About Jeff Kallman

Member, Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and the Society for American Baseball Research.

A-Rod’s right about Coupmissioner Selig in Cooperstown

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Jeff Kallman

Maybe one of Selig’s few truly good deeds was the Show-wide retirement of number 42.

I hate to admit it, but Álex Rodríguez is right. There is a mountain of hypocrisy in former commissioner Bud Selig’s membership in the Hall of Fame. Especially when you marry it to A-Rod’s, Barry Bonds’s, Roger Clemens’s, and Mark McGwire’s lack of Hall memberships.

If the Baseball Writers Association of America is keeping Rodríguez, Bonds, Clemens, and McGwire (among others) out of Cooperstown for their actual or alleged use of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, there should have been no reason why that Today’s Game Committee elected their prime enabler.

Have you ever read Coupmissioner Selig’s Hall of Fame plaque? It’s a minor masterpiece of a mealymouthful. What was then the Today’s Game Committee that elected the Brewers owner-turned-coupmissioner should have been ashamed.

It only begins with omitting that his coupmmissionership began with the “acting” tag after he and enough of his fellow owners of the time strong-armed Commissioner Fay Vincent into resigning before they could fire him.

From 1990 through 1992, you had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and limbness not to know that Vincent’s execution papers began with his futile but full-bodied efforts at making owners and players partners instead of combatants. The Lords of Baseball were anything but thrilled at being seen as a little bit lower than lords.

The bad news was limited. Unfortunately for Vincent, the owners weren’t amused when a) he refused to surrender his authority when it came to labor matters; and, b) he actually played fair (the horror) about expansion spoils and division/league realignment. Then drug-addicted, self-destructive relief pitcher Steve Howe—whom Vincent magnanimously allowed an umpteenth chance—followed a magnificent comeback with the Yankees by stepping in it yet again.

After which Vincent himself stepped in it. Howe’s relapse prompted three Yankee personnel including manager Buck Showalter into facing an official hearing and character witnessing for the drug-battling righthander. Vincent tried strong-arming the Yankee trio into changing that character witnessing. It took press outrage to get Vincent to back off, but it gave those Lords so predisposed room to denounce as dictatorial a man who normally preferred discussion, debate, and reason.

“Formally named [commissioner] by unanimous vote of all 30 owners in 1998,” Coupmissioner Selig’s plaque continues. That’s like handing Kim Jong-un a loving cup for stable, unanimously-acclaimed leadership but forgetting to mention the thousands of bodies whose owners’s extermination made it so.

“Presided over an era of vast change to the game on the field while extending its breadth and depth off it.” So the dilution of championship, the advent of the wild card era with three-division leagues, the birth of regular-season interleague play were just think-nothing-of-it participation trophymongering hardly worth losing your sleep over, eh?

“Fostered an unprecedented stretch of labour peace . . . ” The achievement of which took the season-killing, World Series-ditching, near-ruinous 1994 players’ strike that should have been called an owners’ strike for the manner in which Coupmissioner Selig and his allies all but forced. The only thing the 1994 strike proved, other than how easy it was to manipulate the sporting press of the time into swallowing the owners’ side without investigating the recipe, was that no former owner should ever be allowed to hold the office Selig helped to besmirch.

So much for “acting” commissioner. It’s alleged that the owners spent six years searching for a permanent commissioner. Then, they decided to just remove “acting” from Coupmissioner Selig’s title.

“Under his leadership, umpiring was centralised and replay review was established” Umpiring became worse enough after its centralisation that replay review, which should have been established well before, became all but mandatory.

What the plaque also leaves off, of course, is that Coupmissioner Selig and enough of his fellow owners looked the other way long enough as actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances poured into the game. Looked the other way and never once sought to investigate the whys. Looked the other way until Capitol Hill decided to fashion player perp walks and threaten to spank the game’s bottom unless it moved. Fast.

Did some players take the actual/alleged PEDs up simply believing others doing it meant they needed to catch up, regardless of whether their chosen substances actually did enable that? Of course they did. Did other players take them up believing they’d help faster injury recovery? Of course they did. (Yes, you can look it up.)

Did Selig and his fellow owners make even a cursory effort to determine who did what and why before Capitol Hill roared? Did they make even a cursory effort to investigate when enough players did speak about the injury reasons they took up the stuff? No to both.

Enough of the players who tried the substances were and still are pilloried, with or without real, hard evidence. The coupmmissioner who averted his gaze before Crapola Hill forced his and the owners’ hands into beginning and securing testing has a plaque in Cooperstown. A plaque that also looks the other way at his role in the owners’ flagrant salary-suppressing collusion of the mid-to-late 1980s that ended up costing them $280 million.

The should-be Hall of Famer who was caught red-handed indulging in Biogenesis-provided substances, and threatened to sue baseball’s heads off over it before accepting his precedent-setting suspension, has been a changed man since that suspension ended.

“Once I put myself in therapy, and the year suspension was two years into that, and it took me, and I’m still in therapy,” A-Rod told Stephen A. Smith. “It’s important to explain to the young people, not just to share, hey, here are my great stats and my home runs, but here’s how I screwed up.”

He even compared himself to Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame shortstop who was once one of his best friends before an ill-considered remark sullied that friendship and his arrival to the Yankees compelled a reconciliation strained at first.

“Not only the ego but the lack of self-awareness and understanding my place in the clubhouse, understanding my place in the world,” A-Rod went on. “You know, the truth is, Derek is a phenomenal guy. I first met Derek when he was seventeen. I think I’m catching up to Derek at seventeen, now at fifty. Now we’re pretty much on the same level at seventeen. I mean, Derek’s never made a mistake in his life, and I’ve made every mistake in the book. And I love myself for that. I love myself for the good, the bad and the ugly.”

I’ve looked around. Rodríguez doesn’t have a book for sale.

Maybe it’s time to think about enshrining a man who really did try to save baseball from itself, the one who made only one or two mistakes trying. The man about whom Thomas Boswell once wrote that he, “perhaps more than any other commissioner, took his mandate seriously.”

He came to believe that he really should try to act independently in the “best interests of baseball.” Like [predecessor and best friend A. Bartlett] Giamatti, he viewed baseball as an institution that was both indestructibly strong and constantly vulnerable. Nobody could kill it. But plenty of people, from Pete Rose to narrow-minded, dollar-obsessed owners, could tarnish it.

Maybe we can’t purge Coupmissioner Selig from Cooperstown. But we ought to think hard about prodding to have Vincent enshrined. His plaque won’t look half as ill-placed.

First published at Sports Central.

BBWAA Hall ballot: Reviewing the holdovers

Posted on November 24, 2025 by Jeff Kallman

Will this be Carlos Beltrán’s year? Or will he have to serve Astrogate penance a bit longer?

The Baseball Writers Association of America’s Hall of Fame ballot for 2026 includes fifteen return engagements. One of them remains a bit troublesome because of something foolish and illegal by baseball’s rules he did in his final season as a player. His voting support has increased since his first turn on the BBWAA ballot. Will all be forgiven this time?

I’ll address the ballot newcomers soon enough. For now, the holdovers . . .

Carlos Beltrán

Before the exposure of the Astro Intelligence Agency’s illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing operation of 2017-18, Carlos Beltrán figured to have ended his playing career (as the Astros’ 2017 designated hitter) looking forward to accepting a plaque in Cooperstown. That and managing in the major leagues.

The number-nine center fielder of all time (according to Baseball-Reference via Jay Jaffe) who’d been respected as a student of the game and managerial material in the making found himself having to yield the bridge of the Mets (for whom he’d once starred as a player)—before he had the chance even to manage a spring training exhibition.

Though Commissioner Rob Manfred handed all 2017-18 Astro players immunity from discipline in return for spilling AIA deets, Beltrán was the only player Manfred singled out by name in his Astrogate report. It was Beltrán who suggested the Astros needed to “upgrade” from mere replay room reconnaissance, prompting then-bench coach Alex Cora to arrange the long-infamous real-time camera feed to an extra clubhouse monitor for sign deciphering and the long-infamous trash can transmissions.

That was despite Manfred’s September 2017 warning against using replay room reconnaissance and other such off-field chicanery, after the Red Sox (eventually using their own Rogue Sox Replay Room Reconnaissance in 2018 regardless) and the Yankees were caught trying a few tricks from the dugouts.

Beltrán landed the Mets’ managing job twelve days before Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich (in The Athletic) dropped the first full Astrogate revelation in November 2019. Within 72 hours of Manfred’s January 2020 report, all three incumbent managers named in the Rosenthal-Drellich exposure—Beltrán, Cora (who managed the 2018 Red Sox to a World Series championship), and the Astros’ A.J. Hinch (who acted feebly at best when catching onto his AIA cheaters)—were out.

Hinch was fired by Astros owner Jim Crane in hand with general manager Jeff Luhnow, but after sitting out his Manfred-imposed season’s suspension and some very contrite interviews, he found new life on the Tigers’ bridge. Cora sat out his Manfred-imposed season’s suspension, gave a few interviews in which he expressed genuine remorse for his Astrogate role, and was brought back to manage the Red Sox.

Beltrán said little about his Astrogate culpability until he returned to baseball as an analyst for the Yankees’ YES cable television network. There, he owned up in an interview with YES colleague Michael Kay:

Looking back now—yes, we did cross the line. I made my statement about what happened in 2017, and I apologized . . . This happened in such an organic way for ourselves. We all did what we did. Looking back today, we were wrong. I wish I would have asked more questions about what we were doing, I wish the organization would have said to us, “What you guys are doing, we need to stop this.” Nobody really said anything—we’re winning.

Seemingly, Beltrán either didn’t know or chose not to know that “the organisation” as headed by Luhnow was in it up to its kishkes, having deployed the Codebreaker sign-stealing algorithim despite its creator’s warning that it was legal to use only before or after games but not during.

Had Astrogate never happened, Beltrán would have been a very likely first-ballot Hall of Famer. He played twenty seasons, and his peak with the Royals, the Astros (the first time, helping them reach a postseason with his second-half term there), the Mets (helping them to the 2006 postseason), and the Cardinals (two postseasons) was All-Star caliber or better. (He was actually a nine-time All-Star.)

He earned 67.6 wins above replacement-level (WAR) from his first full Kansas City season through the second of two with the Cardinals. That was despite missing significant time due to injuries in his final Met seasons. “Had he not missed substantial portions of three seasons, he might well have reached 3,000 hits,” Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook) has written, “but even as it is, he put up impressive, Cooperstown-caliber career numbers. Not only is he one of just eight players with 300 home runs and 300 stolen bases, but he also owns the highest stolen base success rate (86.4%) of any player with at least 200 attempts.”

Beltrán is the number seven center fielder all-time for run prevention above his league average with +104. He was rangy, smart on the fielding lanes, and was a top of the line reader of batted balls from his position before Father Time finally began to exact a penalty.

Until Astrogate, of course, Beltrán had only one genuine black mark against him, especially so far as Met fans were concerned: frozen solid by an Adam Wainwright curve ball for strike three called—with the bases loaded, the Mets down two runs, and the pennant on the line in the bottom of the ninth—in Game Seven of the 2006 National League Championship Series.

You know something? It happens. Even to Hall of Famers. Beltrán wasn’t the first superstar to get himself tied up at the last minute of that critical a postseason set, and he won’t be the last. That’s not enough to damage a man’s Hall case. No eleventh-hour shortfall should have been. Not even for Babe Ruth.

You want to continue condemning Beltrán for that? How about The Big Fella getting himself caught stealing on a likely busted run-and-hit play to end the 1926 World Series in the Cardinals’ favour—with Bob Meusel at the plate and Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig on deck?

How about Willie McCovey—with second and third, two out, and the Giants down only 1-0—hitting a howitzer shot speared by Bobby Richardson to end the 1962 Series in the Yankees’ favour instead of sending the tying and maybe winning runs home?

How about Carl Yastrzemski fouling out with two out and the Red Sox down a single run to end the 1975 Series in the Reds’ favour?

How about Mariano Rivera surrendering a Series-losing base hit to Luis Gonzalez in 2001 or—after Dave Roberts stole second off a leadoff walk—an RBI single to Bill Mueller to tie the game at four when the Yankees were only three outs from a 2004 ALCS sweep?

None of those fatalities kept Ruth, McCovey, Yastrzemski, or The Mariano out of Cooperstown when their time eventually came. Getting frozen solid by a great pitch shouldn’t keep Beltrán out, either.

But it’s entirely realistic to suggest that, had Beltrán not gotten himself into the thick of the 21st Century’s worst major league cheating scandal, in his final season as a player, he’d probably be looking at unvarnished, uncontroversial first-ballot Hall of Fame election. Right now, we don’t know how many Hall-voting BBWAA writers will hold it against him enough to make him wait until after his third ballot appearance—or more.

Yes to anyone else?

To beat us, you had to go through the Jones boys.—Hall of Famer Chipper Jones on his Braves teammate Andruw Jones.

Andruw Jones—He’s the most run-preventive center fielder who ever played the game. He was a whale of a hitter as a Brave, too; injuries (and the sour attitude that emanated from them) once he left Atlanta turned him into a sadly declining shell of his former self. But those great Braves seasons should have been more than enough to enshrine him long before this. Yes.

Chase Utley—Maybe the most underrated middle infielder of his time. Deserved several Gold Gloves that he didn’t win. Hit with brains as well as skill and handled himself on the bases even more so. He was worth almost twice as many defensive runs as his Philadelphia double play partner Jimmy Rollins. His peak value is above the Hall standard; his career value only slightly below it, but Utley does deserve the honour. Yes.

The Rest of the Holdovers

Bobby Abreu—He’s a lot closer to being a bona fide Hall of Famer than you think or remember. He was a disciplined five-tooler and few of his time were as good as he was for wearing pitchers down. And he was a good, above-average defensive right fielder. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t remain on the BBWAA ballot.

If not, a future Contemporary Era Committee just might give Abreu a review. His peak WAR is just too close to the Hall of Fame peak average. Maybe.

Mark Buehrle—He was a good pitcher who touched greatness occasionally; a no-hitter and a perfect game prove that. He used a deft off-speed mix and ground balls to thrive. He was also an excellent fielder. But the traditional and advanced numbers don’t get Buehrle through the gate, and his postseason record doesn’t help him. Neither do four league leaderships in most hits surrendered.

The number 79 starting pitcher overall, and still beloved on Chicago’s South Side, Buehrle still might linger on the ballot awhile. No.

Félix Hernández–King Felix pushed the door open that said a pitcher’s won-lost record was probably the least sensible way to judge his work. His heavy early workload took a toll on him; his questionable conditioning caught up to him his final four seasons.

He was a terrific pitcher for a good while, the best in the American League for five seasons. But it wasn’t enough to make him a peak value case, and losing both his fastball and his deadly changeup hurt too much. No.

Torii Hunter—He was good enough to play nineteen seasons. He was a decent hitter but not as run preventive a center field defender as you might have guessed. (Hunter earned nine Gold Gloves the last eight of which may have been off the rep he established in his one plus-run prevention defensive season.)

He’s also remembered as a good clubhouse guy whom teams almost couldn’t wait to add when he was available. But as employable as he was for nineteen years, he’s short enough of a plaque. No.

Dustin Pedroia—Career killed by injury, taking him out before he could finish solidifying the Hall case he was certainly making before that. P.S. You can also stop blaming Manny Machado for the end; by his own admission, Pedroia was foolish enough to try playing through that one and put paid to his career before it should have happened.

Regardless, he’s still the best second baseman in the history of the Red Sox, even if he’s barely the number 20 of all. Maybe.

Andy Pettitte—Jaffe says it better: Pettitte was a plow horse, not a race horse: [B]ased upon both traditional and advanced metrics, Pettitte would represent a rather weak choice for the Hall of Fame—and I say that as somebody who had a considerable emotional investment in his career as a fan and would like nothing more than to find a rationale for electing him . . . although he’s probably not a fit for Cooperstown, flags fly forever, and he’ll always be fondly remembered in the Bronx. No.

Manny Ramirez—Pettitte’s hGH dalliance (to recover from an elbow injury) happened during the so-called Wild West Era, when the game and the world looked the other way. (So did the reputed indulgences of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.) Manny Being Manny included two failed tests for actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances after baseball started testing in earnest.

How foolish could you get? Not even at gunpoint or under presidential threat, whichever comes first.

Álex Rodríguez—Dubious as MLB’s handling of Biogenesis probably was, that didn’t mitigate A-Rod’s using their wares or threats to sue baseball to death to escape punishment, until he was slapped with that massive suspension. He’s rehabilitated his public image to a certain extent since, but I’m not convinced that’s enough to clear his way to Cooperstown yet. P.S. His ranking as a shortstop is almost entirely in his bat; Ozzie Smith he wasn’t. No.

Francisco Rodríguez—From his embryonic supersplash in the 2002 postseason through the rest of his Angels years, K-Rod looked like the very essence of a Hall of Fame reliever who wasn’t named Mariano Rivera, and it wasn’t just his saves count, either.

After he left the Angels, his career was stained when he became involved in a couple of unsavoury domestic violence incidents, one of which (as a Met) injured his thumb when he punched his girlfriend’s father repeatedly, and another (as a Brewer) in which he attacked his then-fiancée. (Case dismissed when she and a household staff member who saw the incident returned to Venezuela, according to numerous reports.)

After his major league life faded, he tried coming back via the independent and Mexican leagues before calling it a career. It’s a question of whether his domestic violence issues will block him, the way they may keep blocking Omar Vizquel. (Andruw Jones pleaded guilty without fuss, paid a hefty fine, and no other such incident seems known of him.) For me, being multiple, they do. No.

Jimmy Rollins—The goods: solid shortstop defense and speed on the bases. The bads: a 95 OPS+; a .330 on-base percentage that isn’t quite what you should find in a Hall of Fame leadoff hitter; and, his basepath larceny didn’t make him a Lou Brock Hall of Fame lookalike. Not to mention that his +38 defensive runs at shortstop are 53rd all-time.

You loved watching him play in his prime even if he was trying to beat you, though, and he was one of those trash talkers who made you laugh instead of scream. But still. Not quite.

Omar Vizquel–He may have been the outstanding defense-first shortstop of the 1990s, but 1) his highlight reels in the advent of widespread cable television masked that he wasn’t quite as good defensively as Cal Ripken, Jr., never mind Ozzie Smith; and, 2) splendid as his defense was, Vizquel still shakes out as the number 42 shortstop ever.

That’s not a Hall of Famer, and that’s not counting subsequent issues of domestic violence and sexual harassment that may keep him unemployed in the game. No.

David Wright—He’s the Mets’s version of Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy: A character-to-burn guy whose Hall of Fame case was snuffed by injuries. He was the heart and soul of the Mets before the injuries began blocking him, but they’ll never forget that 2015 World Series home run that surely qualifies as the biggest blast of his past.

Yes, Wright deserved better. His uniform number retirement should amplify that. No, with regret.

Some portions of this essay—first published by Sports Central—have been published previously.

The microbet scandal: Don’t let it get to Congress

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Jeff Kallman

Darren McGavin, in The Natural, as Gus Sands, the bookie who boasted a) of microbets decades before they turned into a real-life baseball scandal; and, b) claimed his glass eye (with its iris larger than his right eye) was his “Magic Eye” which saw all.

When freshly-resurrected slugger Roy Hobbs was introduced to jaded bookmaker Gus Sands, in the novel and film The Natural, some slightly awkward conversation turned to Hobbs’s sterling doubleheader performance: five hits in the opener, four in the nightcap. “That’ll cost me a pretty penny,” Sands said. “I was betting against you today, slugger.”

Hobbs thought it meant against his team, the New York Knights, but Sands corrected him, saying, “Just you.” This surprised Hobbs. “Didn’t know you bet on any special player,” he said.

“On anybody and anything,” Sands continued. “We bet on strikes, balls, hits, runs, innings, and full games. If a good team plays a lousy team we will bet on the spread of runs. We cover anything anyone wants to bet on.” Sands’s example was a World Series game during which he bet $100,000 on three pitched balls.

The film showed the late Robert Redford looking somewhere between bemused and befuddled. “How’d you make out on that?” he asked. “Didn’t,” Darren McGavin’s smug Sands replied with a fatalistic smile out of which he could and did shift on the proverbial dime.

“But the next week,” Sands perked up, “I ruined the guy in a different deal.” Pausing for a sigh somewhere between extravagant and feigned, Sands went on. “That’s the way it goes,” he began. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. Today I lost on you. Some other time, I’ll clean up double.”

How would he do that? Hobbs inquired. “When you’re not hitting so good.” How would he know when? “The Magic Eye,” Sands replied, pointing to the glass eye with the larger iris. “It sees all.”

From there, the novel had it, Hobbs and Sands wagered on a few small things that led to Hobbs performing some impromptu magic tricks that amused their restaurant show’s MC, befuddled the sports columnist who’d introduced his running mate Sands to Hobbs in the first place, and left Sands himself somewhere between embarrased and infuriated.

Bernard Malamud may have known the wherefores of sports bookmaking in and before his time, even whether a Gus Sands would describe his game-within-the-game bets as microbets. He couldn’t have predicted that betting on anybody and anything, including individual pitches, would ooze into the scandal now bedeviling a major league baseball team and the sport’s governors alike.

If only this could be resolved by yanking tablecloths out from under undisturbed table settings or tweaking a snide bookmaker’s nose to produce several silver coins (tricks Malamud described Hobbs as pulling upon Sands before their evening ended).

MLB went into its marketing relationships with assorted legal gambling businesses certain enough that it was only to reach sporting fans. It didn’t necessarily believe that the relationship would lure players or other team personnel into cooperative gambling behaviours that might or might not have a direct effect upon a game itself.

The disabusement began externally if no less dismayingly, when there came to light over a few seasons various players receiving death threats over certain game outcomes. It wasn’t just frustrated fans pouring their grief out aboard social media, it was frustrated fan bettors ready to horsewhip or hacksaw this or that player for costing them assorted volumes of money.

That was serious enough. But we have had Tucupita Marcano, Padres infielder, banished for life last year for betting on major league games with or without his own team. We have had four other players (Michael Kelly, Jay Groome, José Rodríguez, Andrew Saalfrank) suspended for a year apiece for betting on major league games in which they weren’t involved.

And now we have Guardians pitchers Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase under scrutiny, fire, and arrest for pitch rigging the better to enrich gamblers betting Sands-like on particular pitches. Ortiz was arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn over a week ago; Clase surrendered for arraignment last Thursday. The Guardians are understandably not entirely certain how to proceed from there.

Both pitchers were lost to them last July when the pitch rigging came to light and they were placed on administrative leave. It’s not entirely untoward to suspect that one critical reason Guards manager Stephen Vogt earned a second straigth Manager of the Year award was that he succeeded in keeping his team on message and striking to snatch the American League Central title in spite of the pall created by losing two key pitchers for reasons not associated with the injured list.

“We arguably played our best baseball after they left,” said Guards general manager Chris Antonetti last week. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of our team for.” Which is understandable thinking and magnanimous praise from the man who also admitted, not long after Ortiz and Clase were drydocked, “In the GM manual that I read, they left these chapters blank.”

Ortiz and Clase are accused of enabling gamblers to bet on certain pitches for what totaled six-figure dollar amounts and of receiving kickbacks for their parts in the plots. Since their arraignments, MLB has arranged with a good number of its authorised sports book advertisers to restrict gamblers’ microbets to $200 per and bar making such bets parts of parlays.

It may not be enough. Not since Marcano. Not since Groome, Kelly, Rodríguez, and Saalfrank. Not since Ortiz and Clase.

However tricky was the original idea of baseball taking ad revenues from legal sports books, we had the knowledge that it was strictly for the fans and that players, coaches, managers, front office personnel, clubhouse workers, and other team people were still governed by Rule 21. Governed by it, and wholly obedient to it.

“Why do we need the ability to bet on every pitch?” asked The Athletic‘s Jason Lloyd, who answered promptly. “The correct answer is because of how much revenue prop bets generate, but abolishing the concept of micro-bets in sports is the only true way to eliminate the uncertainty of whether a player is on the take.”

No argument from über-agent Scott Boras, who waxed affirmative on banning microbets when he wasn’t going Dr. Seuss discussing this or that man among his major league clientele at the general managers’ meetings in Las Vegas last week.

“You have to remove those prop bets to make sure the integrity of the players isn’t questioned,” he told Lloyd. “There’s going to be all forms of performance questions given now to pitchers when they throw certain pitches to the back of the screen or situationally, and really, we don’t want any part of it. We don’t want the players’ integrity to ever be questioned.”

He might have added that we don’t want players’ integrity being questioned when they offer at certain pitches, when they don’t, what type of pitches they’re hankering to hack, what type they’ll pass upon, that kind of thing.

Maybe it’s time at last for baseball to rethink the soundness of allowing even legal sports books to advertise around the ballpark or on the baseball air. Rethink it before Capitol Hill, so often interested more in perp walks than proper policymaking, goes from merely demanding MLB “demonstrate how it is meeting its responsibility to safeguard America’s pastime” to ordering MLB onto such a perp walk.

First published by Sports-Central.

We can’t have nice things for too long

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Jeff Kallman

Emmanuel Clase, whom the feds charge masterminded a pitch-rigging scheme for bettors and his fellow Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz.

How tempting is it to define the present era as the one that tells us we can’t have nice things? And, the one that delivers the message more brutally after each of the rare nice things we get.

Baseball just delivered us a postseason for the ages, even if you don’t hold with the wild card system. Put that to one side a moment and admit it. The game we love spent a month showing us that, any time we care to write the game off as a self-immolating bore, it’ll be more than happy to disabuse us.

Think about it. When you get seven postseason sets ending with winner-take-all games, you’ve been blessed to the tenth power. When you get more than one extra-inning postseason hair raiser without the disgrace of Manfred Man (who’s not allowed anywhere near the postseason—yet), you’ve been blessed that big again.

When you get utter cream-always-rises defiance against the wild card system, putting nobody in either League Championship Series except teams whose butts were parked in first place at season’s end, you’ve been blessed above and beyond whatever it was you had the right to expect.

When you get Shohei Ohtani spending one postseason game striking ten out from the mound and hitting three out at the plate, then spending World Series Game Three reaching base nine times—five with the near-complete consent of the Blue Jays who seemed to prefer death to Ohtani’s singular controlled mayhem—your cups runneth over.

When you get a postseason seeing regular-season supermen continue their feats of derring-do and damage (can we forget Cal Raleigh crowning a 60-homer regular season with five intercontinental ballistic missle launches while the Mariners were in the postseason? Freddie Freeman’s eighteenth-inning walkoff?), and heretofore dismissable Clark Kents turning into assorted breeds of Supermen (Addison Barger, Miguel Rojas, call your offices), your bowls, barrels, vats, and tanks runneth over, under, sideways, down, and back.

In other words, this postseason couldn’t have been more entertaining, exciting, and exemplary if it had been coordinated, produced, and directed by Bill Veeck, Casey Stengel, Kevin Costner, and The Chicken.

No, that beyond good deed couldn’t go unpunished, could it? Can we have (demand) this Sunday back?

First there came the should-be-frightening revelation that, according to a popular podcast, Bryce Harper—he who told commissioner Rob Manfred firmly enough to get the you know what out of the Phillies clubhouse if he wanted to talk salary cap, though the two shook hands and shook it off later on—was threatened by “one of Manfred’s deputies,” who said, supposedly, “Don’t ever disrespect [the Commish] like that again. That’s how people end up in a ditch.”

“If this threat is true,” wrote Yardbarker‘s David Hill, “the next labor stoppage could get ugly fast.” If that threat is true, we don’t have to wait for a lockout or a strike to get ugly fast. It’s just become ugly fast.

And how about the ugly-fast-enough revelation that two Guardians pitchers, relievers Emmanuel Clase and starter Luis Ortiz, on administrative leave since late July on pitch-rigging suspicions, have just graduated from suspicion to formal charges of fraud, conspiracy, bribery, and money laundering? Charges “stemming,” as the federal indictment out of Brooklyn says, “from an alleged scheme to rig individual pitches that led to gamblers winning hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to an indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors Sunday.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Eastern District office in Brooklyn said Sunday that Clase’s involvement in the pitch-rigging plot goes back to May 2023, with Ortiz joining up last June. It didn’t exactly cripple the Guardians’s season to lose the pair, especially when they ended up snatching the American League Central from the unexpectedly rising/unexpectedly sputtering Tigers.

But then came the postseason. The Tigers nudged the Guardians out of the picture in a wild card series. From there, aside from the usual off-season doings, undoings, maneuverings, and meanderings, the question around the Guards became when the other shoes would drop around Clase and Ortiz.

They dropped Sunday, all right. The indictment says Clase arranged with a gambler to throw particular pitches for ball counts so the bettor could bet on those pitches (it’s called proposition betting) and reap the financial reward. The indictment says further that gamblers won almost half a million betting on pitches thrown by the Guardians pair, while the pitchers themselves earned kickbacks for helping the bettors clean up.

Clase and Ortiz, said Eastern District U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr., “deprived the Cleveland Guardians and Major League Baseball of their honest services.”

They defrauded the online betting platforms where the bets were placed. And they betrayed America’s pastime. Integrity, honesty and fair play are part of the DNA of professional sports. When corruption infiltrates the sport, it brings disgrace not only to the participants but damages the public trust in an institution that is vital and dear to all of us.

“While the pervasiveness of legalized gambling has upended the sports world, the allegations against Clase and Ortiz are the most severe for the sport since Pete Rose agreed to a lifetime ban for betting on baseball in 1989,” ESPN’s Jeff Passan wrote. “MLB’s rules against gambling on the sport are strict, and Clase and Ortiz could face lifetime bans similar to the one delivered last year to San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano, who placed nearly 400 bets on baseball.

Nocella’s office described Clase as the scheme’s mastermind, saying he’d throw balls instead of strikes and sliders instead of cutters on first pitches, with gamblers betting on each pitch to be called balls or traveling under specific speeds. The indictment said further that such proposition bets would be stacked in parlays often as not, meaning bigger winnings.

But the indictment also charges that Clase gave money to gamblers to bet on his own behalf, texted with them while games were in progress, and was joined up by Ortiz after he came to the Guards in a winter 2024-25 trade, Passan said.

Among others, Clase helped gamblers win $27,000 apiece on one Clase pitch faster than 94.9 mph in an interleague game with the Mets. “Weeks later,” Passan said, referring to the indictment, “bettors added a leg to a parlay for a pitch to be a ball slower than 94.95 mph—and won $38,000 when Clase spiked a slider at least five feet in front of home plate.”

By last April, Clase asked for and got kickbacks for throwing specific pitches. He even asked one winning bettor to send kickback money to his native Dominican Republic “for repairs at the country house.” Last June, Ortiz joined the scheme by agreeing to be paid $5,000 to throw a first second-inning pitch for a ball call, with Clase getting $5,000 himself for arranging it, the indictment charges.

The same month, Ortiz agreed to open the third inning with ball one for $7,000. The indictment also says bank security cameras caught Clase withdrawing $50,000 cash, $15,000 of which went to one bettor in a group who placed $18,000 on that pitch.

Ortiz’s attorney denied in a formal statement that his client would do anything to influence a game improperly, “not for anyone and not for anything.”

Clase was making $4.9 million for 2025 and stood to make $6.4 million for 2026, with a pair of team options for 2027 and 2028 at $10 million each. Ortiz wasn’t near six figures yet so far as I could determine, but he wasn’t exactly improverished, either. Why on earth would either man slide into a shady side profession that could end their baseball lives if convicted and banished?

Maybe we shouldn’t ask. Maybe it won’t matter, at least until the case goes to trial, barring any for-now-unknowable chance of one or both pitchers coming to take plea deals and then throwing themselves upon the mercy of the courts of law and public opinion.

Maybe it won’t mean a thing until or unless baseball decides to take a second, third, and fourth look at its cross-promotion deals with legal sports books. Yes, those were supposed to encourage fan betting alone. Baseball’s prohibitions against players, coaches, managers, and team personnel betting on the sport remain stringent.

Oops. Manfred took a presidential gumshoe in the gluteus to declare Rose’s “permanent” and wholly justified banishment applied only while he was alive on earth—thus making Rose eligible to appear on the Hall of Fame’s next Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot.

But five months after Ohtani’s original interpreter Ippei Mizuhara went to the federal calaboose for stealing $17 million of Ohtani’s money to support an out-of-control gambling habit, it might be wise to review and perhaps repel those cross-promotions. Which might require the kind of spine this commissioner displays very selectively.

When an uppity player told Manfred where he can take his salary cap talk, the commissioner’s office ironed up to slap him down. But when an uppity president behaving like the school bully crooked his finger and demanded Rose be sent to Cooperstown as soon as last week, regardless that Rose earned his banishment, Manfred’s spine went Vaseline.

The stove isn’t the only thing that’s hot. It won’t shock me if baseball tempers get a little hot for a good while. That’s the risk whenever baseball’s witless remind us that we can’t have nice things for very long.

The kitchen sink Series

Posted on November 2, 2025 by Jeff Kallman

Miguel Rojas, about to demolish Jeff Hoffman’s hanger to tie Game Seven Saturday night . . . (Fox Sports capture.)

Be honest. If you stayed the entire course of this World Series, there’s only one conclusion. Both the triumphant Dodgers and the falling-just-short Blue Jays threw more kitchen sinks into it than you’ll find on any Home Depot floor.

And, if you thought the way the Dodgers won Game Six 3-1 came right out of six parts Rube Goldberg and half a dozen parts South Park, both teams seemed hell bent on telling you in the Dodgers’ eventual 5-4 Game Seven win that you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Feel free to choose your own particular flash points. There certainly were more than enough to keep the analysts analysing and the poets dreaming.

But tell me. In which planning session did you have Miguel Rojas hitting a game-tying home run in the top of the Game Seven ninth off Jays closer Jeff Hoffman . . . and then throwing the lead runner out at the plate in a bottom of the ninth, bases loaded traffic jam, for the critical second out making the third inevitable if no less stupefying?

In which sweet dream did you have the Dodgers’ late center field insertion Andy Pages running Jays third baseman Ernie Clement’s drive down and running over Kiké Hernández to get that out?

“I was going to pull a Willie Mays,” said Hernández, referring to Mays’s still-stupefying Game One-saving running-down catch in the 1954 World Series at the rear end of the Polo Grounds, “and then he tackled me, and I felt like I got dunked on, and I thought we lost. I was just down because I thought we lost. And he came up to me and said, ‘Are you OK?’ ‘F— that, do you have the ball?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s go!'”

Sure. Just like that.

But in which script doctoring session did you have done to the Dodgers what they did to the Jays in that situation in the next half inning—a bases-loaded forceout at the plate for out number two meaning the third was all but inevitable again?

In which brainstorming session did you have Will Smith following back-to-back groundouts against Blue Jays starter-turned-reliever Shane Bieber with a blast into the left field bullpen to crack the tie? Leaving yet another starter-pressed-into-relief, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, to shake Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.’s bottom of the eleventh opening double off and get a sacrifice bunt and then a step-and-throw double play by Mookie Betts to finish it all off?

I sure didn’t have those scenarios in mine. Any more than I envisioned the Game Six finish in which Addison Barger, one of the Blue Jays’s most prolific postseason swingers, suffered one of the worst brain freezes known to man, woman, and World Series Friday night—leaning too far off second base in the bottom of the ninth and misreading a soft liner to left by Andrés Giménez that turned into a game-ending double play.

If I’d walked into some producer’s office with scenarios such as those, they’d have booked me on the next available flight to Cloud Cuckoo-Land. If not the Island of Misfit Toys.

The Dodgers were actually down three games to two before Barger’s mishap happened. He’d even set it up himself when he made second and third on a freak ground rule double, a long fly to left that landed stuck in the crease between the outfield wall pad and the warning track. Dodgers center field insertion Justin Dean hollered alertly for the dead-ball/ground-rule double call.

Neither did I have a scenario in which the team winning Game Seven never held any lead in the game until the eleventh inning when Smith’s launch disappeared. Did I fathom the possibility of seven starting pitchers going to work in Game Seven including the whole Dodgers postseason rotation? The winning pitcher in Game Seven relief (Yamamoto) being the guy who started and got credit for the Game Six win the night before?

“It’s hard to say anything else,” said Jays infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa postgame Satuday night. “I thought we were gonna pull off another. But we ran out of some magic.” The magic and the efforts that yanked the Jays from rock bottom last year to the threshold of the Promised Land this year simply weren’t enough in the end.

Not even Bo Bichette’s hefty three-run homer in the Game Seven third, a homer every Blue Jay knew he’d earned the hard way. returning from the injured list to play in the Series after missing everything from September’s birth forward with a knee injury.

“That was his moment,” said utilityman Davis Schneider postgame. “Fighting back from his injury it’s just amazing what he did. He put his career on the line, to be honest. He’s a free agent, he could have gotten even worse and teams might have f—ed him on it, to be honest. But he showed (guts). I appreciate everything he’s done for his team and myself.”

Guerrero apologised unnecessarily for failing to deliver the World Series title Toronto wanted and he knew deserved. Bichette, who goes back to the deep minors with Guerrero, repeated his oft-expressed wish to stay in Toronto even with free agency looming for him, because this season—despite other Jays departing to free agency, too—taught him the truest meanings of “team.”

Everybody re-learns those meanings when you grind a season out that brings you thatclose to the Promised Land knowing only one team will get there. Maybe no Dodger knows this more than Rojas, who provides clubhouse strength and surety even when he’s not doing much on the field.

“When you play the game right, treat people right, are the teammate like Miguel is, the game honors you,” said Freddie Freeman, the Dodger first baseman whose eighteenth-inning Game Five-winning homer was its own kind of proof of that maxim.

But you might have expected Freeman, or Shohei Ohtani, or even the still-struggling Mookie Monster to square up big Saturday night. You know bloody well you didn’t have Rojas lining one into the left field stands in the ninth. You may bloody well know that he didn’t have him lining one into the left field stands in the ninth, either.

World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamota about to be bear-hugged from behind by Will Smith, whose two-out, eleventh-inning bomb pushed the Dodgers ahead to stay and win the Series. (Fox Sports capture.)

“I never walked to the plate thinking about hitting a home run in that situation,” said Rojas postgame. “I just wanted to stay up the middle, try to hit a fastball. I definitely chased on the first one. I tried to lock it in and be on the fastball after that, let the ball travel a little bit more . . . When [Hoffman] hung me the slider, I just put a good swing on it.”

Somehow forgotten in the chaos and mayhem of the final three Game Seven innings was Max Muncy closing the deficit to 4-3 when he pounced on the Jays’ glittering young sprout Trey Yesavage, yet another starter pressed into relief, and drove a one-out, 1-1 offering over the right field fence in the top of the eighth.

“Everyone talks about the Dodgers and how much money we spend and how we’re supposed to do this, and all this stuff,” said future Hall of Fame pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who announced his retirement before season’s end. “I tell you what, man. You can’t buy the character, the heart and the willingness to do things that other people wouldn’t do.”

Kershaw has a point. There’s a team that’s actually outspent the Dodgers in payroll the past four years. (Think about that when you begin feeling weird that the Dodgers are baseball’s first World Series repeat winners in a quarter century.)

Would you like to know where they’ve been those four years? Two second place finishes, two missed postseasons, a National League wild card series loss, and a National League Championship Series loss. Meet the Mets, meet the Mets.

You might find a Met who might have done what Yamamoto did, following his Game Six start and credited win by going out to pitch two and two-thirds game-winning, game-ending relief, on zero days’ rest. Or, what Rojas, Smith, Pages, and the starters out of the pen did. But they have to get there first. (“That,” Kershaw said of Yamamoto, “was probably the most gutsy, ballsy thing any guy has ever done.”)

Gracious in a hard-fought defeat, Jays manager Schneider congratulates the Dodgers after Game Seven. (Fox Sports capture.)

If you can name any pitching staff in the game this season who could and would have gone out to do what Ohtani (starting on three days’ rest, exiting only after Bichette took him crosstown), Tyler Glasnow (getting the last three Game Six outs and then getting seven Game Seven outs), and Blake Snell (two days’ rest, four Game Seven outs) did, you should be playing the stock market.

Or, how about a catcher going Smith’s distance this Series, catching 73 innings of baseball in the seven games including that eighteen-inning round-the-world cruise, which the irrepressible MLB.com writer/research Sarah Langs says beats out Lou Criger of the ancient Boston Americans in the first World Series ever played.

Well, how about we not think about those who will face free agency this winter—yet?

How about we not think about these two combatants other than as they’ve been this entire Series—classy fun?

How about we not think that there were moments you wondered whether the Dodgers would finally figure out ways past the Blue Jays pitching and defenses?

How about we simply thank God and His servants in the Elysian Fields that we haven’t even let Rob Manfred obstruct us from loving a Series that deserved to be loved, despite Commissioner Pepperwinkle’s wheeling, dealing, stealing, squealing, and reeling, because—lo! (you thought you’d escape my noticing it!)—this World Series, like the League Championship Series played to decide who’d play it, featured no team whose butts weren’t parked in first place at season’s end?

And, let us give due props to these Dodgers, warm fuzzies to these Blue Jays, and remind ourselves that, now and then, there comes a Series in which no matter who actually wins or loses, the real winner is baseball.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

Author Archives: Jeff Kallman