneuver on the basepath is a lot like what soccer players do for a living, but their ACLs blow after they do it hundreds and hundreds of times in a row. Hard to say whether it happens if he's under the care of Mets trainers. Anecdotally, I think of blown ACLs as more common in amateur soccer than the pros, so maybe, but what do I know? But it's certainly not crazy to think that more rest over the winter would have made this less likely to happen in spring. The Athletic just ran a piece 5 days ago about the ALC "crisis" in the Premier League. TL;DR it's maybe not as crisis-y as it seems, but there's A LOT of good discussion and guesswork as to the why, including heavy schedule of games, not enough injury preventative training, ramping up training to start a season, tearing the ACL while nursing another injury, type of playing surface, shoes, even genetics. So who the hell knows, it still sucks for Ronny any way you look at it. https://theathletic.com/5120100/2023/12/08/acl-crisis-premier-league-wsl/https://theathletic.com/5120100/2023/12/08/acl-crisis-premier-league-wsl/ One interesting thing was this: In the USA, where Kaeding is based, he says 80 per cent of ACL injuries occur in five sports: soccer (football), American football, basketball, rugby and lacrosse. The common denominator between all these says Kaeding is that they are “an aggressive, competitive, cutting sport activity” (cutting meaning an abrupt change of direction). Mauricio hitting the breaks on the base paths was definitely an abrupt change of direction for his poor knee.

This is what I'm not understanding, why for CBT purposes is this viewed at $460 million? Basically, the calculation they used said that the $680M Shohei will be owed starting in 2034 is worth about $460M in 2023. Think of it in a bigger window of time maybe. If they deferred Shohei's $68M per year for 100 years instead of 10 years, that $68M will be worth waaaay less in the year 2124 than $68M is today. In a hundred years, maybe Shohei's descendants could only afford a used Honda Civic with that paltry $68M bucks so his contract would be worth a much smaller amount today for CBT purposes. So deferring for 10 years is not such a stark difference, but it's still a difference. Or even weirder, if I gave you $20 today, sent you to the supermarket and told you to buy as much as you could and then put you in the DeLorean and sent you to the year 2034 and told you to buy as much as you could at the same supermarket with another $20, you'd be able to buy less because of inflation, etc. Your $20 in 2034 might be valued today at like $13 or whatever. So why do all this shit? Why not just sign him to 10 years/$460? I think cause the Dodgers will still be paying him only $2M actual dollars per year instead of $46M, leaving them a lot of real bucks to spend up to and over the CBT if they choose to, and it sounds like they are gonna do just that. This has been "Dumb Guy Explains Something He Barely Understands Himself." We hope you enjoyed it. PS - I found this article at Fangraphs that breaks down the math, but I don't know if that will make things necessarily easier to digest. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/shohei-ohani-is-deferring-97-of-his-contract/https://blogs.fangraphs.com/shohei-ohani-is-deferring-97-of-his-contract/

And Shohei's not getting that buck sixty-three in 10 years, he's just getting a buck. So even though the actual money is $700M, the value of that stack in 2023 bucks is $460M, so the CBT hit is 460/10 years = $46M (I think I understood that right). It's pretty unique and creative as hell on the Dodgers and Ohtani's part.

I just read this in an MLB dot com article and this clicked with me --> https://www.mlb.com/news/shohei-ohtani-dodgers-deal-deferrals-explainedhttps://www.mlb.com/news/shohei-ohtani-dodgers-deal-deferrals-explained Because the value of a dollar decreases over time, the contract has a present-day value of roughly $460 million for the purposes of the CBT, given that so much of it is deferred for more than a decade. Therefore, the Dodgers will have a CBT payroll hit of roughly $46 million per year for the next 10 years from Ohtani's contract. Essentially, Ohtani offered to defer this much money in order for the Dodgers to have payroll flexibility to continue building a winning team.

The Giants worry me a lot but they seem like the kind of team that would have Blake Snell instead. So I'm voting for Cohen's phat ca$h

So it is incorporated into the tax. It's still confusing (to me anyway), but Ohtani will count as something like $46M against the CBT despite being paid just two million dollars. MLBTR attempts to break it down here (in part, to defend their prediction of the contract he would get, it seems) --> https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/12/why-shohei-ohtanis-contract-structure-is-not-a-luxury-tax-dodge.htmlhttps://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/12/why-shohei-ohtanis-contract-structure-is-not-a-luxury-tax-dodge.html A snippet: Based on what I've seen on social media tonight, a lot of baseball fans think the purpose of these deferrals is for the Dodgers to “dodge” the competitive balance tax (yes, t-shirts are already being drawn up). Here's why that's wrong. The collective bargaining agreement has a section for calculating the CBT hit for a contract that includes deferred money. According to reports, that calculation works out to a $46MM average annual value and accompanying CBT hit for the Dodgers and Ohtani. As you can see here, $46MM tops Max Scherzer's previous AAV record of $43,333,333.33. It's $6MM beyond Aaron Judge's $40MM AAV, which was the highest for a player on a deal of more than three years. Not only is $46MM a record AAV, but it's entirely in line with expectations. MLBTR predicted a $44MM AAV for Ohtani. Most other prognosticators were in that range. In fact, the median Ohtani AAV prediction of the other six outlets we're tracking was $45,984,849. It would be almost impossible for Ohtani's luxury tax AAV to have met expectations any harder.

I just got a buzz on my phone stating that Shohei will earn a $2M salary EACH YEAR of his contract with the Dodgers, deferring the other $68M annually. Interest-free payments on the balance start in 2034. This is fucking incredible to me. He will count against the cap this year the same as our new relief pitcher, Jorge Lopez. LOL

Looked like that right knee buckled. Glad he was able to walk off. Edwin Diaz sure couldn't when he did his ACL.

SQUAT is funny. McNiel looks so awkward with that pained look on his face. The whole thing's just missing a toilet.

ShoJay Ohtani would be wild. It seems he doesn't like all the crazed fanfare so staying in Anaheim would be kinda perfect. Maybe he hates SoCal. Maybe he hates the west coast. Maybe HE HATES AMERICA. Great for the Jays, if true.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: https://twitter.com/KickinitwitKeef/status/1733131142331597271 "We can work with this, we can work wit this, forget about that it's not important". The MLB The Show scouting report is the way.

Thanks, G.

I need a hot Twixter take on my guy Jorge Lopez stat

MLBTR sez the same. https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/12/mets-to-sign-jorge-lopez.htmlhttps://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/12/mets-to-sign-jorge-lopez.html I've been looking for silver linings in most of these STOINS signings but I just see storm clouds here. Lopez has pretty much only had one good season in his career ('22). He throws hard but has never struck many dudes out. FIP and xERA don't tell a woeful story of bad luck or anything. I read a piece, I think by Will Sammon in the Athletic(?), that indicated the Mets wanted to vary the types of pitchers in the pen this year (varied looks, varied pitches at varied velocities and varied angles). His fastball and sinker are both at 96MPH and both got battered last year. I bet they tinker with his pitch usage, at minimum. Good luck, Jorge. Please don't suck!

https://twitter.com/BillysMcds/status/1732629199909695687 Oh FFS Damn, yall I'm not really a Mets fan :'-(

Might be tough to pull off if you're getting Elliot, JD and Turkleton, but see if you can get them to throw in Dr. Cox, too.

Frayed Knot wrote: The Rule 5 restrictions stay with the player who was drafted (Slaten) and do NOT transfer to this Ammons guy for whom he was traded. Not sure why Ammons didn't pitch last year but being less than a year since his drafting he comes with the same amount of team control as anyone with that little pro experience whether on paper or on the field. I bet Stearns was into him and didn't get a chance to draft him so he's righting that wrong.