Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Author: robc

  • Relegation/Promotion in Baseball

    Revolution

    In 1988, in his last Abstract, Bill James wrote an essay called “Revolution”.  I would link to it, but our copyright laws mean that a 31 year old essay is not yet in the public domain, nor never will be.  In it, James suggested freeing the minor leagues from their farm status and having them compete as independent leagues.  Some would accept their levels as minor leagues, some would try to build up and from a 3rd major league, some would fold.  It would allow more teams to exist as every town could have a team and compete at their proper level, with proper levels of pay (none to very little).   There was a lot of good stuff in the article but when I was reading it, in April 1988, I was struck by what he left out…relegation and promotion.  There was no way for a team not in the majors to get there, other than expansion.  It was the obvious flaw in the article.  It is one I have been thinking about ever since, and despite tinkering around, my solution keeps coming back to the same one I thought of 31 years ago.

    Ignoring the relegation/promotion question for now, why would we want free minor leagues?  Have you been to a minor league game?  The decision making is less than spectacular, but it is because the managers literally aren’t playing to win.  They are rewarded for developing players, not winning games.  If that means playing Joey Votto in left field instead of 1B, because the Reds don’t have an opening at first, then so be it (this is not a hypothetical.  And yes, he was a far worse outfielder than you can possibly imagine).   Your AAA team has made the playoffs?  Great, we will call your best player up to the majors so he can pinch hit once a week in September.

    There is no real rooting for your home team.  At best, if you are a fan of their affiliated major league team, you get to see players that you will be cheering for later one.  As a Reds fan and Cardinals hater, when Louisville was a Cards franchise, I had trouble cheering for my local team.  Fortunately, they switched to the Reds (with a brief detour thru Milwaukee).  If the teams were independent, they would be playing to win.  And attendance would go up, not down, in the post season.

    I get up, I get down

    For those not fans of European sports, what is relegation and promotion?  I will use English soccer as my example, as it is the best known to American, but I am sure Pie can fill us in on how it works differently in Romania.   At the end of the season, the worst teams from one league are relegated down to the next lowest league, and the best teams from that league come up.  For example, the bottom 3 (18th thru 20th) in the English Premier League are relegated to the Championship League, and the top 3 (actually top 2, plus a playoff winner of teams 3-6) are promoted from the Championship to the Premier League.  Below the Championship is League 1 and League 2.  Below them is the National Conference, and then it starts getting interesting.  At that point, instead of a straight 1 to 1 correspondence, we get branching, as the leagues form “The Pyramid”.  Below the Conference is Conference North and South.  Below them are 3 leagues, Northern, Southern, and Isthmian.  And below them are more and more branches.  At the lowest levels you get county leagues.  Its just neighborhood teams playing against each other, with better ones moving up and playing against the other better teams.  Think of it as like A-league vs B-league softball.

    If you really care, here is a nice image:

    https://englishsoccerguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/english_league_pyramid.gif

    Centerfield

    Now that we are all on board, what would the American system look like.  First, we have to accept that 1969-1976 had the correct setup for MLB.  Each league had 12 teams, divided into 6 eastern and 6 western teams, with 18 games played in division and 12 played out of division with no interleague play.

    Perfection!  Then it all got screwed up by letting Toronto in the AL.

    While we can’t go back, we can replicate that.  We will expand the majors by 18 teams, and form two levels of 24 teams.  The Major Leagues D1 will have 4 6-team divisions:  NL-East, NL-West, AL-East, AL-West playing the schedule they did in the 70s.  Major League D2 will also have 4 6-team divisions, but will save on travel costs.  There will be two leagues, the Eastern League and the Western League, each with a National and American division.  They will play the same 18-12 breakdown, but wont cross over to the other half of the country.

    Sixth place in each D1 division will be relegated to the appropriate division in D2.  The winners of divisions in D2 will move up.  Below is my initial layout.  I chose the 18 teams from current minor league baseball (17 of the 18 are in AAA) based on 2019 attendance and not being located within the DMA of a major league team.  The 6 MLB teams in D2 were based on geography and 2019 records.  For assigning minor league teams to National or American, I mostly went with their historical affiliations with some adjustments for balance.  Its just an example.  The west starts at Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and the UP.  And whatever that is in Canada – Albertoba or something.

    Here is your 2020 breakdown:

     

    NL-East NL-West AL-East AL-West
    Atlanta St Louis NY Yankees Minnesota
    Washington Milwaukee Tampa Bay Houston
    NY Mets Chi Cubs Boston Oakland
    Philadelphia LA Dodgers Cleveland Texas
    Cincinnati Arizona Toronto Chicago WS
    Pittsburgh San Fran Baltimore LA Angels
    EL-National WL-National EL-American WL-American
    Miami Colorado Detroit Kansas City
    Louisville San Diego Toledo Seattle
    Indianapolis Iowa Columbus Round Rock
    Durham Sacramento Charlotte Las Vegas
    Buffalo Paso Rochester Salt Lake City
    Scranton Albany Nashville Oklahoma City

     

     

    American Pyramid

    That is a start of the system, we could keep the rest of the minors around as farm teams, instead of each MLB team having about 6, each of the 48 would have 3.  But once we go down this path, this won’t last.  There will be more expansion off the bottom of this, We will start the American Baseball Pyramid.  I don’t know exactly how it would develop, but I think it would start with 4 regional leagues, Northeast, Southeast, Central, and West Coast.  Maybe 5, with a Midwest league also, Yeah, probably so.  I don’t know how they would decide the 4 to promote, so maybe it would be 4.  But whatever, you get the idea.  And below that would be 8 or so leagues, and below that state level leagues.  Below that city level leagues, where neighborhoods play against neighborhoods – probably much shorter seasons with a game or two thru the week and then weekend games on Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

    This would give a place for that guy you played little league with, who was a AAA all-star and then spent 2 weeks in the Majors with an ERA over 10, a place to continue to play (this is also not a hypothetical).  Now, there are two types of guys in the minors, young kids who have potential to be major leagues, and guys kept around because they help the young guys learn and may be a coach someday.  As soon as you lose that prospect status, you are generally out the door.  They don’t want a 32 year old at A ball.  But with an independent system, if that 32 year old can help the A league team win and get promoted, he is worth having around.  And they will still develop the 19 year old, so they can sell him to a Major League team and rake in the profits.

     

    Money

    So why hasn’t this already happened?  It might have in the 19th century.  It would have prevented all the failed competing major league attempts, like the Players League and the Federal League and the American League.  The PCL was very close to a 3rd major league and might have become one if the Dodgers and Giants hadn’t moved west.  There were a few players who refused Major League contracts to stay in the PCL.

    Now it won’t happen for the obvious reason:  $$$.  I team dropping to MLB-D2, or even lower, would lose out on lots of money.  With the cost of a team, owners can put up with being bad, they can’t put up with being in a lower league.  And the second monetary reason is leverage.  Although expansion has put a stop to most of it, teams can get shiny new stadiums out of cities by threatening to leave.  Get Las Vegas a D2 team and the threat goes away.  Vegas isn’t going to try to become the new home of the Twins, they can just spend money on players and get promoted.

    The system seems great to libertarians, the best 24 franchises will rise to the top and bad owners will watch their teams fall.  Good fan bases will support their team, providing the money for teams to rise to their appropriate level and stay there.  Bad fan bases will get what they deserve.  And we can also see why crony capitalist wouldn’t like it.

    So yet again, I end an article with a section on why my awesome idea isn’t feasible.

  • Standard Libertarian Disclaimer – Episode 1: Universal Basic Income

     

    This is the first of what will hopefully be a multi-part series, written by a number of different writers, in which the author attempts to do the best job of writing a piece in favor of a policy he does not support.  Then everyone can tell him why it is a freaking bad idea in the comments.

    With that said, lets get started by turning on our

    [standard libertarian disclaimer]

    I am going to start by describing what I think is the best possible Universal Basic Income (UBI) plan, how it would work, what it would cost, and what benefits it would provide.  This will be a pure plan.  Then, because of one part that I think is too far outside the Overton Window, I will discuss an alternative, more politically feasible plan, that is not as good but would converge with the pure plan with time.

    The basic goal of the UBI is to eliminate poverty once and for all.  In order to do that, every American citizen [side note:  I am generally an open borders guy, but if you are just a resident let your home country send you a check] would receive a monthly check.  Each adult (18+) would receive $1040 per month.  Each child would receive $370.  This is based on the 2019 federal poverty guidelines with the adjustment that each adult gets the full amount for a single person household to avoid marriage penalties and the like.  The amount of the check would adjust with inflation each year.

    Thus, we have eliminated poverty among US citizens.  Everyone gets a check that gets them above the poverty line.

    The second part of the plan is to eliminate ALL transfer payments made by the federal government.  There would be no more welfare, no more agricultural subsidies, no more WIC, no more social security payments, no more aid to foreign governments, etc.  The government would still be spending a ton of money, but it would be on military and infrastructure and health care (Medicare, Medicaid and VA – I excluded them from transfer payments but an argument can be made for them being cut too) and other things that while maybe not entirely supported by Article I, Section 8, aren’t too far outside the realm of government services.

    At this point, using a back of envelope calculation I did sometime in the recent past, you can pay for the UBI and balance the budget (well, maybe, I think to get it fully in balance requires some cutting of military spending, which would be a good thing) with a flat tax on all income at 35%.  That seems high, and is, but it works out that due to the check, a family of four isn’t a net taxpayer unless their income exceeds about $97,000 ($96,685.71 to be exact).  Also, the elimination of social security means that the FICA tax has been reduced from 15.3% to 2.9% (Medicare portion).

    Benefits not yet mentioned:

    • Lots of unemployed federal employees.
    • Easier tax form, just a flat 35%, no deductions.
    • The debt owed to the Social Security Trust Fund evaporates overnight.

    That is the purest form.  However, that just reduced a lot of people living on a $3000 a month social security check to poverty level, now living on $1040.  This won’t fly.

    It sucks, but we have to keep SS around for a while.  The alternate plan would end Social Security slowly.  All SS credits earned prior to the start of the UBI would be paid under the current schedule, but you could not earn any more.  For those retired, nothing would change.  Those retiring in the future would get a reduced SS payment depending on credits already earned, so those close to retirement might not notice a difference but those 10 to 20 years away would notice, and those 40 years away would basically not ever receive SS.  I would slowly over time reduce the 12.4% Social Security tax.  If it works out (I don’t know the math on this), maybe by .2% per year so that it is gone in 62 years.

    A few generations down the road, SS would be gone and it would be the same as the original plan.

    [/sld]

    Destroy this idea in the comments.

  • DOOM! But now we know when.

    Here is a handy link.

    You should save this link so that if anyone tells you we only have 12 years left to solve the climate change problem, you can point them to the correct amount of time left.

     

     

  • My First Time

    It was 1998 or so, I can’t place it exactly.  My friend B worked for a company with a client in Southern Indiana.  He heard from some co-workers about this place with really good pizza and an unheard of beer selection.  As a fan of craft beer, such as it was in Kentucky at the time,  it sounded like a place worth the trip.

    Before the rest, here is a little backstory, as best as I understand it.  There was a sports bar called Sportstime Pizza.  Not a creative name, but it was exactly what it was.  They served the expected BMC beers, in regular and light versions, along with a better pizza than you would expect.  Their specialty was a deep dish that is closer to Detroit-style than Chicago-style, but not quite that either.  Let’s just call it New Albany style pizza, because I have never run into exactly it anywhere else.  The son-in-law of the owner convinced the father-in-law to let him open the space next door in the strip mall.  They would share the kitchen and the new place would serve craft and foreign beers.  At the beginning, they served Bud, Miller, and Coors, but never light beer.  Or Lite.  There wasn’t much at first, I think for the first month Guinness was the only option.  But by the time of this story, Rich O’s, as the place was called, had an extensive list of American craft and foreign beers, on bottle and on tap.  A death and a divorce later, the two daughters and an ex-husband would combine them into one name, New Albanian Brewing Company.  But everyone still calls the two sides Sportstime and Rich O’s.

    Back to the story, as I knew none of that at the time.  I was enjoying good pizza and good beer, trying some beers I had never had before, but in styles that I was comfortable with.  I wasn’t pushing the envelope.  My friend and I ended up in conversation with the two very drunk guys at the next table.  That were drinking beers from wine-sized bottles.  They had gone through at least a ½ dozen bottles between them.  They were regulars and were leaving the next day for a hunting trip in Canada to hunt beer or moose or elk or something.  When they discovered they neither of us had ever tried Belgian beer, they bought us a bottle of Chimay Grande Reserve.

     

    That night, my life changed.  I had never tasted anything like that beer before.  Learning more about beer, trying everything I could, homebrewing, starting a brewery, all these events could be traced back to that night.  Chimay Blue will always be one of my favorite beers.  If you want to tell me that St Bernardus ABT 12 is a better beer in that style, I won’t argue with you.  It might even be true.  I have never had Westy, but most who have say it is better.  But those beers don’t have the history.  There isn’t an emotional attachment.

    I don’t know what happened to these guys.  B and I have joked over the years that they were eaten by bears.  I do know we never saw them at Rich O’s again, as often as we were there.  They may have gotten a DUI on their way home and never made it to Canada.  Lots of possibilities.  But whenever I drink a Chimay, as I did while celebrating my 5th wedding anniversary recently, I think back to over 20 years ago, and toast them with my Chalice.