UTK Special 11/7/22

Housekeeping

With the end of the 2022 MLB season, Under The Knife changes a bit. There’s obviously not as many injuries, but there’s a lot of things that happen and I think the lens of injuries colors things like free agency, non-tenders, and team construction. There’s lots going on behind the scenes, products being introduced, and changes in the medical world — and spoiler alert, there’s a really big one coming in December.

While the regular updates don’t happen, I hope you’ll still find value in Under The Knife. I’ve tried to make this as valuable as possible and as at low a price as I could bear. In fact, it’s the lowest price Substack allows, which doesn’t let me do any sales. I will tell you the price will be going up because there’s indications that Substack is going to raise the price. Regardless, I’m likely to go up just to give the flexibility to do sales and such. Before I do that, I’ll give everyone a chance to lock in their price if possible. Substack is doing some cool new features, including the chat, which I’ll experiment with soon, and with some collaboration features that have promise. While I don’t always agree with Substack on who gets to use this platform, they’ve built a pretty good one and I think it works out here on this island of injuries.

There’s likely to be some team sale news — the Nats are expected to sell with the Caps/Wiz group led by Ted Leonsis in pole position, along with the Angels’, which many are hoping will be done in time to be involved in free agency. Don’t count on it - owners will slow it down just to keep big new money from being in on a top class. Instead, I fully expect the new owners (and it will be a group) to focus on a long term deal for Shohei Ohtani as part of the negotiations. If he’s not willing to sign, it changes everything, including the price.

Finally, congratulations to James Click and the Houston Astros. I’m proud to say that I’ve known James for years, going back to our common Baseball Prospectus time, and I bet they wish they’d saved some of the BP Radio episodes we did together now. With Dusty Baker, I guess I should congratulate him as well. He’s a character that makes baseball better - like most, I have some Dusty stories, going all the way back to my first winter meetings - and there’s an argument that his mishandling of pitchers is in large part why Under The Knife got so much attention in the early years. The DMPU was a big part of the growth and notice this column/newsletter/whatever got, so congrats, Dusty.