Sports Time Radio

For a sports fan this has to be a fun time of the year. Tomorrow the NCAA tournament or “March Madness” as it’s called gets started. There’s a lot of player movement in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League while the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association are headed down the stretch of their regular seasons and amping up for the playoffs. Hopefully you have multiple televisions or computer screens, so you can try to keep up with everything going on.

With baseball teams getting ready for spring training and the regular season starting next month it’s interesting that one of the issues that came up multiple times during the negotiations while the players were locked out was teams tanking. It doesn’t seem that some teams didn’t take that message to seriously as there are a couple of teams that appear to be tearing things down and headed for a rebuild.

There was a of reports last season that the Cincinnati Reds were looking to move a lot of their higher salaried players and start to rebuild.

Well, it looks like they started doing that heading into this season. Just this past week Cincinnati has sent Sonny Gray to the Minesota Twins while Jesse Winker and Eugenio Suarez were traded to the Seattle Mariners. Before the lockout started Tucker Barnhardt was traded to the Detroit Tigers and Nicholas Castellanos is a free agent and it’s clear that Cincinnati won’t be trying to resign him.

Now it’s possible that the Reds aren’t done trying to move players before the season starts. Starting pitcher Luis Castillo’s name has come up quite a bit in trade reports and veterans Mike Moustakas and Joey Votto are still on the roster. Votto and Moustakas are each signed through 2023 with options for 2024 while Castillo has one more year of arbitration before hitting free agency after the 2023 season.

Besides the Reds the other team that is doing everything they can to dump salary is the Oakland A’s. Now the A’s haven’t moved as many name players as the Reds have, but there are reports that they’re willing to trade anyone on their roster.

Oakland did make one big trade this week. The A’s sent Matt Olsen to the World Series champion Atlanta Braves for four prospects. The day after the trade Atlanta signed Olsen to an 8-year $168 million dollar contract.

As for Oakland there were reports overnight that they’re very close to completing a trade that would send 3rd baseman Matt Chapman to the Toronto Blue Jays. There are also reports that quite a few teams have inquired about starting pitchers Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas.

We can add the Reds and the A’s the teams like the Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Miami Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates, Washington Nationals, Cleveland Guardians and the Chicago Cubs all of these teams are in some state of rebuilding.

All of these teams are in some various state of rebuilding and in some cases, it seems as though some of these teams are always losing top players due to not being able to sign their best players to long term big money contracts. When these players get to the point where they’re almost out of arbitration years they generally get traded so the team can get something for them before they sign somewhere else as a free agent.

Now unfortunately for fans of these certain teams it’s just the nature of baseball. It is very much a case of the have and the have nots. Some teams are willing to push the limit and even pay the Collective Bargaining Tax to sign top players and other smaller market teams just can’t do that. The question becomes, is there a way to even this out?

There’s been talk for years about profit sharing, but obviously the teams that are making the money aren’t going to be interested at all in sharing that money with the smaller market teams. We’ve heard that a salary cap has been mentioned and there have been other suggestions, but so far nothing that seems to have struck the right chord with all of the owners and it may never actually happen.

Let me know if you have a solution to this issue. I’ll be very interested to see what kind of proposals you might have in mind.

I’m also very interested to know what and how you’re going to watch everything that’s going on in sports. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to watch as much as I can.

I hope you’re listening to the live edition of the Sports Time Radio podcast. The podcast airs live on BlogTalkradio.com, but if you miss the live version of the podcast, you can still listen. The podcast is available for you to listen to any time you want at TuneIn.com.

You can find me on Twitter if you’re interested @Burketime.