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Over the past couple of weeks I've been in a couple of twitter battles with advocates of paying college football players. It's a noble pursuit. "The man" is lining his pockets with billions of dollars off the sweat of "slave" labor.
In a perfect world the players who fill the stadiums would get paid. They're the ones who people come to see, not coaches or athletic directors. Yet they're the ones who are cashing big checks while the players get paid in tuition, room, board, books and stipends. Doesn't seem equitable.
And somehow it's become racial. But this is 2019. Everything is racial.
Sports Illustrated writer Robert Klemko tweeted this out last week:
"If the most adversely affected class was wealthy white kids and not poor black kids, athletes in NCAA revenue sports would have been compensated fairly for a long time."
Hmmm.
How did we get here? Players have been filling stadiums for about a century now.
In 1937 two Chicago high school teams (St. Leo and Austin) played a game in front of 120,000 people in Soldier Field.
In the 50's 70,000 would regularly fill Rice Stadium.
The Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl, Peach Bowl were all filled to the brim long before integration.
The point being, football players have been making "the man" money for a while now. Granted, the money is better than ever. TV deals are through the roof. It's a billion dollar business now but all that ticket money over all those years before integration went somewhere and it wasn't in the players' pockets. It's been this way since the beginning. This is not a racial thing. It's an economics thing.
Don't get me wrong. There's money out there. The stories about bowl directors who make hundreds of thousands, even millions off one game every year are sickening.
Coaches are making upwards of $10 million per year now. Athletic directors are raking it in as well.
Meanwhile the worker bees continue to toil for what is a minute percentage of the pie. A stipend for living expenses was added to the mix a few years ago and it's helped some but the inequity that is big time college athletics remains. Stipends and tuition, room and board and books don't come close to an equitable compensation at the highest level. The big time programs bring in millions.
The problem is that the big time programs are the exception not the rule. Not everyone is Texas or Alabama. Very few programs actually make money when all is said and done. Ask most athletic directors about paying players and the first response will most likely be "Where is that money coming from?"
I asked UH Athletic Director Chris Pezman what would happen if he needed to pay players. "We couldn't do it. We have two revenue generating sports but you can't just pay them. Title IX won't allow it. You'd have to pay everyone. We have 458 athletes in 17 sports. We'd be bankrupt."
But there is a way to get players what they deserve. Let the market dictate it. Let athletes who are in demand make money from their likeness, their autograph, their commercial appeal. Sure it would be dominated by football and basketball players but in Connecticut the women's basketball team would be the most sought after. In Iowa it might be a wrestler, at UCLA a gymnast, at Cal a sprinter.
There would have to be checks and balances. Overzealous boosters would pay the moon and the sun to get recruits to come to their school but it's not like that's not happening now. If you have to put a limit on what each sponsor can pay and a compliance department in each university run by the NCAA and not the school itself you might be able to keep the cheating at a minimum as opposed to what's going on now.
Players look up into the stands of 100,000 seat stadiums with thousands of fans wearing their jerseys and feel like there's an incredible inequity and rightfully so. It doesn't have to be that way. Let the marketplace decide who deserves to be paid. I'm not sure that the NCAA has heard but we live in a free market society. They need to start acting like it.
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The woeful state of the Astros' farm system has made it very expensive to continue maintaining a good team, prohibitively so (in part self-imposed) from having a great team. Even if they re-sign Alex Bregman, trading Framber Valdez and/or Kyle Tucker for prospects could snap the Astros' run of eight straight postseason appearances. But if they KNOW that no way do they intend to offer Framber five years 130 million dollars, Tucker 7/225 or whatever their free agent markets might be after next season, keeping them for 2025 but getting nothing but 2026 compensatory draft picks for them could do multi-year damage to the franchise.
Preliminary Kyle Tucker trade talks between the Astros and Cubs involve both Seiya Suzuki and Isaac Paredes, sources tell @Ken_Rosenthal and me - https://t.co/kIRATDQpEn
— Chandler Rome (@Chandler_Rome) December 11, 2024
The time is here for the Astros to be aggressively shopping both. It doesn't make trading them obligatory, but even though many purported top prospects amount to little or nothing (look up what the Astros traded to Detroit for Justin Verlander, to Pittsburgh for Gerrit Cole, to Arizona for Zack Greinke) if strong packages are offered the Astros need to act if unwilling (reasonably or not) to pay Valdez/Tucker.
Last offseason the Milwaukee Brewers traded pitching ace Corbin Burnes one season ahead of his free agency and then again won the National League Central, the San Diego Padres dealt Juan Soto and wound up much improved and a playoff team after missing the 2023 postseason. But nailing the trades is critical. The Brewers got their everyday rookie third baseman Joey Ortiz and two other prospects. The Padres got quality starter Michael King, catcher Kyle Hagashioka, and three prospects.
Back to Bregman
Meanwhile, decision time approaches for Alex Bregman. He, via agent Scott Boras, wants 200-plus million dollars. Don't we all. If he can land that from somebody, congratulations. The Astros' six-year 156 million dollar contract offer is more than fair. That's 26 million dollars per season and would take Bregman within a few months of his 37th birthday. If rounding up to 160 mil gets it done, ok I guess. Going to 200 would be silly.
While Bregman hasn't been a superstar (or even an All-Star) since 2019, he's still a very good player. That includes his 2024 season which showed decline offensively. Not falling off a cliff decline other than his walk rate plunging about 45 percent, but decline. If Bregman remains the exact player he was this season, six-156 is pricey but not crazy in the current marketplace. But how likely is Bregman to not drop off further in his mid-30s? As noted before, the storyline is bogus that Bregman has been a postseason monster. Over seven League Championship Series and four World Series Bregman has a .196 batting average.
The Astros already should be sweating some over Jose Altuve having shown marked decline this season, before his five year 125 million dollar extension covering 2025-2029 even starts. Altuve was still very good offensively though well down from 2022 and 2023 (defensively his data are now awful), but as he approaches turning 35 years old in May some concern is warranted when locked into paying a guy until he's nearly 39 1/2.
Jim Crane is right in noting that long contracts paying guys huge money in their later years generally go poorly for the clubs.
Bang for your buck
Cleveland third baseman Jose Ramirez is heading into the second year of a five-year, $124 million extension. That's 24.8 million dollars per season. Jose Ramirez is a clearly better player than Alex Bregman. Ramirez has been the better player for five consecutive seasons, and only in 2023 was it even close. It should be noted that Ramirez signed his extension in April of 2022. He is about a year and a half older than Bregman so the Guardians are paying their superstar through his age 36 season.
Bregman benefits from playing his home games at soon-to be named Daikin Park. Bregman hit 26 home runs this year. Using ball-tracking data, if he had played all his games in Houston, Bregman would have hit 31 homers. Had all his swings been taken at Yankee Stadium, the "Breggy Bomb" count would have been 25. In Cleveland, just 18. Ramirez hit 41 dingers. If all his games were home games 40 would have cleared the fences, if all had been at Minute Maid Park 47 would have been gone.
Matt Chapman recently signed a six-year 151 million dollar deal to stay with the San Francisco Giants. That's 25.166 million per season. Chapman was clearly a better player than Bregman this year. But it's the only season of Chapman's career that is the case. Chapman is 11 months older than Bregman, so his lush deal with the Giants carries through his age 37 season.
The Giants having overpaid Chapman doesn't obligate the Astros to do the same with Bregman. So, if you're the Astros do you accept overpaying Bregman? They would almost certainly be worse without him in 2025, but what about beyond? Again, having not one elite prospect in their minor league system boxes them in. Still, until/unless the Seattle Mariners upgrade their offense, the Astros cling to American League West favorites status. On the other hand, WITH Bregman, Tucker, and Valdez the Astros are no postseason lock.
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