Do Free-Spending Dodgers Deserve the Blame?
PLUS: NEW UNION CHIEF WASTES NO TIME DECLARING WAR ON GAME
Pregame Pepper
Trea Turner isn’t exactly looking over his shoulder now that the Phillies have signed an 11-year-old Venezuelan shortstop for $1.8 million . . .
Atlanta also signed a new Venezuelan shortstop, who just so happens to be a cousin of Braves right-fielder Ronald Acuna, Jr. . . .
With free agency looming this fall and Scott Boras as his agent, dynamic Detroit starter Tarik Skubal might as well start looking at houses in Los Angeles . . .
Since Jorge Polanco has played 29 games — including five last year — at third base, wouldn’t it make more sense for the Mets to put him there and move Bo Bichette — who never played there — to first base? . . .
The gambling case against Cleveland closer Emmanuel Clase could be moved to October, effectively eliminating any chance of his return this season . . .
Three-time Manager of the Year Bob Melvin, who took the A’s to postseason play six times, is back with the Athletics in the baseball operations department . . .
Before he was traded to Baltimore for Marv Throneberry, Hobie Landrith hit one home run for the Mets — a 251-foot ninth-inning pop fly to right that beat future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn at the horseshoe-shaped Polo Grounds.
Leading Off
It’s Not Just About Blaming Or Punishing The Dodgers
By Sean Millerick
Okay, maybe it is for Giants fans.
Other than that portion of the MLB fanbase, though? I feel confident in my ability to speak for the rest of the downtrodden amongst baseball fans by assuring folks that any angst about the state of the game is not about solely blaming or punishing the Dodgers for anything.
This felt important to say given a bevy of comments that have been out there this off-season. Some of them came in the wake of that second straight championship. Some of them came in the wake of the Dodgers signing Edwin Diaz. Tons of them came in the wake of the Dodgers signing Kyle Tucker. Plenty have come out in relation to any of the recent chatter on the need for a salary cap.
In the end, they all boil down to the same thing. Don’t blame us! Don’t blame the Dodgers. Blame your owner! They’re the problem. Don’t hate us for doing what your teams won’t! It’s not fair!
And I get it. It can sound like sour grapes. There is a bit of that ban the tush push, why allow a Big 3, maybe hockey teams shouldn’t get to take advantage of sunshine and the lack of income tax energy to all the umbrage. As a sports fan from South Florida, I’ve heard plenty of hate over the years, be it for the Heat, the Hurricanes, or the Panthers. As a baseball fan over 30, I grew up hating the Yankees. It’s just what we did, provided we didn’t live in the Bronx. Fans love a villain…and more than a few among us love being the villain even more.
However, the time has come to get defensive about all this defensiveness, because the outrage from the pro-Dodgers/anti-owner camp has gone too far. Actually, myopic might be the better word.
For the way they are framing the argument is just such an infuriating mix of either an extremely privileged position at one end, or unrealistically egalitarian and idealistic on the other. So rather than pitch you my own fix for baseball’s economics, something I’m sure I’ll do at least once between now and whatever day the 2027 season starts (July 4th is my guess), I thought it’d be better to unpack those three core tenets:
Don’t blame the Dodgers, do blame your owners, and fairness.
As said at the top, I don’t blame the Dodgers. If a system allows for something, no reason not to take advantage. If I had to cite one sports parallel that comes to mind for what they have done this off-season with the Diaz and Tucker signings, it’s a quarterback chucking the ball into the end zone on a free play via penalty.
These were no-risk, all-reward moves because they know the end is near for the status quo. As for the overall ability of the Dodgers, along with the less successful super-spenders, to do these things? I’m not sure the Dodgers crack my Top 5 of whom to blame. Tony Clark? Donald Fehr? Rob Manfred? Congress? The MLBPA?
Heck, I’m angrier at former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt than I am with current owner Mark Walter. Driving the team into bankruptcy and that sweetheart media deal is as much to blame for this mess as anything else.
As for needing to blame the owners that don’t spend Dodgers/Mets money…what is it exactly you folks think the rest of us do with our free time? Of course we blame them.
Speaking as a Marlins fan? Off the top of the dome, I can think of maybe five moments in the last 34 years I didn’t enter a season feeling somewhere between irked and outraged with their ownership.
Of course I want Bruce Sherman to spend more on payroll. Bob Nutting should spend more on the Pirates. Jerry Reinsdorf should spend more on the White Sox. I could give you at least 12 more examples.
Lastly, there is that question of fairness. Why would it be fair to punish the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees of the world? Why should the best players be punished for that matter by placing a limit on their salaries, theoretically meaning more money going to the owners?
To this point, I’m sorry to say fairness just doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, baseball is entertainment.
In a perfect world, every single owner would spend as much as he could, with winning being the sole motivation. Unfortunately, at least not until MLB gets much better at gatekeeping (who becomes an owner in the first place), that isn’t happening. Which leaves us with system-wide change as the only option. If the only way to pull the bottom towards the middle is to rein in the top, I’m all for it if it improves my entertainment experience.
That might not be fair, but it is an honest and reasonable take. I have plenty of room in my head and heart for outrage over fair and just worker compensation. I’m just saving it for the slightly more consequential issues like pay for first responders, for teachers, or for equal pay between the sexes.
If you want to keep it to baseball, minor-leaguers probably still don’t make enough money. Baseball players as a collective whole should get an equal share of the profits with ownership.
But weeping over a player’s looming inability to top Juan Soto’s contract and push for sport’s first billion-dollar contract? Not enough hours in the day for me to get there.
Bottom line? No one is out to get the Dodgers. It’s just that plenty of fans want to feel like the deck isn’t stacked up against them before spring training even starts.
Which at the moment, it is.
Sean Millerick is a diehard Miami Marlins fan but still finds cause for hope every Spring Training. He currently writes for @MarlinManiac. You can find him on Twitter @miasportsminute.
Cleaning Up
Say It Ain’t So, Bruce
By Dan Schlossberg
Bruce Meyer is off to a bad start.
His seat in the executive director’s chair of the Players Association was barely warm when he warned the media that a lockout is virtually certain when the current Basic Agreement between labor and management expires on Dec. 2.
What a way to win friends and influence people, Bruce!
Instead of saying he’d work hard to forge a compromise that might stave off the mother of all sports work stoppages, he’s already resigned to the certainty that there’s going to be one.
In my book, that makes Meyer the ayatollah of the union. No smile, no warmth, but plenty of scowls, threats, and war-mongering. To say he’s a hard-ass would be too polite.
Thanks to decades of strong-armed leadership by the likes of Marvin Miller, Donald Fehr, and others, the Major League Baseball Players Association has become the most powerful union in the country.
But it won’t be the first to strangle an industry.
Though baseball is bathing in billions, the greedy union always wants more — even if it means putting teams out of business. Just ask the Tampa Bay Rays, Miami Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates, and even the Milwaukee Brewers.
While it’s true that teams dominated players before the advent of free agency in 1976, the pendulum has swung the other way.
If Meyer’s name sounds familiar, it should; he was the lead negotiator when the union and the teams went into lockout mode in December 2021, the last time the five-year Basic Agreement expired.
The union hired him in 2018, a year after Tony Clark, then executive director, negotiated a pact deemed weak for the players. But they still won an increase in the minimum salary, which jumped from $507.5 in 2016 to $780,000 in 2026.
On the plus side — at least for the players he represents — Meyer has 30 years of experience as a union leader with the NBA, NHL, and NFL. But all three sports have a salary cap, which MLB wants to impose against an iron fist of refusal by its athletes.
Meyer was on the job as chief negotiator five years ago, when the owners locked out the players for 99 days and came within an inch of shortening the 2022 season. Minimum salary alone jumped from $555,000 in 2021 to $700,000 in 2022, with automatic increases of $20,000 every year. Arbitration changes also were part of the last agreement.
As for Meyer, he’s not the most popular guy on the planet. There’s even some dissent within the union, though he survived a reported coup against him when he was only in its No. 2 job.
Frustrated fans, who have picketed, protested, and even showered outfielders with dollar bills during games, will probably react to Meyer the same way they took to the stone-faced Fehr — with nothing to fear but Fehr himself.
The cantankerous Miller somehow wound up in the Baseball Hall of Fame — after seven straight rejections by the Veterans Committee and its various off-shoots. His enshrinement was posthumous.
With Meyer and Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred seemingly polar opposites, there’s little to prevent a head-on collision of two runaway trains. Even a sitting president who wrote “The Art of the Deal” can’t stop it.
The best bet would be bringing in new negotiators on both sides. But that makes too much sense for the idea to be taken seriously.
So enjoy this season. It might be the last one for quite some time.
HtP weekend editor Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ remembers a time when the only strikes fans had to worry about occurred between the white lines. His illustrated 2025 compendium, The New Baseball Bible, includes a history of baseball’s labor wars. Contact Dan via e.mail: ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia: Players Cooperstown Forgot
No matter the month, nothing stirs up a baseball argument like Cooperstown.
Who’s in? Who’s out? And who should be voted in next time around?
As a seasoned observer of the game and as a member of the fraternity that decides membership, I have plenty of opinions — especially about players who seem deserving but never get mentioned.
Here are a few who should be:
John Franco — A durable but diminutive left-hander, he appeared in 1,119 games — a National League record — and had 424 saves, two more than recent electee Billy Wagner. No lefty had more than Franco, who ranks seventh in major-league history.
Lew Burdette — He won 203 games, the same as incumbent Hall of Famer Roy Halladay, and completed 158 of them. The MVP of the 1957 World Series won by the Milwaukee Braves, he was overshadowed throughout his career by Warren Spahn. But that doesn’t make Burdette any less deserving.
Lou Whitaker — From 1977 to 1995, he appeared in 2,390 games for the Tigers, third in franchise history behind Ty Cobb and Al Kaline. He was a better hitter than Alan Trammell, his long-time double-play partner who somehow squeezed into the Hall of Fame ahead of him.
Alvin Dark — As a player, he was a spark-plug shortstop who hit .289 over 14 seasons, then won pennants in both leagues as a manager. He even won with Charlie Finley breathing down his neck in Oakland.
Joe Niekro — Like brother Phil, a Cooperstown incumbent, he depended heavily upon a knuckleball. A durable right-hander whose best years came in Houston, he won 229 games with a 3.59 ERA, a figure many Hall of Famers could not match.
Tommy John — He told me he’d rather have 12 more wins than have a surgery named after him. A lefty who spent more than two decades in the majors, he won 288 games, missing the charmed circle when he became the first elbow surgery patient of Dr. Frank Jobe. He was a good post-season pitcher too.
Rick Reuschel — He won more often than Burdette or Niekro and had a solid 3.37 ERA as well. A heavy-duty starter, mostly for the Cubs, he pitched four shutouts in two different seasons.
Honorable Mention: Rusty Staub, Luis Tiant, Keith Hernandez, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy.
HtP weekend editor Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ has been around for half a century — long enough to see everybody on this list in person. His e.mail is ballauthor@gmail.com.
Know Your Editors
Here’s the Pitch is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [biggentleben@hotmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@outlook.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.
I can't understand why TJ isn't already in the HoF; stats are solid alone but voluntarily undergoing an "experimental" surgery which has become the standard for pitchers' career resurrection was epic. Agree with Dan; Franco and Whitaker well deserving and Dale Murphy if stats as well as exemplary lifestyle on and off the field has value.