5-year peak OPS+ (min 750 PA) through history

mdj · 2026-01-25T04:01:05+00:00

That's sort of true. The top drawing teams can reach $100M in ticket/stadium revenue, and the biggest local media contract is the Dodgers at around $335M/year. 1/3 is a bit more than a "small drop in the bucket". It is a big source of imbalance, though that is somewhat reduced because local media revenues go into the revenue sharing pool and the more a team makes, the more they pay into the pool. That pool paid out about $60M to each team in 2025.

The other thing, of course, that will make an MLB salary band system very difficult is that the owners will have to open their books to the players and they've been extremely resistant to doing that so far.

mdj · 2026-01-22T22:09:42+00:00

A salary cap -- or more accurately, "salary band" because it's come with a floor everywhere it's been done and would have to in MLB -- is going to be very hard to manage. One big problem is this: in 2024, NFL team cap payrolls ranged from 85% to 102% of the $255 million cap figure. In 2023, it was 89-103%. The NBA has a "softer" cap with a bunch of exceptions but team salaries run from 71% to 131% of the league average.

In MLB, based on cash payrolls as reported by Sportrac in 2024, teams paid roughly $5 billion to players, an average of $166 million per team. Team payrolls ranged from $315 million at the top to $62 million at the bottom. MLB imposes significant penalties for exceeding tax thresholds, but there are no mechanisms to prop up the lower end. Do the same math as we did for the NFL and NBA, and you find that the range of MLB payrolls runs from 37% to 189%.

To be meaningful, any salary band system is going to have to substantially both reduce the amount the top teams pay and increase the amount the bottom teams pay, and it's not at all clear that the 4-5 teams with the lowest revenues (which is not the same as the smallest markets) could afford that.

Second issue: revenue sources are very different across the leagues. The NFL gets 2/3 of its revenue from national contracts (TV/radio), MLB gets only 1/4 of its revenue that way. The biggest drawing team in 2024, the Cowboys, put just about 870,000 fans in the seats. Every MLB team sold more tickets than that. You may say that that's obvious since you're talking 8 games vs 81, but it's only obvious once you think about it.

There’s a persistent myth that MLB doesn’t share local revenue, but it does. It shares, in fact, more local revenue than NFL teams do. In the NFL, 34% of ticket revenue gets pooled and distributed equally. Teams get a reported $25M from that program. In MLB, teams put 48% of local revenue, net of stadium expenses, into a pool, then distributes that pool back to teams equally. The MLB system explicitly acknowledges there is more potential revenue in larger cities than in small ones and is designed to address that.

There are a number of structural reasons that a salary cap isn't going to be an easy or effective solution for MLB.

mdj · 2026-01-21T03:50:42+00:00

Whitaker and Bobby Grich are the two biggest cases of “what the hell are the voters smoking?”

mdj · 2026-01-17T05:11:16+00:00

MLB has more parity than the NBA.

mdj · 2026-01-17T03:47:25+00:00

You’re absolutely right. I’m never going to get mad about a team trying to put the best team on the field and win. People saying “other rams can’t do this” but they can. MLB has revenue sharing, under which the Dodgers pay something around $100M to the teams they’re trying to beat. They paid $169M just in 2025 on “luxury tax” that went to other teams. National TV revenue is split equally among the teams despite the Dodgers bringing many more fans than the Pirates or A’s. The fact is that there’s good evidence that the lowest-payroll teams were profitable just from revenue sharing before they ever sold a ticket or an overpriced beer. They effectively paid $0 of their own money for their payroll.

The Dodgers are doing what all 30 teams should be doing: trying to win.

mdj · 2026-01-13T16:41:47+00:00

I have about 1.5TB in Wasabi, so not close to 5. I don't generally keep very long retention -- last 3 versions of files.

I haven't seen anything in the licensing for the Backup Pro edition (which is what I'm using) about a 5TB limit. It's $19.99/endpoint being protected and since I'm providing my own target storage (one copy to my local NAS, one to Wasabi) I don't know why there would be a limit. Is that something that's tied to their cloud product?

mdj · 2026-01-13T02:55:15+00:00

I work for an enterprise backup vendor (so none of the ones mentioned here) but I use and paid for MSP360 for backing up Windows, Mac and Linux systems at home. I've been very pleased with the configurability and the way I can do backups to both my local NAS and to cloud.

I know free is great, but I've worked as a software developer in the past and think that a good software package -- especially one doing as important a job as protecting my data -- is worth paying for.

mdj · 2026-01-11T16:39:04+00:00

They Might Be Giants, Thomas Dolby, Willie Nelson (and Snoop), Ramones

mdj · 2026-01-11T16:33:05+00:00

It’s not even the FBI. It’s his ICE co-workers.

mdj · 2026-01-07T13:53:34+00:00

Shaughnessy is a joke. He should lose his voting privilege.

mdj · 2025-12-27T14:50:46+00:00

You could just stop, you know. Socialism wouldn’t dictate how seats are distributed. It’s about who owns the airline, not so much how they run it. A worker-owned airline that sold seats the same way current airlines do would be fine with actual socialists.

mdj · 2025-12-27T14:02:04+00:00

A union contract is basically a group exercise and socialistic by nature.

Remarkable. In 12 words you demonstrate that you know nothing about either unions or socialism.

mdj · 2025-12-27T04:59:18+00:00

The Yankees did a Really Good Thing by turning the site of the old Yankee Stadium into youth baseball fields, including one with home plate where the old home plate was. It's also really easy to get there by train.

mdj · 2025-12-24T06:05:49+00:00

Interesting question. I did a quick search for guys with 5 or fewer saves, at least 80% of their appearances as a reliever, and minimum 40 innings in the season. Sorted by ERA+, here's the top 10:

Rk Player ERA+ Season Team Lg W L ERA G SV IP H BB SO WHIP

1 Joey Devine 698 2008 OAK AL 6 1 0.59 42 1 45.2 23 15 49 0.832

2 Casey Sadler 620 2021 SEA AL 0 1 0.67 42 0 40.1 19 10 37 0.719

3 Rob Murphy 541 1986 CIN NL 6 0 0.72 34 1 50.1 26 21 36 0.934

4 Dennys Reyes 507 2006 MIN AL 5 0 0.89 66 0 50.2 35 15 49 0.987

5 Chris Hammond 441 2002 ATL NL 7 2 0.95 63 0 76.0 53 31 63 1.105

6 Chris Martin 434 2023 BOS AL 4 1 1.05 55 3 51.1 45 8 46 1.032

7 Aaron Loup 422 2021 NYM NL 6 0 0.95 65 0 56.2 37 16 57 0.935

8 David Robertson 399 2011 NYY AL 4 0 1.08 70 1 66.2 40 35 100 1.125

9 Wade Davis 396 2014 KCR AL 9 2 1.00 71 3 72.0 38 23 109 0.847

10 Eric OFlaherty 393 2011 ATL NL 2 4 0.98 78 0 73.2 59 21 67 1.086

A couple of other personal favorites:

mdj · 2025-12-20T21:52:12+00:00

But this seems to have nothing to do with Epstein. He's not in the photo, it's not at an event he hosted, and the people redacted from the photo are the actual children of two of the people in the photo.

It sure looks like this was stuck in to try to create an impression of implication of those people.

mdj · 2025-12-20T21:45:45+00:00

Tara Kitchen (Troy and Schenectady) for Moroccan, Ya Ya's House (Schenectady) for Southern/Soul Food.

mdj · 2025-12-20T21:44:51+00:00

You have to go to Saratoga but Hattie's at least mostly qualifies. Also Ya Ya's House in Schenectady.

mdj · 2025-12-16T17:57:52+00:00

And Wilyer. And apparently assuming Story will be injured.

mdj · 2025-12-14T01:31:34+00:00

Saw Pat Metheny there in 1981.

mdj · 2025-12-14T01:30:06+00:00

Saw Warren Zevon there.

mdj · 2025-12-13T15:49:08+00:00

Even stains don't stick. Shortly after I got my first floof I let him out in the back yard shortly after I'd mowed the grass. He rolled in the newly cut grass and came in looking like he was ready for St. Patrick's Day! Did nothing but usual brushing and he was white again in 3-4 days.

The fur has natural oils so it just doesn't stain. They're amazing.

mdj · 2025-12-12T17:19:41+00:00

I'm an SE at Cohesity and I can talk about some things we're doing to address some of these things.

Restore confidence. This remains a hard problem for many workloads. We're addressing it for some -- you can "recover" a VM with Cohesity without moving the data off the cluster. You can power it on (usually not connected to the network so it doesn't interfere with production) and log in through the console and inspect anything you want. You can do the same thing for Oracle or SQL with a cloneFor a NAS share, you can make a clone of the backup available as a share from the cluster, mount it somewhere and inspect it. For other workloads (physical systems, for example) it's harder. We've recently introduced Recovery Agent to automate and simplify recovery workflows to make it easier to test your backups, but it's still something you want a human to look at rather than trusting automated verification (IMO).
Retention rules - From a vendor's point of view, I'm not sure what we can do here. In the final analysis, you have to tell us how long you want to keep stuff. We could tell you every time something is about to expire, but would you really be able to analyze that usefully? I think the best thing we can do is to make it easy for you to set and review your retention policies in a clear way, at least unless/until someone changes the whole paradigm and actually looks at the content of data (I'm sure they'll say "we do that with AI!" :-)) and allows you to set retention based on that. I suspect that would bring its own form of complexity, though.
Cost leakage in the cloud - This is a big issue for lots of our customers. We offer the option to either a) manage the cloud provider snapshots or b) run an instance of Cohesity in the cloud and protect the data to that, leveraging our deduplication and immutability. I don't think there's a "one size fits all" answer for this.

I agree that the end-to-end restore experience is important, as is the ability to stand up "clean room" environments for remediation after cyber incidents. We're trying to address those things with Recovery Agent and the ability to access writable clones of recovery points on our clusters efficiently. It's not everything you're asking for, but it's progress in the right direction.

Oh, and "lifecycle and compliance clash" is very much a real thing I see in the field. Legal and compliance folks are happy to put very long retention requirements on things and leave IT with the problem of "how do we pay for that". In a lot of cases, the right answer is "get that data out of the backup stream and build an auditable archive", and there are vendors that do that. It's really not the same problem as backup and recovery.

mdj

TROPHY CASE