JA's post above is absolutely why Angelos is entirely wrong. They could pay all three of these players and still make money hand over fist. Easily.
Oh I agree that the owners absolutely can afford to pay all these contracts. By the same token, if they all ran their teams like non-profits or at a loss in order to pay all the sentimental favorites what it would cost to keep them around, the franchise values probably wouldn't keep increasing like they do.
Then what's the point of sports to people who aren't owners?
The problem is that fans no longer pay for the team's revenies. Revenue for teams is more measured in the TV contracts and in other streams. If the Coliseum was sold out every season the A's would not suddenly have money to pay for big time players.
In NFL, yeah.
Agreed with that. I was using "fans" as sort of a catch all for everything fan-related in that if you have a team that craters the trust of the fanbase, pretty much everything is going to go south: attendance, TV revenues, etc. It's not going to happen overnight, but I think that undermining fan confidence by calling out the boom-bust strategy in the midst of a really great year for your franchise (after you've been bad for five plus years) is not a wise PR move.
I was there too!!!!!
The Post article speculates that there may be a financial settlement for the remainder of his contract.
He was great when healthy but, man, $245M for like 30 ineffective innings. Unreal. The Nats dodged Rendon but got burned bigly on this one. Wonder how much insurance covered.
It would depend on the insurance policy. Given he is retiring for medical reasons, he will be paid the full value of the contract, so it just comes down to what amount the Nats have covered by insurance vs. what they have to pay themselves.
It's pretty incredible that out of all the elite names that the Nationals have had since coming to DC (Soriano, Harper, Scherzer, Turner, Juan Soto) the one they ended up signing for a huge contract ended up being Strasburg, who while a pivotal player in the history of the franchise, had the most obvious red flags.
Perhaps the biggest disagreement in my marriage. We literally can't talk about it.
I don't know if Scherzer belongs on the list of not getting a huge deal. They signed him for 7/215 entering his age 30 season. That was the sixth or seventh biggest contract in history at the time. Worked out well for them.
To be fair to the Nats, it is starting to look like they may have committed highway robbery on the San Diego Padres in the Juan Soto trade.
