Hot Stove 2023-2024

Yeah! I wasn’t aware of him cos I don’t know many players on the Tigers besides Torkelson, Greene & Carpenter but I was first drawn to Skubal when I read this back about him in August:

Until that pitch on Friday, none of the 130 batters he’d faced this season — lefty or righty — had homered against Skubal, and in his three-plus seasons in the big leagues, only two lefties had ever taken him deep. He’d thrown more than 400 sliders to left-handed hitters in his career and only seven times had those hitters connected for an extra-base hit

i was aware of him on a vv deep level because he helped my fantasy team stay in the running for awhile there. i survived on my weekly skuby snacks.

Nice

i was gonna say he's the kinda pitcher who when you're deep in your fantasy league sorting all SPs by last 2 or 4 weeks of stats you're like "ok skubal is throwing like cy young again, i wish i had drafted him" and then another 4 weeks later he's gone a month w/ a 7.79 ERA and is back on the waiver wire

if you sort the 2023 LHP WAR leaderboard on fangraphs and set the IP total to 70, which allows skubal to qualify you get the following numbers

name/WAR/IP

1. justin steele / 4.9 / 173.1
2. framber valdez / 4.3 / 198.0
3. jordan montgomery / 4.3 / 188.2
4. blake snell / 4.1 / 180.0
5. jesus luzardo / 3.7 / 178.2
6. tarik skubal / 3.3 / 80.1
7. eduardo rodriguez / 3.0 / 152.2

he is the kinda pitcher fangraphs' version of WAR is generally biased towards but still pretty compelling. the list of very good LHP SPs is extremely short

his first few starts were pretty mediocre too, he was getting better as the season went on. it's a pretty small sample size obv but vv promising. he *might* be better than everyone else on that list.

Looking at the list of tigers above… they’ve got so much young talent, I’m kind of frustrated on behalf of their fans that they don’t want to start filling out the gaps with quality free agents. I know they got burned with Baez, but they seemed to give up after that.

They just got Miggy off the books as well

Meanwhile, in Seattle (Mariners twitter undefeated)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBGOZuVaUAAHPnk?format=jpg&name=small

i think free agency is hard if you’re not a team big enough to just swallow the Ls like nothing happened

the e rod timeline — signed a good pitcher to an under market deal but was only able to do so by giving him an opt out that ended with him leaving for more money to a team in a warmer climate — is prob instructive in terms of the constraints some of these teams face in FA

e-rod didn't want to go to a warmer client when they tried to trade him to the dodgers at the deadline and he invoked his no-trade clause!

*climate, not client duh

ok fine, so just for more money

Great deal by the dbacks, vry strong top 3 in that rotation now

Exclusive @TheAthletic: Shohei Ohtani will defer $68 million per year of his $70 million annual salary over the course of his 10-year, $700 million deal with the Dodgers, allowing the team to keep spending, according to a person briefed on the terms.https://t.co/IsnWlsbTq9

— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) December 11, 2023

they're insane if they think they'll be able to get away with this for the life of the contract (and the 10 years after)

Insanely bad for the game.

Loooooool that is ridiculous

Vry interested in what happens post 2033

I am massively confused by this. So, as far as the competitive balance equation is concerned that contact averages out to just $45m a year??
Does Ohtani know he’s basically earning 45m when you account for inflation?!
I’d also like to know if it’s calculated by todays rate of inflation and if that’s recalculated every year based on where the prime rates etc are at. This is all so baffling. Do they have to set up some kind of blind trust / savings account type thing to dump money into yearly so they can actually play the guy out in 10 years?!?!

Apparently ends up being around 46mil a year for the luxury tax

I think it’s amazing how he’s gone from being one of my favourite players to someone I wouldn’t cry about suffering a career ending injury, myself

Oh, i see now it pays out over 10 years after the contract is done and not all at once

I think ohtani knew lol. Though it’s a very funny scenario where no one in ohtani’s camp understands inflation till after reading all the articles post-signing

I also hope the best player in my favourite sport suffers a career ending injury??????????????????????

Literally 680 million deferred………

I guess with inflation rates being so high right now, it really diminishes the long term value… obv Ohtani must be banking - literally - on rates coming back down in a few years. But I do want to know if/when baseball recalculates the value of they have to factor in inflation

This makes the Pujols contract look like a model of sanity!

I would guess he knows the estimated value, but wanted the team he signed to to stay competitive. So maybe he thought “yeah I’m worth 500 mil for 10 years but I want the team I sign to to be able to sign more players so we’ll do this bonkers 700 mil deferred business”.

he did it so they could sign yamamoto

Seems like a cunt thing to do tbf, I’m sure I remember owners complaining about how much money Steve Cohen spent and he wasn’t dreaming up deals to cheat the luxury tax so he could keep spending

For anyone wondering if MLB will challenge or cancel Ohtani's contract: The answer is unequivocally no. There is a specific article in the collective-bargaining agreement that addresses this. And it's very clear: Deferred money is limitless -- even $680 million of $700 million. pic.twitter.com/DGNK0JulED

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 11, 2023

Teams have several different angles to weaponize this, such as "You're no Ohtani and he's only getting ~$45m per NPV!" and "You're no Ohtani and he agreed to huge deferments as a team player!" It basically takes away most labor gains of the AAV record going up by $25m-plus.

— Jarrett Seidler (@jaseidler) December 11, 2023

Yeah I figured there was no way they (dodgers, or ohtani’s party) would take it this far without knowing either 1. It was legal or 2. It was a grey area that they could fight and win

the owners put this exact scenario into the CBA, because deferred teals are incredibly team friendly. i’m sure every front office is losing its mind but the owners care more about staying rich collectively than they do about anything involving the games, so their reactions are probably more like elation that even more precedent has been set for top players to take contracts that are far cheaper in the long run than the stated dollar value

For anyone wondering if MLB will challenge or cancel Ohtani's contract: The answer is unequivocally no. There is a specific article in the collective-bargaining agreement that addresses this. And it's very clear: Deferred money is limitless -- even $680 million of $700 million. pic.twitter.com/DGNK0JulED

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 11, 2023

I guess there’s also tax implications depending where he’s living while collecting the deferred money?
I guess if the dodgers want to pay a ghost player $68M a season stating in 10 years they’ll have to live with that. I’m guessing this is a great way for a current GM to fuck over a future one

Yeah there’s going to be another lockout isn’t there.

yes the tax aspect makes the most sense to me — i hesitate to assume bob n. is passing on accurate information but

Shohei Ohtani’s decision to earn just $2 million a year certainly is a great benefit to the Dodgers’ payroll, but also a stroke of genius for tax repercussions.
If he’s not living in California once his deferred payments start, he will not be subjected to heavy California tax.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 11, 2023

Ignoring the ridiculous deferments for a moment, this does put Ohtani back into the “what people thought he’d get paid after his UCL injury” bracket

xp but idc in particular if he’s doing it for that reason, but if you choose to pay a player $70m then that should count towards your cbt. Not this manipulative shit because you want to keep your draft picks and keep spending. The league literally introduced a Steve Cohen tax to rein teams in, but what’s the point then?

Interesting! pic.twitter.com/RFBk4BL42S

— Danny (@TatisMVPszn) December 11, 2023

The thing is they’re not choosing to pay him 700 mil a year, and that was made obvious as soon as the deal broke with a tweet immediately after about deferments. This isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s just a phenomenon that’s finally been taken to its extreme

they should just abolish the luxury tax if they're just gonna let teams skirt it like this

The judge thing, while related, is a bit different. You end up paying an average to the luxury tax in the years judge (presumably) won’t be playing. Ohtani’s contract will be counted to the luxury tax completely for all 10 years, just at a lower cost due to inflation

The judge example to the extreme would be even worse as you could do a 100 year 300mil contract to only have 3 mil a year to your luxury tax. When you take the deferment manipulation to the extreme, it’s still 45~mil a year to the luxury tax for 10 years

^^to clarify, not saying this deferrement business ain’t bad, just the judge example would have been a worse precedent to make. You could really max out and ruin a team by using years of the contract to manipulate the luxury tax

I love Ohtani but this is straight up bullshit and I think this sort of thing is really bad for the game. Can’t root for the Dodgers after this sorry

if you choose to pay a player $70m then that should count towards your cbt. Not this manipulative shit because you want to keep your draft picks and keep spending. The league literally introduced a Steve Cohen tax to rein teams in, but what’s the point then?

― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Monday, December 11, 2023 6:35 PM (fifteen minutes ago)

gyac, it's easy to understand it's just that you're viewing it thru the lens of competition when it needs to be viewed thru the lens of money

the reason the owners introduced the steve cohen tax is because the large majoriy of them don't want to feel any pressure to engage in the way steve cohen is doing business, which is to say spending a shit ton of money every year on his baseball team

the reason why the owners are more than happy to let a team manipulate the luxury tax w/ deferred payments ie because they would all love to engage in the business of deferred contracts

the incentive structure here is very clear, it's just that the idea of it being about winning on the field is kayfabe. it's about winning at the bank.

I get that. I think it’s bullshit, and Ohtani is a scab. He can afford to do this because he has tens of millions in endorsements. I stand by my opinion that it’s bad for the game, in both the short and long term.

This is just getting worse and worse.

Fuck baseball!

lol

The next ownership group will figure it out 😳

— Justin Turner (@redturn2) December 11, 2023