This post may just be for witchiest and silveradept, sorry

[cosmolinguist]

I canceled the automatic renewal of my MLB TV subscription a month or two ago.

I'm sure I'll go back to it. I don't think a year without watching or listening to baseball will do my (currently already shitty) mental health any good. But I just need to have a lot of feelings first.

To cut a long rant short, Major League Baseball teams are going through a financial reckoning. A bubble is bursting, where what had for years been huge amounts of income guaranteed to every team from TV deals is starting to not be guaranteed any more. But since MLB isn't one thing so much as it's thirty teams with diverse regional TV deals and at the whims of different billionaire owners/families/investment groups, the financial bubble is bursting in fits and starts as different broadcast contracts come to an end in different regions and different legal shenanigans happen in court as a result of them. The Twins are not the first team to be affected but they're in the first handful.

And for them, being affected looked like expecting to lose $50-60 million a year as of the end of last season. Hints of payroll cuts, less money for players, were quickly confirmed once their season was over. And their season wasn't over until well into the playoffs because, for the first time in twenty years the Twins won a postseason series. And they didn't completely embarrass themselves in the next one. (They embarrassed themselves quite a lot! But they didn't get swept, they won a game!)

The family that owns the Twins are billionaires. They don't need to worry about "making up for" or "finding" this extra $50-60 million the way a household budget would if it lost a source of income. They spent about $150 million on the players last year but they could spend another $150 million, they could spend another $500 million, and it would make no material difference to them.

And there's a decent argument to be made that they should spend, not double or anything but at least a little more, for the 2024 season. 2023 did see that historic playoff run, the end of a curse older than many of the people playing in it -- longer than they can remember anyway, a lot of them would've been like 2 years old or 7 years old the last time the Twins won in those circumstances! That brought a lot of interest, excitement and goodwill around the team. I remember distinctly being in a gas station during my September trip back to Minnesota and hearing two young guys there discussing whether Sonny Gray or Pablo Lopez should start the first playoff game. You never get that. People would rather talk about the Vikings from the second their training camp starts (or before!) than talk about baseball, especially by September; it made me smile so much to hear it.

Along with that fan interest, last season for the Twins also featured three amazing rookies, a confluence you almost never see. That many young (and thus cheap, and with bright futures to look forward to) players all at once felt like a gift that it would only be sensible to capitalize on. They still have Buxton and Correa, however diminished by injuries in 2023, for years to come. They were going to lose some great players to free agency -- most notably Sonny Gray, but also Kenta Maeda who'd made an amazing comeback from his Tommy John halfway through the year, so the rotation was going to be a little thin -- and it made sense to shore up those weak points. It felt worthwhile to do that. In a way it hasn't in...many years.

So it was a particularly disappointing time to hear about taking $30 million off the payroll, when fans could not-unreasonably dream of $30 million more being justifiable, for once.

I learned a lot of boring details of how cable companies work, I learned what "regional sports networks" are, and it's all very dull so I'll spare you that and say that at what felt like nearly the last minute, the TV deal was bailed out by Amazon, of all people. The Twins wouldn't get quite the $50-60 million they were used to, but I think they could expect like half or two-thirds of that. This was great news of course: surely now we could expect the owners to bump spending up to what it had been last year, if not a little more for like inflation and whatnot. Right?

Right?!

Nope!

Noises have been made about "There are other elements that impact how you think about your business plan," and attendance, and whatnot. But fundamentally the Twins' owners don't have to give any reason and they don't. They don't speak publicly, leaving the team president and so on to make excuses or whatever and take the fans' ire themselves. They have more money than all their fans put together probably, so they're not beholden to us.

Of course it has long been the case that sports teams are owned by people so rich that their lives seem alien to us and vice versa. Nothing new has happened there. But having it driven home in this way is just no fucking fun at all.

My Twins podcasters (who are also writers who cover the team) basically said in their last episode that there's a pessimistic and an optimistic way to look at this season. The pessimistic one is everything I just said. The optimistic one is that they're still likely to win the AL Central and thus will go back to the playoffs. I don't find myself very excited about that though, since it's famously the worst division in MLB, constantly mocked and dismissed, and rightfully so honestly. "The Twins aren't any better because they don't need to be any better" might even be one of the things affecting the owners' unwillingness to spend more money. Why do more than "good enough" when your immediate competition is so bad?

Looking wider than the Twins hasn't made me feel much more excited this off-season. The trades and signings have left me gloomy about the state of Major League Baseball.

The 2023 season was fun partly because teams like the Mets that spent tons of money didn't necessarily get very far with it. The Padres were bafflingly underperforming (I feel really sorry for them actually). The Yankees were below 500 briefly, for the first time since, what, the 1990s or something. And teams that "shouldn't" do that well did great, right up to the Diamondbacks being in the World Series "a year too early," as if they hadn't earned it or didn't deserve it or had to wait their turn.

I think this season full of defied expectations helped fuel the speculation around where Shohei Ohtani would end up. It felt like we were living in a world where anything is possible. The Pirates had led their division for a long time! Carlos Correa didn't end up with the Giants or the Mets like he "should" have! Why wouldn't Shohei end up with the Blue Jays or the Cubs or whatever??

When he landed with the Dodgers, the reactions I heard were all like "...oh of course. It was inevitable. We were foolish to ever expect that anything else would happen." And that made me really sad. I'm writing this down because we didn't think that was inevitable and I think that's important. It was fun. It's not fun seeing no end in sight to the Dodgers' dominance, just like it's no fun seeing any way the White Sox will ever get meaningfully better.

Seeing soon after that Juan Soto was going to the Yankees, my heart sunk. This was an old familiar feeling from the previous Steinbrenner who just went out and bought everyone. This is the feeling of "we're just the farm system for the Yankees" (a thought that I truly believed at the time was invented by Twins sportswriters and talk radio callers because it turns out now that I have access to media from other parts of the country it was a common sentiment!). This is the feeling of resources consolidating in all the old places, which I had been hoping last year was a step away from but now it feels more like a fluke, as the likes of the Dodgers continue to pile on unseemly amounts of talent at the expense of many other teams.

The Dodgers going to win 100+ games forever (even though it hasn't gotten them very far in the playoffs! a fact that I and many others continue to find hilarious). Meanwhile the White Sox have no feasible path to ever being good again (not while Jerry Reinsdorf is alive anyway!).

I dunno, maybe I will care. Maybe all this is just my depression talking. But I ignored Spring Training, it's Opening Day today, and I don't even feel like I'm missing anything. And that makes me sad.

Comments

[otter]

I am sad for you, as I know how much you usually love baseball

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I'm sad for me too.

[ex_amphetamine428]

I've never really understood the TV contract kinds of things. For basically all my life, most of the Cubs games were on WGN (local channel 9) and if they weren't, then they were on one of the other local channels. When the contract expired they didn't renew it. Most of the games required cable after that because of the Fox Sports Nets et al having so many of the games. I guess the Cubs didn't like the deals so they made their own network like the Yankees have, and most of the games are there now. In the past few years there was a long period where DirecTV didn't have it because they couldn't agree on a deal. Then it was Comcast, and it's just infuriating because it sounds like that station is hemorrhaging money and the fans are the ones who get punished for it. I literally cannot watch a majority of the Cubs games because I don't have cable. I imagine if they'd continued with WGN they'd be in a much better spot

[silveradept]

I hear you in all of this, right from "baseball owners are rich enough that they can get an antitrust exemption" to the depressing conclusion that baseball owners will put in only as much money as they feel the team needs to be profitable, not necessarily good. (And with most markets only having one team in their area, it's not like you can go cross-town to see the other multi-billionaire's team.)

And in being part of the division that's the farm system for the rest of the baseball world.

The regional sports networks thing is very, very awful and continues to contribute to all the ways that baseball will continue to be a sport for the people who enjoy a day at the ballpark rather than a sport that people want to pick up or talk more about. At least, outside of the markets that actually pay their players and win games.

Admittedly, my MLB TV is a perk that I get for my mobile carrier having their name on a stadium, so I don't have to pay for it directly. So I did watch Opening Day, and there was only one run scored through the whole game. (My team scored it, so we've officially had at least one day where we've been above .500)

Then again, there's also drama surrounding Shohei and his people, which is not a good thing at all.

[cosmolinguist]

Trying (and failing as ever) to catch up on my RSS feeds on a day off, I have this morning [read a Fangraphs article] (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/okay-but-seriously-what-if-the-rockies-made-the-playoffs/) that seems relevant here: even at the far end of the bell curve of probabilities, there is no way the Rockies are going to make the playoffs.

I am bereft at the smallness of our dreams.

If literally everything goes right for the Rockies, and we end up in the far right tail of that win total graph, this is what it’ll look like. And unless they actually make it to that one-in-five million 107-win season, they’d probably need the Giants and Diamondbacks to underperform, and the five or six best players on the Dodgers to give up baseball and start a jam band.

[forests_of_fire]

I'm so sorry. I know baseball means a lot to you, but I can understand wanting to take a break.

[cosmolinguist]

<3