Welcome to Rates and Burials. It is Friday, December 3rd, Derek Van Riper, Inoceris, and look who it is.

It's Britt Joroli back with us after some much-deserved time off.

Britt, thank you for taking time off because temporarily baseball pretended like it wasn't going to have a lockout and then a bunch of really cool things happen.

So we had a lot to talk about all week long.

So I'm going to give you full credit for that flurry of activity that no one expected to see

prior to the expiration of the CBA.

Yeah, naturally, I spent four days in Carlsbad at the GM meetings and really had my

finger on the pulse because I kept telling people, God, it's going to be a

really slow month until they figure out the CBA. And now it's a long December. The conspiracy

theorist in me is like, did they just do that so they could say that, you know, we just spent

$1.7 billion on players, you know, what

are they complaining about?

No, I heard from a lot of agents that, like, teams were nervous, too, about what was going

to be coming.

And I think they just felt better having something locked in.

Addressing needs with rules they knew as opposed to having to address them later with rules that might be different. Well, that's the thing. If the rules change, I think, I think the luck, I think that's what you did see is the teams that weren't that close to the Luxaxx tax, they were the ones that spent the most, right? The teams that were really close to the Luxaxx tax were in the Lux tax. The only one that spent was the Mets, right? and they were just ones that spent the most right the the teams that were really close to the lux

tax were in the lux tax the only one that spent was the mats right and they were just kind of like

whatever whatever the rules are we're going for it but like the the big ones like the dodgers

yankees and red sox like i think they were like well i'd rather know what the penalties are before

i go over or you know whatever you know what i'd'd rather know what the penalties are before I go over.

Or, you know, whatever.

I'd like to know what the Lux tax looks like. Yeah, the penalty's the same. Are they worse? Is the threshold going up? Is the threshold going away? What's going to happen? I think the threshold going away, that's a pipe dream. That's not happening. So I'll just I'll I'm not going to delete that out, but I'm going to say that's probably not going to happen.

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