OF COURSE, SNELL SIGNS WITH THE DODGERS AS BASEBALL RELEGATES TO 29 TEAMS
Will they break a record for the most consecutive World Series titles, now at five, when Mark Walter spends $182 million for the pitcher who shut them down in 2020 while Sasaki is next on the ledger?
The glory of baseball also leads to the gore. All you need to know about the condition of the major leagues — the Dodgers alone as a one-team colossus, other clubs playing in small stadiums and aching for new homes — is a $182 million pitcher named Blake Snell. He becomes an ace of an all-time behemoth in Los Angeles when his original team, in Tampa Bay, must play in an 11,026-seat microyard and might be moving to Montreal.
Does anyone, beyond lame-duck commissioner Rob Manfred, think this sport has any shot in hell when the collective bargaining agreement expires in two years? Of course, Snell returns to the Dodgers when he was shutting them down in the 2020 World Series.
Thoroughly, he deserved to remain in Game 6 as he held a 1-0 lead for the Tampa Bay Rays, who were trying to force a 3-3 tie. He was removed in the sixth inning by manager Kevin Cash, who promptly watched the Rays lose the game and hand away the title. Why? For what reason? Didn’t Snell have nine strikeouts with no walks on merely 73 pitches? Hadn’t he allowed only two hits?
“I was lost,” Snell said. “I didn't know what to say, what to do. I just remember I called my dad when I got to the hotel. We talked for a minute, and I didn't say much. I didn't have nothing to say. I was like, ‘We really just handed them a World Series.’ That's how it felt.”
Wasn’t it a peculiar decision and an alarming decampment in the losers’ downtrodden history, which now requires a downshift to a Tampa spring-training park before a possible move to Canada or Salt Lake City or Aruba? Snell was dealt that offseason to San Diego, then signed with San Francisco before joining Los Angeles on a five-year deal this week. He is the latest reinforcement of why the Dodgers could win six consecutive Series, or more, when five is the all-time record by the 1949-53 Yankees. The Rays? Their time by the Gulf of Mexico could end soon, thanks to a hurricane that blew down the roof of Tropicana Field and leaves a long-term stadium deal in grave jeopardy.
Snell chose the Dodgers for one reason. It’s not the weather. That would be Shohei Ohtani, the man who deferred $680 million of his contract, and should debut as a pitcher next April after the Dodgers open in his native Japan on March 18 and 19. “That was what Shohei did to help us be able to make sure we could put the best team around him on the field,” said the affluent caretaker, Mark Walter.
Think about MLB’s faint future if you’re walking down the avenue in St. Petersburg. That’s how fans felt in Oakland before the Athletics moved to Sacramento, where they purportedly are waiting for a new Las Vegas stadium in 2028. That’s how they feel on the South Side of Chicago, where a story leaked: The White Sox are speaking to Nashville representatives who’d love the bring the 121-game losers to Tennessee. In a 30-team marketplace, baseball has eight prime operations: the Dodgers, the Yankees and Mets in New York, the Phillies in Philadelphia, the Braves in Atlanta, the Cubs in Chicago, the Red Sox in Boston and the Padres in San Diego. A few parks work as places to watch action and get drunk on summer days and nights. Others are just there. Others are dying.
Imagine the embarrassment of the Rays and Athletics playing on softball fields while the Sox are desperate. “Um, you know, I think the White Sox are in a difficult situation. I think the location of the stadium is tough,” Manfred told Fox Sports. Baseball can’t afford three stumbling mechanisms when the NFL and NBA carry on — in all markets — with revenue sharing and competitive balance. Will Manfred and union boss Tony Clark go to battle for a new system? Warfare could end the sport, recalling when the 1990s were buried with a World Series cancellation and too much strife.
The money piling into Dodger Stadium is maddening. Walter, who still runs Guggenheim Partners on West Monroe Street in Chicago, nods his head and approves the Snell deal as the owner. Which comes after last offseason, when he signed Ohtani for $700 million, Yoshinobu Yamamoto for $325 million and Tyler Glasnow for $136.5 million. All four will be in a monstrous rotation after Dave Roberts won the Series with makeshift sorcery. Snell, with two Cy Young Awards, likely wins the Opening Day start and could be joined by another sizzling free agent, Roki Sasaki. Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin and some version of Clayton Kershaw will serve as, um, backups. Imagine the San Francisco Giants, the fierce rivals, agreeing to pay Snell a deferred amount to pitch for the Dodgers.
Will they win a record 117 regular-season games? Will they win six straight Series? Will anyone leave an open seat in the stadium? The ownership also pays $365 million to Mookie Betts, $162 million to Freddie Freeman and $140 million to Will Smith. If they are joined by the enormity of Juan Soto, who could make $700 million (or more), what is the point of playing six months of games and another month of a postseason?
“We’ll see what happens,” said Mets owner Steve Cohen, who waits with the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies. “We built a great team last year. I fully expect to do the same this year.”
In New York, Soto has suffered a Series loss in the wrong town. The Dodgers already are much better. Why consider life as a perennial also-ran when he can celebrate in Los Angeles with Ohtani, Betts and Freeman hitting in front of him? The news should come next week while Soto has made phony news jabs. “The announcement you’ve been waiting for. What? You were waiting for a different announcement?” he joked online, touring Celsius as his latest endorsement partner.
It makes you wonder why anyone in Chicago attends a Sox game when only one player, Andrew Benintendi, has made as much as $75 million during the Jerry Reinsdorf debacle. It makes you wonder why fans go to Wrigley Field when the Cubs show no interest in, oh, Soto or Corbin Burnes. Here you thought baseball had relegated half its teams.
Try 29.
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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.