Today’s a pretty busy day for baseball news, but I’m leaving in a couple hours to make the Thanksgiving trek back to Western PA and so I don’t have a whole lot of time to really write about some things I’d like to tackle today, like the new CBA.
The new CBA is going to be announced within minutes here, and it’s going to include some kind of strict luxury tax on the draft. Exactly what the threshhold is going to be, how strict the tax is, what sort of draft picks teams will lose for repeat violations, etc., but it’s clear that it’s targeted at keeping the Pirates and Nationals and Royals from spending excessive sums on the draft and that sucks for a number of reasons. The terms appear to be quite strict, and I’m not lying when I say that this has me seriously disillusioned. I want to write more now, but I’m very short on time and the more I read the more livid I get. I’ll have more tomorrow, I promise.
Meanwhile, the Pirates have signed Jake Fox and Shairon Martis. You may recall Fox as the big fellow who played for the Cubs and hits home runs and does literally nothing else, though he’s purportedly kind of a catcher. Martis threw a no-hitter for the Dutch team in the World Baseball Classic a few years ago and pitched a bit for the Nationals since then. He’s only 24, but he’s never really pitched well above Double-A. These guys are probably minor league depth, but at least with a liiiiiitle more upside than your typical minor league depth, which makes them semi-interesting.
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