“A little more competence. A little more care.”

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Dodger Stadium

The way some people talk, you’d think this was baseball’s version of the ancient Roman Colosseum, the Dodgers are the Evil Empire, Dodger owner Mark Walter is Emperor Nero, and the Dodgers plan to throw Christians to the lions.

The question used to be, “How can you tell whether a lawyer or a politician (do we repeat ourselves?) lies?” The answer, of course, was, “One’s mouth is moving.”

Asking if you can tell whether most baseball owners lie just by moving mouths has not been unreasonable for an unreasonable length of time. Asking likewise of baseball’s commissioner is even less unreasonable anymore.

Rob Manfred leads the charge toward imposing a players’ salary cap at long enough last.  For every time he mentions a players’ salary floor, a minimum payroll per team, the salary cap comes out of his mouth about twenty times, roughly counting.

It’s as though the idea of the owners not named the Dodgers investing conscientiously in putting the most competitive possible teams onto the field in honest efforts to win is an affront to whatever it might be that Manfred holds dear. But it’s a waste of breath to remind anyone anymore than money alone doesn’t guarantee championships.

The 2025 Dodgers didn’t win one of baseball’s most thrilling World Series of all time because they put a $321.3 million player payroll forward on Opening Day. They won it because their postseason roster played championship baseball right down to the last minute.

Their opponents from Toronto didn’t win the American League pennant because they put forth an Opening Day player payroll about $100 million lower. They won it, and damn near won the World Series in the bargain, because their postseason roster played championship baseball right down to the next-to-last minute.

Nine 2025 teams fielded player payrolls of $200+ million. One sub-$200 million payroll went to last year’s postseason (the Cubs, at $196.3 million) and lost in the first round. The number three payroll (the Yankees, $293.5 million) lasted into the second round. Five other sub-$200 million payrolls (the Reds, the Guardians, the Tigers, the Brewers, the Mariners) entered the postseason and two (the Brewers, the Mariners) got as far as each League Championship Series.

The number four 2025 player payroll (the Phillies, $284.2 million) got knocked out by the Dodgers in a division series. Three $200+ million 2025 player payrolls (the Braves, the Astros, the Rangers) didn’t get to the postseason at all.

And the number one 2025 player payroll didn’t get to the postseason either. The Mets were too busy going from as high as 5.5 games above the National League East pack to 13 games out of first place and not even eligible for a wild card—because the Reds, with a sub-$130 million 2025 player payroll, won their season series against the Mets and thus won a wild card tiebreaker.

“Here’s a question: Who, exactly, is the salary cap for?” writes USA Today‘s Gabe Laques. He answers with questions baseball’s would-be salary cappers would rather not confront until the next-to-last minute or a lockout, whichever comes first:

Is it so the upper-middle class teams—your Red Sox, Phillies, Giants, Blue Jays, Yankees, Cubs—can stay within shouting distance of the Big Two?

To provide a puncher’s chance for the most bedraggled among us—your Pirates and Marlins, Royals and Reds?

This is where it gets challenging to determine if the cap would actually help—or if some of those franchises would simply continue their same aversion to serious competition, pocket their shared revenues and lock in even greater profits for every other franchise.

Those last nine words strike to what so often seems the nearest and the dearest to Manfred’s heart, even ahead of his inveterate tinkering: the common good of the game as making money for the owners.

Never mind the Dodgers being pushed out of two straight postseasons in division series losses before they won their two straight World Series, as The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner notices. (Or, that they’d won exactly one World Series between the end of the Reagan Administration and the beginning of the COVID-19 pan-damn-ic.) Never mind, either, that they got the push-outs from the Padres and the Diamondbacks.

“It is easy now,” writes Kepner, “to forget how random short series really are.”

It’s been a terribly kept secret that Manfred has longed to see baseball achieve some sort of equivalence to the big bad NFL. “Setting aside for a moment the virulent anti-labor landscape of the NFL,” Lacques writes, “it is clear that its salary cap does not solve many of the problems some baseball fans claim is now endemic in their un-capped sport.”

He reminds baseball’s pro-cap Chicken Littles that the past eighteen Super Bowls have featured a whopping . . . eight NFL franchises. (That’s not going to change this year, folks. It’s going to be the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks.)

It gets better. The AFC Championship Game has featured either or both of the Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs over the past fifteen seasons, a span during which only twelve teams reached the Super Bowl. How many baseball teams have reached the World Series in that same fifteen-year span, starting with 2011, Lacques asks? Answer: Eighteen.

Eighteen, which means it’s easier to reel off the ones who didn’t make the Fall Classic: Baltimore, Minnesota, the Chicago White Sox, Seattle, Oakland/Yolo Countys, the Los Angeles Angels, Miami, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Diego and Colorado.

The Padres, Orioles, Brewers and Mariners all reached a league championship series in that time. Do the remaining franchises strike you as particularly well-run? Do they have distinguished ownership groups with clear vision and a penchant for innovation? Consistently operate at a high level?

Try one example: The Angels aren’t exactly dirt poor. They were 2025’s number thirteen player payroll. ($190.5 if you’re scoring at home. Not Dodger dollars but not exactly Pirates penury, either.) Anyone accusing the Angels of having a distinguished owner with a clear vision and a penchant for innovation would lose in a court trial.

The Arte Moreno Angels have made tunnel vision a way of life. They’ve wasted the Hall of Fame-worthy prime life of the greatest position player the franchise has ever known. They couldn’t even show the brains to trade the game’s unicorn two-way player for geniune value before his contract expired.

They let Shohei Ohtani escape to free agency with an expected income equal to the economy of a tiny island country . . . before the Dodgers convinced him they believed in winning more than they believed in making generational talents surrealistically wealthy.

It’s not the only such example in major league baseball. The Angels are merely the least obscure of such franchises whose ownerships are vision impaired and innovation challenged. The ownerships that think their problems are . . . all the Dodgers’s or the Mets’s fault. (Did you ever think you’d see the day when the Yankees were no longer baseball’s Evil Empire?)

“The players and owners should find creative ways to dull the Dodgers’ edge, so other teams can come closer to matching it,” Kepner writes. “But you cannot make the Dodgers dumber or less driven to win. And as long as they are smart, motivated and opportunistic, this era will belong to them.” The first two, especially.

“For now,” Lacques writes, “[the Dodgers and the Mets] are the game’s pariahs, their proverbial hands slapped for trying too hard. The industrywide price, in management’s eyes, should be a salary cap. A greater solution: A little more competence and a little more care from those who have displayed precious little of either.”

A little more competence. A little more care. What concepts.

Two Bs and a Tuck

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Alex Bregman

“There’s an excitement in the air about Cubs baseball,” said their new $175 million third baseman Alex Bregman after signing with the team last week.

What a week, right? Just like that, three of the more luminous members of this winter’s free agency class found new homes for varying dollars.

The usual suspects scream blue murder. A few unusual suspects pick up Dodger manager Dave Roberts’s expressed equal adoration for a salary cap and a salary floor. So, who’s coming out how, where, and why? Let’s look with sober eyes.

Da Bear Market Dept.—Think about it: On the same evening the NFL’s Chicago Bears shoved the Green Bay Packers to one side and out of the race for the Super Bowl, in Soldier Field, the Cubs made erstwhile Astro/Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman a rather wealthy man.

With the Red Sox thought to be pushing a bit extra to bring Bregman back, the Cubs pushed enough to land Bregman on a five-year, $175 million that includes a mutually agreed-upon $70 million worth of deferred money.

You think Bregman’s new teammates weren’t enthused about the deal and their new mate? “I texted him when the news broke: ‘Dude, let’s freaking go’,” said pitcher Jameson Taillon, an Arizona neighbour of Bregman’s according to The Athletic. “He FaceTimed me. He was like, ‘Hey, we’re just finishing up dinner. Can I come over?’”

He wasn’t alone, wrote the journal’s Patrick Mooney: “Pete Crow-Armstrong, the All-Star center fielder, was in attendance at Soldier Field when he found out that Bregman would be a new teammate. Immediately after seeing the reports, Gold Glove shortstop Dansby Swanson called Bregman from a friend’s wedding.”

The Cubs made a run for the postseason last year. After a few years behaving like the big city kid who seemed to be seduced by the outskirts of Four Corners, Nowhere in Particular, they started behaving like the bigger market team they’re supposed to be once the postseason run ended.

“There’s an excitement in the air about Cubs baseball,” said Bregman while he made a bit of a whirl-around Chicago tour last week. “I can’t wait to get after it.” Pause. “After it” means “pennant race” and “World Series trip” for a man who now picked uniform number 3 to indicate he’d like a third World Series ring as well as stability for his family.

He’s known as a student of the game, a disciplined hitter, a sharp-fielding third baseman, and a clubhouse godsend. All Bregman has to do is live up to all that as best a 31-year-old with more than a few miles on him can, as he did when his body allowed in Boston last year. Da Cubs will make sure his appreciation is far, wide, and deep.

Tucker, the Man and His Team Dept.—Meanwhile, an erstwhile Cub lit the fuse on fresh screaming over the big, bad, behemoth Dodgers and their big, bad, behemoth platinum vault. The erstwhile Cub is Kyle Tucker, considered the number one free agent in the winter class by those who thought Bregman was the class’s second banana.

Tucker signed up for four years, $240 million, and opt-outs after years two and three. The deal also includes $30 million in deferred dollars. If Tucker helps the Dodgers to a third straight World Series title, Dodger City will consider it all very wisely spent. If he doesn’t or can’t, well . . .

That screaming won’t be limited to denunciations of the Dodgers as the new Evil Empire. It’ll include audible-in-the-Klingon-Empire demands for explanations as to why a no-doubt talent but with 27.3 wins above replacement-level in eight season is pulling down $17 million a year more than Aaron Judge, Yankee bombardier first class, who earned about 3.0 more WAR just over three of the past four years.

The Dodgers are betting on Tucker’s future coming somewhere near Judge’s present, of course. Aside from the dollars, the Dodgers could offer something far deeper to the low-keyed Tucker. He can do Tucker things without the floodlights baking him too heavily compared to the rest of the Dodgers’ star power.

He might have been the star of this free agency market, when Bregman and Bo Bichette weren’t, but that’s about as far as Tucker seems to care to go when it comes to attracting attention with anything beyond his still-growing bat and his virtuosity playing right field.

What’s Bo Know Dept.—Bo Bichette is a Met. Roll the rhyme around awhile, Metsropolitan New York. Savour the possibilities to come with a healthy Bichette helping the Mets ride all the way to a postseason. (Remember: He came off the injured list to be one of the shining time Blue Jays in last year’s World Series.)

Now, be afraid. Be very afraid. Because the Mets plan for their new $126 million infield toy is to move him from his normal shortstop to third base. Every Met fan since the day they were born will warn you. The Mets don’t have a sterling history of third base conversions. (Mets legend David Wright was born to the position, you may remember.)

Ask what happened when they traded a talented but still-erratic arm named Nolan Ryan to the Angels for a veteran elite shortstop named Jim Fregosi . . . and decided to turn that veteran elite shortstop into a third baseman. Case closed.

Bichette can hit. The only population that doesn’t know that might be a colony of Arctic walruses. But with the glove? He’s 36 defensive zone runs below his league average as a shortstop, and his range factors per game are below the average, too. He played a little second base in the minors but not a lick of third base in the Show.

The Mets turned toward Bichette more seriously (they’d been talking previously) when Tucker went California bound the night before. The Phillies saw the Mets embrace Bichette and elected to reunite with veteran catcher J.T. Realmuto after all.

Now all the Mets have to do is get a read on whether Bichette will be the second coming of poor Jim Fregosi or the first coming of Bo Bichette, third base maven. Not to mention whether Brett Baty, the incumbent third base Met, will have a reasonable future moving to the corner outfield, as some reports speculate.

Well, the Mets have been many things over the decades. Boring has rarely been one of them.

Manfred’s just thinking aloud. Isn’t he?

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Rob Manfred

Manfred insists he’s done when his contract is. What manner of mischief might he wreak before then?

This is commissioner Rob Manfred’s story and he’s sticking to it. For now. Ask him whether he’s going to want to rethink his previously-enunciated intent to retire when his current contract expires in three years, and he digs in like a batter who knows he’s facing not Bob Gibson but Bobo Garglebargle.

“I’m done at the end of this contract. I’ve told [the owners] that, and I’m gonna stick to it,” Manfred insisted in a WFAN radio interview last week. “I’ll be 70. It is enough . . . You have a certain period of time when you have things that you want to accomplish, you take your best shot, you try to get as much done as possible. And then it’s sort of time for the next guy with his set of things. And I think that’s healthy and good for this.”

So far, so good. So, what does the most inveterate tinkerer who ever held the commissioner’s office want to get done before he moseys off into the sunset?

Without saying he’s committed to it—yet—Manfred mentioned discussions about inflicting a split season and in-season tournaments upon major league baseball. “We do understand that 162 (games) is a long pull,” he said. “I think the difficulty to accomplish those sort of in-season events, you almost inevitably start talking about fewer regular-season games.”

But not fewer postseason rounds and games, of course. Manfred isn’t that sensible. “It is a much more complicated thing in our sport than it is in other sports,” he continued. “Because of all of our season-long records, you’re playing around with something that people care a lot about.”

You’re playing around with a lot more than that, Commissioner Pepperwinkle.

Wait until it gets to the part where he speaks of bringing MLB to 32 teams. And, realigning baseball into eight divisions of four teams each. Presuming it’s going to be one new team in each league, would it do to suggest something a lot more sensible?

You guessed it. I’m going there again. Instead of eight divisions of four teams each, how about four divisions of eight teams each? How about two such divisions in each league? If you wish, you can keep them named the National League East and West, and the American League East and West. Goodbye three-division lunacy and wild-card whackadoodling.

Think of the benefits that would come forth. I’ve made the argument before, but it’s worth making it yet again. Four divisions, eight teams each, and you don’t get to play for a championship unless your butts were parked in first place at season’s end. Let’s not forget to put an end to the farce of regular-season interleague play, either. Save that for where it really belongs, the All-Star Game and the World Series.

And won’t it be fun to have something we haven’t really had in this century—namely, real pennant races again. No more of this Bizarro World nonsense of the thrills, spills, and chills of teams fighting to the last breath to finish the season . . . in second place.

Come to think of it, let’s be done at long enough last with those hideous All-Star and City Connect uniforms. They go from ugly to disgusting and back to repulsive before turning nauseating. Haven’t you missed seeing All-Stars wearing their own uniforms, the fatigues of the teams they represent in the game?

And we haven’t arrived until now at the truly fun part. You want to get rid of postseason saturation as much as I do? You want to make the postseason both meaningful and fun again? You want more World Series such as last fall, when a) the only combatants were teams who finished first in their divisions, anyway; and, b) those two went tooth, fang, claw, and anything else they could think of until somebody finally won it? You want to relieve Manfred’s discomfort over the long season?

Of course you do. So . . .

We’ve simplified the game’s alignment to two divisions each for each league. We’ve made for real pennant races again. Now we get to call for best-of-five League Championship Series. That’s the way they played it from divisional play’s birth in 1969 through 1984. Now, you restore the World Series’s primacy by keeping it a best-of-seven. Did I mention that it also means no baseball under snow or November watch anymore?

You also have postseasons of—maximum—seventeen games under the foregoing back-to-the-future remake/remodel. Meaning you have yearly totals of—maximum, again—179 major league games for each league. You can’t tell me that’s not plenty of baseball. And who says an earlier opening to the Hot Stove League won’t be a little more fun, either?

Speaking of which, beware. Maybe the only thing worse than Manfred pondering in-season tournaments would be landing a hard deadline for free agency signing. Athletics outfielder/designated hitter Brent Rooker called it the most anti-player idea Manfred could have. So, naturally, Commissioner Pepperwinkle started stumping for it harder the day after Rooker spoke against it.

“I think there’s going to be some more conversation about it, because I do believe that there’s a marketing opportunity,” Manfred told WFAN. “Let’s face it, we operate in a really competitive environment. Just put entertainment, generally, to one side—just sports, right? It’s really competitive. And I think that you make a mistake, particularly during the offseason, when you don’t take every advantage to push your sport out in front of your fans during that down period.”

Some think you make more of a mistake taking the fun out of the Hot Stove League. For owners and players alike. The owners aren’t saints, but they’re not wholly brainless. The ones who can (will) spend love the chase. The ones who can’t (won’t) spend love to bitch about the ones who can. Fans who kvetch one moment about swelling player dollars cheer the next when their team lands an Alex Bregman.

(By the way, don’t pity the Red Sox for failing to convince Bregman to stay. Not when they seem to have quaked over including a no-trade clause in his new deal but the Cubs had no problem giving him one. Well, there’s still Bo Bichette to whom the Red Sox might turn, within reason.)

“[W]hat they said back was, they thought that kind of [signing] deadline would work to the disadvantage of the players,” Manfred said of player reaction to the idea. “And you know, I just—I don’t put much credence in this.” Shocker.

At least, Manfred promised that any realignment would not include forcing two-team cities into the same division. But the bad news is that, historically, it was easier for pitchers to hold Hall of Famer Rickey (The Man of Steal) Henderson on base than it is to put most commissioners’s promises in the bank.

“I don’t really get the owners pinching pennies . . . “

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So what is with A’s owner John Fisher suddenly opening his purse?

Dave Roberts supports a players’ salary cap and a salary floor. Clayton Kershaw probably thinks his now-former manager could use a little extra enlightenment. It would have made for some lively discussions in the Dodger clubhouse if Kershaw hadn’t retired after the World Series.

“You know what? I’m all right with (a salary cap),” Roberts told Amazon Prime’s Good Sports a month ago. “I think the NBA has done a nice job of revenue sharing with the players and the owners. But if you’re going to kind of suppress spending at the top, I think that you got to raise the floor to make those bottom-feeders spend money too.”

Kershaw picked a slightly showier place to say he thinks the owners bleating for salary caps are talking through their scalps, actor Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast. But it ain’t the venue, it’s the verdict. “I don’t understand some of the ownerships’ arguments with this stuff,” the future Hall of Fame lefthander began near December’s end.

Because there’s probably hundreds of multi-billionaires that would love to own a professional baseball team. I bet we could get a list of 100 guys right now that are uber-wealthy, that would love to run a baseball team . . . It might not make the money you would want it to make, but over time it’s just like a stock. It’s going to continue to appreciate.

It’s just like anything else. [The Dodgers are now] worth 3x of what it was . . . I don’t really get that part of it, of the owners pinching pennies.

Grammar aside, Kershaw has the amplifier of Roberts’s second point. But what he doesn’t quite get is that the penny-pinchers have one view of baseball. They think, and they have a commissioner who behaves accordingly, that the good of the game is nothing more than making money for themselves.

My Internet Baseball Writers Association of America newsletter colleague Bill Pruden says responsible baseball ownership begins with a full commitment to fielding a competitive team, but you don’t have to look fast to see that’s not exactly every team’s aspiration. “The A’s and the Pirates immediately come to mind,” he continues, “when one thinks of teams that have, for years, offered little evidence of a real commitment to winning.”

It depends upon what your definition of “winning” is.

For years, A’s owner John Fisher wanted nothing more than to dump Oakland like an inconvenient wife. He let his A’s shrink to compost but failed to strong-arm Oakland and its home county into handing them a new home almost entirely on the house. He finished what was started long enough ago and let the Coliseum and his team finish becoming compost. He said it was the fans’ fault for not wanting to watch scrap heap baseball.

Then Las Vegas’s mouse-like political (lack of) class signed off on $380 million tax dollars with no public hearings or votes toward building the A’s a garish new playpen on the Strip. The owners rubber stamped Fisher’s betrayal while agreeing to waive the normal $1 billion relocation fee.

Fisher got off the way wealthy husbands only dream of getting off when dumping their aging wives for younger mates. While playing in Sacramento’s minor league playpen awaiting the finish of their glass house, we wonder reasonably whether Las Vegas bought the proverbial pig in the proverbial poke.

But lo! As Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills once wrote and sang, there’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Or is it? All of a sudden, the A’s are spending. In the past year, Fisher’s purse has opened wide and said, “Aaahhhhhhhhh.” Sort of.

* The A’s extended right fielder Lawrence Butler with seven years at $65.5 million.

* They extended designated hitter/outfielder Brent Rooker with five years at $60 million.

* Most recently, they extended left fielder Tyler Soderstrom to seven years at $86 million, with an eighth-year team option that includes escalators which could hike the value as high as $131 million, according to The Athletic‘s Devon Henderson and Will Sammon. It’s the largest guaranteed deal in the history of the A’s.

No, those aren’t exactly the kind of glandular long-term deals bestowed upon the Shohei Ohtanis, Bryce Harpers, and Mike Trouts of the game. Bo Bichette could land a more valuable deal than those three combined. And optimists think the A’s are prepping for 2028, when their new playpen is supposed to open where the Tropicana Hotel and Resort used to stand.

But $256.5 million is money not heretofore seen flying out from the A’s piggy banks, even if it’s less than a) some teams’ entire payrolls, and b) a third the full value of Ohtani’s ten-year contract. And it might be hard to remember Fisher speaking the way he did to another Athletic writer, Evan Drellich, earlier this offseason.

“At the end of the day,” Fisher told Drellich, “our goal is to put the greatest team on the field that we can and payroll is an important part of that. But our [front office has] demonstrated over decades now that they can see things in players that other teams don’t see . . . We’re going to sign our guys to longer-term deals, as well as sign free agents who can make our team better.”

Until they aren’t?

Those three extensions, wrote Yahoo! Sports’s Mark Powell, were “a stark reminder that [Fisher] always had the money, but chose not to spend it.” Tell the abandoned wife named Oakland what she didn’t know.

Real cynics think you can tell most baseball owners lying when you see their lips move. The current collective bargaining agreement’s coming finish at the end of the 2026 season already has “salary cap” on those lips, with “salary floor” seeming to be a sotto voce side or afterthought.

Maybe few to none among those owners might dare to ponder Kershaw’s thought about wealthy men and women willing to buy in and actually invest in building competitive teams. They might sooner respond to him, now that he’s retired with only his Hall of Fame election ahead of him so far, “Beat it, buster.”

Ask Oakland whether Fisher’s words are his bonds. They’re liable to demand polygraph proof.

First published at Sports Central.

Our 2025 Dodger Sym-Phony Awards for Extinguished Foolishness

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Dodgers Sym-Phony Band

Cacophony in Blue: the Dodgers Sym-Phony Band, plus a pair of unidentified Dodgers, one of whom seems determined to show he has only a slightly lesser sense of time and beat.

When Mr. Cartwright first laid forth the basic dimensions of a baseball field, he had no idea that the game to which he lent his landscape eye would be capable of pastoral play, bursts of excitement, spells of intellect, and . . . enough tomfoolery, foolhardiness, and fool’s gold to inspire poets, pundits, and professional mischief makers alike. The poor man.

Said tomfoolery, foolhardiness, and fool’s gold are not restricted to the field, of course. Baseball’s fans have been (mostly) an agreeable gathering of the aforementioned poets, pundits, and professional mischief makers (not to mention amatuers), patrician and plebeian alike. Baseball’s players have not been immune to mischief making, either.

In regards to which, I hereby open the envelopes and reveal the 2025 winners of the Dodgers Sym-Phony Awards. Named for that crew of Ebbets Field fans who couldn’t carry tunes in backpacks or briefcases alike, but whose clattering, splattering cacophony charmed the living brains out of those who once packed the Brooklyn bandbox on behalf of slapstick one generation and social groundbreaking pennant contention the next.

Animal House

Donald Trump played Douglas (We now consecrate the bond of obedience) Neidermeyer to Rob Manfred’s Chip Diller when it came to the late Pete Rose . . .

The Animal House Thank You, Sir, and May I Have Another Iron Paddle—To Commissioner Rob Manfred. When a certain president threatened to pardon the late Pete Rose and demanded Rose’s immediate Hall of Fame enshrinement, Manfred met said president in due course. After which, he reached into his heart of hearts, prayed hard, and decided . . . that “permanent” meant mere “lifetime,” after all.

Never mind Rose’s too-well-known violations of Rule 21(d). Never mind his decades of lying about it until or unless it was time to sell yet another autobiography. Never mind the aforesaid president’s erroneous insistence that Rose only bet on his own team to win. (The days Rose didn’t bet were construable by the gambling underground as hints not to bet the Reds those days.)

Once upon a time, such behaviour was believed to be beyond a president and beneath a commissioner. Even if by belief alone. Mr. Trump is not the first and probably won’t be the last president to stand athwart common sense and the law, yelling, “Just try to stop me!” But Mr. Manfred was under no legal, moral, or ethical obligation to satisfy Mr. Trump’s witless hankering, either.

The PT 73, whose crew sometimes managed to make real patrols when not making real mischief.

The Quinton McHale PT-73 Crest—To everyone who thought (erroneously) that the too-much publicised torpedo bats of the early 2025 season were, with apologies to George Carlin, going to curve your spine, grow hair on your hands, and keep the country from . . . who the hell knew exactly what?

It didn’t help that the Yankees spent an early season weekend demolishing the Brewers with a few of their batters using the torps.

“Torpedo bats were the talk of MLB in April and May in 2025 and then were never heard from again,” wrote my IBWAA Here’s the Pitch colleague and Almost Cooperstown writer Mark Kolier. “The opening Yankee series versus the Brewers was an anomaly. And players who had great early season success while using a torpedo bat were unable to sustain that success . . . The torpedo bat panacea was fun to talk about while it lasted. But now that’s over.”

We think.

The Maier’s Trophy for Interference Above, Beyond, and Beneath—To Austin Capobianco and John P. Hansen, Yankee fans with onion juice for brains. Banned from all major league ballparks and other facilities indefinitely in January. The crime: Grabbing the wrist of Dodger right fielder Mookie Betts and trying to pry a long foul out of Betts’s glove. Game Four, 2024 World Series.

Dishonourable mention: Barstool Sports writer Tommy Smokes, writing: “The Yankees were down 3-0 in the World Series and you do whatever it takes to extend the at-bat for your guy at the plate.” Today, wrist-grabbing and attempted ball snatching. Tomorrow, shooting when you see the whites of their balls?

The Rose “Make Your Bet and Lie In It” Golden Thorn—To Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, Guardians pitchers, accused of a pitch-rigging scheme involving throwing particular pitches for particular counts to enable betting on those pitches (it’s called proposition betting) and financial rewards for the bettors.

Reputedly, gamblers won almost half a million on what the pair threw. Clase and Ortiz are charged, too, with earning kickbacks for their, ahem, pitching in.

The Chicken Little Flying Fickle Finger of Fake—To everyone who bleated the sky is falling, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and we don’t feel fine, when Robby the Umpbot made his major league debut last spring training. Robby answered the call of duty when Cubs pitcher Cody Poteet called for his help with one on and Max Muncy (Dodgers) at the plate.

Robby ruled an 0-1 fastball at the knees, called ball one by plate umpire Tony Randazzo, was in fact strike two. Nobody threw lightning bolts down from the Elysian Fields.

The Clarence Bethen-Wile E. Coyote Brass Stethoscope for Injuries Straight Outta Looney Tunes—Named in honour of 1) the pitcher who forgot his false teeth were in his back pocket and slid into second base with a bite on his butt; and, 2) the clod of a canine (Famishius slobbius) who kept Acme in business for eons buying their constantly-backfiring weapons and traps:

* Mookie Betts (Dodgers)—A nocturnal stroll to the reading room turned into a toe fracture. The Mookie Monster missed four games as a result. He opined that he thought we’ve all suffered toe fractures from nocturnal bathroom breaks. I’d like to see the roll call first. And, whom among them might have sung “Midnight Stroll.”

* Zack Littell (Rays)—He learned (or re-learned) the hard way how not to use your head while parenting. Chasing his son around an inflatable slide park, he plowed into scaffolding not padded for play. Let’s guess his favourite song wouldn’t be “Ring My Bell” for a long enough while.

* Jose Miranda (Twins)—Sent back to AAA after a viral baserunning mishap, he went to Target first. (Bad name, in this instance.) He needed bottled water. He reached high for a case of it. He couldn’t stop it from tumbling down. Four weeks on the injured list with a strained left hand, then cut loose entirely when he returned without hitting much else. I submit that nobody had the nerve to play him “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

* Mariano Rivera (Old-Timers)—The Hall of Fame Yankee relief legend suffered a torn Achilles tendon . . . while pitching in a Yankees Old-Timer’s Day game. You guessed it: I don’t think his favourite song last year was “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.”

* Ryan Weathers (Marlins)—His pre-game stroll around the mound brought foul weather. He’d thrown his final warmup toss, then turned right to take the stroll. His catcher Nick Fortes threw up the middle to start the round-the-horn routine. The ball didn’t make it. It hit Weathers flush on the left side of the head.

Then, when he shook it off and pitched three innings, Weathers strained his lat and missed three months. I’m going to guess the poor guy’s favourite song is not “Stormy Weather.”

Wishing them and all no further embarrassing wounds, pinpricks, or fractures. And, wishing you from there (and here) a happy New Year, a damn-sight-better-than-the-old-one New Year, and a 2026 baseball season to come in which there’s no foolishness like (mostly) harmless foolishness.