Bauer to Dodgers

[CJD]

(02-09-2021, 12:49 PM)MileHighGrowler Wrote: No parity and you sometimes just wonder how much it actually matters to the smaller market owners to win.  They're not going to compete with the spending, so they know their chances are more limited.  I don't know if the statement was truly reflective of the business, but I remember watching Moneyball and the A's basically saying look, we can't compete with the big spenders in the league, and that's okay.  It's just a fun family outing and that's all it needs to be.  I feel like that's been the experience of a Reds fan for many years now.  They'll make a couple of offseason moves, hope for the best, but at the end of the day they're not fully in to win it.  

Yea. This is why the NFL, in my opinion, is infinitely better than the MLB. Parity is absolutely paramount when discussing sports. Otherwise, what's the point? Oh, you can spend 3x as much money as the other teams and win? Good job, I guess? 

The only really notable thing that can happen in MLB is when a low budget team is improbably good (like the 2015 Royals or 2003 Marlins) and those are almost always due to incessant tanking to get a bunch of high draft picks, those high draft picks happening to work out all in the same ~5 year window (which isn't typical in baseball because a lot of the most talented players are drafted straight out of high school, so you have 5 to 10 years before they see any meaningful MLB impact with high bust potential) and then the team just milks those cheap young players until they are out of arbitration. Then that team usually goes into a deep hibernation while they await another period of high draft picks to work out all at the same time.

I thought that the Reds could have been that group in 2012 when they had Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips, Jay Bruce and Scott Rolen leading their line up and a pitching staff with Cueto, Latos, Leake, Bailey and Chapman all peaking at the same time while being relatively affordable. But they blew it by getting swept at home against San Francisco after taking a 2-0 lead on the road. And now we've been stuck rebuilding for close to a decade now.

It's just discouraging that any time a small market team has a good player, they are destined to leave the team. It's like we're a farm team for the real MLB teams.