The Washington Nationals added Robert Hassell III and Andry Lara to their 40-man roster. The number of players increased from 36-to-38 to protect Hassell and Lara from the Rule-5 draft.
With two open spots on the roster until Spring Training starts, you would think that general manager Mike Rizzo has opportunities in the next 35-days with a couple of free agent signings before Christmas. That would be a nice present to Nationals’ fans. Rizzo could probably find another space or two if needed through a DFA or a trade if he needs more than two slots.
Other 40-man spot(s) will open up when the team moves player(s) to the 60-day IL during Spring Training. Josiah Gray, who is recovering from TJ surgery, will go back on the 60-day IL, and that will open up an extra spot. The other 60-day IL candidate is Mason Thompson. He had his second UCL surgery of his baseball career, as he also needed the operation back in high school. His 2024 surgery, in early March, will almost certainly land him on the 60-day IL to have him available mid-season.
Those extra spots to open during Spring Training will give Rizzo the flexibility to sign good players to a minor league deal with a chance to make the team. That very likely could be a veteran reliever and a veteran catcher. The roster is the tightest it has been in years.
While all eyes are on free agency and the Winter Meetings set to open in Dallas in 2½ weeks, nobody knows the names of the new players who will ink deals with Washington. If you use X/Twitter as your guide to pessimism, over 500 votes are in for a poll that asked if Nationals ownership is committed to spending to build a winning team this offseason? Only 28 percent are believers that ownership is committed to spending. That is not good for a team that was the second biggest spender from 2015-2021. In fact, it has to hurt in converting those 72 percent of non-believers into fans who will spend money on tickets.
The league dynamics have changed with the Mets, Dodgers, and Yankees competing at record levels of spending in the largest disparity ever in the game from the top-3 teams to the bottom-3 in spending. How can you compete to sign Juan Soto as a team with mid-market or small-market revenues?
After paying CBT penalties, the Mets, Dodgers and Yankees will have paid out over $1 billion combined towards salaries and benefits for players on their 40-man rosters this year. The bottom-3 teams didn’t even reach 10 percent of that amount on their individual spending.
Maybe the answer of revenue parity will come in the form of nationalizing the TV deals into one MLB plan that splits the revenues equally among the 30-teams like MLB does now with their game of the week deals that the league has with ESPN, FOX, TBS, Peacock, and ROKU.
The Dodgers are thought to be getting over $200 million in TV revenue in their own rights fees, and the New York Yankees received an estimated $143 million in 2022 while the Colorado Rockies, received just $57 million that same year, according to Forbes. The Nats, as we all know, are just above the Rockies in regional sports network (RSN) revenue from MASN which is a sizeable disadvantage in the rich NL East sans Miami. The fall of Diamond Sports Group’s broadcasting has sent ripples through nearly one-third of all of the teams in MLB.
When you think of filling those 40-man spots with star players, there is always the thoughts of what Rizzo can spend in reality. That is the new truth in sports for most owners not named Steve Cohen of the Mets. He is so rich that the next three richest owners don’t equal his net worth of $20 billion per Forbes. Spending $50 million a year on a player for Cohen would be like a millionaire spending $2,500 on a vacation. At some point, the zeros are just blurred lines.
Until there is a hard spending cap in baseball, Cohen, Mark Walter, and Hal Steinbrenner will continue to spend in a competition of the Big-3. The rest of the teams will fight over the players they don’t have a spot for.
The Mets got beat by the Dodgers in this year’s NL Championship Series, and the Yankees fell to the Dodgers in the World Series. All three are “in” heavily on Soto. The real winner will be Soto’s bank account, and his agent, Scott Boras. Sure, the fans of the winning team will be happy in the short-run. The teams that don’t get Soto will be upset at some level. Their unhappiness will be supplanted shortly afterwards with other top free agent signings. That is how baseball now works. The rich just keep adding future Hall-of-Famers to their rosters.
A three-quarters vote of all MLB owners could allow the league to change the TV plan in the owner’s constitution. The MLBPA union might have a say also, but don’t expect the richest teams to roll over on a national TV deal. Would 23 owners vote for it? What happens to RSN deals that won’t expire until 2038 like the Dodgers current deal? Could this end up in the courts?
While Commissioner Rob Manfred might be thinking of the bigger picture that nationalizing a TV deal for all games is good business, what about more parity among the teams? The CBT taxes on the biggest spending teams is not deterring the Top-3 teams.
Baseball feels broken for the majority of the teams that pessimism is a daily grind for too many that follow the team. How do you deal with it? Try to find your happiness that your team can defy the odds. The light-spending Royals and Guardians made good runs in the postseason this year. Make the postseason and you have a chance.
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