The Room

EPISODE 201: The most dysfunctional ritual in sports, revealed.

A funny thing’s happened during Super Bowl Week: the NBA has stolen the spotlight.

Luka Doncic got traded from Dallas to the Lakers in the most immediately-panned transaction of all time — reportedly because the Mavericks didn’t want to pay him a longterm contract worth $345 million. Jimmy Butler just got traded from Miami to the Warriors, who just gave him a two-year, $121 million deal.

In other words: The answer to all your questions is money.

But one sport resolves a team’s questions about what its own players are worth very differently from the NBA and the NFL.

And the policy is… insane.

Because in Major League Baseball, when an “arbitration-eligible” player and his boss disagree about the type of raise that player deserves, they have the opportunity to walk into something that both sides refer to as The Room.

In The Room, the player and his employer argue directly with each other… off the record… in front of a tribunal of judges… about how much that player sucks.

And then they have to go back to work.

It is very difficult, as you might imagine, to find people who want to revisit this experience. Several teams and executives find the ritual so self-destructive that they refuse to even step into The Room, as a policy.

But on this episode, I’d like you to meet former NCLS MVP Cody Ross and all-star Dan Uggla: two men who couldn’t wait to re-confront their old boss with the Marlins, David Samson. And they helped us find out what The Room is really like.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Lovingly,

Pablo