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Wildest contract in the history of sports, while also being potentially brilliant. Dodgers can still spend on talent, and they’ll sell out every night. Will absolutely make their return on investment
 
The funniest part about the Ohtani thing is i'm pretty sure he was never going anywhere except for the Dodgers (maybe San Francisco or San Diego at most). I'm pretty sure he wanted to stay in Southern California though and by signing with the Dodgers he kinda doesn't even need to move from where he was currently living if he doesn't feel like it. The other big thing about California to him I think is Japan. A 7pm game in LA means it is noon in Tokyo, which is a very doable time for them to watch him over there rather than 9am or earlier.
 
I've been a huge baseball fan for the past 15 or so years but this Ohtani news really has me down. I'm a fan of a small market team (Tampa Bay Rays) and I've always been really proud of being able to compete and win against teams with $30M players and $200M payrolls but man, how are we supposed to compete when other teams can pay one player what our entire payroll is (yeah I know that a lot of the money is deferred)? Especially with the Dodgers still looking at some of the other top free agents too! I mean we all know that the Dodgers are gonna be the Dodgers, win 115 games and get swept out of the first round of the playoffs but I'm a little bummed about it right now.
 
The issue isn't "big market" or "small market" its "stingy billionaire" and "less stingy billionaire." Ohtani was never leaving Southern California (imo) but the Giants made an identical offer. The San Francisco/Bay Area media market is hardly in the top 10 any longer. I understand the outsized impact large television contracts have for Big Teams, but ultimately if the dudes who own these teams wanna flex, they can.
 
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Jake S said:
The issue isn't "big market" or "small market" its "stingy billionaire" and "less stingy billionaire."
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Right on the head. And the stingy billionaires simply use the fact of being in what is traditionally a small media market as a reason to not spend on the team.
 
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Nick said:
Right on the head. And the stingy billionaires simply use the fact of being in what is traditionally a small media market as a reason to not spend on the team.
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John Fisher has been peddling every excuse under the sun to not spend on his sports teams. He got the stadium he wanted for the San Jose Earthquakes not even 10 years ago and went on record this year moaning that the stadium he helped design wasn't up to snuff. That makes his capitulation over the stadium situation in Oakland all the more galling. He moans about needing a stadium, so to get one he picks up and moves to one of the smallest media markets on earth.
 
Jake S said:
John Fisher has been peddling every excuse under the sun to not spend on his sports teams. He got the stadium he wanted for the San Jose Earthquakes not even 10 years ago and went on record this year moaning that the stadium he helped design wasn't up to snuff. That makes his capitulation over the stadium situation in Oakland all the more galling. He moans about needing a stadium, so to get one he picks up and moves to one of the smallest media markets on earth.
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It's also not like in this present day and age in a small market like Oakland there can't be a dynasty. The Golden State Warriors won 3 of their 4 championships of their dynasty in Oakland and the dynasty was built from the ground up and most of it was spent in Oakland with the team spending insane amounts of money on that team in a "small market" in the process.

It's all about the willingness to invest in success, something the Rays have had a lot of over the past 15 years or so but it's always with a rotating group of players instead of saying "this is our core for the next 5 years and we're going to actually try to win a championship by investing in pieces around them".
 
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Nick said:
It's all about the willingness to invest in success, something the Rays have had a lot of over the past 15 years or so but it's always with a rotating group of players instead of saying "this is our core for the next 5 years and we're going to actually try to win a championship by investing in pieces around them".
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This is an oversimplification, but the Dodgers are basically The Rays But They Spend Money.
 
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Galactus said:
I've been a huge baseball fan for the past 15 or so years but this Ohtani news really has me down. I'm a fan of a small market team (Tampa Bay Rays) and I've always been really proud of being able to compete and win against teams with $30M players and $200M payrolls but man, how are we supposed to compete when other teams can pay one player what our entire payroll is (yeah I know that a lot of the money is deferred)? Especially with the Dodgers still looking at some of the other top free agents too! I mean we all know that the Dodgers are gonna be the Dodgers, win 115 games and get swept out of the first round of the playoffs but I'm a little bummed about it right now.
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I wouldn't let this bum you out. My Diamondbacks did the unthinkable. Only won 84 games, was not expected to do a single thing all season and made it to the WS. Money does not always buy championships. Obviously this is an outlier, but it can happen again, and even more so happen to a team that's a little more seasoned and prepared.
 
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"Small market" most of the time goes hand in hand with owners that want to spend money. I'm not going to sit here and defend Stu Sternberg, I certainly wish he'd sell the Rays to an ownership group that spends more but I've been wanting that for 10+ years and I don't think it's gonna change anytime soon so you play the hand you're dealt. We have way too many people watching the game on TV to have a payroll as low as we do. We're a top #15 media market although I do think the dynamics are a little different in Tampa with so many transplants to the area without fandom of the local teams. But it is what it is.

Nick said:
It's also not like in this present day and age in a small market like Oakland there can't be a dynasty. The Golden State Warriors won 3 of their 4 championships of their dynasty in Oakland and the dynasty was built from the ground up and most of it was spent in Oakland with the team spending insane amounts of money on that team in a "small market" in the process.

It's all about the willingness to invest in success, something the Rays have had a lot of over the past 15 years or so but it's always with a rotating group of players instead of saying "this is our core for the next 5 years and we're going to actually try to win a championship by investing in pieces around them".
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The Bay Area *is* a top 10 US media market (it's #10), not a small market. The Warriors are the entire Bay Area's team, that's who owe root for here. Also comparing the NBA to MLB is apples and oranges. In the NBA there's a maximum contract with the incumbent team able to offer a bigger contract than any other teams. The NBA has a salary cap. Yeah, there's wiggle room with Bird Rights and things like that but MLB doesn't have that. Comparing team spending/ability to build dynasties if you spend between baseball and basketball is tricky to not possible. And even then, those Warriors were the result of the greatest shooter of all time signing a below market contract because he had injury problems (and then promptly losing those concerns), drafting a HOFer in the second round and having the cap space to sign the second best player in the league to a contract the season he hit the market.

The Rays rotate their cast because they've decided what I think is right (and what alomar points out), once you get into the playoffs weird things happen. If you can't spend to stay competitive like the Yankees or Mets or Dodgers can, is it better to bottom out every 10 years and be terrible and then every 10 years field a great team (like the Orioles are doing)? I'd rather do what the Rays do, win 90+ games a year and make it into the playoffs. Who knows what happens then. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to complain about the deck stacked against them that isn't stacked to the same extent in other sports.
 
Because of the lack of a salary cap, the lack of edge in negotiations for teams that develop the players among other issues, the deck is more stacked in favor in rich teams in baseball than it is in other sports, yes. But also yes, the Rays would be able to hang better if Stu put more money into the team, both are true.
 
Galactus said:
The Rays rotate their cast because they've decided what I think is right (and what alomar points out), once you get into the playoffs weird things happen. If you can't spend to stay competitive like the Yankees or Mets or Dodgers can, is it better to bottom out every 10 years and be terrible and then every 10 years field a great team (like the Orioles are doing)?
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As someone who has been a spoiled sports fan my whole life being from Massachusetts, my particular take on this regarding Baseball using the Red Sox as my example, I feel this is an incorrect strategy. Granted, the Red Sox have been a team to grow from the farm a bit more than some big market teams out there.

I had been a fan since the late 90's, but the first time I truly cared was 2003, in part because they had a real shot. I remember being up super late watching Game 7 of the ALCS and when Boone hit that home run I was devastated. We of course won the World Series the next year. But then there was a few rough seasons. Championship in 2007. Tough loss to the Rays in 08 and then a bunch of bad years until 2013, which culminates in another championship. Cycle repeats with quite a few mediocre to bad years again culminating in a World Series in 2018.

Ever since then, outside of an ALCS run in 2021, it has been a team that has looked pretty rough and it's only getting worse because why? Because ownership doesn't want to spend money and they've done everything they can to get rid of franchise cornerstones so they don't have to pay them. The Red Sox are operating as if they have no money, currently. However, if they win a championship within the next 10 years or so i'll consider the tough times worth sitting through. To me regular season wins mean nothing if you don't end up with a ring at the end of it all.
 
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That's a fair point! I guess none of the teams I follow in any sport has ever won a championship so I guess I don't really understand what it feels like as a fan to win one. It probably does outweigh the bad years but I don't know about that. If I could guarantee a Rays win if we go all in I'd definitely go for it.

But that's also with the benefit of hindsight. A couple plays change (Torii Hunter catching the one home run was the first one to come to mind for the Sox but you remember that game better than I do and can tell me if it actually mattered!) and the Red Sox have no titles to their credit either. I guess that's what my idea is. If you go all in as the Rays you get one or two tries over a decade or two with good odds vs keeping the trade chains going and getting 5 or 10 chances with long odds. I wish Stu would just spend the damn money but given that he won't I personally would rather do what we do (admittedly maybe Stockholm Syndrome )
 
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Galactus said:
That's a fair point! I guess none of the teams I follow in any sport has ever won a championship so I guess I don't really understand what it feels like as a fan to win one. It probably does outweigh the bad years but I don't know about that.

But that's also with the benefit of hindsight. A couple plays change (Torii Hunter catching the one home run was the first one to come to mind for the Sox but you remember that game better than I do and can tell me if it actually mattered!) and the Red Sox have no titles to their credit either. I guess that's what my idea is. If you go all in as the Rays you get one or two tries over a decade or two with good odds vs keeping the trade chains going and getting 5 or 10 chances with long odds. I wish Stu would just spend the damn money but given that he won't I personally would rather do what we do (admittedly maybe Stockholm Syndrome )
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To make another comparison that almost sucks worse imo (and it’s kind of the position the Rays are in), as a Pats fan, sure we won six SB’s in the Brady era, but after the Pats won in 2004, I watched another decade of great football that ended in nothing but late postseason losses before they won again in 2014. Same with the Celtics for the better part of the past decade.

In my experience, there’s more pain in tough, late playoff losses resulting in just a great team that came up short again (a position the Celtics have been in for about six years now) than if a team just sucks.
 
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Not to get too far off topic but my friends and I had that same argument about college football. We're all Oklahoma fans at the time when the safest bet in the land was OU squeaking into the Playoffs at the #4 seed and getting beaten (usually badly) by the #1 seed. We were split about 50/50 between the "let's just win in one of the NY6 bowls and not get embarrassed" and "play the semifinal and see what happens". Sounds like you and I would be on the opposite side of that argument too!
 
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