Pregame Pepper
Did You Know . . .
Almost held hitless on Opening Day, the Mets hit a combined .188 while losing their first four games, all at home . . .
Jon Berti, the fleet infielder acquired from the Marlins by the Yankees, should see lots of playing time at third base now that veteran incumbent DJ LeMahieu has been diagnosed with a fractured right foot . . .
On the same day Edwin Diaz made a triumphant, trumpet-blaring return to the Mets bullpen, brother Alexis Diaz blew a two-run, ninth-inning lead to Washington and picked up the loss for Cincinnati . . .
Pitching brothers Tylor and Trevor McGill missed their first chance to face each other last year when both were sent to the minors on the same day, June 24 — just before a scheduled series between Tylor’s Mets and Trevor’s Brewers . . .
The Oakland Apathetics used 41 different pitchers last season and could do the same this year . . .
After winning consecutive batting crowns (in opposite leagues), Miami’s Luis Arraez went 0-for-6 on Opening Day . . .
In his debut for the Red Sox, ex-Cardinal Tyler O’Neill became the first man in baseball history to hit a home run in five consecutive Opening Day games . . .
With O’Neill traded and both Lars Nootbaar and Dylan Carlson injured, the Cards were woefully short of outfield help when the 2024 campaign started . . .
Former MVP Paul Goldschmidt, in the walk year of his contract, followed a bad spring training (.128 and 20 strikeouts) with a 3-for-4 Opening Day that included a home run.
Leading Off
Nevada, Meet Jackson County:
That Missouri county told the Royals owner, “Build it yourself!”
By Jeff Kallman
Voters in Jackson County, Missouri did what at least one Nevada teachers’ union hoped Nevada voters would have the chance to do. The Jackson County voters told the owners of baseball’s Royals and football’s Chiefs to take their demand that taxpayers continue paying for the teams’ facilities and stuff it.
The now-failed ballot initiative would have extended the county’s 3/8 cent sales tax another quarter century, financing a new Royals ballpark and upgrades to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium. In essence, the voters told the Royals, “If you want to build it, you can pay for it yourselves. And don’t even think about upending established local businesses for it.”
Just a few days before the vote, according to several reports, Royals owner John Sherman promised to kick $1 billion in toward a new ballpark. Chiefs owner Clark Hunt promised to kick in $300 million for the Arrowhead upgrades. Mighty big of them.
“The billionaires don’t finance my follies. Why should I finance theirs?” asked Michael Savwoir, a leader with the KC. Tenants advocacy group opposing the extension. “I think we can all agree it was a pretty shabby job of selling anything, pretty shabby in terms of how it was delivered—the message, the deceit, the strong-arming and the extortion.”
Deceit. Strong-arming. Extortion. Those are polite ways to phrase the manners in which sports owners pry billions out of localities for new playpens for which they’d only have to kick pocket money in, if that.
We’ve come a terribly long way from the days when Walter O’Malley discovered the hard way that New York building and planning tyrant Robert Moses had no intention of letting anyone—not even the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner—build a new privately-owned ballpark or other New York sports facility, if he had anything to say about it.
Nobody’s forcing the Royals’ hands. Kauffman Stadium isn’t anywhere near the rambling wreck into which the Oakland Coliseum was allowed to devolve for so many years. It seems plenty enough re-makeable. When people such as The Athletic’s Nate Taylor write, “[B]ased on Tuesday’s results, the long-term future of both teams, and where the Royals and Chiefs will host their home games, are unclear,” they’re describing false adversity.
“You know what would be cool?” asks Cup of Coffee journalist (and former NBC Sports baseball analyst) Craig Calcaterra. “If someone . . . would frame this as the owners of the Royals and the Chiefs putting their futures in question their own damn selves.”
Because they're the ones claiming they need a billion+ in taxpayer dollars to stay. They’re the ones who wove the fiction that their stadiums are decrepit and unviable when they clearly are not. They’re the ones who introduced the prospect of them leaving town as the ultimate end game. They, to use the parlance of wrestling/internet arguments, worked themselves into a shoot over all of this. They created a phony story about the dire need for public subsidies in order to get some goodies and now, apparently, they believe that story of dire need. Voters didn't do shit to them except call their greedy-ass bluff.
Nevada, take note. Las Vegas’s Tropicana Hotel has closed and faces an October date with the wrecking balls in order to make room for a new Oakland-to-Sacramento Athletics ballpark in Vegas. The A’s will share the Sacramento River Cats’ tiny Sutter Health Park from 2025 until whenever the Vegas ballpark gets built, if it ever gets built.
Remember: The Nevada State Education Association is suing over the legality of state lawmakers and the state’s governor ramming $380 million in tax dollars (before potential cost overruns, of course) through last year. That suit followed a court quashing the NSEA’s bid to force the dough to a public vote on a ballot initiative. Perhaps that court feared Nevada voters, like Jackson County voters, might prove not to have tumbleweed for brains.
A's owner John Fisher and his parrot David Kaval tried and failed to strong-arm Oakland into all but handing them a delicious new real estate development with a ballpark thrown in for good measure. Fisher’s ten-thumbed way has reduced them to rubble enough that they’ve resembled a minor league team for most of the past four or five years. (They opened the new season 1-6.)
There’s perverse poetic justice in the A’s winding up in a minor league ballpark. But it’s still hell to watch for A’s fans who’ve been abused nigh unto death. Sherman isn’t even half as likely to let that happen to his Royals, even if he claims their “last possible season” in Kauffman would be 2030.
“If the Royals are unable to move to a new downtown stadium before 2030,” Taylor writes, “one possible outcome is that the franchise could leave Kansas City altogether for another market willing to build a new ballpark.” Is that a threat or a promise?
Dallas mayor Eric Johnson has already said he’d love the Chiefs to think about moving there. (A homecoming: they were born as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League in 1960.) Who’s to say some other mayor won’t say he or she would love the Royals to think about his or her town?
And who’s to say Sherman won’t think about it? Especially if their taxpayers can be hosed the way Jackson County’s refused to allow?
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Unpredictability is What Makes Baseball Great
By Dan Schlossberg
Joaquin Andujar was right. Asked for a one-word description of baseball, he said, “Youneverknow.”
Less than a week into the new season, that point was made more than a dozen times.
The New York Yankees, supposedly crushed by the elbow injury that sidelined Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole, reeled off five straight wins — three of them in the home of their hated arch-rivals, the Houston Astros.
Seeking to reach their eighth straight American League Championship Series, the Astros struggled at the start until a total unknown named Ronel Blanco beat the Blue Jays April 1 with the earliest no-hitter in baseball history.
Houston ace Justin Verlander, the oldest and highest-paid player in the majors, sat on the sidelines with a shoulder injury while trying to figure how and when he could continue his march to 300 wins (he has 257).
The 41-year-old Verlander, traded back to the Astros by the Mets last August, apparently escaped Flushing just in time, as the 2024 team lost four straight at the start of the season.
The only sure thing in the American League West is a last-place finish by the Oakland Athletics, playing a lame-duck year or two before moving into a new stadium in Las Vegas. But the A’s made news this week by demoting Esteury Perez, who led the American League with 67 stolen bases last year but doesn’t do anything else well.
In the National League, the Los Angeles Dodgers made headlines for all the wrong reasons: a gambling scandal allegedly involving newly-signed superstar Shohei Ohtani; an infield defense so undependable that MVP contender Mookie Betts moved from right field to shortstop in a stop-gap measure; and an injured list dominated by starting pitchers Clayton Kershaw, Walker Buehler, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, and Ohtani.
The Mets were a mess, making only one hit [a Starling Marte homer] against Milwaukee on Opening Day, then dropping four straight, including a 10-inning, 5-0 defeat by Detroit that ruined a nine-inning scoreless duel.
Pittsburgh pirated five straight wins for the first time in four decades, surprising fans who expected another cellar-dwelling season, while the cross-state Phillies gave up a combined 20 runs in consecutive games started by highly-paid aces Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola.
National League batting champion Luis Arraez somehow went 0-for-6 in the first game of the Miami Marlins, while journeyman Nick Martini — only slightly better in the power department — delivered a pair of home runs for the Cincinnati Reds.
Nor could anybody have predicted that Atlanta’s Max Fried, normally a control artist, would have a 40-pitch first inning in Philadelphia that he couldn’t escape — the first time in some 126 starts that he didn’t survive the initial frame.
Jesse Chavez, starting his fifth different stint with the Braves, relieved Fried and picked up the win, continuing a string of excellence in an Atlanta uniform after failing to hook on with the woeful White Sox during spring training.
The only team with two 40-year-old pitchers (Chavez and Charlie Morton), the Braves picked up wins from both in a three-day span.
While all this was going on, players like Brandon Belt and Tommy Pham were still looking for 2024 teams. So were Wil Myers, Jean Segura, Jonathan Schoop, A.J. Pollock, Zack Greinke, Noah Syndergaard, Aaron Loup, Brad Hand, Mark Melancon, and Vince Velasquez.
That proves that being a free agent is not necessarily a panacea for all — especially when more teams are paying payroll than enlarging it.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is national baseball writer for forbes.com, columnist for MLBreport.com and Sports Collectors Digest, contributor to USA TODAY Sports Weekly, writer for Memories & Dreams, and weekend editor for Here’s The Pitch. He’s now on a speaking tour to promote his latest book, Home Run King: the Remarkable Record of Hank Aaron. E.mail ballauthor@gmail.com for more information.
Timeless Trivia: Will Philly Fans Force a Forfeit?
“They don’t boo nobodies; that’s what I’ve been told. I like playing here. It’s a fun place to play.”
— Braves pitcher Spencer Strider about Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park
Fans in Philadelphia treated the family of Atlanta manager Brian Snitker so rudely that he didn’t bring them to this year’s season-opening series in Citizens Bank Park . .
The Phillies themselves cancelled their popular “Dollar Dog” night because alcohol-fueled fans were throwing hot dogs at each other and also at the players on the field . .
If rowdyism continues at Citizens Bank Park, where fans have picked up the nickname “Philadelphia Boo-Birds,” a forfeited game is a real possibility . . .
Since 1954, there have been five forfeits in the majors — none since 1995. Only one of them, by the 1977 Baltimore Orioles, was intentional . . .
In a forfeited game, the score is recorded as 9-0 but all records from the game count.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.