Laika

Spanky, take the L.

I've thought about this before. I would definitely give it to the player if they were offering me anything worthwhile, like a bat or jersey signed by the player. Harder decision if you have a truly historic ball though. Like an all time record homer.

yes

The Yankees gave Chapman a mega contract. It's not comparable to Toronto trying to bring back Ray or Semien after dealing them. Nobody should want Toronto to have to pay Robbie Ray the absolute highest amount of money to sign him. You'd like to think that after his career turnaround there will be other factors that are at least a bit important to him. The Yankees had to rebuild. The situations aren't comparable other than playoff proximity. They traded a 39 year old DH and two relievers that deadline. The Yankees also had a negative run differential that year - deadline decisions are as much about projected performance as they are about current standings.

No, because pitching injuries are predictable and expected. No team should ever think "well let's just hope our 5 decent SP stay healthy for the last 60 games" especially when options 6 and 7 are s***

Bad math because Stripling is hurt anyway so it's Berrios over like, f***ing Anthony Kay? And in theory Berrios is also a pen upgrade because you stick a healthy Stripling there. SP who can really compete are a but 2022 need though.

This isn't OOTP Baseball. Good luck signing Semien and Ray if you trade them away while only a few games back of a playoff spot. The Mariners for absolutely crucified by their fans for that Toro trade. I like the trade for them but it's because the Mariners suck and their reasonable playoff chances are pretty abysmal.

Why should the Blue Jays, who have money, act like the Rays, who are poor and will always be poor? Toronto can just buy guys like Ryu and Springer on the open market. They don't need to hoard prospects and collect years of control forever and ever.

Definitely not true about 2022. It would not be reasonable to expect Martin and SWR to outperform Berrios.

I could not disagree with this more. Toronto was in the mix with like 50% playoff odds and they were one of the best looking teams of that mix. They have choked hard in the last couple of weeks but that does not mean the process was bad. They should be buying every time in that type of situation. Honestly, this organization has made the playoffs 8 times since 1977. Five of those were 29+ years ago and one of those was a fake playoff entry (2020). So two legitimate playoff teams since 1994. And people get mad when they buy at the deadline? Loser mentality.

I pretend I do not see this. Instead I will go to 1:30 and watch that play.

Some of this is solved already in the NFT world. At least for some projects. For example, some of the projects only allow a specific address to mint a small number of NFTs. So a billionaire can't scoop them all up unless they wait for other people to mint the entire run and then buy them on the secondary marketplace from private individuals. It's an even playing field at the time of minting - that's kind of why retail crypto enthusiasts are having so much fun in NFT land right now. So no rich guy boxing out really occurs at the initial point of sale. It can occur when the rich people identify an entire project as potentially a good investment and they decide to scoop up a huge amount of the supply from the secondary market. But you probably see that happen in the physical card world. I know people who run card stores order like, truck loads of magic cards when they come out. Honestly some of what you say about the physical collecting sounds like a barrier to entry to me. The parts about physically driving around, etc..

https://decrypt.co/79125/ethereum-rock-jpeg-sells-for-600k-as-nft-frenzy-continues

Imagine if Fanatics in 2026 puts out their first mint. It's 250,000 cards in total. The odds of minting the rarest cards are pretty low so while there might be something like 300 Cavan Biggios the program will only make like 10 Vladimir Guerrero Jrs. By chance, only ONE animated Shohei Ohtani card gets pulled from digital packs. He just won his second MVP in 2025. That card is going to sell for milllllllllions probably. Like, right away.

The condition based pricing is just a way that scarcity is created over time, naturally. Say 50,000 gen 1 Charizards were printed but only 500 made it out of the decade in 9/10 or 10/10 condition... NFT minting just creates known scarcity from day 1. You know (or can reverse engineer) the actual odds of pulling a certain type of NFT on mint. With day 1 scarcity you can get somewhat appropriate market pricing a lot sooner than waiting years and years to see what survives and stays popular and in good condition. NFTs would suffer from SOME temporal scarcity increases because certain tokens would get lost in wallets, stuck in dead owner's hands, etc. Over time, who knows what this means as far as comparing traditional collecting to digital collecting. I'm sure there will always be a space for physical card collecting - there will always be aficionados. Will NFT collecting replace some of that market share or just function as a new industry?

Yeah it depends. You can never make the token address for the NFT go "poof" and some NFTs can be made with "metadata" that makes it so the visual of the NFT can actually be produced from the on-chain information. But it is true that current setups have the NFTs basically linked to a centralized UI/database. But there are a myriad of ways to do this and some are more lindy than others.

Look into it a bit more. Yeah you don't get the physical card anymore but you also get other benefits and you solve a lot of the problems with physical cards. - You can't damage an NFT. It is in mint condition forever, so to speak. - Ownership is verified on the blockchain. Counterfeiting solved. - Transfer of ownership is instant and borderless. - You can have animated or video "cards"! - You can have redeemable NFTs that you can "burn" in exchange for a physical object. - You can still do pack openings. Kids sit and watch streamers open packs from digital trading card games (even non NFT games like Hearthstone). You can import the card collecting hobby, in its entirety, onto a smartphone. This makes the whole hobby so much more accessible.

The next couple of years will be crucial for trading card brands. NFTs are exploding but it's still just the tip of the iceberg. The future of baseball cards will be digital. Topps already has an NFT system with WAX. I am not sure if the new company Fanatics has any involvement yet with NFTs. It's interesting that the new deal starts in 2026. People who buy Topps NFT baseball cards in 2021 through 2025 will kind of be getting a piece of history. The first official NFT baseball cards and the last official Topps baseball cards. Hmmmmm smart buys?

Crazy that if you had traded him for anything worthwhile you probably make the playoffs in this league. Cody Bellinger single handedly ruined your DDL season. Himself.

This would go viral on the Facebook

Imagine being a Cody Bellinger bagholder? How many "buy low" offers have you received over the season that you rejected and now want a mulligan on...

Can Arozarena smell October?

The key is to not overreact. Continue to stockpile good pitching depth from all avenues, make some responsible signings and or acquisitions, and it will work out fine. This year was mostly s*** luck.

Not even close

Do you know what a strawman is? And I never said you referred to those things. The point is that it's nothing even close to a free market. It is and ways has been a f*** the players over slowly but surely market.