I tell you what though. Scott can pull it out with the 11th pick in Round 23. He can pull a Fred.

With his last pick, Fred ties Jeff Z. They wait for Scott.

They have 76 points, Scott 70.5.

What do I know? He's got a five point lead -- worried about Fred!.

Scott's in 4th

Jeff Z takes Joe Cowley (10 wins, no saves) as his last pitcher. Seems like a mistake. He's tied with another team in saves, one behind another.

He picks Ed Olwine.

A pitcher. How's that for playing it cool? Is still half a point back.

Start of Round 22...

Jeff Z is in first, Scott half a point behind.

But I think Scott is going to reclaim the lead with his next pick. DH is still open.

Just tuning in, start of round 15...

Scott's got a lock. With just three pitchers he's leading in saves and ERA, has 8 points in WHIP. The Rotoman Regimen: last by two country miles in wins and Ks.

Only has three hitting slots left -- MI, OF and DH -- but two of those will get him a  good hitter and he's already killing on offense.

His six pitching slots will bit by bit gain him a point or two in WHIP (other teams, trying to get wins and SO, will slide).

It's all over -- nice going Scott!

If there's any worry, it's that Fred's in second. Fred moved up four or five places with his last pick to take the 1999 retro.

Can he do it again?

I'll check in again in an hour. The suspense is making me yawn.

Eichorn went #10 ... Joe Carter appears to be the first "mistake" ... and Mike Witt the biggest "miss" ...

Here's what I find to be the top 12 players in 1986 in a rough accounting.

1. Mike Scott $63

2. Roger Clemens $55

3. Mark Eichhorn $45

4. Mike Witt $42

5. Tim Raines $40

6. Rickey Henderson $40

7. Mike Krukow $39

8. Dwight Gooden 39

9. Fernando Valenzuela $39

10. Don Mattingly $38

11. Eric Davis $38

12. Kirby Puckett $38

It will be interesting to see how many of these players actually go in the first round. Mark Eichorn, with 14 wins and 166 SO, should be a first-rounder, but the XFLers have shown such a strong bias against relief pitchers in the other retros that he might not.

The players can and will tell them to go jump.  Too bad about the 2020 season.  I'd better brush up on my Korean teams.

RIP, a great baseball name from my youth

From: Will Carroll <[email protected]ubstack.com>

I’ll leave it to the Joe Sheehans and Maury Browns of the world to break things down, but I will give you a quick cheat sheet to work with when an owner of your favorite team cries poor. Remember - the listed owner is the managing partner and there are almost always minority partners as well. Some teams have upwards of a dozen while some managing partners have surprisingly small stakes in their teams. There’s a book I’ve pitched twenty times in there, but just know it. ARIZONA: Ken Kendrick Kendrick was a long time bank executive in Texas, then started Datatel, a software company. He owns a T206 Honus Wagner card, which he bought at auction for $2.8 million, which is more than what the Dbacks would pay Madison Bumgarner this year under the proposed deal.

Conclusion of Joe Sheehan's essay today (which starts in the Mike Trout thread)...

It gets very interesting when you look at players who have just started to make money. Mike Clevinger, 29 years old, is owed $4.1 million this year, his first arb-eligible campaign. Under a pro-rated plan over 82 games, he would be paid about $2.1 million; under this plan, he will be paid about $1.5 million, giving $600,000 -- more than he’s made in any year, about a third of what he’s made in his career to date -- to Larry Dolan. Dolan is 89 years old and worth $600 million.

This is not a good-faith offer. It’s an attempt by unimaginably wealthy men and businesses to leverage the unfair playing field of public opinion and the information gap -- player salaries are public, teams’ books are not -- to shake down their employees. At no point in MLB history have owners had a big year and spread the gains to the players out of a sense of fairness. In recent times, they’ve become very skilled at keeping revenues rising and moving baseball money into non-baseball ventures, all while keeping payrolls flat. There’s nothing wrong with that; the players have always advocated for a free market, accepting a bit less along the way, rather than a set revenue share. They’re advocating for a free market -- with the risks to capital that entails -- today.

This proposal would result in Mike Trout giving Arte Moreno nearly $14 million. It should be laughed out of the room.

More from Joe Sheehan (Mike Trout thread)...  

Liberty Media owns the Atlanta Braves, and the Braves themselves trade on the NASDAQ <https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/batrk> . Pinning down the worth of a company is a fraught thing, but per one source <https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LSXMB/liberty-media/net-worth> , Liberty Media is worth $10.35 billion. On the day MLB was shut down, March 12, BATRK closed at 17.34. Yesterday, it closed at 23.20, a 35% gain even as 40 million people lost their jobs. Freddie Freeman would have to give Liberty Media $3 million under this plan.

More from Joe Sheehan (Mike Trout thread)...     

We can do this all day. Under this deal, Gerrit Cole would give Hal Steinbrenner about the same $13.7 million Trout is giving Moreno. That’s more than Cole has made in any season of his career prior to this one. Here’s a fun one: Jacob deGrom would be paying the Wilpon family about $3 million. deGrom made a total of $14 million in base salary while winning the last two NL Cy Young Awards.

The Joe Sheehan Newsletter

May 27, 2020

Mike Trout is the best player in baseball. I’ve argued that he’s the best to ever play baseball, given the way the caliber of play has evolved. He’s as popular a player as there is in the game; there’s a well-regarded podcast <https://blogs.fangraphs.com/category/effectively-wild/>  that could rename itself “Effectively Trout” and be well inside truth-in-advertising laws. Trout, a superstar at 20, has carried himself like a man a decade older. The most significant controversy around him has been a complaint <https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24125053/mike-trout-bigger-marketed-rob-manfred-says>  that he doesn’t sell himself hard enough.

Mike Trout was the best player in baseball in his first full season in the majors. He hit for average and power, and stole 49 bases in 54 tries. He was the best offensive player in baseball while playing very good defense in center field. He wasn’t voted the league’s most valuable player, and let’s not relive that <https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/8631764/miguel-cabrera-mike-trout-race-al-mvp> . He did finish second in the balloting to Miguel Cabrera.

Heading into 2013, Arte Moreno could have paid Mike Trout, who had been the best player in baseball in 2012, whatever he wanted. The Angels were one of nine teams to draw three million fans, and they were just starting a 20-year agreement with Fox that would pay them $150 million a year <https://www.latimes.com/sports/la-xpm-2011-dec-08-la-sp-angels-fox-tv-20111209-story.html>  for their TV rights. Cabrera, to use one data point, made $21 million in 2013. Alex Rodriguez, the highest-paid player in baseball, was set to be paid $28 million before his suspension. Three of Trout’s teammates would make at least $16 million. Given all of that, Arte Moreno paid Trout $510,000, or $20,000 over the major-league minimum.

Mike Trout was the best player in baseball in his second full season in the majors. He hit for average and power, and stole 33 bases in 40 tries. He was the best offensive player in baseball while playing center field, if a bit less efficiently than he had as a rookie. He wasn’t voted the league’s most valuable player, and let’s not relive that <https://mlb.nbcsports.com/2013/11/15/mike-trout-vs-miguel-cabrera-a-proxy-battle-in-a-larger-cold-war/> . He did finish second in the balloting.

Heading into 2014, Arte Moreno could have paid Mike Trout, who had now been the best player in baseball for two years, whatever he wanted. The Angels had again drawn three million fans, the local Fox deal was pumping money into the team, new national-TV deals with ESPN, Fox and Turner would bring more cash to Anaheim. Cabrera, the two-time AL MVP, was set to make $22 million. The highest-paid player in baseball was Zack Greinke, at $28 million. Albert Pujols would be the highest-paid Angel at $23 million. Given all of that, Arte Moreno paid Mike Trout $1 million in 2014, about $500,000 above the league minimum.

Not long after agreeing to that contract, Trout sat down and worked out a long-term agreement, similar to the deals we’ve seen young stars sign for decades now. In that first contract Trout locked in $144.5 million in guaranteed money and, in exchange, guaranteed the Angels he’d stay with the team three years past 2017, when he could have left via free agency. On the day he’d signed the deal, he’d earned a little more than a million bucks as a major leaguer after two years as the best player in the game.

In 2020, Mike Trout’s contract, the second long-term deal he’s signed with the franchise that has routinely put 70-win teams around him, was set to pay him <https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/al-west/la-angels/>  $36 million. Back in April, he and his union agreed that should a 2020 season be played, they would accept pro-rated pay for any games played; for Trout, that’s about $222,000 a game, or $18,222,000 for 82 games. Based on the complicated formula in the owners’ current proposal, Mike Trout would instead make $4,567,000 for 82 games. He would be giving the missing $13.7 million or so to Arte Moreno, on Moreno’s say-so that he needs it.

(ESPN’s Jeff Passan got to slightly different numbers <https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/1265498728019918848>  in his thread last night; I’m sticking to base salary in this piece for consistency, but whoever’s numbers you use, you’ll arrive at the same place.)

The plan the owners gave to the players, after a week of leaks and posturing, is a document that’s hard to take seriously. It asks players who will be asked to travel in airplanes, stay in hotels, eat meals they did not prepare or watch be prepared, and have dozens and even hundreds of interactions a day in the middle of a pandemic to do so at up to a 70% pay cut. That’s not 70% relative to a full season; that’s 70% relative to the pro rata pay the players agreed to when they gave management the option to curtail the draft and pay bonuses on the installment plan.

More insidious, though, is the principle behind the plan. It’s asking Mike Trout to give money to Arte Moreno. Trout is rich; Moreno is wealthy. When Moreno had leverage, he paid Trout as little as he could. Now he’s asking Trout to give him back basically all the money Trout made <https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/al-west/la-angels/>  in the first four years of his career.     

<[email protected]>

A reader responding to Craig Goldstein makes an excellent point.

Can you picture the excitement in the owners' zoom room when someone proposed making Mike Trout play this year for $5,748,577 instead of the $19,065,843 he would get in the agreement that both sides signed on March 26?

Hot damn! I'll vote for that!

Craig Goldstein at BP puts it this way.

It’s an interesting tactic from the league, to promote the idea that the wealthiest should sacrifice to take care of the less wealthy, it’s just a wonder they haven’t applied it themselves. 

Brett Anderson sums it up succinctly with his tweet.

Tonight at 8, the XFL retro draft for 1986.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O9VIV02qVejPbDqBD6loItSxUpN6MzGvir8hgC0vbIQ/edit#gid=0

It takes about 3 1/2 hours. I'll be watching the end game.

Anyone want to predict the first round?