I was at the game when he forearm-shivered Fernando Vina, but I went with my aunt and uncle and they wanted to leave early so I missed it.
fuck me sideways, didn’t know left. that sucks
Yeah, I don’t have any inside info, but something “changed” for the worst. They were hiring people like kyleb and showing a willingness to get ahead on analytics. There was another guy like him who quit as did president of baseball operations Dick Williams. It’s been pretty much all slash and burn salary since then.
The Dodgers now have given out a $100 million contract in three straight years, following massive deals for Mookie Betts in 2020 and Trevor Bauer in 2021. Freeman is the first infielder (and seventh player overall) to receive a $100 million deal from the Dodgers.
The spending gives the Dodgers four former MVPs in Freeman, Betts, Cody Bellinger and Clayton Kershaw. They also add Freeman’s bat to a lineup that led the NL with 5.1 runs per game last season.
The Dodgers’ projected top three hitters – Betts, Freeman and Trea Turner – have three of the six best odds to win NL MVP at Caesars Sportsbook. And Los Angeles was already the betting favorite to win the World Series with 6-1 odds entering Wednesday; the odds dropped to 5-1 following word of Freeman’s agreement.
Posnanski made a good point in a recent article - if you’re a fan of a small market team, you actively expect your best players to leave, which is not a feeling that exists in most sports. And so you find yourself rooting for your team to trade those players, to at least get something of value in return. That’s terrible for the game.
I have a friend who is a big football and baseball fan, and he pointed out something the other day that I had not thought about. He likes the Bengals and he likes the Guardians, both small-market teams with owners who, to say the least, do not seem super-interested in spending a lot of money to build a winner.
But, he says, as a football fan, he simply doesn’t have to worry about losing superstar quarterback Joe Burrow. It just doesn’t even cross his mind. Burrow will be the Bengals quarterback for the foreseeable future and maybe even his entire career. You never know what circumstances will come up, but as a fan he feels a great comfort investing all of his emotions into Burrow, knowing that he’s not going anywhere.
Meanwhile, as a Guardians fan, he knew pretty much from the start that Francisco Lindor was too good and that Cleveland definitely would not keep him. The clock was always ticking. He could love watching Lindor play, sure, but he could not love Lindor, not in the same way, because the arrangement was always temporary.
But in baseball, it’s actually even worse than that. It’s not only knowing that Lindor would inevitably leave. At some point, the hardcore fan actually has to root for Cleveland to TRADE Francisco Lindor because otherwise they wouldn’t get any value for him when he did leave.
I think we all can agree: This stinks for baseball fans.
Counterpoint: Milwaukee is a small market and has done a great job of keeping their star players over the years. It’s just shitty small market owners who are only in it to book a profit off revenue sharing that do this. MLB’s lack of a salary floor is the problem that allows this.
Sure, there are some examples that don’t neatly fit this story (like the Moneyball A’s), but isn’t the bolded consistent with the idea that MLB has a structural problem that makes it much less rewarding to be a fan of small teams?
My point is simply that it’s not a small market problem, it’s a structural and shitty owner problem. St Louis is a small market too, but no issues there. Miami is one of the largest markets in the US, but they’re one of the prime examples of this problem.
Yeah it’s a salary floor problem. Imagine if NFL teams were only spending $30M like the Pirates. MLB is basically just a check cashing service for about a third of the owners.
I think this is consistent with the original article? That the MLB’s structure leads to this circumstance where shitty owners consistently dump the team’s best players. I would argue that there’s a huge overlap between shitty owners who do this and small market teams, but I take your point that it’s not the same.
They started the spring games yesterday, a day earlier than advertised. It’s $10 off for mlb.tv, at $129.99/yr, pretty much a pro-rata for the two weeks of spring games cancelled.
So there I was, hurriedly signing up for mlb.tv again, early yesterday morning. I never imagined the players would fold like they were in Manilla like that. I was also hurriedly trying to find those little feet for the tv. I hadn’t turned it on since the Superb Owl game. I had since emptied all the furniture out of Sabo the dogs room, prepping to paint. Unfortunately, that’s the room that currently has the tv stuck onto a wall. I had success with the former, but not the latter (as of yet).
So far my Red Sox have played two games, and Sabo’s Padres one. Their records are… 0-0 of course, these are exhibitions. That’s the great thing about spring training… everyone’s teams are always tied for first.
It’s a money printing machine for every owner
How the fuck is Correa not a tiger right now
105/3 for him. That’s ridiculous.
Yeah, that was messed up. It made the rounds not long before the pandemic hit. All of a sudden his Twitter account was gone, and then the story came out a couple of days later. I was shocked. Fucking scumbag.
My “Jonah Keri is the best baseball writer in baseball and it isn’t close” Facebook post I made in like 2007 aged super well
He can be a good sportswriter and be a piece of shit in his personal life.