Category Archives: Baseball

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

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Darren McGavin

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

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Emmanuel Clase

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

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Miguel Rojas

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.

Yoshinobu Yamamota, Will Smith

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.”)

John Schneider

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.

We interrupt your World Series fun . . .

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Yoshinobu Yamamoto

Yamamoto carving the Blue Jays in Game Two, following the Jays’ bludgeoning the Dodgers in Game One, was rudely interrupted by the commissioner putting his foot in his mouth again.

Hand it to Rob Manfred. Baseball’s commissioner certainly found a way to soil or at least cloud our World Series pleasure. The Blue Jays bludgeoned the Dodgers in Game 1; Yoshinobu Yamamoto put restraints on almost all the Blue Jays to even it up in Game 2. Nothing but fun.

That’d teach us. Baseball’s lessons include periodic reminders that Murphy’s Law includes a clause about no good deed going unpunished. We just couldn’t be allowed to love this Series without Manfred invited to spread a little fertilizer across the field.

We couldn’t be allowed to enjoy Blue Jays outfielder Addison Barger becoming history’s first pitch hitter to step up with the bases loaded and send one into the seats. We couldn’t be allowed to enjoy Barger plus Dominic Varsho and Alejandro Kirk going long in the middle of the Jays making life miserable for Dodger starter Blake Snell and a few other starters-turned-bullpen bulls, to the tune of a 11-4 Game 1 blowout.

We couldn’t be allowed enjoy Yoshinobu Yamamoto carving the Blue Jays like Thanksgiving turkeys in Game 2, going the distance for a second straight postseason start, the first Dodger to do that since Orel Hershiser in 1988 and the first anyone to do that since Curt Schilling in 2001. Not to mention the Dodgers making a nice mix of small and tall ball — an RBI single here, a pair of solo homers there, a bases-loaded wild pitch, and a run-scoring force out yonder, to beat the Jays in Game 2, 5-1.

No, that pleasure was just too much, wasn’t it? We couldn’t even enjoy the pleasure of calling out the cone-head contingency in Rogers Centre chanting, “We don’t need you! We don’t need you!” whenever Shohei Ohtani strode to the plate, Ohtani having spurned a Jays offer on behalf of staying in southern California even if it meant switching leagues.

It wasn’t quite as contemptibly disgusting as the notorious AI-generated feces flyer his apparent pal in the White House dreamed up a weekend ago. No one that I know of is rushing to strap Manfred into the cockpit of a Boeing Shitterfortress yet. But if reporters who spotted and buttonholed him before World Series Game 2 had premeditated it, they couldn’t have done a better job of getting Manfred to put his foot in his mouth. Yet again.

With a gambling scandal battering the NBA, Manfred was asked whether baseball remains vigilant in protecting the game’s integrity from gambling infestations. After all, two Guardians pitchers (Emmanuel Clase, Luis Ortiz) remain in drydock while investigations continue into whether they accommodated suspicious microbets while pitching in June.

“We didn’t ask to have legalized sports betting,” Manfred said Saturday night. “It kind of came, and that’s the environment in which we operate. Now we don’t have a lot of choice about that, and if it’s going to change — broadly change — probably the only way it would happen is the federal government.”

The federal government.

The one whose chief executive may have strong-armed Manfred into declaring, whoops, the “permanent” banishment mandated for violating Rule 21(d) didn’t mean “permanent,” after all, meaning the end of the late Pete Rose’s exile from baseball and blockage from the appropriate Hall of Fame ballot.

The one whose chief executive conducts a dog-ate-my-homework presidency with more glee than his predecessors ever showed, while threatening the long tentacles of the law upon people in and out of government, for no crime other than disagreeing that he can do as he damn well pleases, indeed, the Constitution (which says otherwise) and the law be damned. And, with more glee than his worst such predecessors ever allowed themselves.

Manfred also said he didn’t want to discuss baseball’s pending labour issues right now (“I want to get seven exciting [World Series] games. A year from now, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about labor”), but boy have we had great postseasons since the 12-team system with wild card rounds, haven’t we?

If anyone put in front of Manfred the thought that this postseason has actually seen nothing but first-place teams in both the League Championship Series and the World Series, I haven’t been able to spot it yet.

Perhaps the commissioner wishes to fix things that might actually be broken. How about negotiating a salary floor, not a salary cap, with reasonable penalties for falling short of the floor, the better to get those billionaires’ boys’ club members who refuse to invest in their teams to either invest or divest?

How about expanding to two more major league teams, one for each league? Then, how about rebuilding baseball’s leagues and divisions thus:

1) Two conferences in each league. We’ll argue over naming them later.

2) Two divisions per conference. We’ll argue over naming them later, too.

Then, we move toward restoring genuine championship play:

3) No more wild card nonsense. If you didn’t finish the regular season with your butts parked in first place, you get to wait till next year. (A properly instituted and enforced salary floor may also stop Reds, White Sox, Rockies, and Pirates fans from awakening on Opening Day thinking, “This year is next year,” but I’d rather sacrifice a great if sad saying on behalf of up-and-down league competitiveness.)

4) No more regular season interleague play. Save it for the All-Star Game. And, while we’re at it, be done at last with those fakakta All-Star and City Connect uniforms that run the gamut from ugly to disgusting and back to repulsive. Let the players wear their proper team uniforms for the All-Star Game again. (And, for the Home Run Derby, if it must continue and for those invited to swing. Which reminds me: only bona-fide All-Stars shall be considered for Home Run Derby participation.)

5) Best-of-three division series, featuring none but the regular season division winners.

6) Best-of-five League Championship Series — the way it was from the 1969 birth of divisional play through 1984.

7) The World Series shall remain a best-of-seven, and thus have its absolute primacy restored.

Last but not least: 8) The foregoing will prevent postseason saturation, while 9) still providing plenty of postseason games. At maximum, there would be (count them!) 29 games. Even if every such series ends in a sweep (remember, baseball is the sport where anything can happen — and usually does), you’d still have 20 games.

Now, back to our World Series fun. Let’s get back to determining whether ancient Max Scherzer, the Blue Jays’s planned Game 3 starter at this writing, can summon up the old Max the Knife one more time. Or, whether the Dodgers help him decide the hard way whether it’s time to think about having his glove bronzed and letting those great seasons past make his Cooperstown case.

NLCS Game Four: Shoh there!

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Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani is about to send his second of three NLCS Game Four bombs to somewhere approaching the Delta Quadrant . . .

Was this destiny, or the mere re-awakening of a sleeping giant? Had he gone 2-for-the-National League Championship Series entering Game Four only to set Dodger Stadium and the world up for a display any world’s fair including last century’s gaudy boondoggles in New York would have been proud to hoist?

Don’t ask. You’ll drive yourself mad trying to answer, becasuse any answer might be right and any might be wrong. Just remember that Shohei Ohtani did what he did to win Game Four on both sides of the ball.

On side one he was Bob Gibson without the glare and stare, throwing six innings of two-hit, ten-punchout, shutout ball, before he ran into a spot opening the seventh ticklish enough for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to lift him with two on, nobody out, and Alex Vesia warm and good in the bullpen.

On side two, Ohtani was . . . oh, David Ortiz, Reggie Jackson, and Babe Ruth, all at once. If there’s such a thing as a postseason series sweep you could call dramatic, Ohtani made sure this one was it.

The vanquished Brewers who’d only managed to muster up a single run in each of the four games could do little enough other than watch and appreciate what was being made on their dollar. Even as they could only mourn that, whatever they were doing to keep Ohtani on his best behaviour prior to Game Four, it failed them miserably enough.

“We’re watching something we’ve never seen before,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who probably still couldn’t believe the manner in which his team’s ticket to the World Series was stamped Friday night. The scoreboard said 5-1, Dodgers. The margin was four runs; the Dodgers out-hit the Brewers by four. But . . .

There have been ouitlier pitchers who’ve hit home runs in postseason play. As Jayson Stark exhumes, only two starting pitchers have ever hit two postseason bombs in their whole careers: Hall of Famer Gibson (1964, 1968) and one-time Orioles co-ace Dave McNally (1966, 1974). And, “[s]eeing as how all pitchers not named Ohtani aren’t even allowed near a bat rack anymore, that’s a record that will never be broken,” Stark adds. “Unless Ohtani breaks it!”

Babe Ruth, you say? Well, now. Ruth pitched 166 games lifetime, including the postseason, and never hit two homers in any but one of those games, on 13 June 1921. He also recorded one measly strikeout that day. The Bambino hit three homers in a single postseason game twice, Game Four in the 1926 Wortld Series, and Game Four in the 1928 Series. Guess how many innings he didn’t pitch in either of those games.

It gets even more insane from there. How would you like to name all the pitchers who’ve hit more home runs at the plate in a game than what they allowed from the mound in the same game? Stark has named the two, Philadelphia’s Rick Wise (23 June 1971) throwing a no-hitter and Detroit’s Jesse Doyle (28 September 1925) in relief but hung with the loss despite getting eleven outs during his turn.

Yes, it’s very fair to say that Ohtani blasted those two right out of the running. What the hell, he began the blasting in the first inning. Top—he shook off a leadoff walk to Brewers second baseman Brice Turang to strike out the side. Then he led off at the plate in the bottom half, worked the count full against Brewers starter Jose Quintana, and hit one into the right field bleachers.

Two base hits and a strikeout later, Tommy Edman singled Mookie Betts home and Teoscar Hernández pushed a ground out to first that enabled Will Smith to score. As things turned out, that was really the only scoring the Dodgers needed on the night. These Brewers may have had the regular season’s best record and outlasted the wild-card Cubs in the division series, but they found themselves playing the futility flutes against the Dodgers’ big brass.

Bottom of the fourth, the count 3-1: Ohtani launched Brewers reliever Chad Patrick’s 3-1 offering to and past the rear end of the right center field bleachers. Speculation that the ball ended up making its way to the Hollywood Freeway wasn’t unreasonable.

“My reaction,” said Dodger president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, “was just mouth agape. Trying to track it. Not seeing it come down. And saying: Did that one just leave the stadium?” All I could see was the ball flying over a Starlux Airlines sign and its roof section. Maybe it ended up somewhere in nearby Glendale, maybe in the back yard that once belonged to Hall of Fame manager/character Casey Stengel.

The sad part was that blast being the only real blemish against Patrick on the evening. He pitched four relief innings and kept all but one of the Dodgers from getting any cute ideas against him. If the Brewers now ponder the what-ifs if Patrick could have started, you can’t exactly say they’re wrong.

Bottom of the seventh, Trevor Megill relieving Patrick and striking Andy Pages out to open. Megill, who’d posted a 2.49 regular-season ERA and a .209 opponents’ batting average against him. Pitched respectably in the earlier rounds this postseason, too. Now he had Ohtani in the hole 1-2. The next launch had to settle for landing a few rows up the left field bleachers.

Well, what did you expect? You thought Ohtani would hit a third bomb into satellite orbit? The man’s only human, after all.

Here are the guys I feel sorry for other than the Brewers, who ran entirely out of fuel at the worst possible time after such a magnificent season: the Mariners. They finally fought back hard against the Blue Jays who’d threatened to sweep them away in their own Seattle playpen, en route an American League Championship Series fall.

Then, they had an eighth inning to remember Friday: Cal Raleigh leading off with a Game Five-tying home run; then, after back-to-back walks and a hit batsman, prodigal Eugenio Suaárez hitting an opposite-field grand slam four rows up the right field seats. Guaranteeing a Game Six back in Toronto, where they’d swept the Jays out of Games One and Two.

Cal who? Eugenio what? Not even their late-hour of power could erase the magnitude and the impact of the Shoh in Los Angeles.

Go ahead. Review every great single-game postseason performance. Then tell me if they were better than Friday night in Chavez Ravine. Tell me Reggie Jackson seeing only three pitches and hitting every one of them onto or near the el train behind Yankee Stadium in Game Six of the 1977 World Series was a better performance. Now, tell me how many innings he pitched at all in that game.

Tell me Don Larsen’s perfecto in the 1956 World Series and Roy Halladay’s no-no in the 2010 National League division series were better performances. Now, tell me how many home runs they also hit in those games.

I don’t remember Bill Mazeroski, Kirk Gibson, Joe Carter, David Ortiz, and David Freese pitching even in the bullpen in their Big Postseason Games. Nor do I remember Howard Ehmke, Carl Erskine, Sandy Koufax, or Moe Drabowsky dialing the Delta Quadrant at the plate during their postseason pitching virtuosities.

Bob Gibson punched out ten and hit one out in the decisive Game Seven of the 1967 World Series. He did the same thing in Game Four of the 1968 Series. In between was his seventeen-punchout jewel in Game One of the ’68 Series without hitting one into the seats. None of them equal 10+K/3 HR in the same game, either.

(Who the eff is Moe Drabowsky, you say? He the eff is the guy who relieved Dave McNally in Game One, 1966 World Series, and pitched 6.2 innings of spotless, eleven-strikeout, one-hit, shutout relief the rest of the way, launching the Orioles on their surprising sweep of the last-standing Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers. At the plate, alas, Drabowsky went 0-for-2 with a walk and a strikeout.)

I don’t want to leave either the Mariners or the Blue Jays hexed or vexed as they get ready to resume ALCS hostilities. But remember that the Dodgers won the first three NLCS games without Ohtani doing much at the plate. They’re dangerous enough without him. Friday night was a staggering reminder of how dangerous they are when he is on. Whomever wins the American League pennant has a lot of studying to do.