BASEBALL’S UPSIDE-DOWN NEW WORLD: SPENDERS LOSING, MISERS WINNING
As payroll monsters Cohen and Seidler crash, much smaller spenders in Arizona, Cincinnati, Baltimore and, natch, Tampa Bay are thriving along with sensations Carroll and De La Cruz — now, market them
If the postseason began today, TV networks would call advertisers and offer full refunds. Shohei Ohtani, the one universal reason to watch baseball, would be headed back to Japan for the sixth straight October. The Mets would be the most expensive busts in the history of American team sports. Would the Yankees also fall short, sabotaged by Aaron Judge’s torn toe ligament? Would the Padres stand in the ocean breeze, with their projected $275 million payroll, and absorb the laughter of a told-you-so industry? Dodgers, Phillies, Angels, Blue Jays — what if the big spenders go home early?
And imagine these characters in their places: Corbin Carroll and the Arizona Diamondbacks, Elly De La Cruz and the Cincinnati Reds, Luis Arraez and the Miami Marlins, Adley Rutschman and the Baltimore Orioles. Imagine a World Series between the Tampa Bay Rays, currently on a 108-victory pace as they continue to embarrass the billionaires swinging their Bics and checkbooks, and Atlanta Braves, the one major player remaining in the National League even after shedding Freddie Freeman and Dansby Swanson.
To some of us, this is a refreshing shift of storylines in a sport that needs new blood. First shorter game times, now teams and players taking advantage of long-overdue rules changes that reward speed and pace. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Theo Epstein for writing the landmark letter convincing the commissioner, Rob Manfred, that baseball was more boring than sticks, which should merit King Theo his own Hall of Fame wing after previously breaking curses in Boston and Chicago. The New Game is enabling fun disruptions heretofore stuck in the quagmire of MLB’s reluctance to evolve.
For Manfred, this is a rare aesthetic victory in a season when he has reduced game lengths by an average of 33 minutes, from an all-time slog of three hours and 11 minutes in 2021. Scoring is up, stolen bases are a thing again, and no one falls asleep reading a phone at the ballpark. Oh, he’s still a klutz — needlessly blaming Oakland for losing the A’s to Las Vegas, and belatedly saying he regrets not punishing Houston Astros players involved in the 2017-18 cheating scandal. At least he listened to fans and media who said the games were unwatchable. You’ve seen the MLB commercial where actor Bryan Cranston says of the new pitch clock and infield shift ban: “THIS is the game we all want to see — get the ball, pitch the ball, keep the defense on their toes.”
Then, a slogan: “Three New Rules. More Great Action.”
Finally, truth in advertising from the sport that lies.
Yet for Fox, ESPN and TBS — the networks that keep pumping financial oxygen into a sport on a slow decline for decades — a postseason without a traditional marquee team would spell ratings death. It also would expose one of Manfred’s biggest flaws in his nine-year reign, an inability to market young stars and teams on the rise. Regardless of emerging sensations, he can’t begin to match the sales machinery of the NFL and NBA, which command more interest in the offseason — there are people in Bora Bora who can pronounce Wembanyama — than MLB does in the regular season. When baseball has trouble creating conversation pieces in established superstars — the only Ohtani buzz concerns where he’ll play next if he flees Anaheim, as he should — how will it make America aware of Carroll and De La Cruz, two dynamos already making history, let alone the daily drama of the 5-foot-10 Arraez threatening to become the first player to hit .400 since Ted Williams in 1941?
“I believe in myself. I trust myself,” he said.
If only we could trust Manfred to follow up and exploit what he was barking about before the season. When asked if the Padres were wise to carry MLB’s third-largest payroll in one of its smallest media markets, he said of owner Peter Seidler, “The trick for all smaller-market teams has always been sustainability. He’s made a massive financial commitment — personally — to making this all happen. The question becomes: How long can you continue to do that?” The Diamondbacks, Reds, Marlins and Orioles have proved him right thus far. So have the Padres.
Who knew they would stumble into July? They are 5-13 in one-run games and 0-6 in extra innings, part of an eyesore slide that is making the smaller spenders look smarter — especially after the regional sports network that was supposed to help pay the bill, for a roster including five long-term contracts worth at least $100 million, stopped its bank deposits. All eyes are on Seidler, who meant well but doesn’t have nearly the wealth of Steve Cohen to absorb financial losses. He spent lavishly to make San Diego feel good, which doesn’t make sense to cold-climate people who only see the country’s best weather. So far, he is patient. “The ballpark is a place for joy,” Seidler said last week. “People come out here and they want to forget their worries.”
But no one wants to see high-priced clunkers. The lesson: No longer are the teams that spend the biggest fortunes instantly rewarded for their largesse, as Cohen is grotesquely finding out in New York. Not only will he pay a luxury-tax penalty higher than the payrolls of 10 teams, some of those teams might make the playoffs while the Mets crash. Their failures are turning into slapstick comedy that isn’t funny to boobirds who expected more than a 35-42 first half from a $331 million assemblage, which the luxury tax will push to $445 million. Even those employed by Cohen can’t hold back any longer.
“The Mets’ 42nd loss of the year is their most horrific,” play-by-play man Gary Cohen, no relation, shrieked Sunday after they blew a three-run lead in the eighth inning with three walks, two hit batters and a wicked error.
I’m having fun learning about Carroll, who is off to a better 100-game start than Mike Trout. I’m having a blast watching De La Cruz, who has hit for the cycle and been called a “unicorn” and a “beast” during his first 17 big-league games. He has awakened a slumbering baseball town and prompted teammate Joey Votto to compare him to “a young Mickey Mantle,” saying, “He’s the best runner I’ve ever seen, and he has the most power I’ve ever seen, and he has the strongest arm I’ve ever seen.”
Really? Then where is Manfred with the proper promotional blitz? Oh, he was in London, actually believing Euros care about baseball while raising suspicions that free tickets made the stands look fuller for a Cubs-Cardinals series. There is plenty of NBA interest abroad. The NFL has opened some eyes. Baseball, across the pond, is a bastardized form of cricket.
Besides, he has plenty of issues to fix back home. Only 6.2 percent of MLB rosters are comprised of Black players. Vegas could become a problem, not a solution, if owner John Fisher continues his cheap spending practices in a small market that has seen the Golden Knights win the Stanley Cup and the Raiders invest in Super Bowl aspirations. And how does Manfred explain to Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner, whose payroll ranks No. 2 this season, that major-market teams are being one-upped in the standings by the small-market clubs they’ve subsidized for years?
“What really gets me going in a negative way is owners that aren’t putting money into the team when they could, and that’s happened in the past, and that probably happens every year to a certain extent,” Steinbrenner said recently. “That’s what a lot of the owners like me don’t like.”
Now, suddenly, the big spenders could be locked out of October by the Diamondbacks (21st-ranked payroll), Marlins (22nd), Reds (25th) and Orioles (29th). The Rays, in what continues to be a modern miracle and ongoing tribute to brainpower-fed results, have the No. 28 payroll and could win it all. In the end, we’d be fools not to expect behemoths to prevail with large investments over, say, a 10-year period. This could be a mere blip.
But it’s a cool blip, from Arraez’s demonstrative bat flip after a rare home run to De La Cruz’s entertaining back-and-forth with the always effusive Votto. Asked to describe their relationship, the rookie said via a team interpreter: “I admire him, and he admires me back. We have those conversations over and over again.”
From the back of the interview room came a voice. “Hey! Hey! I didn’t say I admired you back,” Votto said. “But I do.”
“I’m mad at you,” said De La Cruz, in English.
Market it, Rob Manfred. It’s ratings sustenance that is made in America, not in an English soccer stadium.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.