Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: Chris Bassett is a Baltimore Orioles pitcher. He has pitched
with Toronto in the past.
Speaker 1: That's what he's best.
Speaker 3: In Oakland's feels like he would sometimes he would either
go six innings of shutout ball against the Astros or
then get crushed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one or the other.
Speaker 2: He is on the subcommittee for the Players Association, and
apparently if you're on the subcommittee, one of the things
you are a sub of is you are in the
labor negotiations. When asked yesterday about the salary camp in
baseball or a potential salary cap, here's the quote.
Speaker 1: The salary cap doesn't fix anything.
Speaker 2: If you look at every major sport that has a
salary cap, we have the best parody. The salary cap
is not the issue. Having suppressed salaries across the league
so owners can make more money is not the answer.
Now stay with me now on this quoting Bassett life.
If I tell you in twenty five years the Dodgers
will be playing and going to the ten World Series
and winning seven of them, is that an issue? Because
that's the Patriots. Then Chiefs have been to six or seven.
The Philadelphia Eagles have been to four or five. The
parody in our sport is better than any other sport,
so we will make changes to try to help the
so called bottom teams out. But a salary cap and
suppressing salaries and taking from players to try to help
the so called bottom feeders spend more that is not
the answer, because again, if you're trying to make a
competitive league across the board, we have proof that every
single league has less parody than ours. So how can
you sit there and say a salary cap is going
to fix this when every single salary cap sport has
less parity than ours.
Speaker 1: It makes no sense. Whant to chew on that for
a minute.
Speaker 3: I will say now, when he says there's the better
parody than any other, he's talking about teams that have
appeared in the World Series.
Speaker 1: You're talking about leagues.
Speaker 3: When he says games hartly, Yeah, I know, But what
is the definition of we have better parody? How is
he defining parody?
Speaker 2: Is the champions or that there have been numerous different
World Series champions in the last ten years. We have
seen the Astros win, we have seen the Braves, when
we've seen the Nationals win, we have seen the Rangers,
when we have seen the Dodgers win. He's saying, if
you go look at the NFL, who's typically there. It's
been New England, it's been Kansas City. If you look
at the NBA, you think of what largely what the
NBA well, And there's been parody there. Denver's won a championship,
Golden States won a bunch.
Speaker 3: It seems like there's been a fair amount of parody
in everyone. So I'm wondering what the measure is and
what exact numbers he's using. And I will also say
baseball is susceptible more to randomness then the other two sports,
if you do us, especially certainly in NBA. NBA is
the least random in a seven game basketball series, which
each game is like two hundred possessions, generally the better
team is gonna win in a seven game series, generally speaking.
Speaker 1: Barring injury. Baseball, I mean you get, like.
Speaker 3: You get Joe West calling a home run that wasn't
you get I don't know, a ball rolling off of
at the top of the wall it at Fenway like
stuff can bloops and weird stuff. I feel like baseball
is more of that than any other to what we
talk about, like the worst, the worst of the absolute
worst teams can still win like they win generally sixty
plus games.
Speaker 1: Let me put it this way. And I don't know
if this is a comp or not.
Speaker 2: I can't tell you that a small, a small market
team may win a bunch of NFL games next year.
There might be a chance that what was the small
rest of the market teams would be your Jacksonville Jacksonville's,
it could be your Carolina's. It could be to a
lesser extent than the Packers up in Green Bay with Milwaukee.
I have a pretty good feeling, not guaranteed feeling, but
a pretty good feeling Rossy that we're never going to
see a Marlins versus Guardians World Series.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Diamondbacks caught lightning in a bottle and made
a World Series. Like, oh, it's great parody the Diamondbacks were.
The Diamondbacks made a World Series. Ye, But the Diambacks
weren't even good that year. I mean, they won what
like eighty four eighty five games, and they got hot
in the playoffs.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I guess we can.
Speaker 3: There's a number of examples we can think of, Like
the Patriots, for example, you could argue didn't deserve to
be in the super Bowl. So maybe we can do
this to every league.
Speaker 2: Can you have a league that has a floor without
a ceiling, without a cap? I mean theory.
Speaker 3: I guess you could only a salary floor and no
salary cap, correct, right, I guess is there is there
a way you can do that. You could do it,
but I don't think you can get the owners to
agree to that.
Speaker 2: That's what I think Chris Bassett wants. He even said
as much in his quote. He's like, we want to
helpbout the bottom feeders. We want to make sure they're
more competitive.
Speaker 3: Because generally it's what is Let me look it up.
What is the floor in the cap in the NBA? Yeah,
salary four is one hundred and forty million, which is
so yeah, there, their floor is ninety percent of the
salary cap. That's not going to happen. In baseball, cap
is one hundred and fifty four million. Floor is one
hundred and thirty nine. So baby, let's just call it
one fifty five. Yeah, that's only fifteen million a wig room.
There's no way baseball orders agree to it.
Speaker 1: That no way.
Speaker 2: So the owners are gonna say, all right, you want
a floor. We get that, but we want to camp too.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm generally in these types of situations, generally on the
player's side, but I can't buy the oh, we have
more parody than anybody else.
Speaker 1: You can't use parody.
Speaker 2: As an explanation, as a as a logical reasoning for
no need for a cap. The Havelves have a much
greater long term advantage in baseball than any other of
the major sports, and it is because of the lack
of a salary cap, and the Dodgers, while enjoying it now,
have basically said, hey, we want the Our contracts are
already crazy right now, part because of us, are large
part because of us. You're we need a governor and
the playersball player is like, well, that's your fault. You
can't control your spending and that's on you. You're the
ones that want all these players. So look, you can
see if I'm both sides of this, for sure, you
absolutely can. There when when when you go to a
player and you say we're putting a cap on something,
that means they're going to cap the amount of money
the players are going to get, there will not be
a Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: There will not be in New York.
Speaker 2: There will not be a Chicago that will say budget
be damned, because you if you have a cap, you
have a budget.
Speaker 1: And that's what the players do not want. Let's talk
to our buddy Aggie doug here.
Speaker 2: Maybe he's an economist here on the Matt Thomas wild
Ross eighty what do you got today?
Speaker 4: I am definitely not an economist, but I do know
that this is basically planning from a different rule book.
I mean that's all it is. I mean you basically say, okay,
well our field is you know, one hundred by you know,
seventy five, but the Dodgers field is only eighty by sixty.
It makes absolutely no sense. You can't play with a
different set of rules just.
Speaker 1: Because the Dodgers have more money.
Speaker 4: That doesn't make them basically they can go out and
money with it. I mean the Yankees used to do
it in the eighties and the nineties. So yes, absolutely,
I agree with Back that that's not a recipe for success.
It's not a guaranteed recipe for success because obviously we
know the Yankees they sucked even when they had, you know,
paid all those players. You got to pay the right players.
The point of having this whole parody conversation. It's a
different sport. In the NFL, if you have a franchise quarterback,
you're probably gonna make the playoffs. In the NBA, if
you have one or two superstars, you're probably gonna make
the playoffs. So for them to sit there and say, oh, well,
you know, if we pay you know, our top fifteen guys,
let's just say top fifteen out of twenty six significantly more,
let's even say twenty five to thirty percent more than
any other team can even afford, not even like they can,
but they can afford. So that's a completely different set
of rules.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I'm not smart enough to do this adly
any of us are. It's hard for me to cross
over sports and say, well, if one sport does it
one way, we should do it another way.
Speaker 1: I I can't. I can't figure that out. And I'm
more going to.
Speaker 4: Think about it like if you have a stud pitcher, right,
Like if you have a stud pitcher, or like like
we had your done and we had you know, uh,
you know, our two or three pictures that were great
with Framburg and dressin Verlander. I mean, but we had
to have a lot of other guys do a lot
of things, and we paid them a lot less money
than the Dodgers would ever even think about paying. So
I guess that's just my point is that when you
have the ability to pay thirty percent more for even
a guy that's just a guy on some other teams
and that's just your plugin guy or your bench guy,
that makes absolutely no sense.
Speaker 1: Thanks Zachie Doug for the phone call. Appreciate it.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 1: The players are definitely afraid ross if there's a cap,
there's not enough money to go around. Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 3: If there's a cap, then the Dodger just bank all
these profit if it's that the players have no access to.
Speaker 2: That is correct, because the television deal for the Dodgers
doesn't change unless the Major League Baseball owners collecqively say
we'll take all of our TV money and put it together,
and the.
Speaker 1: Dodgers have no interest in doing that.
Speaker 3: Okah, We're going to take this straight to the bank.
And then if you make a cap for you know,
the same cap for the Rays is the same cap
for the Dodgers. That's that's just letting the Dodgers keep
all their cash and the players. You're not allowing the
players to get into that Yeah, I don't know, this
is interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah again, we.
Speaker 2: Got a lot more minutia to go to over the
next calendar year. I would just say the overriding sentiment
was I wouldn't be booking West Palm Beach for twenty
twenty seven.
Speaker 1: Put it that way.