WITH ALL ATTENTION ON DODGERS AND OHTANI, BASEBALL FIGHTS COLLUSION
Other clubs are also-rans and in secret conspiracy by dropping payrolls, which allows the Royals to spend more than the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Rangers and a sport to face 29-team complicity issues
When one team in Los Angeles spends more than $1 billion and nobody else has spent one-fifth as much — and when the Kansas City Royals have invested more than the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and World Series champion Rangers — I see a Scrabble compilation of sport’s ugliest word.
Collusion.
We are not watching the major leagues in 2024. We are watching one behemoth, the Dodgers, and a $700-million slugger with so much robust force that he broke the trainer’s 1080 Sprint apparatus. When Shohei Ohtani wore the motorized harness around his waist, he shattered it when every other teammate wears it. This only adds to the mystique of a man who has driven up the price of my Chavez Ravine seats, including a menu with Dodger Dogs, to $900 each for the home opener — and required us to watch his spring training debut Tuesday.
Of course, he hit his first home run, end of the bat to the opposite field, smiling and slapping Freddie Freeman and taking his first of many trips through the dugout. He went 1 for 3 against the White Sox, who never have spent more than $75 million on a player as Triple-A creepers. All while fans wore Ohtani jerseys that immediately sell out in team clubhouses, as Japanese companies occupied advertising boards at Camelback Ranch. What, did you think he’d hit four homers the first afternoon? We are navigating him as much as scrutinizing. “Context is everything. And with a player like Shohei, sometimes context isn’t brought to light,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I’ve never had a dealing-with-a-world player. I mean, there’s only one Shohei.”
And here he is.
“Arizona factor, a little bit,” he said of the left-field blow.
Nervous? “Not really. Just focused on getting ready for the season,” he said.
Was the crowd fun? “Definitely felt the energy,” he said. “I appreciate it.”
When someone in the media contingent fell, Ohtani stopped and looked attentively before saying, “Ohhhh.”
He is Japanese, a blunder in the sad world of Stephen A. Smith, who kept his job after stepping into the worst margins of xenophobia. “The fact that you got a foreign player that doesn't speak English, believe it or not, I think contributes to harming the game to some degree, when that's your box office appeal,” he said, forevermore. “When you talk about an audience gravitating to the tube, or to the ballpark, to actually watch you, I don't think it helps that the No. 1 face is a dude that needs an interpreter so you can understand what the hell he's saying, in this country. And that’s what I’m trying to say.” What Smith was trying to say: He’s a hater who is offended by a translator.
Yet Ohtani remains the only ballplayer on the brains of Americans who otherwise thirst over leading NFL draft picks, when the selections are two months away, and prepare to gamble $20 billion on a dullish March Madness. And in two years, when baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expires, I will bet anybody that a labor lockout lasts much longer than 99 days. We dealt with that hardship two years ago, which drove more people away from their TV sets, leaving more teams with trauma over local broadcast rights.
Collusion.
Funny how insiders laugh when Scott Boras, now an agent and not a superagent, accepted $80 million over three years that allows Cody Bellinger to leave the Cubs after any season. All that does is create disarray in the mind of a player who needs self-solidarity. Think it’s good for Bellinger or the Cubs to pay him $30 million while pondering if he’ll leave next offseason, in a career of spectacular peaks and valleys? What if he approaches his old MVP status? He’ll be departing Wrigleyville at once, leaving Tom Ricketts with the same lineup hole. Everyone acts as if boss Jed Hoyer went sneaky on Boras. If Bellinger is horrible again, he still makes $30 million next year. And he’ll be elsewhere if he’s great, and the same goes for three other Boras free agents who might take similar “pillow” contracts — Matt Chapman, Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery.
These are dangerous elements, prompting interminable strife in any CBA. How would you like to be the Minnesota Twins and hear an executive chair, Joe Pohlad, announce publicly he has serious payroll limits? Did he violate a labor law by using the media? “We’re not going to go out and spend $30 million on a player right now,” said Pohlad, nephew of owner Jim Pohlad. “The players that are out there right now that probably a bunch of fans are talking about, we are not in the market for those players.” Instead, the Twins spent $4 million on outfielder Manuel Margot, acquiring him from the Dodgers, who will pay $6 million to trim down his salary for a team spending $25 million less than last season. The Twins are among a dozen teams with lesser payrolls.
Collusion.
A wee handful want to win. Most do not. “Clubs have plenty of money to spend, but they’re not spending in a matter that is customary to competitiveness,” Boras told Bob Nightengale of USA Today. “It’s not that they don’t have the ability to pay, but their choice to regress on their payrolls. Nobody is saying the revenues in baseball are not going up, or that every team isn’t getting record revenues than at any time in their history, but you’re seeing clubs that are not in any way pursuing competitiveness in the manner of the past.”
It seems the Red Sox are finished with championships after winning four in 15 years. Fans are livid, asking why owner John Henry is sinking hundreds of millions into helping the PGA Tour. No wonder All-Star third baseman Rafael Devers sounded off: “Everybody knows what we need. You know what we need, and they know what we need. It's just there’s some things that I can’t say out loud. But everybody that knows the organization and knows the game knows what we need. … They need to make an adjustment to help us players to be in a better position to win.”
One owner who loves to spend is John Middleton. Of a loss to Arizona in the National League championship series, the Phillies owner told the Philadelphia Inquirer: “If you’re using the phrase, ‘Get over it,’ it’ll never happen. I mean, ‘09, ‘10, and ‘11 still hurt. You don’t get second chances to win that year. To be up 2-0 and heading to a place where you took three out of four in August and lose two out of three, and then lose two at home, when you have your foot on your enemy’s throat, you kill ‘em. And we didn’t do it. I’m angry. It’s a funny word to use, but when you lose like that, I get angry. And frankly, if people don’t get at least a little angry, I’m not sure you care enough.” But how will Middleton react when Bryce Harper, who still has eight seasons and almost $200 million left on a contract signed in 2019, requests an extra three years and $150 million through … Scott Boras?
Collusion.
Then you have see-through uniforms with shoddy lettering. And the rule keepers shortening the pitch clock to 15 seconds with no runners on base and, down from 20, 18 seconds with men on. “That's a conversation that should have warranted a much longer dialogue than what we had,” said Players Association chief Tony Clark, a busy servant so far. “We voiced those concerns, players voiced those concerns, and yet, the push through of the change to the pitch clock still happened. We just had the biggest adjustment this league has ever seen to length of game. Rather than give us another year to adjust and adapt to it, why are we adjusting again, and what are the ramifications going to be?” An injury epidemic among pitchers?
Collusion.
Work stoppage at 11:59 p.m. EST on Dec. 1, 2026.
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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.