Tag Archives: New York Mets

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.)

The Gallows Poles

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Carlos Mendoza

Carlos Mendoza—taking the fall for a deflation not of his making.

On opposite coasts, two baseball men met their unmakers toward the end of last week. One was a manager, the other was a general manager. Both weren’t exactly the prime issues with their bottom feeders.

Met and Angel fans had reason enough to feel a bit of relief after, respectively manager Carlos Mendoza and GM Perry Minasian. But they also had reason to feel frustrated. Mendoza wasn’t the problem with the Mess. Minasian wasn’t the entire problem with the Angels.

Not even bellying up to a bar and getting blinder-than-Ray-Charles drunk would compel anyone to call Mendoza and Minasian the second coming of Casey Stengel or Branch Rickey. But would the same drunk accuse either of being the second coming of Matt Williams or Frank Lane?

Strap someone into the witness chair under oath and neither he nor she will say Mendoza was mistake-free without facing perjury charges. He was executed two days after a comedy of errors against the Cubs while losing 10-5 prompted enough remaining Met fans in Citi Field and about a hundred thousand times that many out of the ballpark to clamour for Mendoza’s head at last.

But Mendoza wasn’t the man who assembled this menagerie of mismatched Mets. It wasn’t Mendoza who pinked half his coaches last winter. Including and especially pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, long since hired to that job by the National League East-leading Braves. It wasn’t Mendoza who let Pete Alonso walk into the free agency arms of the Orioles or Edwin Díaz walk into those of the Damned Dodgers. It wasn’t Mendoza who traded Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo away.

And it wasn’t Mendoza who brought in successors who’d underperform and/or end up on the injured list along with one of the two best remaining Mets, Francisco Lindor. That’s on president of baseball operations David Stearns. The same David Stearns who turned a far lesser budget into consistent success in Milwaukee, once upon a time. But, now, the same David Stearns who’s proving only that if you give him a superbudget he has an apparent knack for shopping the wrong aisles for the wrong merchandise.

Too many new faces came to equal too many parts to build a car that couldn’t or wouldn’t run. This year’s Mets are baseball’s Yugo. All of a sudden, the sorry condition of the 162-224, 2023-2025 White Sox seem even more like ancient history. The White Sox today are at the top of the American League Central heap. The NL East, and everyone else in the Show, have heaped upon the Mess.

Under interim manager (and former Padres manager turned Mets farm director) Andy Green, the Mets finished play Sunday having lost two out of three, with Kyle Schwarber abusing them to become the fastest in Phillies history to hit his 30th home run of a season.

Don’t say things can only look up from here until or unless Stearns turns last week’s trade of once-successful, lately-struggling pitcher David Peterson to the Cubs into a respectable heap of on-the-fly rebuilding pieces by way of continued trade deadline-approach activity. The optimism isn’t exactly high.

Perry Minasian

Perry Minasian—how far behind his back did the Angels’s owner tie his arm?

On the same day the hapless Mendoza met the managerial gallows, Minasian met likewise on the opposite coast, right before the Angels met their longtime left coast rivals the Athletics and got slapped around, 9-3.

Minasian wasn’t exactly the willful demolition expert the likes of Lane, John Holland, M. Donald Grant, Woody Woodward, Dave Littlefield, Cam Bonifay, and Randy Smith proved to be. In all fairness, he operated under the ten-thumbed handicap of the Angels’s owner, Arte Moreno, whose pre-baseball marketing success compelled him to assemble baseball teams according to marketability first and baseball cohesion second through tenth.

It’s only fair to call Minasian out on such mistakes as almost constantly trading any Angels future for hurrying prospects to the parent club so fast it became debatable whether those who looked like real comers down on what remained of the farm would have better than replacement-level success in the Show.

But it probably wasn’t Minasian who insisted upon such blunderful moves as . . .

* Drafting all pitchers in 2021 and watching most of them become trade pieces, injury-addled, or out of affiliated baseball entirely.

* Firing manager Joe Maddon during a twelve-game losing streak to end a tenure in which Maddon (and perhaps anyone else) couldn’t overcome a lack of pitching depth and a crowd of injuries.

* Going all-in at the trade deadline during Shohei Ohtani’s final Angels season . . . but not dealing Ohtani for the badly-needed reinforcement of prime prospects and major league-ready top talent he could have drawn.

* Putting six players onto the waiver wire a month after that all-in deadline—including two of the deadline acquisitions.

* Continuing not to turn the healthy version of Mike Trout into a trade piece that, like Ohtani, would have brought badly needed youth back to commence or continue that badly-needed team and organisational overhaul.

As The Athletic‘s Sam Blum phrased it, “Minasian inherited a bad organisation and left it a disastrous one.” Really, though, Minasian probably spent his entire Angels tenure, loyal though he was to Moreno, with the proverbial arm tied behind his back.

Moreno still can’t decide whether to invest like the large market owner he is or the small market owner too many former Angel personnel have suggested he’s become. Meanwhile, the Angels spent the first weekend of the post-Minasian era taking two of three from the A’s, with Josh Lowe’s first career salami slice all the runs they needed to win, 4-1.

Will Green prove to be the manager the Mets need to stabilised while retooling? Or, will the Mets hunt other candidates, send Green back to running the farm, and put Stearns on a crazy short leash depending upon his trade deadline work? Will they hire Alex Cora as Green’s permanent successor? Carlos Beltran? Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols? Rob Thomson?

Will John Mozeliak—who worked in the Cardinals front office for the entirety of Pujols’s original eleven seasons there, and built their 2011 World Series winner—use his interim GM time with the Angels for more than just to oversee the draft and the trade deadline? Will he leave his permanent successor, maybe, with Pujols in the manager’s chair after incumbent Kurt Suzuki’s single-year contract expires?

Forgive Mets and Angels fans if they’re putting their heads between their knees instead of answering.

Slaughter on Sunday: the Mets and the Nats

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Mike Yastrzemski

Yastrzemski’s first-inning throw, flying toward the net pole it hit in the bottom of the first in Citi Field. It helped the Mets’s A.J. Ewing hit one of the strangest RBI doubles of the decade Sunday.

Don’t look now, but one pair of National League East teams don’t look quite as beaten down now as their season openings left them. No matter what their fans might tell you.

I give you the Nationals. At the end of April: 15-17. Since the first of May, including Sunday: 22-18. They’re two games over .500 as I write. Even if they’re ten games out of first place, they’re not exactly the most grotesque thing in the nation’s capital, either. (For starters, they never thought of having UFC cage matches outside Nationals Park for an added distraction.)

Now, I give you the Mets. At the end of April: 10-21. Since the first of May, including Sunday: 22-18. They’re still eight games below .500, but they’re not exactly the most grotesque thing in New York anymore, either. For now. Why, there but for the disgrace of that twelve-game losing streak in April might they be fully equal to the Nats. Might.

Both teams acquitted themselves more than admirably Sunday afternoon. Matter of fact, both their opponents could accuse them of human rights violations. The Mets bushwhacked the Braves, 8-1, handing the NL East leaders their second series loss of the year. The Nats might be called in front of the Hague for the 10-1 sinking they laid upon the Mariners.

Each team had to shake off first-inning trouble, though the Mets might have had the slightly tougher time of it. The Nats only surrendered a single run by way of an outfield bobble; Mets starting pitcher Freddy Peralta had to wrench, twist, and turn his way out of a bases-loaded jam, escaping with no damage worse than a sacrifice fly.

From there?

Nats pitcher Mike Mikolas pitched seven shutout innings after taking over for opener P.J. Poulin. Peralta went forth to throw four shutout innings before four Mets relievers pitched four more to finish the Braves. They didn’t have even close to all the fun.

The Mets dropped a four-run bottom of the first on Braves, including and especially A.J. Ewing hitting one of the most unusual RBI doubles you’re likely to see. Not because of how he hit it but because of how Braves left fielder Mike Yastrzemski’s play on it developed.

Yastrzemski retrieved the ball cleanly and threw in, but the ball escaped him and rang off the netting pole behind the third base line, allowing Young (RBI single) and Juan Soto (safe on a previous fielder’s choice bunt) to score. One out later, Ewing came home on Brett Baty’s single.

Except for James Wood abusing Mariners starter Emerson Hancock with a bottom of the first-opening homer, the Nats were quiet at the plate until the fourth. Then rap-bang-bang-crack-bang! Dylan Crews—leadoff double. CJ Abrams—base hit up the middle, first and third. Kiebert Ruiz—RBI base hit, first and second. Daylen Lile—RBI double, second and third. Nasim Nuñez—two-run single.

James Wood

Wood’s leadoff launch off Hancock in the first only started the Nats’s Sunday punching.

Five straight hits and the fun wasn’t quite done. Nuñez ended up on third thanks to a throwing error on a pickoff attempt and came home when Jorbit Vivas grounded out to first.

The Mets tore another pair out of Braves starter Bryce Elder in the fifth when Ewing and Marcus Semien homered back to back to open the inning. Then, they took another pair out of Braves reliever Molina when Soto slashed a two-run single up the pipe. The Nats had an eighth-inning dance yet to come, a pair of RBI doubles and a run-scoring groundout.

What was it all about? The Mets were written off as such a Mess you’d have thought games such as this would be the kind in which they were the battered and not the battering. The Nats have been hitting tons as a team for much of the season but their pitching wasn’t exactly striking fear into the hearts of opposing lineups.

Come Sunday, the Nats’ pitchers posted an ERA of 1.00 for the day while their batters partied like it was 2019. A team whose pitching took a 4.88 fielding-independent pitching rate into Sunday’s game needed and got a big-game performance up and down the staff. Especially considering how brittle their bullpen really looked after blowing their way to a walkoff 11-10 loss to the sad-enough-sack Giants last Wednesday.

The Mets were pitching only slightly better entering Sunday while their team hitting made a lineup of Bob Ueckers resemble a lineup of Willie Mayses. But their pitching on Sunday, too, showed a game ERA of 1.00. And their hitters posted a .371 game batting average. If only they could lather, rinse, repeat all that most of the time from here.

If only.

Things are intriguing enough in their division right now, especially with the Braves learning the hard way why Spencer Strider hasn’t looked his normal self on the mound (elbow inflammation and an injured list stay) and having to continue compensating for Ronald Acuña, Jr.’s health. (Hamstring; injured list.) And, with the gang from Philadelphia being 26-13 since the first of May and 8-3 so far in June.

The Phillies have dates to play the Mets and the Nats this month. The Mets still have a lot farther to go before they can say they’re anywhere near past the worst of it. The Nats are better off than the Mets but still vulnerable on the mound. These Phillies might struggle even in second place but they’re not yet in the pushover class.

Meanwhile, there are those fellows down Miami way. Through the end of May, the Marlins were 26-34. Their June, so far? 10-2, after they outlasted Paul Skenes and the Pirates. But they, too, have more of a question mark than an exclamation point over their heads.

Bank on it. Even with the Mets and the Nats resembling threshing machines on Sunday, there are gears turning in both front offices. And those in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and even Miami won’t necessarily take breathers just yet.

“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.