The Sporting Class: Baseball's Salary Cap, Universal Playoff Expansion... and Elon Musk, Owner?

As Major League Baseball heads for a lockout, peacemaker John Skipper and capitalist David Samson reunite on the new rules of engagement: What are the dealbreakers? How long can both sides fight before broadcasters intervene? And are the Brewers and Rays evidence that the Dodgers don't need to get reined-in after all? Plus: what baseball owners and A. I. CEOs have in common, why more playoffs are good for everyone, how Elon Musk getting into sports could save America… and whether Pablo ever washes that cardigan. • Subscribe to "Nothing Personal with David Samson" https://pod.link/1483011704 • Plus: Submit your confidential tips to Pablo https://www.pablo.show/tips (Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Apple Card.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  If this was the Batman series, it would be, tune in next week to find out what Pablo was afraid to say.

• 0:17Pablo Torre?

  Right after this. This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory, two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles, side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?

• 1:01Pablo Torre?

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• 1:45Pablo Torre?

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• 2:30Pablo Torre?

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• 3:21Pablo Torre?

  It's been too long since we've had both of you guys here, John Skipper, David Samson. Together at last! The people have demanded it, John.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Well, sort of together at last. I'm used to being able to reach out and touch David, so the fact that he's in this amorphosphere somewhere, you know, it's not quite as good as having him right here.

• 3:40Pablo Torre?

  I miss your mutual affection for each other. I miss David's fear of John's germs. I miss...

• 3:48Speaker 01

  That's what this is about.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  You're out of reach.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  I just couldn't bear to be in the same room as you, John. I just couldn't. I was too concerned about, like, end-of-days pandemic-type stuff.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  All these things are jumping off me, but they've got nowhere to go. So it's all a confusion of fungi and bacteria and viral material.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Between the two of your sweaters, I'm happy to be here in the camera.

• 4:13Pablo Torre?

  People have asked, how many times have I gotten my cardigan washed? And I am proud to report,

• 4:20Pablo Torre?

  game-worn, yet to be sullied by such technology.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  You look like a bench player.

• 4:28Pablo Torre?

  I mean, I smell like a bench.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Nothing on your uniform.

• 4:32Pablo Torre?

  I was looking at this power rankings from Front Office Sports about the owners in sports who donated the most to federal races. And John was, of course, unsurprised to learn that Miriam Adelson has put at least $67 million into helping Republicans keep Congress, at which point he pointed out that there is a non-zero chance that one day Elon Musk becomes a sports owner.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Those numbers would go up a lot.

• 5:01Pablo Torre?

  And I just want to think about that for a second, because I had contemplated the world, David, in which Elon owns a sports team, but now, I can't not think about it.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think he'd buy a team. I think he would just buy every team. Just buy the league. He wouldn't do well in an owner's room. Frankly, I don't think he'd get 23 votes to buy a team. But if he went in, you know, at a couple hundred billion for the entire league, I think people would have to think about it.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Given the amount of money he has, he could do all kinds of punk tricks with that. I'm offering $25 billion. Baseball teams line up, basketball teams line up, and tell me why I should spend that on your club. It's the Elon Musk Club.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  No, it wouldn't work, because, again, he wouldn't get the votes. I think it's a different conversation, which is, I'm giving everybody for X what anyone will give, and I just feel like taking the league private, if you will, and owning every team. But there's a bunch of people in position to do that. It's not surprising to me that Bezos hasn't bought a team yet. Why would you be bothered? Think about why Michael Rubin divested himself of the Sixers. It's way easier to do business not owning a team than it is to do business owning a team.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 6:20Pablo Torre?

  But the idea of, he's a trillionaire, he could have everything. Doesn't he want to have the thing that people actually like, as opposed to a thing that is constantly, I don't know, I guess I unfortunately do like X, the everything app, because I'm on it all the time. Why don't you have the thing that, like, rates well among, like, the public and buys sports? You know? It just feels like that's an argument that his family office would want to make.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  More important to keep Ken Paxton in office than to own a basketball team.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  And for him, it certainly is. Yeah, I think that's a good business decision.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  In a second-division football league, soccer league, he could buy a team for that.

• 7:04Pablo Torre?

  Do we need Elon Musk to get into sports to save the country? Would be a follow-up question that I'm now contemplating.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I don't think that the words Elon and "save the country" should be in the same sentence. That's not really what I'm looking for, for my relief. It's from Elon Musk.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  I do like his Wi-Fi, though.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  His Wi-Fi?

• 7:26Pablo Torre?

  Starlink is, god.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Just make sure that you're not using it with any Ukrainians.

• 7:32Pablo Torre?

  Thank you, John.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Because it would turn out to be bad service.

• 7:35Pablo Torre?

  That...

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Elon.

• 7:38Pablo Torre?

  It's a very, as always, also a very good boy.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  I'm much more micro than you guys. I just want to make sure that there's never a Wi-Fi issue, so Belt and Suspenders requires regular Wi-Fi through the general way you do it, and then sticking a dish on the side of your house to make sure that there's never a position...

• 8:00Pablo Torre?

  What?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  So that doesn't happen.

• 8:03Pablo Torre?

  Oh, okay. That was David being an actor, an excellent actor.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  That...

• 8:07Pablo Torre?

  I thought he was having a stroke.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  By the way, we have that on tape, right?

• 8:11Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, this is gonna be an awkward episode on account of that happening now.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  That was me frozen. Thank you very much.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  It threw me.

• 8:20Pablo Torre?

  It's very worried.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I'm carrying on is going to be a challenge.

• 8:25Pablo Torre?

  I didn't know what Belt and Suspenders meant either, but now I understand. I mean, two independent safety measures, backup systems to ensure success or prevent failure.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, if you really want to be careful about whether your pants are staying in the appropriate place, you've got an insurance policy. Suspender breaks, you still got the belt.

• 8:46Pablo Torre?

  I was more familiar with the double-bagging school of safety.

• 9:09Pablo Torre?

  It might not feel like it, but the holidays are almost here, which means businesses everywhere are hiring for seasonal roles. And some of these jobs are wonderfully specific. Talking about ham glazers, lead elves, Santas with real beards, not, you know, some fake bearded Saint Nick. And up north, they always need more snowplow drivers, which requires a specific license to operate. And when you need someone with a specific skill, experience, or qualification, they're in high demand and not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is ZipRecruiter. And ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. Its powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly,

• 9:54Pablo Torre?

  and candidates can tell you in their own words why they're excited about your job. So no wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/ptfo. That is ziprecruiter.com/ptfo. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 10:21Pablo Torre?

  I want to get to the fact that we are a show that talks about sports business and the fact that the World Series has ended, the Milwaukee Brewers, congratulations to them, a small market, David, a small market that has done what they've never done before and won this thing. As now we look into the future, a crystal ball smudged with the fingerprints of so many, so many executives that David calls colleagues, even friends, some of them. And what do you see, David? What do you see about baseball even being a thing that we should be considering as a going concern into the coming year?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  You act like there's never been a collective bargaining negotiation between management and union. It's like asking when the airline pilots are on strike. Will there ever be flights again? Or are we stuck only where we can drive? I think that's exactly the position you should take with your Pulitzer Prize and Edward Armour Award, that it is the end of baseball, period, because there's no negotiating going on and there's going to be a lockout. I think that's perfect.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Do you know that there are two groups of people, very prominent individuals in this world who are asking to be restrained from harming others or themselves, the baseball owners and the AI CEOs? Please stop me, please stop me before I spend more money. But I'm a freedom-loving guy, but not here. So stop me while I try to pay Otani a fantastic sum of money.

• 12:05Pablo Torre?

  I want to get, though, just the clarity, David, around there is no chance that we don't enter a lockout. We agree on that. Everyone is anticipating that. Why are we even pretending otherwise?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  John, 11:59 PM, December 1st, the players will be locked out. There will not be an agreement before. There's no incentive for either side to move off of their entrenched positions. Actual negotiating hasn't even begun.

• 12:33Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so the idea that the salary cap, which I was alluding to vis-à-vis the AI companies who are hoping that the federal government regulates them to save their pocketbooks. The fact that the salary cap is referred to by the league, by the commissioner's office, it seems, as a nuclear option here. It is that level of problem in their view. That is a full, unexaggerated conviction. They actually plan to try and preempt this as if it's a nuclear bomb.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Well, it's certainly an October position. But remember, a lot of things change during the course of a collective bargaining negotiation where people go off what their quote-unquote is this is an absolute deal stopper. When you go into a negotiation, my view has always been that you keep three different lists. One list is, yeah, no problem, I will give right now. The middle list is, I'll still give, but I need to get, and it doesn't necessarily have to be equal. I'll just keep track. And then the third list is deal breakers. I am not moving off my position on this. It doesn't matter when, or it doesn't matter what's offered by the other side. And the goal of the negotiation is to make sure that that deal breaker list

• 13:52Speaker 02

  is as short as possible for both sides, or they intersect to the extent that both sides have a deal breaker point. Because otherwise, people would never get to an agreement, even outside of CBA negotiations, just in the life of negotiating.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So for provocation's sake, David, what problem are they trying to solve?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  The fact that there is such a huge difference between the number one payroll and the number 30 payroll. And they look at all the other capped leagues and see a collar. It's all, when you're on Wall Street, collaring is everything. That is what wealthy people do in order to diversify. Basically, it's about risk avoidance, measured with risk tolerance. And you cap your upside, but you protect your downside. And sports is no different.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  But so you're suggesting the problem is that the differential between what different teams spend is vast. So what's the problem with that?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Oh, it's just a matter of fairness. It's a matter of fairness in a league, that's all, John.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I thought you were a capitalist. Is it unfair to control the search market? Spend more money on search than the other 17 search companies? It is.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a capitalist, except I want a chance. I need, that's why you can be a capitalist, but believe in the rule of law. And you can believe in the Sherman Antitrust Act. You can be a capitalist, but there have to be rules.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Didn't Milwaukee and Tampa Bay just prove that that vast difference in the amount that teams spend doesn't necessarily determine who wins?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  It's such a novice argument, John. It's like saying when you get five black numbers in a row in roulette, that means the odds aren't 50/50 the next spin. It's really not relevant.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Excuse me for being naive, but the English Premier League doesn't care if everybody spends the same amount of money. And they do pretty well. They're okay. There's no salary cap in the English Premier League.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  I'm incredibly confused. Were there not just 114 violations by Manchester City because of financial fair play, which is rules, which is basically what we're talking about? And if you violate those rules, you're subject to relegation? You're subject to all sorts of things?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  But those rules say that you can spend proportionally to how much revenue you have. So all it does is continue to pull it apart. They don't want Coventry City to win the league. They really don't. They want Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, missing one or two, to win every year. And that's mostly what they've done. So it's the equivalent of saying, well, the Yankees can spend $1 for every dollar they bring in, and the Milwaukee Brewers can spend $1 for every dollar they bring in. That's essentially what they do already.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, then why did the super league not go forward? Why were fans so upset about a super league then?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Because their favorite teams were going to be pulled out of the rivalries in the countries, in the local league.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Fans take you inside a meeting, John, where we said to the owners of the Yankees, literally, it was in the middle of an owners' meeting, listen, you want to screw around and not do revenue sharing, and you want to hide revenue and all the different things? No problem. Yankees and Red Sox, you guys just play each other 150 times, play each other in the playoffs every year, and go off on your own. And that's the concept of a super league. And when you offer it, it's like, well, you know, that actually probably will not accrue to our benefit because our fans, both who watch, other than you, would prefer Yankees-Red Sox every day. The majority of people would say, that's really, that's really not the league that we are looking for.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't explain to me why this set of American capitalist entrepreneurs have to be told, you can't spend. You gotta, I gotta stop you from spending more money.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  It's the same reason there's a speed limit on a highway. You have to sometimes protect people from themselves.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  We're protecting the most privileged individuals in the world from overspending some of their own money on athletes.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Do you have the same view of Saudi Arabia? I assume you have the same view of Manchester City. They violated, they spent too much. If it's their money, they have it to spend. Why would you, why would you care?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Well, once again, once you set a group of regulatory practices in place, you have to abide by them. Right now-

• 18:28Speaker 02

  So that's all we're talking about.

• 18:30Pablo Torre?

  Oh, but this is, but this raises, I think, the question that I think a fan is probably wondering, which is like, what am I rooting for here? Like, am I rooting for the union and the players who say they want a salary cap for reasons that, you know, and just to, can we just make that case, David? So if you could, as they say in Silicon Valley sometimes, steel man what the union is saying. If you were to make, if they were to hire David Samson for a day and they were to say, David, we're going to get you your billable hours, but we need you to make the best case for us. What does that case look like?

• 19:05Speaker 02

  That every way the league has had to have your franchise worth more is in the system in which we exist right now. And that is a non-salary cap system. And when you look at what your rate of return is on your investment in your other businesses, and then you look at what's happened with your franchises, you will realize that something's going right in how this league operates. So the equivalency would be you saying that I've got a great silo of business that is very profitable, but I'm going to ignore the operative way that I function and I'm going to take my losing part of the business the way I operated and take it to the winning part. Would you ever do that? Of course not.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  So why would you change the current rules in the sport when everything is going perfectly well for the people who run it? That's the union argument.

• 19:57Pablo Torre?

  That's pretty good.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Not a bad argument.

• 20:01Pablo Torre?

  But the question now-

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Can I answer it?

• 20:03Pablo Torre?

  Well, the question, we're going to clip that, actually. We're going to clip that and aggregate it.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Excellent job.

• 20:07Pablo Torre?

  And get David in trouble with all of his friends. What I wanted to then get to, though, is the public interest, right? It's like, okay, so the union and the players, of course, want unconstrained spending. And the owners are like, we see a speed limit as helpful to our financial health. And the fan basically wants, I would say, what John was triangulating, which is, I want competitive games played among the teams that I like and the players that I enjoy. And I want this TV show to be really good. So the question is, is the TV show a better TV show with a salary cap or not? When, by the way, of course, the NFL has one, the NBA has one. This is an exception to the rule.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't think the fans have a clear choice on who to pull for there, right? Oddly enough, I suspect they're more sort of fake outraged by, I can't believe, you know, so and so is making, or what did Otani sign for? $700 million?

• 21:12Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, a heavily deferred contract that becomes very interesting to February.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  That tends to upset fans in a way, I think. On the other hand-

• 21:21Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, sticker shock of like, look at all these rich people.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Owners of sports teams are not a particularly, not an audience in need of great deal of empathy or fuzziness from their fans. I don't know fans who go, yeah, man, I love my owner.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  It's one of the great mysteries to me why both management and players are engaging in such an outright PR war to curry the favor of public opinion when, A, it doesn't matter inside the room. It just makes you feel better. And B, it's not even relevant to the economics of the game. Nobody is, in my opinion, worthy of empathy. But that's my situation when I think about any of the arguments that happen between managements and unions. I think both sides have protections in place. Both sides have make a living. And it sounds terrible to say and out of touch, but it's not. There are workers, there are owners. That's just what it's always been in business. Sometimes you're an owner, sometimes you're a worker, sometimes you're both,

• 22:23Speaker 02

  sometimes you're neither. And the way things are, everybody has a boss. And what people tend to get upset about is when they perceive that something's happening that isn't fair. And what baseball's arguing is that what's not fair is that an overwhelming majority of the teams don't have an equal chance of winning at the end. And isn't that why you're a sports fan? Because you want to be let down 29 out of 30 times because you lost on the field, not because you didn't have a chance to win before the game started.

• 22:56Pablo Torre?

  But this is where the fan smells bullshit, right? Because the fan is hearing that and they're saying, okay, but that's not your actual motive, owners. Your motive is not, oh, the customer-

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Let's take care of the fans. They have a competitive environment.

• 23:10Pablo Torre?

  Being imperiled. No, I mean, and I want to say this, David, because I want to bring some of the data in here. There've been a couple of polls. Sports Business Journal and Seton Hall, they did a poll. And just to give you a sense of how split this issue can be, 54% of general baseball fans favor a salary cap, compared to only 19% who oppose it. 27% undecided. Support rises, though, to 58% among avid baseball fans. The Athletic, their fan surveys indicate that somewhere above 60% of respondents back a salary cap and floor a system. But 73% of fans agree that payroll disparities have made competitive balance in the sport unfair, right? So that's what fans are really circling, right? Is, are the Dodgers just winning everything and is that-

• 23:52Speaker 01

  I love that the fans say that. But the fans love nothing less than a great dynasty, right? You, you, you, you know, if you're in the baseball's office, don't you want the Yankees to win every year and play the Dodgers?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  We just want seven games. Five, well, I assume that was your rule always in a seven game series. Five is the, four stinks, five is sort of market neutral and really you can make hay in six and seven.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  We always budgeted five and a half.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Over, under five and a half. This year's World Series went under.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a tough one. The, the NLCS was only four. And that was, the ALCS went seven, so you had 11. And that's always what you count, count them both, even though it's different networks. But from a league standpoint, that's five and a half, which is perfect. But then the World Series went five, so overall it was under by a half.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  So where were the Tampa Bay Rays ranked in the salary?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  It depends on how you calculate it, but 27th is the general-

• 24:55Speaker 01

  So we're going to need to lock the players out this year because the teams that don't have the money just don't have a chance after the 19th and 27th highest payrolls were in the World Series.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  I think it's great, John, in a business to only look at the last year and take the smallest sample size you can find and ignore the fact that it took the Brewers 44 years to get back to the World Series after 1982 and Tampa's never won one at all.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  So is the ideal situation that every team wins one time in a 30-year cycle?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  It's not the ideal situation for the media partners.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  It's not. And baseball is the hardest to do because, because the home fans make up such a large percentage of the audience that if you get to small market teams, the ratings are lower, a lot lower.

• 25:52Pablo Torre?

  And that's because of the regionalism of baseball. Is that the audience is so much of the fans of the local team.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  It's kind of an attribute of the sport, right? It's a daily sport because of the volume of games played in the town they live in. Now, I know that world changes a little bit. You no longer have the newspapers in the town. They're following it every day and you're not listening on the radio every day. But it still is very much a local sport. So as a broadcaster, we wanted the Yankees and the Red Sox because every time we put them on, we got better ratings. And, and baseball is never quite, in, in basketball, you get stars who transcend their team. So people cut on to watch Yanis. I guess people cut on to watch Otani, I guess, but I think there's a lot-

• 26:36Speaker 02

  That's the whole point, John, though. Listen, we want to make a system, that's all I ever wanted during my career, is a system where if the Oklahoma City Thunder win the championship, which is a small market, that they don't automatically have to trade SGA. They can sign them. And in baseball, you win a World Series if you are on the bottom, you won't be able to re-sign your stars. And we would love a system that where it is actually incentivized or possible to retain your stars. The Brewers are brilliant, but think about the churning they've done. Josh Hader is a closer, trade him. And then bring in Devin Williams, fantastic, trade him. Corbin Burns, great, trade him. Who's next? Who's next? And at some point, you want an economic system where you can't legislate away stupidity.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  But what you can do is make it so it's possible that smart people can keep the right players who they want to keep and they don't age out and end up going just to the Yankees.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I actually don't have a, for unusual for me, a really, really strong point of view about a salary cap. I mean, it does feel interesting to me and I'm enjoying testing my capitalist friend. If you had 40 farmers and 30 farmers in Nebraska, you say, well, to make all of you be competitive, you each have to get 40 acres and you had to use the same fertilizer. I mean, it's a basic-

• 27:56Speaker 02

  That's what the government does. I can't believe you-

• 27:59Speaker 01

  No, no, no, they do not. They do not try to make farmers-

• 28:03Pablo Torre?

  We, well, we, but this is where sports and the question of the public interest are a bit of a funhouse mirror. And I also am somebody who has a bit of a conflict when it comes to salary caps. We may or may not have just one various claim for investigating violations of it. And if you're going to ask me, do I think they're a moral instrument that our divine creator has presented to us for the benefit of the public? I would say probably not. Probably not. It's a thing that owners have implemented to curb their own voracious appetites.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  I think the fact that the owners are calling for it and willing to lock out-

• 28:42Pablo Torre?

  It's a bit of a tell.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Would tell, it's a bit of a tell as to who this is good for. It's not about the fans and them being happy that everybody has a fair chance. It's about the owners wanting it's to restrict the amount of money that their competitors can spend.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  I'm so thankful, John, that as an employer, you always did everything only with your employees in mind. I mean, that is just, obviously, that made you the single best president ever.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  I didn't say that, of course, Dave, but you did just make the argument that the essential problem to be solved is that there's sort of an unfairness. I don't think if you, if you survey a whole lot of fans, they're going to go, yeah, the game is really unfair right now. It's, it's not, I don't like it. Because my team, the St. Louis, I don't know, the Cardinals, they won, they haven't won in a long time.

• 29:32Pablo Torre?

  It's been a while.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  They have a small market.

• 29:33Pablo Torre?

  Well, yeah, market size.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  It's just, it's just a funny, it's a funny reversal.

• 29:38Pablo Torre?

  You're a mentalist here.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  It's a bit of a funny reversal of the discussion ordinarily, in that I would actually argue for the free market. And, uh.

• 29:46Pablo Torre?

  That's what I'm really sort of grappling with here, is that socialist skipper is now suddenly.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  But now, I'm going back, I'm for the players, I'm for the labor, I'm for labor.

• 29:57Pablo Torre?

  What this tells me, by the way, is that if you are a billionaire owner who wants to see a salary cap come to fruition, I think the landscape is primed for it. I don't think this is an issue, frankly, that has a lot of fan outrage. I think even the people who want to take a side are like, well, I don't really care that much about it. I think labor, the players specifically, the union, has a very strong view, and I do not dispute the conviction they have in it. But even in that, and again, I keep, I'm just imagining Dominique Foxworth just like headbutting me as I proceed to sort of like minimize the fight against salary caps, but even in that constituency, of course, there are, there's a conflict of incentives

• 30:40Pablo Torre?

  for some players who really like salary caps and some players who don't.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  You should just point out to Dominique, the next time you speak with him, that when you're thinking about the union, you have members of that union, the overwhelming majority of members of the union are not Otani. The overwhelming majority are far more concerned on the minimum salary than they are on whether there's a salary cap. And one thing that owners count on in any negotiation management, they count on a fracture in the union because people at the end of the day operate in their own self-interest. And when you've got a majority of players at the minimum saying, wait a minute, you're saying I was making 780 grand, but that can go to 1.5 million? That is a very meaningful change, I'm voting for that. So there's all sorts of ways that when you're negotiating, you have to know your union,

• 31:28Speaker 02

  and the baseball union is certainly comprised of individuals in far different circumstances, more than pilots or teachers or anything like that.

• 31:38Pablo Torre?

  To be sure. And I guess what I'm therefore saying is,

• 31:43Pablo Torre?

  what a salary cap is, is a mutually agreed upon aspect of a, of a sport. And at a certain point, um, it would not surprise me in the least that baseball joined the other ones in implementing one. And that the outrage around it would dissipate over time because, of course, this would effectively be something, even if they were leaned upon to do it, because it's so important to owners to implement, that they would make peace with eventually, which is to say, longhand, now shorthand, the owners like their hand here. They like the hand they're playing when it comes to how this thing is going to resolve.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Well, they should, right, David? What's the average tenure of a baseball player now? Is it four years?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just under four years. They barely get to arbitration. So of course, if you take a year away, you're cutting people's careers by 25%, and other than Mark Walter and the Lakers, generally people hold on to their assets for a longer period of time, so they have the ability to amortize the loss, if you will. And that always gives management the advantage, not just in baseball, that's a general rule of thumb of how management is able to take advantage of labor more times than it doesn't.

• 32:55Pablo Torre?

  And that's, I think, the biggest picture story, is that management beats labor whenever there is anything like a contest of wills. And the question becomes, as that is bothersome in a very real and profound way to anybody who has empathy for labor, the question is, what does the union get to get in exchange? What do you get?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  So now we're talking about negotiating.

• 33:18Pablo Torre?

  And now we're at David's other list.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  That is it. You, you just did it. So now we're in the middle list, which is all right, we're going to be giving, we're going to be getting. We've established there's going to be a salary cap and a salary floor, let's now make an agreement around that concept. Let's figure out a way to get more money to younger players. Let's figure out a way to get players into free agency earlier so that they can get paid and not hit free agency at 32 and all of a sudden get one or two-year deals and be unhappy about it. Let's figure out a way to make sure that upon retirement, that the benefits and the pension and the healthcare is satisfactory to members of the union today, as well as members of the union tomorrow. Let's figure out a way to maybe give a little tiny stup over to the minor league players

• 34:03Speaker 02

  and see if that can be helpful to get a couple of player rep votes. So all of that negotiation happens on that middle list, Pablo.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Is stup a, uh, an actual legal term?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  No, it's just, it's Yiddish and it actually, I, it's, it doesn't.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  I'm actually aware, I'm actually aware of that. I just love hearing you say stup.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  From time to time.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:24Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, in this case, we probably, we should bag that one as well.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  But, but don't you think, you, you'd asked before what fans want, fans want them to play the games, right? It nearly turns out to be a pox on both your houses, right? It's like, why do these rich guys have to help protect themselves in spending? And why do these overpaid players fight about getting more money?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  But that doesn't happen for months.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  It didn't happen, it wears off in a week. When they start playing again, it wears off.

• 34:51Pablo Torre?

  And there's also, and by the way, this is where I also just gotta give my take that in the public consciousness, I think, this is my, this is my true mission here, perhaps, on this planet. The word billion and the word million sound so similar that I think we gotta change one of them because people don't understand how vastly different those things are. They rhyme, they're one letter apart, they're close on the keyboard.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  999 million to 1 billion is not that different.

• 35:22Pablo Torre?

  And what an owner argument, what an owner level argument.

• 35:35Pablo Torre?

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• 36:08Pablo Torre?

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• 36:49Pablo Torre?

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• 37:16Pablo Torre?

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• 37:57Pablo Torre?

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• 38:42Speaker 01

  It's a pretty perilous time to go out. But you have the possibility of displaying to the broadcast partners that they might make the same or maybe even a little more money with your games not on. And they're in a difficult market right now because baseball has done a lot of good things the last couple of years that I've liked a lot. I like that a small market team won. And it's a fun team. But the NFL and the NBA are necessary for the sports media companies to have to forestall distribution agreement trouble. Right? And it's not clear if baseball can do that.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  And that's why they have separated themselves in terms of rights fees. Because, and we could argue on the NBA. You can't argue on the NFL. If you have that and you go out of service during the season, you have a, they have a big problem. Yeah, I think the same thing is true of the NBA right now. I think if the NBA went out, you would have people cancel their subscriptions and it would increase the deterioration of the cable television universe, from which a lot of the money that goes to pay these media rights still comes. I would argue probably the preponderance of the money still comes from cable fees that go to, go to sports teams.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would just add to that one thing, John, which is what baseball is trying to do is take all the local broadcast revenue and pool it together and try to be more like the NBA. And there are services that are interested in taking all of the local broadcast rights. And the regular season in baseball actually has more importance than the regular season in basketball. Because there's so many hours of programming. When you've got, even if it's 154 games, which is one of the proposals from the ownership side, you're just talking about a tremendous amount of hours that these streaming services and these cable broadcasting companies are interested in. However, my initial point to you, John, is that

• 40:49Speaker 02

  when you would get involved in, because you were a part of, you were there for a lot of labor discord. The issue is October is where the bills are paid. And the regular season, the way it used to be, was more of an afterthought. But in the new world of media, Major League Baseball regular season is actually valuable if you get more than 23 owners to agree to pool the revenue. So what baseball is trying to weigh right now is how, how long can we delay that? How long do we fight with the players before we have to start talking to the broadcasters about the new rules of engagement, which likely will include pooling of local revenue?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, by the way, isn't local rights an obsolete anachronism? They're not gonna, nobody is going to distribute these on a local basis. They're all gonna become national games, aren't they?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, John, I don't think you'll get rid of all local because if you think about what Gotham does in New York is the best example I like to use, which is if you get that app and you are a subscriber to Gotham, you can get Yankees games. But if you're talking about the blackouts and the blackout issue goes away when you pool everybody's local revenue and you do a deal with a larger company that includes multiple teams. And from a fan standpoint, that's a huge benefit. But from a revenue standpoint, the blackouts, and this is a very terrible secret that is kept inside the industry. The blackouts are actually what added value for a lot of teams. Because they had, like Florida, we couldn't have fans in Florida

• 42:29Speaker 02

  who would rather listen to the Yankees and then have the ability to listen to the Yankees. They were not allowed. We had certain rights where we had a territory. And if those territories disappear, which is something that's being talked about, it has to come with full revenue sharing.

• 42:46Pablo Torre?

  I want to understand, though, the role of the broadcaster, John, when it came to a labor dispute. Did people come to you looking for you to put a thumb on the scale in either direction? Would unions or leagues commissioners lobby you to get involved in any regard?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  No. And they, and David would probably have some level of incredulity at this. It wasn't, we weren't that involved. I mean, I would have, yes. Would I have talked to the commissioner if I was holding baseball rights and said, man, I think a lockout has a lot of peril to it. What can we do to help if we can do anything? But there's not much you can do to help. There was some contract, and I can't remember quite the contracts in terms of who gets paid or doesn't get paid. I don't think the leagues get paid if there are no games. Is that accurate?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do. But if you miss more than 60 games, you just have to add a year at the back end. So it basically extends the national deals. And that's a, what people are saying would be a pressure point for the owners. But inside the owner's room, that's actually not how we would talk at all. Because if you toll it for a year, basically, we'd go out in 2029, let's say, and we'd be a year further removed from a lockout or a year further removed from a recovery that's required. So the players are thinking, hey, if we just hold on, the owners will have to cave. And in a lot of ways, I believe it's the opposite. That if a deal isn't done quickly, the owners will say, hey, no problem. You're missing your paychecks. We're happy to add a year to the existing media deals

• 44:23Speaker 02

  and take it out where we will then have more understanding of how to maximize the revenue.

• 44:28Pablo Torre?

  But the question then becomes then, when does a media rights holder become incentivized to intervene? And what David is saying is probably not till right before the postseason. And John, you're of that sense as well?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Again, I didn't actually have that much experience with lockouts and strikes. There were not that many during my tenure. And I don't remember, I don't think any league missed a season from 2000.

• 44:55Pablo Torre?

  Is that because you were paying so much money for these deals that everyone was like, man?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

• 45:01Pablo Torre?

  The skipper cash machine, shooting out bills. Let's just play these games.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  It's just the timing of when the deals came up and when they were right, or team actions. But when was the last lost season in one of the major sports?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Well, full season, I mean, hockey missed quite a bit of time. It's been, baseball has not missed a regular season game in, since Rob got to baseball. So it's certainly 25 years, if not longer. Maybe it was 94 was the last time. I don't think since then. And so for me, it's not about in 22, they just had to move the season by a week. That's how the lockout ended. It got into March and they just delayed spring training, delayed the season opener for a week. And it was no problem. The broadcasters came to the table and were willing to show the World Series a week later. That was Fox at that time. So the broadcasters do have to get involved because they've got an area in their schedule where the postseason is.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  And if you move that, sometimes the broadcasters are not interested in moving it because it gets into the other part of their calendar, whether it be football or something else that they have. So, John, it would come a time and it would be normal that you'd be communicated with about anything that's going on on the labor front.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  But I think we just saw, I had the good fortune not to have this incidence come up in my tenure. So I'm trying, I was trying to think back.

• 46:26Pablo Torre?

  No, the NFL, the last lockout was 2011, but zero regular season games were missed. That was the longest lockout, by the way, 136 days in NFL history. The NBA, also 2011. That ended up shortening the regular season, as some might recall, to 66 games from 82, which felt, as a side note, pretty good. Pretty good feeling season. That was memorable as like, oh, this kind of worked out for everybody. But yeah, you're right. It was, John presided over labor peace.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. I solved eight of nine labor negotiations in the first six months in my job. I don't know why I haven't gotten the prize for that yet.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  I'm not sure what prize it would be, but I would be happy to have to get one.

• 47:08Pablo Torre?

  There's a FIFA peace prize is in there somewhere.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Prize, you can take it from Trump. I'm sure that you'd love to be sloppy seconds to Trump's Nobel FIFA Peace Prize.

• 47:26Pablo Torre?

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• 48:53Pablo Torre?

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• 50:47Pablo Torre?

  The one thing I feel like is worth just acknowledging here as I try to think about what else do both sides agree on, what broadcasters agree on, what owners agree on, what do players even agree on, is the idea of playoff expansion, which has been a recurring joke on this program, because every time we talk about any sport, they're expanding the playoff. And now college football, John, has long prophesied, the college football playoff will be 24 teams.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 51:16Pablo Torre?

  And as the guy who architected the landscape of college football and college sports when you're running ESPN, how does it feel to see the number 24 almost as an inevitability?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Generally, expanding playoffs is good for the broadcasters. And for the most part, fans like more playoffs. So, you know, that's two pretty good arguments for it.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  I personally hate when they do these stair-step tournaments. You should play 16 teams or 32 teams. This business of some teams get a bye, some teams don't is silly. Just play. Just play. 16 to me was what I thought the magic number was. And I thought you have four power, got four conferences, the top 14 teams get in from each conference. That, of course, would be too socialist for the SEC and the Big Ten. But, but, you know, it doesn't excite me to see more.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  John, it's all for you. You do understand. Everything we do as a league is trying to come up with events that you'll pay for. So, special events, a Field of Dreams game, or another round of playoffs. We're trying to get you to say, oh, this is a great thing. We will give you incremental dollars, or we will increase what we perceive to be the value of your inventory, which we can take it or leave it, but give me what we would call jewel events. Think about with bowl games. You love the fact, hey, put a bowl game, Pop-Tart Bowl Game, just any bowl game, we'll put it on the air, we're guaranteed, you know, 6 million people, way to go, we'll pay for it.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  That's what college football playoff expansion is. It's just more bowls, but now it's just more playoff games. And the broadcasters, I can't imagine that you'd have a limit. The NCAA basketball tournament, let's add a few more play-in teams and then add a couple more teams, and this will be great.

• 53:11Pablo Torre?

  76 teams.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Is that this year?

• 53:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, it's coming. It's 2027 in the postseason.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  It's, it's, why 76?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  But to your point, David, why 76? It creates a few more games of inventory that somebody can pay for.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  And people do. There's so much more competition now.

• 53:32Pablo Torre?

  Of course. I just want to put some numbers on this, right? College football playoff, as they double the field to 24 in 2027, and this is after the handshake agreement that has been publicly reported by multiple places, it's nearly $350 million added to the $1.3 billion college football playoff deal that ESPN had. You know, and I suppose, look, baseball, to go back to that for a second, they, 2022, right, was when the playoff field expanded. Now, a wildcard system, different, all that, but like, the solution, as there's only so much more to frack out of the ground, is what if we just make everything a playoff?

• 54:11Pablo Torre?

  What if we continue to just sell it all as a playoff, even if it's now just increasingly less special?

• 54:19Speaker 02

  I want to hear your reaction to that, John, because if you were presented with a package that was not any regular season college football games, but that you would get just the playoff games, the reason why you've never been offered that is you would take it.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  No, I always wanted some regular season. I like it. I think it's good for the sport. I think it's good to have fans interested all year. I didn't want just playoffs at any point. I don't think we did any. I mean, the college football playoff deal was done separately, so that was done by itself. Was that a good deal? Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  But take your hat off of having to have hours in order to justify the prices you were charging to the distributors and the platforms. But from the standpoint of just standalone games, do you disagree? Maybe I have it wrong, but I thought that playoff games were far more profitable than a regular Week 4 game.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are, but I don't know what a good analogy is, but I don't, I think you do disservice to the sport if you're not covering it. We had the hours to fill, so there was no reason to just do playoffs. I was going to point out that I just came back from Mexico, and in Mexico, they have two championship rounds a year. They have the first half of the season, which is called the Apertura, and then eight of the 17 teams play a playoff for the Apertura champion. I'm not sure they call it that. And then they play the Closeira, which is the second half of the season, and they play down again. So they play two seasons back to back in order, and it does give you two playoffs, two shots at the playoffs.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  That would be interesting to me as a broadcaster.

• 56:01Pablo Torre?

  Okay, hold on. That is funny. I hadn't thought about, what if you took the NBA regular season, you cut it in half, two seasons, you have some sort of championship A.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Well, they did. The cup is kind of a version of that, right?

• 56:15Pablo Torre?

  It's their way of getting, of testing the waters on that.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And to David's point, it worked, right? You just said, here's a bright shiny object. It's not really any different than regular season games, except we're putting a playoff structure on it.

• 56:29Pablo Torre?

  Row the Emirates on the logos, and we're in business.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, why do you think the NBA cup came into existence? I'm just curious what you think the provenance was of the NBA cup.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think ultimately they're trying to go, how can we make sure that the regular season doesn't become less and less of a must-see for fans? How can we take some games and give you a reason to watch them? Well, it's just watching. Look, I'm having a little anui myself as the season starts here. I'm not kind of ready to watch the Knicks every night again, yet, right? So, these games don't seem to matter much to me right this moment, so they put the cup.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  But when the NBA cup starts, would you watch that?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  So then that seems to me to be the end of the discussion. You're trying to get more jewel events inside the regular season, and the NBA said, well.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Well, you are, but it's a little like a sandwich.

• 57:22Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  If you don't have two pieces of bread and then a sandwich, you're just eating some ham.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And I guess without a regular season.

• 57:31Pablo Torre?

  Is that an old Southern proverb?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Without a regular season, you're eating a sandwich without any bread.

• 57:35Pablo Torre?

  Well, I do like the idea, though, of like taking, Dave, all right, let's make this more local and regional for everybody. You're at Katz's Deli, and you get the big pastrami.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Give me a bagel with cream cheese locks. Hold the bagel.

• 57:51Pablo Torre?

  But in this case, what they're saying is like, here's a big pastrami sandwich, but guess what? We're gonna serve it as two open-faced sandwiches, and now you have two sandwiches. You had one sandwich, now you got two, and guess what? After you finish the first open-faced sandwich, you get a little trophy. And then after you get the second one.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  And what do people do in that case? They order extra bread on the side. That's all we're talking about is what these jewel events are, is getting more pieces of bread to make extra sandwiches.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  And the owners would like to spend a little less bread.

• 58:26Pablo Torre?

  And of course, as John is saying about like the college football season, we want the regular season. The question just becomes, when everything is playoffs but a couple of things, does the other couple of things, is that even nearly as interesting to the consumer?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Now you're talking about the balance. This is exactly what you do in any business, is you figure out, we're trying to make more things important, but we got to make sure that what is not labeled as important becomes irrelevant. And so you do that balance, and it's very hard. It's why businesses are always changing, how they categorize things, how they market things, because you're always trying to figure out what is the sweet spot, and the damn sweet spot always changes. Makes it harder to find.

• 59:12Pablo Torre?

  There's a joke here.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  That is snorkel.

• 59:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, there's a joke here that now has been made that I wish had not been.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  You got it, Pablo.

• 59:18Pablo Torre?

  I did.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Who made it? Oh, you haven't uttered it yet.

• 59:24Pablo Torre?

  I think he's done too much.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  By the way, if this was the Batman series, it would be, tune in next week to find out what Pablo was afraid to say.

• 59:36Pablo Torre?

  The fact that we have been talking about pastrami and David is talking about finding the sweet spot makes me think that we're done, probably. Perhaps one of us should be eliminated playoff style, actually, at the end of this episode.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  I think this is a sweet spot for this episode.

• 59:53Pablo Torre?

  David Samson, John Skipper. As always, I'm glad that none of us truly understand each other, and for that reason, we remain friends.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  See you later.

• 1:00:12Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

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• 1:01:02Speaker 04

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