Tag Archives: Los Angeles Dodgers

Heart, stones, and Tarik Skubal

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Tarik Skubal

Tarik Skubal, now a Dodger. Stop screaming, start thinking.

Last Wednesday, Tarik Skubal took the mound for the Tigers, in Comerica Park, with just about the entire world deciding it was going to be his last such appearance before this year’s trade deadline. Is that the way you saw it, with no room for alternative views?

If so, then boy did the Tigers do everything in their power not to prove they wanted to keep him and try to re-sign him.

Skubal did his part. It only began with fighting back from the 2-0 hole to strike Orioles leadoff hitter Tyler Ward out to open the game. That made Skubal the second-fastest pitcher in major league history to reach a thousand strikeouts (he missed Hall of Famer Randy Johnson by one game) and the fastest in Tiger history to do it.

Then, he worked six and two thirds while his mates staked him to a 7-1 lead, scoring three in the third, two in the fifth, and two in the sixth. And what kind of appreciation did the Tiger bullpen show with a mission of protecting a six-run lead with a mere three and a third innings to go, theoretically?

The Orioles absolutely trashed the Tiger pen for two runs charged to Skubal’s jacket after he left the game and seven more to come before they came away with a twelve-inning, 10-9 triumph. The only surprise should have been Skubal not known to have demanded a ticket out of town post haste after that kind of depreciation.

Three days and nights later, Skubal was traded. No thanks for the memories, Tarik. And try not to knock those three delicious prospects—righthanded pitchers  River Ryan (if that doesn’t sound like a movie star’s name, I’m not sure what would) and Brady Smith; outfielder Zyhir Hope—on their asses when you pass them on the way to downtown Dodgerville.

“Here comes the anti-Dodger hysteria,” snarked The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal when the deal got done. “Here comes another round of small-market defeatism. Here comes the lockout, not that its occurrence was ever in doubt.” Defeatism? How about small-market self-immolation? How about small-market brain impairment?

The Tigers just couldn’t summon up the will or the ways to stay near the American League race fringes the rest of this season, never mind summoning up the will and the ways to think that maybe Skubal would be the anchor of a new generation of Tiger competitors. And before you all continue yapping money!money!money! and cap!cap!cap!, how about catching a breath and doing a little serious thinking for a change?

For one thing, serious thinking is embedded just as deeply in the Dodger DNA as reputedly bottomless financial resources. “Skubal to the Dodgers was not a fait accompli,” Rosenthal writes, “nor should it have been.”

Other contenders had big-time prospects to offer. Every team could afford the remaining $9.4 million on Skubal’s contract. How is it that the Dodgers again were the ones to step up? How is it they so often pull off these kinds of moves, even when money is not the deciding factor?

. . . The Dodgers aren’t just doing this with money, though their vast revenues sure help. They are the industry standard, or close to it, in scouting, developing, trading and every other aspect of a baseball operation. They also possess a singular quality that most other teams do not, a fearlessness that could help them become the first team to win three straight World Series since the 1998 to 2000 Yankees.

. . . They’ve exploited their ability to withhold from revenue sharing a healthy portion of their mammoth local TV deal, an arrangement that arose from a settlement in bankruptcy court between MLB and former owner Frank McCourt.

They’ve also exploited their signing of Shohei Ohtani, the greatest player of our generation, to an absurdly deferred $700 million deal that he offered to every club pursuing him in free agency, including his previous one, the Los Angeles Angels.

By the way, the Dodgers landing Skubal’s rental isn’t a guarantee that they’ll get the World Series three-peat they crave. Try to remember (as Rosenthal does) that the Dodgers got knocked off in two straight division series by the Padres and the Diamondbacks, and almost lost a third straight such set to the Padres again.

And, in case you’ve forgotten, winning their second straight Series last fall wasn’t exactly a lopsided demolition derby. The Blue Jays forced them to a seventh game, and it took fortune, surrealism, and survival for the Dodgers to win it at last.

The word around the game according to several known reports is that a number of teams including the National League Central-leading Brewers and the AL East-leading Rays weren’t shy about paying Skubal the rest of the season. So how did the Damn Dodgers—who have the resources as well as the attitudes to think about extending Skubal long and handsomely—end up with the trade season’s big prize?

The aforementioned fearlessness. Never mind the ancient Washington Senators in Damn Yankees singing you gotta have heart. (And stop paying more attention to whatever Lola wants, too.) You gotta have stones, too. The Dodgers have those in as much abundance as they have heart.

“[H]ere’s something else the Dodgers exploit: the risk-averse nature of so many other clubs in today’s game,” Rosenthal continues. ” . . . [T]he dirty little secret of a salary cap and floor system is that it would not guarantee small-market teams success. Many would need to develop more of a killer instinct, an instinct the Dodgers demonstrate time and again.”

They used to say that about the Damn Yankees, too. Around the turn of the century.

For the Mets, Hall of Fame day and play

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Jeff Kent, Andruw Jones, Carlos Beltrán

Former Mets Jeff Kent and Carlos Beltrán sandwich longtime Braves center field vacuum and bomber Andruw Jones at the Hall of Fame Sunday. Today’s Mets even made them proud back in New York. (National Baseball Hall of Fame photo.)

So little has gone right for the Not-So-Amazin’ Mess (er, Mets) this season that even the grumpiest cynic among Met fans must have entered Sunday praying for something, anything. On a day when two former Mets were inducted into the Hall of Fame, one of whom elected to be represented as a Met, the least the Mets could do was win a damn game.

Carlos Beltrán was one of baseball’s center field greats. Not open for debate or debunk. He was a demolition expert at both sides of the plate. He’s one of only five men to hit 400+ home runs and steal 300+ bases. And, as Jayson Stark (The Athletic) hoisted forth, there are only two men in all baseball history to play 40+ postseason games and a) bat .300+; b) reach base for a .400+ on-base percentage; and, slug .600+

Who’s the other guy? Some moon-faced mug named Ruth.

“[W]ith apologies to Reggie Jackson,” Mr. Stark croons, “Beltrán may have been the real Mr. October.” (Sit down and shut up about that 2006 National League Championship Series-ending called strikeout. His Babehood saw and raised, running unconscionably into a World Series-ending out trying like a fool to steal a base he couldn’t have stolen aboard a scooter by then.)

No apologies necessary. Nobody forgets Jackson’s three-bomb Series-winning party in Game Six of the 1977 Series, of course. But take a look at what counts in the long haul, Beltrán over 65 postseason games and Jackson over 77 (WPA: win probability added, not the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal):

Will the real Mr. October please stand up?
  BA OBP SLG OPS WPA
Carlos Beltrán .307 .412 .609 1.021 2.26
Reggie Jackson .278 .358 .527 .885 1.22

It’s almost to wonder how come Beltrán never earned a nickname comparable to Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson’s. Did you know Beltrán is the only player in major league history with 312 stolen bases and an 86.4 percent stolen base percentage? The Man of Steal has a mere 80.7 theft percentage.

Beltran was also as run preventive as the day was long with his glove. Maybe not quite as run preventive as fellow Sunday Hall inductee Andruw Jones—but nobody else was, either. Not even the immortal Willie Mays. Jones and Mays are numeros uno y dos, after whom come Paul Blair, Jim Piersall, Kenny Lofton, and Devon White. If only those four could have hit in the Beltrán-Jones league, never mind Mays.

“When people ask me why I choose this cap,” Beltrán said during his induction speech, referring to the Mets after saluting every team for whom he played, “I have to say this, guys. It’s simple. Every organization shapes your career. New York shaped my life.”

Jeff Kent wasn’t all that much as a very young Met, of course. He was prickly at his best at that time. Dealt from the Blue Jays (for pitching great David Cone), Kent answered a prank from his new teammates with fury. From there to the Indians in another trade and then to the Giants, he built a parallel rep as a solid player (especially at the plate) and a bit of a sour belly.

As a Giant, Kent yanked himself into the books. No, it didn’t hurt that he got to bat with Barry Bonds’s kind of protection, but that kind of protection matters nothing if you don’t or can’t take advantage. Kent took. And how. Six straight seasons of 20+ home runs and 100+ runs batted in; nine straight of 20+ bombs and 90+ steaks.

By his own eventual admission, Kent found it difficult to impossible to let himself be seen as human. Yet when the Contemporary Era Committee elected him last winter, Kent let himself show what he didn’t dare unless he was getting into a scrum with Bonds: real emotion.

He even thanked his Giants manager, Dusty Baker, profusely enough. “He was the right man at the right time for me, and I’m naturally a half-empty guy . . . Looking back, I think I complicated the game a lot more than it needed to be. And Dusty was the opposite. Dusty didn’t complicate the game. He respected it.”

If only the Jeff Kent at the Cooperstown podium could have been available to the Jeff Kent who snapped at pranking teammates, lied about popping wheelies on his motorcycle his final Giants spring training, and chewed out mercurial Dodger teammate Milton Bradley for non-hustle when Bradley was playing on a balky knee that exploded on him on a subsequent baserunning play. Among others.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Kent’s and Beltrán’s former Mets were going to be damned if they were going to let the Dodgers take a third straight from them on Hall of Fame day.

Freddy Peralta, whose shaky season seems to have ensured his Mets tenure will be short and somewhat less than sweet, pitched four decent innings of six-hit, three-run (two earned) ball. The Mets bullpen put the Dodgers on lockdown the rest of the way for the most part.

Then the Mets took what they could get from Dodger starter Emmet Sheehan (a first-inning RBI single from Francisco Lindor) and his nasty little array of heaters and skidders, before he yielded after five innings. Then the Mets got to abuse the Dodger pen starting in the sixth. Jack Dryer walked a pair around one out, but Evan Phillips had the honour of Tyrone Taylor blasting his 1-1 service into the left field seats.

An inning later, a passed ball enabling A.J. Ewing to score led to a two-out walk to Jorge Polanco, which led to Marcus Semien—one of the gaggle of Mets brought aboard for this season only to find themselves playing out of position (and possibly out of their gourds) often enough—banging Will Klein’s 1-1 offering over the left field fence.

All the Mets had to do was keep the Dodgers pinned the final two frames. Luke Weaver squirmed unscathed out of a bases-loaded jam into which he’d squirmed a little too handily in the eighth—Freddie Freeman singling; Tommy Edman singling two outs later; Kyle Tucker hit by a pitch—before Teoscar Hernández bounced one to the third base side that Weaver himself grabbed and threw on from a fadeaway angle to just get the third out. Then Devin Williams found enough of his once formidable self in the ninth to shake off a leadoff single and strike the side out.

Met fans could be forgiven for asking why ex-Mets couldn’t be inducted into Cooperstown every day; or, at least, five out of seven days. Because on the sunny day when two received their plaques, the Mets had the great sense to play like the team they were supposed to have been cobbled, knobbled, and roped together to be this season.

Ron Hunt, RIP: Plunk rock

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Ron Hunt

“He crowds the plate like Raquel Welch crowds a bikini.”–The Pittsburgh Press, about Ron Hunt, long after he left the Mets in a heartbreaking trade.

Many enough in New York were impressed early and often with Ron Hunt, the first Met to earn a starting berth in an All-Star Game (1964, played in newborn Shea Stadium), aside from us kids who believed the comically inept Mets were just that much more human than the aloof, imperial Yankees.(“The Yankees,” Bill Veeck once wrote, “always took the attitude that they were doing you a favour by permitting you to watch them perform.”)

The impressed included Roger Angell, in only his second year of writing literarily virtuosic baseball reports, opinions, asides, and epitaphs for The New Yorker. “The sun’s brightest rays this spring,” Angell wrote, in a May 1963 essay, “have shone around the middle of the [Mets’s] infield.”

Ron Hunt, a skinny twenty-two-year-old second baseman up from the Texas League . . . has quick hands, excellent range to his left, and a terrier’s eagerness for a moving ball . . . [He] has kept his [batting] average close to .300. He reminds me of Pee Wee Reese at the plate—an unassuming, intelligent swinger who chokes up on the bat and slaps singles to all fields.

Hunt ripped a walkoff double for the first Mets win of 1963; original owner Joan Payson sent his wife, Jackie, two dozen roses. He actually finished second to Pete Rose in the National League’s 1963 Rookie of the Year vote. A year later, Hunt impressed Angell yet again. “The Mets are short on heroes,” Angell wrote.* “Their gamecock, their small nova, is Ron Hunt, the second baseman.”

Now in his second season, Hunt appears to be one of those rare ballplayers who improve from year to year. Four years ago, he batted .191 in the low minors. Last year, as a major-league rookie, he hit a solid .272, and so far this young season a stream of modest singles and doubles has kept him constantly above the .300 mark. Originally a third baseman, he now has mastered the pivot at second and he fields with assurance, if not brilliance. His new partnership with Roy McMillan, the veteran shortstop just purchased from the Braves**, cements the Mets’ infield. McMillan has slowed down a step or two and is having trouble at the plate, but he is a tough, tobacco-chewing, old-time pro and a boon to this young team.

He also began mastering the art of taking one for the team, quite literally. His 243 lifetime drills were a modern major league record when he retired in spring 1975. (“He gets good flesh on the ball,” cracked one newspaper once upon a time.) If they’d had walkup music in that era, you could have had a field day picking Hunt’s. He was 1960s/1970s baseball’s great plunk rocker.

In May 1965, Cardinals infielder Phil Gagliano blasted Hunt on a takeout slide as Hunt tried to pick a slow grounder by Hall of Famer Lou Brock. That shoulder separation almost killed a season which began with Hunt missing its first fifteen games with a jammed finger. He came back early that August but the season was more than lost.

After returning to form enough to make the NL All-Stars in 1966, Hunt ran afoul of Mets manager Wes Westrum (Casey Stengel’s successor) and was dealt to the Dodgers with outfielder Jim Hickman for former NL batting titlist Tommy Davis and outfielder/infielder Derrell Griffith, who’d never play a single major league game for the Mets or anyone else again.

Ron Hunt

Hunt’s final Topps baseball card as a Met. He didn’t exactly look the junkyard-dog type.

“The trade broke his heart,” wrote Hunt’s Society for American Baseball Research biographer Tad Myre. “The Hunts loved New York City, the Mets team, and the Mets fans. Ron figured he’d be a Met forever and wanted to be around when the club started to win. It did not help that he had to learn of the trade from sportswriter Dick Young.”

With the Dodgers for a season, the Giants (after a trade) for three, the Expos for three and two thirds, and his hometown Cardinals for shy of a third, Hunt broadened his reputation as a baseball junkyard dog. For seven straight years he led the National League in getting hit by pitches, and for the first six he led the entire Show. He also walked far more than he struck out, but he once said pitchers told him if he got them to 3-1 in the count they might as well drill him.

“He even practised getting hit in batting practise,” said his Expos manager, Gene Mauch. “Hunt has had to fight for everything he got . . . Hunt has a big day, goes four-for-four, the next day he’s out early wanting to work on some things, wanting to do it again, nor being satisfied.”

When his playing career ended, Hunt—who died last Wednesday at 85, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease that may have come from four baseball concussions and “indeterminate” ones when he played high school football—involved himself in farming, liquor and sporting goods stores, and a youth baseball association from 1987-2003 aimed at preparing kids aiming to play college baseball.

The great plunk rocker also made sure that at least one piece of his Mets past stayed with him: he kept two pairs of seats from the late Shea Stadium in his home. (He was also known to have saved a good number of the balls that hit him during plate appearances as well.***)

Hunt was probably one of the most classic examples of the player whose guts you hated with a passion—until or unless he became your teammate. If you made him a friend, you had a friend for life, according to just about every published tribute to the man.

If you made him a husband, as his high school sweetheart Jackie Stewart did, you had what Myre called a marriage “for the storybooks” which produced two children, Tracie and Ronnie. “The happiest day of my life,” Hunt called his 1961 wedding day. “That’s what she told me to say.”

Ron and Jackie Hunt had a habit of making friends among the fans with whom they dwelled off the field. Veteran New York Post writer Ken Davidoff, profiling Hunt and his Parkinson’s battle in 2018, asked whether he wanted Met fans to pray for him. “Just tell them I said hi,” Hunt replied. “I don’t know them. They don’t know me personally. Just tell them I said hi. I’ll never forget you.”

His wife, children, grandchildren, fans, and friends won’t forget him, either. Here’s hoping Hunt’s entry into the Elysian Fields was gentler than his near-customary way of reaching base.

* Both Roger Angell essays quoted were included in the first of his imperative anthologies, The Summer Game. (New York: Viking Press, 1972; Nebraska: Bison Books, 2004.)

** Hunt himself was an acquisition from the Braves, the Mets having bought him after their first tremendously, hysterically horrendous (or should that be horrendously hysterical) season.

*** Don Baylor broke Hunt’s modern-era lifetime plunk record in 1987 and retired with 267. Hall of Famer Craig Biggio broke Baylor’s record in 2005 and retired with 285.)

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

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Dodger Stadium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Bs and a Tuck

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Alex Bregman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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