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Post by elguapo on Mar 20, 2013 15:29:46 GMT -5
How about an unspecified reterment plan of some sort versus a very expensive pension? Which of those would you perfer? Because that's what MLB is proposing. Prefer. Retirement. And your choice is nonsense. No team will have an "unspecified retirement plan". There's no such thing. Each team would have flexibility to design a retirement plan, like companies in the real world do. Teams compete to attract talent, and teams that offer a total compensation package (of whatever form) that is most attractive to the labor pool will have an advantage.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Mar 20, 2013 20:19:02 GMT -5
How about an unspecified reterment plan of some sort versus a very expensive pension? Which of those would you perfer? Because that's what MLB is proposing. Prefer. Retirement. And your choice is nonsense. No team will have an "unspecified retirement plan". There's no such thing. Each team would have flexibility to design a retirement plan, like companies in the real world do. Teams compete to attract talent, and teams that offer a total compensation package (of whatever form) that is most attractive to the labor pool will have an advantage. My choice isn't nonsense, it's what MLB is proposing. Do you really think they're reducing the standards of what teams are required to offer so those teams can go out and offer superior retirement packages? They're already free to do that.
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Post by amfox1 on Mar 21, 2013 10:55:10 GMT -5
Hanley Ramirez needs surgery for his thumb, injured in the WBC.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 21, 2013 12:29:44 GMT -5
Prefer. Retirement. And your choice is nonsense. No team will have an "unspecified retirement plan". There's no such thing. Each team would have flexibility to design a retirement plan, like companies in the real world do. Teams compete to attract talent, and teams that offer a total compensation package (of whatever form) that is most attractive to the labor pool will have an advantage. My choice isn't nonsense, it's what MLB is proposing. Do you really think they're reducing the standards of what teams are required to offer so those teams can go out and offer superior retirement packages? They're already free to do that. I think Fenway has a point here. My guess would be that ownership, at least some of ownership, has made it known to the commish that they feel they could do a better job at investing retirement resources. That, to my mind, is a dangerous supposition. I won't go into all the details except to say that the fiasco of 2007-2008 with over-valued investment instruments all cratering in concert proved to me that there were some serious knowledge gaps in the global financial brain trust. I hope the MLBPA thinks this through very carefully.
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Post by iakovos11 on Mar 21, 2013 13:11:34 GMT -5
As a participant, the pension is likely to be better - assuming that the employer doesn't go into default. But with flexibility, teams could offer, and likely will, a 401k plan with some match. Perhaps they could also do a 401a (employer only makes contributions)or add a profit sharing to the 401k plan. These defined contribution plans shift the investment risk from the employer to the employee. Employer is no longer required to have a certain amount of assets set aside to meet the pension payments (current and future). This is very common in recent years. More and more companies are phasing out pension plans in favor defined contribution plans. I see very few of them anymore and most of the ones I do see are being phased out. In addition to shifting investment risk to the employee, it also requires (at least with the 401k) that the employee participate in his retirement savings in order to get employer matching dollars. To many this makes sense.
Now the shifting of risk is fine and all. But the employer still has a fiduciary duty to the employees an must do their due diligence - or hire it out - to provide an appropriate plan (low costs and solid investment options).
The article seems to say Pensions will still be around, but the clubs will administer them as they see fit. But if the goals is switching to 401k plans, it really isn't uncommon. The rest of corporate America has already gone down this road. Whether MLB is different and it would be unfair in this arena to make the same changes is another question. I don't know the answer.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Mar 21, 2013 14:33:37 GMT -5
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Post by pedroelgrande on Mar 21, 2013 14:49:39 GMT -5
Hanley Ramirez needs surgery for his thumb, injured in the WBC. Sorry for Hanley he sacrificed for DR and ended up getting injured...Oh well we won now hopefully he comes back well and has a good season.
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Post by James Dunne on Mar 21, 2013 15:00:28 GMT -5
If Dee Gordon plays well in his absence, the Dodgers will have a choice to make, as they're currently pretty weak at third.
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Post by mattpicard on Mar 21, 2013 15:02:59 GMT -5
Hanley Ramirez needs surgery for his thumb, injured in the WBC. Sorry for Hanley he sacrificed for DR and ended up getting injured...Oh well we won now hopefully he comes back well and has a good season. Hopefully. Interesting tweet from Dylan Hernandez.: "Don Mattingly said that he doesn't know if Hanley Ramirez will be the #Dodgers' shortstop when he returns." We're talking extremely substandard defense either way, but moving Hanley off SS once and for all is a damn good thing for his teams defense.
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Post by elguapo on Mar 21, 2013 15:44:36 GMT -5
For those who insist that every team offer the same retirement benefit - does that hold for all parts of compensation? Should the salary of every non-uniform employee be mandated by Major League Baseball?
That kind of thinking is incredibly backward from my perspective. You have 30 employers - each should offer the compensation that each deems necessary to attract the appropriate personnel - if your compensation is relatively poor, you'll have a hard time attracting and keeping talent. But I know the free market is anathema to a lot of the folks around here. To think people are getting their panties in a wad because some baseball employees might see changes to their pension plans. Welcome to the real world!
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 21, 2013 16:29:25 GMT -5
From my perspective, the free market is anathema to baseball, period. Having what might as well be hard caps with draconian penalties for spending beyond those caps has little to do with an open marketplace. The draft is no different, with a spending pool that really narrows what can be offered to players, and more tough stuff if you go past that. It's the owners screaming "stop me before I kill again". How about we talk about what MLB should plan for their workers, after we discuss that for a while? Adam Smith didn't have too many illusions about monopolies, and I don't either. This monopoly, one that piles up wads of cash, much of it hoarded, needs to do right by its employees in my opinion. This isn't the pre-Marvin Miller era and I'm thankful for that.
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Post by jdb on Mar 22, 2013 9:26:22 GMT -5
Dan Patrick was talking about the Braun rumors again today. Says MLB is after him and its going to be a huge story the first two weeks of the season.
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Post by elguapo on Mar 22, 2013 10:01:11 GMT -5
This monopoly, one that piles up wads of cash, much of it hoarded, needs to do right by its employees in my opinion. Does this comment have anything to do with adding flexibility to the pension plan offered? Do you really think being offered a compensation package without a specific type of pension constitutes oppression? Are scouts and minor league personnel drafted and assigned to a certain team and have no other market for their services than MLB? Is baseball driving its employees into poverty by paying them "as little as $40k"? This is daft.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 22, 2013 10:47:04 GMT -5
This monopoly, one that piles up wads of cash, much of it hoarded, needs to do right by its employees in my opinion. Does this comment have anything to do with adding flexibility to the pension plan offered? Do you really think being offered a compensation package without a specific type of pension constitutes oppression? Are scouts and minor league personnel drafted and assigned to a certain team and have no other market for their services than MLB? Is baseball driving its employees into poverty by paying them "as little as $40k"? This is daft. Those are your conjectures, not mine. I made a very simple point in response to your contention that the board is filled with people for whom the free market is anathema. Not at all. I'd personally like to see one erupt some time in baseball. The endless subsidies to teams, the tax breaks, the talent monopoly, all of it smacks of the same sort of gold-plated socialism that encrusts so much of private capital. Look around you. My argument is this: If that's the game, then what's good for one is good for all. A guaranteed benefits plan, with a nice chunk of the cash carefully invested for those workers is perfectly fine given the near obscene profit margin for some teams. If the owners and the players want to broaden that with team-specific market-oriented provisions, that's also fine. But turning it over to the Jeffrey Loria's of the world to do with as they wish might just be a serious mistake. Some of these jokers are the same people who were pushing to have all of Social Security privatized. That's before the crash. Think of what would have happened had all of that collaterized debt, much of it crap, been stuffed into those newly privatized accounts. In summary, buyer beware. Now, back to baseball.
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Post by ibsmith85 on Mar 22, 2013 12:29:54 GMT -5
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 22, 2013 13:01:49 GMT -5
Tough break for the Padres in a competitive division. He had a part in that starting rotation. Hopefully he comes back stronger, but not this year.
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Post by jmei on Mar 22, 2013 13:50:57 GMT -5
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Post by mattpicard on Mar 22, 2013 18:11:49 GMT -5
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 22, 2013 23:05:22 GMT -5
The lawsuit does in fact claim injury to the league from loss of profit... so let's get Selig on that witness stand!
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Post by mredsox89 on Mar 23, 2013 2:55:51 GMT -5
Selig can't honestly go to court and claim financial loss due to the Biogenis and steroid issues, right? Even if baseball might be in an even better place financially (I don't think it could really be any better), he will get laughed out of the courtroom for claiming financial hardship when the the overall finances have ballooned positively over the last 5 years
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Post by jmei on Mar 23, 2013 8:54:01 GMT -5
Selig can't honestly go to court and claim financial loss due to the Biogenis and steroid issues, right? Even if baseball might be in an even better place financially (I don't think it could really be any better), he will get laughed out of the courtroom for claiming financial hardship when the the overall finances have ballooned positively over the last 5 years The thing is, it doesn't really matter that baseball still made buckets of cash as long as MLB can argue that they would have made more cash if steroid scandals hadn't occurred. And while that's going to be an uphill battle for MLB, it's not impossible.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Mar 23, 2013 22:00:13 GMT -5
The thing is, it doesn't really matter that baseball still made buckets of cash as long as MLB can argue that they would have made more cash if steroid scandals hadn't occurred. And while that's going to be an uphill battle for MLB, it's not impossible. Hey, anyone remember that great '98 season that reinvigorated baseball after the '94 strike? MLB condoned PED use for decades. Now they want to claim they're some kind of victim here? Because it prevented them from becoming slightly richer?
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 23, 2013 23:19:55 GMT -5
The only thing the commissioner's office has more of than spending cash is hypocrisy. That they keep an endless supply of for special occasions like this.
This sort of cinched it for me. I think they're late to the party, and that this may be their clumsy way of trying to make up for lost time. They've known about the clinic since Manny got caught so if this is the best they can do... You get the picture.
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Post by charliezink16 on Mar 26, 2013 1:52:14 GMT -5
Selig can't honestly go to court and claim financial loss due to the Biogenis and steroid issues, right? Even if baseball might be in an even better place financially (I don't think it could really be any better), he will get laughed out of the courtroom for claiming financial hardship when the the overall finances have ballooned positively over the last 5 years The thing is, it doesn't really matter that baseball still made buckets of cash as long as MLB can argue that they would have made more cash if steroid scandals hadn't occurred. And while that's going to be an uphill battle for MLB, it's not impossible. Let me translate this into a non-legal script: "I am suing you due to the fact that you won't allow us to act naive regarding a law-breaking matter." Hmm...
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Post by James Dunne on Mar 26, 2013 9:21:58 GMT -5
Not sure if this was noted. Jeff Kobernus, who the Red Sox grabbed in the Rule 5 draft and was then flipped to the Tigers for Justin Henry, was returned to the Nationals.
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