From the beginning, the city did its part, when the Rockies arrived in 1993, Denver didn’t hesitate, it showed up immediately and loudly, Coors Field became a destination before the organization had earned it, the Blake Street Bombers turned baseball into a nightly event, Dante Bichette and Larry Walker didn’t just produce offense, they created identity, the game felt alive there in a way expansion teams rarely achieve.

Then came 2007, Rocktober was not just a run, it was a signal, a team caught fire, rode momentum all the way into the World Series, and showed that Denver could matter when the games meant something, that matters because it strips away the usual excuses, the market is there, the fan base is there, the appetite is there, what has been missing is direction.

And that is where this gets uncomfortable, the Monfort family has never been invisible, Dick Monfort speaks, he shows up, he presents as someone who cares deeply about the team and the city, that sincerity is real, and that is exactly why the failure lands heavier, this is not indifference, this is conviction without clarity, and over time, that becomes something worse than neglect, it becomes an organization that believes it is right while consistently being wrong.

The Rockies had a real window, not a theoretical one that analysts like to project, a real one you could feel, back to back postseason appearances in 2017 and 2018, Nolan Arenado in his prime, a roster that for a moment stopped being swallowed by Coors Field and instead learned how to survive it, that moment demanded alignment, it demanded escalation, it demanded that ownership recognize what it had and push, instead, the organization fractured itself.

The extension of Arenado was supposed to signal commitment, what followed exposed confusion, internal doubt, direction that shifted depending on who was speaking, and then the move to the St. Louis Cardinals, a trade that didn’t just send away a franchise player, it told everyone paying attention that the Rockies did not believe in their own timeline, when a player of that caliber leaves not because of market limitations but because of belief, that lands squarely at the top.

What followed has been one of the most confusing stretches of ownership behavior in modern baseball, the Rockies are not cheap, which almost makes this worse, they spend, but they spend without structure, contracts appear disconnected from roster reality, investments are made without a clear competitive arc, messaging remains confident while results drift in a familiar range of irrelevance, this is not Oakland dismantling, this is not Miami cycling, this is not Pittsburgh choosing restraint, this is a franchise operating as if intention alone is enough.

And it shows up in the one place ownership cannot hide, adaptation, for three decades, the Rockies have known that Coors Field fundamentally alters the game, pitching behaves differently, development has to be different, roster construction has to be different, there is no excuse for not having a defined, repeatable model by now, instead, they oscillate, at times they act like the environment does not matter, at other times they overcorrect and let it dictate everything, there is no sustained philosophy, no identity that carries from player development to roster construction to in-game strategy, just reaction.

That is not a front office issue, that is ownership, ownership sets tolerance, ownership sets urgency, ownership decides whether continuity is strength or an excuse, in Colorado, continuity has become insulation, loyalty has been extended past the point where it serves performance, familiarity has replaced accountability, over time, that takes hold into something quiet but destructive, stagnation that feels stable.

The most damning part is this, the fan experience is still strong, Coors Field still fills, the atmosphere still holds, people still show up because baseball in Denver is still a good night out, and ownership has leaned on that, not explicitly, not in a way they would ever say out loud, but in a way that shows up in behavior, the urgency never quite matches the opportunity, the pressure never quite builds to a breaking point, the organization exists in a space where being good enough to draw is allowed to coexist with being nowhere near good enough to contend, that is a choice.

So the question becomes unavoidable, what is the plan, not the public version, not the optimistic framing, the actual plan, the one that connects development, roster construction, spending, and identity into something that can be repeated, after thirty years, there isn’t one.

And that absence shows up in the scorecard, competitive intent lands at 26 because the pushes have been episodic, not sustained, fan alignment sits at 25 because the gap between what is said and what is delivered has widened, especially after Arenado, cultural fit earns a 23 because the roots in Colorado are real but execution continues to lag behind the environment, financial integrity comes in at 25, the money exists but it moves without cohesion, labor and organizational culture sits at 25, where loyalty has preserved continuity at the cost of evolution, long term vision is a 26 because there is still no repeatable model for winning at altitude, integrity and accountability lands at 24, absent scandal but marked by explanations that circle issues rather than confront them, relationship to history is a 24, with 2007 still doing too much of the work, impact on the health of the game is a 25, because a strong market living in sustained mediocrity drags on the league more than people admit.

That totals 223 out of 270, above the bottom tier, but that distinction feels technical, because the real difference is this, Oakland was stripped down, Miami resets in cycles, Pittsburgh chose caution and let it harden, Colorado has chosen belief without adjustment.

They are not villains, that would be easier to explain, they are something more frustrating, a franchise with every condition necessary to matter that has spent a decade convincing itself that it already understands why it doesn’t, at some point, that stops being a phase, it becomes identity, and that is why they sit at 27.

History matters here in a way it doesn’t for every franchise, because this isn’t some interchangeable brand trying to find relevance, this is Honus Wagner, this is Bill Mazeroski, this is Roberto Clemente, whose presence still defines how the sport talks about responsibility and humanity. The 1971 Pirates changed what a lineup could look like, and the 1979 team carried a city in a way that went beyond wins and losses, which is exactly why stagnation lands heavier here than it does in a place like Miami, because there is something real underneath it that people still recognize.

The city held up its end of the deal. Public money helped build PNC Park, and it isn’t a relic or an excuse or a place that needs to be replaced, it’s one of the best settings in baseball, a civic jewel that gave ownership a stage most franchises would envy. When Bob Nutting assumed control in 2007, he stepped into a situation that already had stability, a new ballpark, and a fan base that had endured two decades of losing but was still waiting for a reason to believe again.

That reason finally showed up between 2013 and 2015, when the Pirates broke through with three straight postseason appearances and back-to-back ninety win seasons, and that Wild Card game in 2013 felt less like a single night and more like a release of everything that had been building for twenty years. That was the window, the moment when the evaluation really begins, because the question shifts from whether you can get there to what you do once you are there.

Milwaukee leaned in. Tampa leaned in. Pittsburgh stepped back.

The Milwaukee Brewers, under Mark Attanasio, recognized their window and treated it like something that needed to be extended, not protected, trading for major league help, locking in pitching, and running payroll higher than strict market math would suggest, not recklessly but with intent, acting like contention windows are meant to be pushed. The Tampa Bay Rays, operating with even tighter constraints and a worse stadium situation, built an infrastructure that keeps them relevant year after year, reaching a World Series in 2020 and treating limitations like problems to solve rather than ceilings to accept.

Pittsburgh treated the window like something to manage carefully until it passed.

After 2015 there was no aggressive reinforcement, no meaningful payroll stretch to extend the run, and over time the core dissolved, with Andrew McCutchen, Gerrit Cole, and Starling Marte all moved without any real signal from ownership that urgency existed. You don’t need to argue it emotionally because the payroll data tells the story cleanly, with the Pirates sitting in the bottom third, and at times the bottom five, across multiple seasons from 2016 through 2025, all while league revenues climbed past ten billion dollars and franchise values surged.

Milwaukee didn’t behave like that. Tampa didn’t behave like that. Pittsburgh often chose to operate near the floor.

Revenue sharing is designed to support competitive balance, not to protect ownership margins, and when a publicly supported franchise continues to run bottom-tier payrolls during a period of league-wide financial expansion, the question stops being about capability and becomes one of intent. The city helped finance the ballpark, the fans showed up when given a reason, and the league structure provided support, so when ownership leans on language like sustainability and patience, it lands differently when the pattern shows consistent caution at the exact moments when aggression would have mattered most.

Even inside the clubhouse, the tone suggests a higher bar than what has been delivered, with Paul Skenes brushing aside nostalgia about the 2013 Wild Card game as if it represents something insufficient rather than something to be celebrated, which is a subtle but important shift because it shows that the expectation internally may already exceed what ownership has been willing to match.

The scorecard reflects that reality more than any single narrative ever could. Competitive intent sits at 28 because the Pirates did not push when they were close and have not sustained relevance since. Fan alignment lands at 27 because the messaging has emphasized patience while the experience has been cycles of rebuilding. Cultural fit comes in at 24 because Pittsburgh will accept hardship but expects visible effort, and caution rarely reads as effort in a city built on grit. Financial integrity lands at 28 given the combination of revenue-sharing support and repeated bottom-tier payroll positioning during a revenue boom. Labor and organizational culture sit at 26, acknowledging improvements in development but also the erosion that comes with constant turnover. Long-term vision lands at 27, where the philosophy is articulated but not executed at the level demonstrated by Milwaukee and Tampa. Integrity and accountability come in at 26, absent scandal but defined by a consistent pattern of conservatism framed as prudence. Relationship to history earns a 22 because Clemente’s legacy is still respected, and that matters. Impact on the health of the game lands at 27, because a historic franchise in a strong baseball city spending a decade largely outside serious contention affects the credibility of the league.

That produces a composite score of 235 out of 270, placing Pittsburgh above Miami and Oakland but still firmly in the bottom tier.

The distinction is straightforward when stripped down. Oakland reflects contraction and portability, Miami reflects instability and broken trust cycles, and Pittsburgh reflects restraint that has hardened into stagnation, while Milwaukee and Tampa demonstrate that restraint does not have to mean retreat because they operate under the same structural conditions and choose aggression within those limits, whereas the Pirates choose caution, and over time that choice becomes identity, and identity becomes record.

That is why the Pittsburgh Pirates sit at 28.

Not because they are a small market, not because Miami does not “get baseball”, not because the fans are fickle. That’s the lazy take people use when they don’t feel like thinking.

They sit at 29 because this franchise has spent three decades teaching its own market to distrust it. They have trained fans to expect betrayal as a business model. They have won two World Series and still managed to feel like a franchise without a stable identity. That combination should be impossible. Yet here we are.

If the A’s at 30 are the modern symbol of contraction and portability, the Marlins at 29 are the modern symbol of instability as operating philosophy.

And it starts at the top.

The first owner was Wayne Huizenga, the South Florida titan who helped bring baseball to the region. He didn’t arrive as a baseball romantic. He arrived as a businessman with a regional vision and a willingness to spend when the moment called for it. In 1997 he went for it hard. The Marlins won the World Series in their fifth season of existence. That should have been the birth of a generational fan base. It should have been the moment Miami became anchored to baseball the way other cities are anchored to the game.

Instead it became the origin story of cynicism.

Huizenga used the title run and then detonated the roster. The first modern fire sale. He made the argument that he couldn’t keep bleeding cash without a stadium and the revenue streams that come with it. He said you shouldn’t fall in love with a team. That line is one of the most revealing ownership quotes in the sport because it tells you exactly how he saw it. A roster is not a relationship. It is inventory. That teardown didn’t just trade players. It broke the emotional contract with the market before it ever had a chance to harden into tradition.

John Henry owned the club briefly after that. His tenure matters mostly because it reinforces how early the franchise became trapped in the stadium narrative. Henry wanted a ballpark, didn’t get what he wanted, and effectively moved on. The ownership position itself felt temporary. The franchise wasn’t being built. It was being negotiated.

Then Jeffrey Loria arrives, and this is where the story becomes a cautionary tale. Loria was an art dealer, combative, controlling, and widely resented even before he showed up because of how the Expos era ended. Yet in 2003, under Loria, the Marlins won again. A second World Series title in seven years. That should have changed everything. It should have turned the Marlins into a durable institution.

Instead it doubled the damage. Because even a second championship didn’t produce continuity. It produced another cycle.

As contracts came due and payroll pressure rose, the teardown instinct returned. The franchise moved core pieces and reset again. Then came the 2012 moment, and this is where the Marlins become one of the most important ownership case studies in modern baseball.

The stadium.

Marlins Park, now loanDepot Park, sits in Little Havana on the old Orange Bowl site. The symbolism should have been perfect. Miami is a deeply Latin city. Baseball is a deeply Latin sport. A retractable roof solves Miami weather. A modern, baseball-first park should have anchored the franchise for fifty years. But the financing turned it into a civic scar.

The public shouldered the overwhelming share of the cost through long-term bonds. Once interest is counted, the taxpayer burden balloons massively over decades. The deal triggered political blowback, lawsuits, and public anger that outlived the stadium’s construction. It became a national example of how not to build a public-private partnership. And then the franchise compounded the injury by breaking its promise almost immediately.

In the lead-up to the stadium opening, the Marlins sold a new era. Rebrand. Flash. Big signings. Miami identity turned up to eleven. Colorful everything. The home run sculpture. The nightclub vibe. The message was clear. We’re back. We’re serious. This will be different.

Then one bad season later, the roster was gutted.

If you want the human cost of that betrayal, you use José Reyes. He described being encouraged by ownership to settle in Miami, to buy a home, to build a life there, and then being traded almost immediately. You can hear the disbelief in the quote because he was processing the same thing the fans had already learned. This franchise will market hope and then sell the parts.

If you want the quote that should be engraved on the tombstone of Marlins trust, you use David Samson. Samson bragged publicly about how the stadium deal was negotiated and then said the quiet part out loud. He said they didn’t care if nobody came, they would play in front of nobody and still have the money. That line matters because it reveals a worldview. Once the stadium revenue streams exist, fan loyalty becomes optional. That is not how civic ownership speaks. That is how extraction speaks.

And then Loria sells the team for a massive windfall after the stadium is built. That is the part that still burns for people. The public assumes the risk, and the owner captures the upside. That perception is poison, even when the legal contracts are airtight. Fans don’t care about the contract. They care about the morality of the transaction.

Then Bruce Sherman buys the franchise in 2017 and brings Derek Jeter in as the face. This is important because it was supposed to cleanse the franchise. Jeter is a symbol of winning culture, professionalism, and long-term credibility. His presence was supposed to signal stability and seriousness. The new regime promised sustainability. The franchise told Miami, in effect, we understand you don’t trust us. We’re going to earn it back.

And then they immediately pressed the reset button again.

Stanton gone. Yelich gone. Ozuna gone. Realmuto gone. The most marketable core in years was shipped out quickly. Yes, you can defend it as necessary teardown after Loria’s mess. But the problem is Miami has heard that song too many times. Every new ownership group claims it inherited a mess and needs time. The fans have been asked for time since 1998.

Jeter said at the town hall that he couldn’t sit there and say trust me. He was right. And that line is the indictment. A franchise with two championships had reached a point where its ownership had to ask for trust like it was an expansion team. That is not a fan problem. That is an ownership history problem.

Then Jeter resigns. He says the vision for the future is different than the one he signed up to lead. That matters because it suggests the ceiling is still structural. It suggests that even a guy like Jeter, the embodiment of winning expectations, could not reconcile his concept of competitiveness with the ownership group’s appetite for spending and risk.

Now we hit payroll, because the payroll story is the simplest way to show posture.

The Marlins have repeatedly spiked spending in short bursts and then collapsed it. It happened after 1997. It happened after 2003. It happened after 2012. The pattern is not that they never spend. The pattern is that they spend, sell the hope, and then pull the plug.

The 2012 stadium season is the cleanest example. They spent to create the illusion of a new era and then traded it away immediately. That wasn’t just baseball strategy. That was a breach of trust during a public-financed moment when trust was the only currency they had left.

MLB revenues surged past $10 billion annually in the modern era. Franchise valuations have exploded. Miami’s stadium situation is resolved. They have the asset. They have the roof. They have the city branding. The structural excuses are thinner than they used to be.

Now bring in the Tampa Bay comparison, because it destroys the lazy “small market” narrative.

Tampa Bay exists under similar Florida conditions. It has revenue-sharing support. It has stadium uncertainty. It has payroll constraints. And it has been a sustained contender because it treats constraint as a discipline problem, not an excuse to reset the franchise identity every time payroll gets uncomfortable.

The Rays use revenue sharing as competitive oxygen. The Marlins have too often used it as insulation while the reset button gets worn down to the plastic.

Now the scorecard, with the why embedded in each number the same way we did for the A’s.

Competitive Intent and Effort: 29. The Marlins have not demonstrated sustained commitment to staying in a window once it opens. Their history is ignition followed by demolition. Two titles, and still no sustained era. That is the definition of unstable competitiveness.

Fan Alignment and Honesty: 29. The franchise has repeatedly sold a story it did not support with behavior. Stadium promises followed by a roster dump. New ownership promises followed by another teardown. Trust is the product. They have repeatedly shipped it out of town.

Cultural Fit to the Area: 27. Miami is global, Latin, intense, stylish, and skeptical. The Marlins have tried to market their way into that identity through spectacle, color, and vibe. But cultural fit requires authenticity. Nothing kills authenticity faster than a franchise that constantly reboots its identity and treats stars like temporary assets.

Financial Integrity and Revenue Use: 29. The stadium financing left a permanent scar, and the franchise’s spending posture has too often signaled that ownership would rather reset than risk. The perception, fair or not, is that the public assumed risk and ownership captured upside. Perception is reality when you’re trying to build loyalty.

Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture: 28. Constant churn is a workplace condition. Managers turned over. Front offices changed. Star players were moved. Jeter resigning over vision differences matters here. So does the steady league-wide perception that Miami is not a stable destination.

Long-Term Vision and Stability: 28. The Marlins do not build arcs. They build resets. Even the moments that should have anchored stability, two championships and a new stadium, were followed by chaos.

Integrity and Accountability: 28. The organization has repeatedly externalized blame. Market. Attendance. Politics. Miami. Stadium. Accountability is not just admitting reality. It is absorbing responsibility in a way that builds trust. That has been rare.

Relationship to History and the Game: 26. Two championships exist, but the franchise never allowed those moments to become a durable civic identity. In other cities, history becomes a spine. In Miami, history has often been treated like a highlight reel that doesn’t obligate the present.

Impact on the Health of Baseball: 28. Baseball needs Miami to be alive. Miami is a global baseball city, a gateway market, and a cultural engine. The Marlins’ repeated instability weakens the league’s footprint in a region the sport should dominate.

That is why they are 29.

Composite Score: 252 out of 270

Not because Miami cannot support baseball. Miami has proven it can, when it believes. Not because the Marlins cannot win. They have proven they can, twice. Not because the stadium is badly located. It’s in a culturally important neighborhood and it should have been the anchor.

They are 29 because ownership behavior taught the market to stop caring as a defense mechanism.

The A’s at 30 are the story of a legacy institution being shrunk and made portable. The Marlins at 29 are the story of a market that was never allowed to form a stable bond because ownership kept treating the franchise like a short-term project.

Two titles. One stadium. Thirty years.

Still asking fans to trust.

That is the indictment.

And that is why the Miami Marlins sit at 29.

Overall

29. Miami: 252

30. Oakland: 268

Baseball is not a business. It is a business wrapped around something that was never fucking meant to be one, and the people who own it have either forgotten that distinction or decided it no longer matters. That difference is not philosophical. It is structural. Because the moment you treat baseball as nothing more than a business, you begin stripping away the very things that gave it value in the first place.

And here is where the argument collapses under its own weight. You do not own a normal business. You operate under a federally protected antitrust exemption that has existed for over a century, an exemption that has allowed you to control structure, limit competition, dictate franchise movement, and maintain a system that would not survive in a true open market.

So, when you say, “it’s a business,” the obvious question becomes, which kind?

Because if you want to be treated like a business, then act like one. Give up the exemption. Open the market. Let competitors form leagues. Let cities build their own systems. Let the game exist without your centralized control. But do not pretend that doing so would suddenly create a level playing field. You have had a century-long head start, protected and reinforced by the very exemption you now ignore when it is convenient. You control the teams, the territories, the media rights, the farm systems, the infrastructure, and most importantly, the history. You own the timeline.

Yes, there are other leagues, but that does not make your system open. Those leagues exist outside your structure, not within it, and no new team can simply join yours. Entry into Major League Baseball is not determined by merit, demand, or market opportunity. It is controlled, restricted, and granted at your discretion. Entire cities can be locked out indefinitely, not because they lack fans or support, but because they are not invited. That is not how a real market works. In any true business environment, if there is demand, supply can respond. New entrants challenge incumbents. Competition forces evolution. In your world, access is permission-based.

That is not competition. That is control.

And any new league that tried to compete would not be stepping into a neutral environment. It would be competing against a century of protected dominance, entrenched loyalty, exclusive media ecosystems, and a cultural monopoly that was never forced to defend itself in an open system. That is not capitalism. That is a moat you did not build alone. It was fucking given to you, reinforced by law, and maintained without real competition.

With that comes something you keep trying to avoid. Responsibility.

The problem is not that baseball generates revenue. The problem is that ownership and the league have allowed the pursuit of revenue to redefine the purpose of the game. Every time you say “it’s a business,” you are asking fans to lower their expectations, to accept that loyalty is one-sided, that decisions will be made without regard to history, community, or connection, and that the things they care about most are secondary to the balance sheet.

You are asking people to care deeply about something you are treating superficially.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in your full embrace of gambling.

This is the same sport that built its mythology around integrity, that banned players for gambling, that positioned itself as something that had to be protected from even the appearance of compromised outcomes. Now you are partnered with sportsbooks, integrating betting into broadcasts, placing odds alongside the game itself, and turning every pitch into a potential wager.

And when anyone questions it, you fall back on the same line.

“It’s a business.”

No. It’s a contradiction.

You cannot sell integrity as part of the game’s identity while simultaneously monetizing the very thing that historically threatened it. You cannot lecture players about protecting the game while cashing checks tied directly to its risk. You cannot stand on tradition when it suits you and abandon it when it becomes inconvenient to revenue growth.

Because baseball was never just about watching players perform. It was about knowing them, not personally, but through presence, through repetition, through the slow accumulation of moments that turned players into something more than statistics. You knew their stance, their rhythm, how they carried themselves through failure and success, how they existed over the course of a long season that gave you time to understand them.

That required continuity. It required patience. It required a game that was not constantly being optimized for attention or monetization.

Under your version of “business,” players have become assets, roster turnover feels like inventory management, loyalty is replaced by optionality, and contracts define identity more than character. You are not building connection. You are managing portfolios. Fans feel that, whether they articulate it or not. They feel the distance, the lack of permanence, the shift from relationship to transaction, and once that connection erodes, everything else follows.

Fans do not attach to financial metrics. They attach to people. They attach to the player who struggles and finds his way back, to the veteran who hangs on a year too long, to the rookie who arrives without warning and becomes part of a summer. They attach to presence, and presence cannot be optimized, scaled, or reduced to a metric.

When you flatten baseball into a business model, you reduce those moments to content, something to consume, something to scroll past, something interchangeable with everything else competing for attention. Baseball was never supposed to be that. It was supposed to be something you lived with, something that unfolded slowly enough for meaning to take hold, something that did not demand your attention but earned it over time.

A business demands attention. Baseball used to earn it.

There is a difference, and you are erasing it.

Every rule change driven by pace over presence, every pricing decision that pushes families out, every gimmick designed to compete with short-form content, every moment where access to players is turned into media instead of mystery, all of it gets justified by the same line.

“It’s a business.”

No. It is a choice. A choice to trade depth for efficiency, connection for control, long-term meaning for short-term return and this same flawed thinking shows up in another place where it does not belong. Government.

“Run government like a business” sounds efficient and logical on the surface, but it fails for the same reason. A business serves shareholders. Government serves people. A business can cut what does not produce profit. Government cannot decide that certain people or communities are no longer worth serving because they do not generate enough return without abandoning its purpose.

When you apply a business framework to something that exists for public trust, you strip away its meaning. That is exactly what is happening here. You are applying a business model to something that exists as a public cultural asset, something built on shared memory, civic identity, and generational continuity, and in doing so, you are hollowing it out.

The irony is that you still rely on the very things your model is eroding. You rely on nostalgia to sell tickets, on tradition to justify pricing, on history to maintain relevance, while your decisions steadily undermine all of it. You want fans to feel something, but you do not want to be accountable to that feeling.

So, you fall back on the line, “It’s a business.” It is not; it is a fucking excuse.

Because if baseball were truly just a business, fans would treat it like one. They would walk away when the product declines, switch to something better, make rational decisions based on value. But they do not. They stay, they argue, they care, they pass it down, because they know, whether they say it or not, that baseball is not supposed to be just a business.

It is supposed to be something worth protecting from becoming one.

And you, as owners and as a league, are not just operators. You are caretakers of something you did not create, something you do not fully control, and something that will not survive if you continue to treat it as nothing more than a vehicle for return.

Because baseball does not disappear all at once. It erodes, quietly, decision by decision, each one justified the same way, until one day the numbers still look good, the revenue is still there, the business is thriving, and the game, the thing that made all of it matter in the first place, is gone.

The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas fucking A’s sit at 30. Not a surprise… It is the outcome of a nine-category evaluation applied across a decade of ownership behavior. When you line up payroll contraction, revenue-sharing intake, relocation posture, and stewardship philosophy from 2015 through 2025, the result is not ambiguous. The A’s finish last because the trajectory of the franchise bent smaller while the sport grew larger. But before you can understand why they sit at the bottom, you have to remember what they were. Under Charlie Finley in the 1970s, the A’s were disruptive and central. Green and gold uniforms. Mustaches as identity. Three straight World Series titles from 1972 to 1974. They were bold and visible. Under Walter Haas, the tone changed but the responsibility deepened. Haas treated the franchise as a civic trust rooted in Oakland. Rickey Henderson said, “Walter Haas treated us like people. He cared about Oakland.” That is ownership at its highest level. Care, place, responsibility. Then came Moneyball, when Billy Beane and his front office reversed the logic of baseball and forced the entire league to modernize. For decades, the A’s were dominant, eccentric, or revolutionary. They were never irrelevant.

John Fisher’s era defined them differently. Fisher inherited Gap wealth, retail wealth trained to preserve margins and protect assets. That background is not disqualifying in commerce. But baseball ownership is not retail management. It is custodianship of competitive intent and civic memory. From 2015 through 2025, the A’s provided one of the clearest examples of ownership contraction in modern baseball. They made the postseason three straight seasons from 2018 through 2020 with payroll hovering in the $85 to $95 million range. League payroll averages during that stretch exceeded $130 million, but Oakland was within striking distance of viability. Then came the collapse. Payroll dropped near $50 million by 2022, remained near the floor in 2023 and 2024, all while league revenues surpassed $10 billion annually and franchise valuations exploded. Rebuilds happen. That is not the indictment. The indictment is posture. When you dismantle a competitive core during a revenue boom and operate at or near the payroll floor while receiving substantial revenue-sharing distributions that in some seasons likely exceeded your entire active payroll, that is not cycling. That is insulation. The system exists to allow small markets to compete. It does not exist to subsidize dormancy. And if you can watch that pattern unfold and not think what the fuck is this model, you are being polite on behalf of a franchise that stopped being polite to its own city. Then came relocation. Oakland to Sacramento to Las Vegas. Framed as inevitability, but inevitability implies exhausted alternatives. What it felt like instead was incremental leverage. Attendance cited as evidence while payroll shrank. Fan engagement questioned while investment declined. The franchise shifted from civic institution to movable asset. That is where stewardship collapses.

Competitive Intent and Effort: 30. Postseason windows were liquidated rather than reinforced.
Fan Alignment and Honesty: 30. Messaging diverged sharply from behavior as payroll contracted and relocation tension lingered.
Cultural Fit to the Area: 30. A franchise once synonymous with Oakland edge drifted toward abstraction and portability.
Financial Integrity and Revenue Use: 30. Revenue-sharing recipient operating at or near the payroll floor during a league revenue boom.
Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture: 30. Sustained non-competition and instability erode institutional morale and trust.
Long-Term Vision and Stability: 30. The path from Oakland to Las Vegas was turbulence, not arc.
Integrity and Accountability: 29. Houston’s sign-stealing scandal earns sole possession of 30 in pure integrity collapse. The A’s handling of contraction and relocation still reflects defensive ownership posture.
Relationship to History and the Game: 29. The A’s legacy is enormous, but fractured by detachment from place.
Impact on the Health of Baseball: 30. Relocation churn and payroll suppression undermine the credibility of revenue sharing and competitive balance league-wide.

Seven categories at 30. Two at 29. Composite score: 268 out of 270. Overall Rank: 30. This is not about personal dislike, though I will admit plainly that I do not respect this ownership posture. It is about trajectory. Finley made the A’s loud. Haas made them rooted. Moneyball made them revolutionary. Fisher made them smaller. They are last not because they were small, but because they chose smaller.

There are things ownership does that drive me fucking insane, and there are things I deeply respect. John Fisher pisses me off. Watching a franchise with the history of the Athletics shrink into portability while revenue sharing flows and valuations explode makes me angry. Not because they were small, but because they chose smaller. That posture feels extractive. On the other end, I respect Mark Attanasio in Milwaukee. He doesn’t grandstand. He doesn’t posture. He operates in the background. Sometimes I wish he’d show more fire publicly. But the Brewers are serious internally. They draft, develop, pitch, compete. They don’t behave like victims of their market. They behave disciplined. That earns respect.

The Dodgers always want to win. That matters to me. You can hate the imbalance. You can roll your eyes at the payroll. But they behave like October is the expectation. They don’t drift. They don’t dabble. They don’t pretend that finishing second is acceptable. The Yankees, on the other hand, have confused me over the last decade. They’re rich. They’re iconic. They talk championship standard. But the posture hasn’t always matched the mythology. There have been moments of aggression and moments of restraint that feel misaligned with who they claim to be. When you’re the Yankees, drift hits differently. It feels louder.

The Mets under Steve Cohen are dramatic, and I don’t hate that. Baseball needs drama. It needs bold owners. It needs risk. Cohen swings hard. Sometimes he misses. But at least you can’t accuse him of hiding. That chaos has energy. The Braves feel structured. The Rays feel relentless. The Rangers pushed when it mattered. The Orioles endured pain honestly. The Guardians operate lean but sharp. The Padres swung big. The Mariners finally broke through and felt alive again. The Phillies act like contention is the baseline, not the dream.

Then you have teams that float. The Twins at times felt cautious when conviction was required. The Cubs oscillated after their title. The Rockies feel like they exist in their own fog. The White Sox under Reinsdorf often felt stuck between eras. The Angels had generational talent and still drifted. The Nationals won a title and then collapsed into uncertainty. The Diamondbacks rebuilt quietly and struck fast. The Blue Jays hover on the edge of something that never fully locks in. The Cardinals carry legacy heavily. The Red Sox oscillate between bold and baffling. The Astros rebuilt ruthlessly, then damaged credibility, then stabilized into machine-like competence. The Tigers are still trying to find their arc again. The Royals flash, then fade. The Marlins feel perpetually provisional. The Pirates test patience. The Reds tease potential. The Giants feel like they’re searching for their next identity.

Every franchise has a story. I don’t need ownership to be perfect. I actually like tension in the game. I like when an owner is bold enough to be polarizing. I like when markets feel alive because something is happening. What drives me fucking crazy is drift disguised as strategy. What drives me fucking crazy is spin. What drives me fucking crazy is when ownership treats baseball like a margin vehicle while asking fans to treat it like inheritance.

I appreciate seriousness. I appreciate when an owner acts like winning is the job. I appreciate when a franchise knows who it is. I appreciate when mistakes are owned instead of buried. I appreciate when payroll decisions match messaging. You might disagree with my conclusions. That’s fine. That’s part of it. But I’m not grading vibes. I’m grading patterns.

If I call something out, it’s because I care. If I praise something, it’s because I see structure behind it. This isn’t about tearing down for sport. It’s about saying plainly that ownership matters. Some of them are doing it right. Some of them are not. And over the thirty weeks of the season, I’m going to say which is which. Let the chips fall where they may, I hope to spark the discussion about ownership more deeply so they can’t hide like the players, managers, and GMs can’t… John Fisher you drive me fucking crazy, see around opening day…

I’ve always been wired to care more about structure than spectacle. About how decisions get made, who makes them, and what incentives sit underneath everything we see. In my professional life, that’s the real work. Strategy. Alignment. Accountability. Long-term consequences. Outcomes don’t magically appear. They are built, or undermined, by the people at the top and the systems they design.

Baseball clicked for me the same way.

The game on the field is the visible layer. The real story is upstream. That’s where direction is set. Where corners are cut or protected. Where truth either exists or gets managed. I’m less interested in what happens on a random Tuesday night in July than in why it keeps happening year after year.

Every season we argue about the wrong people. Players. Managers. Slumps. Contracts. Effort. Body language. We debate front offices like they’re sovereign entities.

It’s noise.

None of it exists without ownership.

Baseball moves at the speed of money, patience, ego, leverage, and risk tolerance. All of that lives in the owner’s box. Players come and go. Managers get fired. Prospects rise and disappear. Owners stay. They decide when a team is “close enough.” They decide when a rebuild is convenient. They decide when payroll is a tool and when it’s suddenly a burden. They decide when a city deserves a winner and when it should be grateful just to have a team.

We rarely talk about them honestly.

This season, we will.

Who Owns the Game will run for thirty weeks. One owner at a time. Ranked worst to best. Yes, worst first.

And before anyone asks, I already know who sits at the bottom.

It’s the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas fucking A’s and their asshole of an owner.

That isn’t hyperbole. It isn’t emotion for emotion’s sake. It’s a decade-long pattern of extracting value while eroding trust. It’s treating a franchise like a movable asset instead of a civic institution. It’s treating a fanbase like collateral damage in a leverage play.

That’s where we start.

From there, every other ownership group will be evaluated across nine categories:

Competitive Intent and Effort

This is not about wins. It is about whether ownership consistently tried to win in good faith.

Did they avoid deliberate non-competition as a business model. Did they maintain pressure during competitive windows. Did they push when opportunity existed. Did they tolerate mediocrity when aggression was available.

This category measures organizational will.

Fan Alignment and Honesty

This measures whether ownership respects its fan base.

Did they communicate transparently about rebuilds and strategy. Did they blame fans for attendance while cutting payroll. Did messaging match behavior.

Fans are stakeholders. This category measures whether they were treated that way.

Cultural Fit to the Area

Baseball franchises are civic institutions. They sit inside real cities with real histories.

Did ownership understand the character of its city. Did it lean into that identity or flatten it into a generic brand. Did it treat the team as rooted, or as portable.

This measures stewardship of place.

Financial Integrity and Revenue Use

Where did the money go.

Did revenue growth translate into competitive investment. Was revenue sharing reinvested or pocketed. Were financial constraints used honestly or strategically.

This category measures whether ownership behaved like a custodian or an extractor.

Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture

How were players and employees treated.

Did ownership improve conditions when it could. Did it resist basic standards until forced. Did it create a culture of stability or churn.

This category measures how power is exercised internally.

Long-Term Vision and Stability

Did ownership provide coherent direction.

Were front offices allowed to operate with stability. Was there constant churn. Did strategy shift with mood, or follow a sustained plan.

This measures institutional discipline.

Integrity and Accountability

When mistakes happened, what followed.

Did ownership absorb responsibility. Did it correct systems. Did it deflect blame.

This measures moral posture under pressure.

Relationship to History and the Game

Did ownership honor the franchise’s past.

Was history treated as marketing decoration or institutional memory. Were former players respected. Was continuity preserved.

Baseball is a memory sport. This category measures whether ownership understands that.

Impact on the Health of Baseball

Ownership decisions ripple beyond one franchise.

Did behavior improve competitive balance. Did it damage league credibility. Did it strengthen or weaken public trust in the sport.

This measures influence relative to footprint.

Each category will be ranked 1 through 30. No ties. No hedging. The rankings will reflect ownership behavior from 2015 through the 2025 season, weighted toward sustained patterns and recent accountability.

Every team will be judged relative to its resources. Market size matters. Revenue matters. Ownership wealth matters. Stadium control matters. Division context matters. You are not compared to New York if you are Milwaukee. You are compared to the best possible version of Milwaukee. Large-market teams do not get credit simply for having capacity. If you had the means to push harder and chose not to, that will show up.

Ownership is judged on what it did with what it had.

Baseball ownership is not morally neutral. It is a custodial role with ethical obligations. Exploitation that is legal is still exploitation. Indifference is still a choice.

Shame will not come from adjectives. It will come from placement.

If you rank 28th in competitive intent, that means 27 ownership groups tried harder over the last decade. If you rank near the bottom in integrity, that means others handled power better.

If we want to understand why some franchises feel alive and others feel hollow, why fan trust feels thinner than it used to, we have to stop pretending ownership is background noise.

It isn’t. It’s the engine. We begin at the bottom. And we work our way up. See you around opening day John Fisher…

I’ve always been wired to care more about structure than spectacle. About how decisions get made, who makes them, and what incentives sit underneath everything we see. In my professional life, I live in that world. Strategy, alignment, accountability, long-term consequences. You learn quickly that outcomes don’t magically appear. They’re built, or undermined, by the people at the top and the systems they design. Baseball clicked for me the same way. The game on the field is the visible layer, but the real story is upstream. That’s where direction is set, corners are cut or protected, and truth either exists or gets managed. I’m less interested in what happens on a random Tuesday night in July than in why it keeps happening year after year. That’s the lens I’m bringing here, because that’s where the game actually gets decided.

Every baseball season, we argue about the wrong people. We argue about players. About effort, contracts, loyalty, slumps, body language. We yell at managers like they’re generals instead of middle management. We debate front offices as if they’re sovereign entities. It’s all noise. Because none of it exists without ownership. Baseball doesn’t move at the speed of the game on the field. It moves at the speed of money, patience, ego, and leverage. And all of that lives in the owner’s box.

Ownership is the quiet constant in a sport obsessed with the daily churn. Players come and go. Managers get fired. Prospects rise and disappear. Owners stay. They decide when a team is “close enough.” They decide when a rebuild is convenient. They decide when payroll is a tool and when it’s suddenly a burden. They decide when a city deserves a winner and when it should be grateful just to have a team. Yet we rarely talk about them honestly. When we do, it’s usually framed as inevitability. Small market. Big market. Business realities. As if those phrases explain anything at all.

I’ve never been as interested in player stats as most fans are. I don’t obsess over WAR, exit velocity, or projected upside in a vacuum. I’m far more interested in who actually runs the game. Baseball, at its core, is an organizational sport from top to bottom. Drafting, development, payroll philosophy, patience, communication, risk tolerance, and honesty. None of that shows up in a box score, but all of it determines whether those box scores ever matter. The organizational strategy matters. The incentives matter. The people at the top matter. And when ownership gets it wrong, everything downstream suffers. The clubhouse. The fanbase. The city.

If anyone doubts that baseball is an organizational game, they only need to look at the Los Angeles Angels. For years, the Angels had two of the most extraordinary talents the sport has ever seen in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. Generational players. And what did the organization do with them. Almost nothing that mattered.

That wasn’t a failure of talent. It was a failure of structure, vision, and leadership. Trout and Ohtani didn’t fail the Angels. The Angels failed them. Poor roster construction. Short-term thinking. Constant churn. No coherent pitching strategy. No sustainable development pipeline. The presence of those two players should have guaranteed relevance, contention, and credibility. Instead, it exposed how hollow the organization really was from the top down. You can have Mike Trout. You can have Shohei Ohtani. You can have highlight reels, jersey sales, and national attention, and still be fundamentally broken. Talent doesn’t save bad ownership. Stars don’t fix misalignment. Baseball punishes organizations that mistake individual brilliance for organizational health.

This season, Who Owns the Game is me pushing back on all of that. One owner at a time. Thirty weeks. No pretending this is neutral. No hiding behind balance for balance’s sake. This will be my take on the people who actually shape the game. The owners I respect. The owners I don’t trust. The owners who confuse me. And the owners who flat out piss me off. Because if we’re going to keep asking fans to emotionally invest in baseball, to pass it down, to show up, to care, then it’s fair to ask what kind of people are sitting at the top deciding what that investment is worth.

Some owners get it. Mark Attanasio runs a small-market club with discipline and realism, but without contempt for the fanbase. He doesn’t pretend Milwaukee is something it’s not, and he doesn’t treat restraint like a moral achievement. Mark Walter and the Dodgers show what happens when resources are paired with competence instead of chaos. That organization feels intentional. Serious. Like winning is the expectation, not a happy accident. You may not like the imbalance, but you can’t say it’s bullshit.

Then there are owners who test the limits of patience and goodwill. Bob Nutting has turned loyalty in Pittsburgh into an endurance sport. And then there’s John fucking Fisher. This is where pretending this can all be discussed politely breaks down. Because this motherfucker isn’t a market problem. It’s not bad luck. It’s not timing. It’s a case study in treating a franchise like a disposable asset and a fanbase like collateral damage. That deserves to be called exactly what it is.

The extremes matter too. Steve Cohen proved that unlimited money doesn’t guarantee coherence if you don’t understand how baseball actually works. Arte Moreno spent years convincing fans that star power was a plan, when it was often just a distraction from deeper dysfunction. Longevity doesn’t equal wisdom either. Jerry Reinsdorf forces us to ask what happens when ownership outlasts urgency, curiosity, and the willingness to evolve.

This series isn’t about piling on. It’s not about pretending owners are villains by default. It’s about accountability. About patterns. About behavior over time. About whether an owner absorbs risk or exports it to fans and cities. About whether losing is treated as failure or simply folded into the business model. About whether baseball is seen as a civic trust, a competitive pursuit, or a financial instrument wrapped in nostalgia.

I love this game. That’s why I’m willing to say things plainly when they need to be said. Baseball deserves better than being run on autopilot by people who never have to answer for the experience they create. Fans aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being sold hope instead of progress. They know when patience is being abused. They know when the message doesn’t match the behavior. This series is about sitting with that gap and refusing to look away.

Each week, I’ll take one owner and pull the thread. Who they are. How they made their money. What that tells us about how they see the world. What they’ve done right. What they’ve done wrong. And whether, at the end of the day, they act like someone who actually deserves to own a baseball team. Not because they can afford it. But because they understand what it represents.

If we want to understand where baseball is going, why some franchises feel alive and others feel hollow, and why fan trust feels thinner than it used to, we have to stop pretending ownership is background noise. It’s not. It’s the engine. So, let’s finally look it straight in the face and ask the question we avoid every year.

Who owns the game. I will see you in a couple of months…

The Dodgers didn’t just move west in 1958. They abandoned Brooklyn. They ripped themselves out of a borough that loved them like family. Ebbets Field was old and cramped, but it was alive. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, the Dodgers finally winning it all in 1955, the connection between team and community. That bond was real. Walter O’Malley didn’t care. Robert Moses wouldn’t give him the land he wanted for a new stadium, so he packed the team up and went chasing money on the other side of the country. Horace Stoneham and the Giants followed. In one move, the National League turned its back on the city where it was born.

Chavez Ravine wasn’t empty land waiting for baseball. It was a Mexican American neighborhood. People lived there, raised families there, built lives there. They were promised new housing and instead were evicted. Bulldozers tore down homes, and in their place rose Dodger Stadium. My team’s cathedral is built on top of a broken community.

You can feel the history in the place. You can feel the joy too. Koufax’s dominance. Fernandomania. Kershaw’s brilliance. Kirk Gibson limping to the plate in 1988 and launching a home run that stunned a sport. That swing still feels mythical, as if the game itself bent to willpower. Then, decades later, Freddie Freeman steps up in Game 1. Different context, but the same impossible electricity. He swung and time folded. Gibson’s miracle replayed in a new body, in a new era, in the same cathedral. The stadium shook and people roared like the game had never changed.

Those moments are why we fall in love with baseball. They make us believe in magic. But the magic sits on top of betrayal. The cheers echo across ghosts of neighborhoods that were bulldozed, across the silence of Brooklyn fans who never got their team back. Baseball, like America, keeps telling us stories of progress while hiding the costs under the rug.

In 1987 the Dodgers reminded us again how ugly the truth can be. Al Campanis, one of the architects of championship rosters, went on television to celebrate Jackie Robinson’s legacy. Instead, he embarrassed himself and the franchise. He said Black people lacked “some of the necessities” to be managers or general managers. He tried to rationalize prejudice with pseudoscience, even saying Black people were not good swimmers because they lacked buoyancy. He was fired within days, but the damage was already done. It was proof that racism lived inside the walls of an organization that had once broken baseball’s greatest barrier.

dThis is why I write the way I do. Some people call me angry, as if anger is a flaw. I see it as clarity. Nostalgia is comfortable. It lets us forget that progress often comes wrapped in pain. I do not write to destroy joy. I write to keep joy honest.

Look around society. The same patterns repeat. People in power bulldoze neighborhoods for stadiums and call it renewal. Executives say the quiet part out loud, then resign, and we act like the system has been fixed. Politicians claim to honor the past while actively undoing the sacrifices made by those who came before. It is the same story on repeat. If we do not remember, if we do not call it out, we are just waiting for the next version to come along.

The human condition is an odd fucking thing. We crave heroes, but we excuse their sins. We love institutions, but we ignore the damage they cause. We celebrate miracles under the lights while pretending not to see the bulldozers in the shadows. Baseball is a mirror. It reflects the best of us and the worst of us, often in the same inning.

That is why I use baseball as my lens. It is small enough to be personal and big enough to carry the weight of society. It lets me write about Gibson’s home run and Freeman’s echo of it, while also writing about broken promises and prejudice. It lets me say that beauty and betrayal can live side by side, and if you are not willing to admit that, then you are not telling the truth.

So when I sit at Dodger Stadium and the light hits the San Gabriel Mountains just right, when the place feels like heaven, I feel the beauty and the stain at the same time. That is the truth of being a Dodger fan. We got the legends and the miracles. We also inherited the weight of what it cost. And that weight is worth remembering, because forgetting is how we end up repeating it.

I go to Dodger Stadium whenever I can and I love it. My girlfriend is Filipino and she feels at ease there. That matters. Los Angeles is sprawling and fractured. People sort themselves into their own parts of the city. Yet inside the stadium the barriers fade. The concourse is filled with accents, the air carries the sound of Spanish and English blending into the same cheer, and the stands are dotted with jerseys that tell the story of heritage and pride. Dodger Stadium feels different from most other ballparks. It is not about corporate luxury or celebrity sightings. It feels blue collar and family driven. Parents passing the game down to kids, grandparents holding onto traditions, friends laughing and eating together. Outsiders imagine Los Angeles as Hollywood, shallow, and transient. They picture fans showing up in the third inning and leaving in the seventh. That is not the reality I see. The fans arrive early, they settle into their seats, and they stay until the last out.

That is why the Dodgers’ donation resonates. It connects directly to who fills those seats. Los Angeles is immigrant. Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, Filipino, Guatemalan, Black, White, Jewish, Armenian, and more. That diversity shows itself in the merch, in the way the crowd sings, in the languages you hear around you. It is not a homogenous crowd. It is a portrait of the city. The Dodgers did not give this money to make a political point on television. They gave it because they know who they represent.

I think about Fernando Valenzuela when I think about this donation. In the 1980s his screwball carried more than a team. It carried Mexican American pride into a space where it had been invisible. Fernandomania was about more than baseball. It was about community finally seeing itself reflected back from the mound. There was backlash then. Some people called the flags in the stands un-American. They did not see the hypocrisy in celebrating St. Patrick’s Day or Oktoberfest without question while condemning Latino pride. Fernando refused to shrink. He pitched, he won, and he showed a generation that their culture belonged.

I still feel Fernando’s presence in the ballpark today. I see his number on jerseys. I see his face in murals. I see his story carried by families who cheer in Spanish and English side by side. That legacy is not about division. It is about addition. It is about making the definition of American larger and more inclusive.

This is where lived experience comes in. So many people sit in their echo chambers, treating everything as black and white. They do not step into the grey. They do not walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. If your family has never lived with the fear of a knock at the door in the middle of the night, it is easy to say immigration is only about laws. If your family has never wondered how to pay rent when a parent is taken away, it is easy to dismiss the fear. But when you sit in Dodger Stadium and look around, you realize those lived experiences are sitting next to you. The man in the Mookie Betts jersey may carry a story of deportation. The woman in the Clayton Kershaw shirt may be the daughter of immigrants who worked three jobs to buy those tickets. You do not see those stories at first glance, but they are there.

Baseball has always been about perspective. To play the game well you have to anticipate angles, see the whole field, know what comes next. Life asks the same. Too often people reduce everything to a simple call. Safe or out. Right or wrong. But life is lived in the grey, in the space where you recognize someone else’s struggle as valid even if it does not mirror your own.

That is why I keep coming back to Dodger Stadium. It reminds me that heritage is not a threat. It is a contribution. The Filipino families, the Mexican American families, the Korean American families, and everyone else who packs that stadium are not taking away from America. They are America. The Dodgers’ donation to immigrant families is not a corporate PR move. It is a reflection of that truth.

Between innings I sit in the stands and I think about all this. Baseball mirrors the divisions of this country, but it also shows the possibility of unity. You cannot hear the roar of a home run and know if the person cheering next to you voted the same way you did. You just know they are with you in that moment. The Dodgers’ one million dollars will help families hold on. The stadium itself shows what it looks like when a city holds together. That is why I will keep coming back. It is not just a game. It is proof that we can live in the grey and still cheer for the same team.

I like Newsom. I’ll say it. He carries himself with confidence, and when he goes toe to toe with Trump he looks like a grown-up in a room full of chaos. But it frustrates me too. It should not take polish and perfect lines to look competent. It should not feel like brilliance just to appear sane. The bar has been dragged so low that simply showing basic composure feels like statesmanship. And people wonder why so many of us are exhausted.

What wears me down most isn’t even the politicians. It’s the people. People baffle me. They unsubscribe because of who I follow, not what I write. They cut you off not for your arguments but for your associations. They live in bubbles so airtight that fact and fiction don’t matter anymore. They’ll dismiss doctors and scientists and trust whatever bullshit they find on the internet. They celebrate their own ignorance, proud of it, waving it like a flag. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of people who think their opinion, built on a meme or a podcast, carries the same weight as decades of research. I’m tired of people who would rather burn everything down than admit they might be wrong.

And yet, every so often, something jolts me. When Marjorie Taylor Greene stood with victims, I was impressed. I don’t like her politics. I don’t like the way she operates. I don’t like the chaos she thrives on. But in that moment, she showed a shred of humanity. That doesn’t erase the rest of it, but it reminded me that we used to be allowed to recognize decency in someone we disagree with. Now, even admitting that feels like betrayal. That is how deep the divide is.

Chicago isn’t on fire. I live there half the time. I walk the streets, I see the families on the lakefront, the kids heading to school, the workers rushing to catch the train. California isn’t burning either. I work there a lot. I drive the streets, eat at the restaurants, meet the people. Yes, both places have problems, but they are not the apocalyptic wastelands the talking heads pretend they are. People cling to these lies because they want to believe in collapse. They want to cheer for failure because it gives them an enemy to hate.

That’s the part that pushes me toward baseball. The game is not perfect, but it is honest. It doesn’t care about your politics or your opinions. You can’t fake a .220 batting average. You can’t lie your way into October. Over 162 games, the truth comes out. You either perform or you don’t. You either step up or you fail. And when you fail, baseball doesn’t let you gaslight your way out of it. You own it. You wear it. Then you come back the next day and try again.

I think about Pete Rose, who could not tell the truth until it was too late. I think about Curt Flood, who risked everything because he believed dignity mattered more than comfort. I think about Jackie Robinson, who faced hate every time he stepped on the field and still played the game harder than anyone else. Baseball has always been tied to the real world. It has always reflected the fights, the flaws, and the beauty of this country. It has always been a mirror. But unlike politics, unlike culture, unlike the noise that surrounds us, baseball still shows me that integrity matters.

I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe most days. Either that, or maybe I was lucky for most of my life, protected from just how ugly people can be, and now I’m finally seeing the world as it really is. And I don’t like it. I don’t like the anger, the ignorance, the arrogance. I don’t like the people who cheer for collapse, who embrace cruelty, who confuse lies with strength. Some days I don’t like people at all.

But I keep coming back to baseball. Not because it saves me, but because it keeps me grounded. It reminds me that truth still counts. It reminds me that effort still matters. It reminds me that character still shows. And it makes me believe, even when the world is drowning in bullshit, that reality has a way of surfacing.

This is where I stand. I see the circus. I see the president screaming his lies, I see the polished governors sparring with him, I see the people tearing each other apart. I am angry and I am tired, but I refuse to surrender to ignorance. Baseball is not an escape for me. It is a compass. It points me back to honesty, to discipline, to the idea that failure is not the end as long as you own it and try again. In a world that feels like it has lost its mind, baseball is still real. And for now, that is enough.

I felt the change coming years earlier. In 2014, when I spent the year traveling to all continental 48 states, I made it a point to stop in those outposts. Clinton, Iowa. Burlington, Iowa. Mobile, Alabama. Bakersfield and Modesto, California. You could still feel it then. Small town pride. Fans who circled opening day like it was a holiday. People who treated their local ballpark as a gathering place as important as the courthouse or the church. But even then, I could sense baseball was shifting under their feet.

In those towns, you would see teams marketed like miniature versions of the big leagues. Polished branding campaigns, official hashtags, social media blitzes. It was fun, but it also felt artificial, like something was being forced. The intimacy of “our team” was being replaced with “the brand.” These teams were losing the rough edges that made them belong to their communities. They were being streamlined into efficiency machines.

I have been reading the Baseball Joe books (I am going to republish them under Baseball Buddha Press). A boy with a bat and a dream, working his way from the sandlots to the majors. Corny, yes. But they captured something the minor leagues once represented. Possibility. Connection. Hope that stretched from a dusty field to the bright lights. By 2014, I could see that world already slipping away.

There are still MiLB teams today, plenty of them. Some are gems. The San Jose Giants come to mind. The atmosphere there still feels old school. But even a place like that has polish on it now. It has to abide by MLB standards, and MLB standards are about efficiency, not intimacy. What makes a community unique is sanded down so the product is consistent, streamlined, and safe.

Baseball has always been about imperfection. Crooked foul poles. Rusty bleachers. The peanut guy who knows every kid’s name. That is what tied a town to its team. When you strip that away in the name of progress, you might get a shinier ballpark, but you lose the sense of self.

It is not just baseball. America itself has moved this way. Industry left a lot of towns behind, and baseball followed. The mills closed, the factories closed, and eventually the ballparks went dark too. The civic pride that came from working at the plant during the day and watching your team at night has been replaced by a blur of marketing that makes everywhere look the same.

We live in a world of instant gratification now. Everything has to be packaged, sold, and consumed quickly. The simple time of a community gathering around the ballpark has been replaced with hashtags and highlights. In that shift, something deeper than baseball has been lost.

I will never forget the sense of belonging I felt in those towns in 2014. They weren’t glamorous, but they mattered. They mattered because baseball was there. When MLB cut those ties, it didn’t just hurt the fans. It shrank its own soul.

The vanishing towns are proof that baseball isn’t immune from the forces hollowing out American life. It claims to be the national pastime, but more and more it feels like the national brand. And brands don’t bind communities together the way a team once did.

When I watch the game, I cannot help but sit with that contradiction. In nearly every other corner of our lives, failure is treated as a scarlet letter. We do not forgive mistakes easily. You screw up at work, you are written off. You make the wrong choice in a relationship, you are branded as careless or unreliable. In baseball, the same numbers that would get you fired in the real world get you celebrated. People will pay to watch you fail seventy percent of the time.

I think about this when I read the old Baseball Joe stories. They are books that came out more than a century ago, written for kids in the deadball era. On the surface, they are simple, straightforward tales. Joe is the good kid with talent, ambition, and heart. He faces a string of challenges that test him. Rivals undermine him, pitchers strike him out, injuries set him back, and sometimes the crowd doubts him. The lesson is never hidden or dressed up. Joe always has to push forward. He never runs from the failures, even when they cut him down. He meets them, learns from them, and returns to the field. That is what keeps the story alive.

And it is not just Joe. Every ballplayer who has ever laced up a pair of spikes has lived with this reality. Ted Williams, the last man to hit over .400 in a season, still made outs six times out of ten. Babe Ruth struck out nearly 1,400 times. Mickey Mantle used to say that striking out was just part of the game, but he still felt the sting of it every single time. Reggie Jackson, who hit some of the most iconic postseason home runs in history, also held the all-time record for strikeouts when he retired. They called him Mr. October for the hits, not for the failures, but he carried both everywhere he went.

We do not like to admit how much failure builds greatness. In life, people want the shortcut, the highlight reel, the end result without the grind. They want the wins without the bruises. They want the shine without the dirt. That is not how it works. Baseball strips that illusion away. You are going to fail. A lot. The real question is whether you keep walking back to the plate after you do.

When I read Baseball Joe, I see a blueprint for how to handle failure. Joe is not flawless, no matter how cleanly the books try to frame him. He gets rattled. He gets knocked down. But he always comes back. It reminds me that even the fiction written for kids in that era had more respect for the grind than a lot of what we see today. Those writers knew baseball was built on character, not just talent. They knew you could not teach a kid that success came easy, because anyone who had been to a ballpark knew otherwise. You strike out, you make an error, you boot the ball, you lose a step. The question is whether you come back tomorrow with the glove oiled, the spikes tied tight, and the will to do it again.

Somewhere along the line, people lost that lesson. I see it all the time, not just in baseball but everywhere. The first time somebody faces resistance, they fold. They look for excuses. They point fingers. They act like the world is unfair. Fuck that. Of course it is unfair. Of course it is stacked. Of course you are going to come up short. That is life. Baseball does not hide it from you. It throws it right in your face. And if you have the guts to keep showing up, you find out that failure is not the enemy. It is the training ground.

Think about what happens in an at-bat. A hitter goes to the plate, knowing that most likely he is going to fail. That knowledge is baked into the moment. The pitcher is trying to fool him. The defense is set to beat him. The odds are against him from the start. Yet he digs into the box, takes his practice cuts, and waits. He tries anyway. That is courage, even if the word sounds too lofty. People forget that courage is not about certainty. It is about action in the face of failure. Baseball teaches that in every pitch, every swing, every strikeout, and every walk back to the dugout.

I remember when I first started to understand this as a kid. I did not get it right away. When you are young, you think the game is about winning. You think it is about being the hero, hitting the ball out of the park, being the one everybody claps for. Then you strike out, and you feel small. You wonder if maybe you are not good enough. The first time that thought hits you, it can crush you. But if you keep playing, if you keep watching, you learn the deeper truth. You learn that every single player you look up to has gone through the same thing. They failed too, and they just kept coming back.

That lesson carries outside the lines. The world will feed you failure whether you ask for it or not. You will get cut from jobs. You will lose people you love. You will make mistakes that haunt you. There is no clean box score for life, no stat sheet that says, “Look, this balances out.” The failures stick. The question is whether you stop swinging.

I keep going back to Pete Rose when I think about this. He was a man who refused to stop swinging. The guy played with a relentlessness that could not be ignored. But he also failed off the field, badly, and then denied it for years. That is another side of the failure lesson. Baseball teaches us to face it, but sometimes even the fiercest players cannot. Rose’s story is complicated. It is about greatness, but it is also about what happens when you cannot own the weight of your own mistakes. Baseball gave him the chance to be remembered for hustle and fire, and he chose to gamble it away. The game still teaches through his story, but in a different way.

Failure is not just about swinging and missing. It is about what you do afterward. Do you learn? Do you own it? Do you pretend it never happened? Do you try to pass the blame? These questions are not just for ballplayers. They are for all of us. That is why baseball still matters. It is not just a sport. It is a mirror.

When I read Baseball Joe, I see that lesson woven into stories that were written a century ago but still feel current. They were not afraid to show Joe getting beat, struggling, facing adversity. The writers understood that kids needed to see their hero fall short, because falling short is the human condition. That is where the story is. That is where growth lives.

The older I get, the more I understand that baseball is really a long meditation on failure. The season is 162 games for a reason. There is no hiding from it. Slumps come. Errors pile up. Injuries happen. The season grinds. That is why the heroes of the game are not the ones who never failed, but the ones who kept showing up. Cal Ripken showing up every day for more than 2,600 games. Hank Aaron chasing Babe Ruth with quiet consistency while carrying the weight of hate on his shoulders. Bill Buckner taking the heat for one error but still walking back into a ballpark every spring with his head up.

Failure does not define them. Response does.

Between innings, I sit with this thought. Maybe the real measure is not how many times we miss, but how many times we are willing to walk back to the plate, bat in hand, ready to take another swing. That is why I love this game. It is not just about the home runs or the wins in October. It is about the grind, the strikeouts, the empty at-bats, and the courage to keep coming back.

And if you want the truth, that is not just baseball. That is life. Fuck the illusion that you have to be perfect. Perfection does not exist. The game knows it. The game always knew it. That is why baseball is still worth watching, still worth reading about, still worth believing in.

I’m talking about Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption. The crown jewel of baseball’s hypocrisy. The league parades itself as fair and pure, “America’s pastime,” while hiding behind a legal shield that lets owners do whatever the fuck they want. They can block competition, extort cities for stadiums, and screw players, especially the ones without power. And here’s the kicker, this has been baked into baseball from the very beginning. Even those old Baseball Joe dime novels in the 1910s were hinting at how little control players had over their own lives.

The whole mess starts in 1922 with the Supreme Court case Federal Baseball Club v. National League. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a brilliant mind in many ways, dropped one of the most ridiculous rulings in history. He basically said professional baseball wasn’t interstate commerce. That it was just a series of “exhibitions” taking place within local ballparks.

Never mind that teams traveled across state lines. Never mind the money changing hands nationwide. Holmes said this wasn’t really business. Just a pastime. And because of that, baseball didn’t have to follow the Sherman Antitrust Act, the law meant to stop monopolies from crushing competition.

While railroads, oil companies, and steel barons were being hauled into court for running monopolies, baseball was given a free pass. The Supreme Court handed the owners a golden ticket and they’ve been cashing it in for over 100 years.

Most fans don’t realize how far this thing stretches. It’s not some quirky legal footnote, it’s the entire business model of MLB. MLB can stop rival leagues from starting up, or kill them before they gain traction. They control franchise territory, so no other league can say, “Fine, we’ll put a team in Brooklyn” or “We’ll bring pro ball back to Montreal.” Teams can threaten to move, or actually move, and cities have no alternative. You either cough up tax dollars or you lose your team. There’s no competition waiting in the wings. For decades, MLB used the exemption to keep minor league players poor, powerless, and locked into whatever scraps they were given. Remember when they cut more than forty minor league teams in 2020? Thanks to the exemption, those teams had no legal recourse. Zero. And of course, the infamous reserve clause, which basically bound a player to a team for life, was defended under this exemption. Players couldn’t escape it until Curt Flood took his stand in 1969, and even then, it took years of grinding to get free agency.

This isn’t some innocent oversight. It’s a rigged game.

You want proof that people knew the system was rotten even in the so-called “pure days”? Look at the Baseball Joe books from the 1910s and 20s.

These were kid-friendly novels written by Howard Garis under the pseudonym Lester Chadwick about Joe Matson, a young phenom making his way to the majors. The stories were corny, filled with rah-rah patriotism, and meant to inspire. But buried in those dime-store pages were cracks in the façade.

In Baseball Joe in the Big League, published in 1913, Joe learns the hard way that contracts bind him to the club with almost no say. He’s warned about “unscrupulous owners” and shady deals. The underlying tension is clear. Even a superstar like Joe was at the mercy of management. The kid could pitch and hit like a dream, but his rights were paper thin.

It’s almost laughable. A century ago, in pulp novels written for kids, the problem was already in print. Players had no power, owners ran the show, and the game’s structure was tilted. Fast forward to now, and the only difference is the dollar signs are bigger. The rot hasn’t gone away, it’s metastasized.

The courts have had chances to fix this mess, and every single time they’ve punted. George Toolson, a minor leaguer, challenged the system in 1953 after being exiled to the bushes. The Supreme Court admitted the exemption was weird but said, “Eh, it’s Congress’s problem.” Curt Flood, who sacrificed his career fighting the reserve clause, brought the case again in 1972. The Supreme Court openly admitted the exemption was an “anomaly” and “inconsistent,” but still refused to overturn it. They literally said baseball was “special” and deserved special treatment. Congress finally moved a tiny bit in 1998 with the Curt Flood Act, saying MLB players, not minor leaguers, not franchises, not fans, could sue under antitrust laws. That’s it. A sliver of reform while the rest of the monopoly stood untouched.

Every time the system is questioned, the answer is the same. Baseball is “unique.” Translation? Owners are too powerful, Congress is too spineless, and the public loves the game too much to risk burning it down.

Fast forward to today, and you can see the damage everywhere. Forty-plus minor league teams wiped out overnight in 2020. Entire towns lost their ballclubs, livelihoods vanished, and players lost developmental spots. Could those teams sue? Nope. MLB’s antitrust exemption slammed the door in their face. Look at cities like Oakland. The A’s held the city hostage for years, demanding a new stadium. When Oakland wouldn’t play ball, the team bolted to Vegas. Fans had no leverage, the city had no leverage, because MLB’s monopoly means no replacement, no competition, no other way out.

For years, minor leaguers earned poverty wages. The exemption meant they couldn’t organize or sue under the same laws other workers could. Only recently, after public outcry, did MLB throw them crumbs with a union and better pay. But make no mistake, that was a choice, not justice.

And then there’s the sheer hypocrisy. MLB loves to wrap itself in the flag, in nostalgia, in the story of being “America’s pastime.” But what’s more American than competition? What’s more American than the free market? Baseball says, “Not for us.” They play by different rules, then tell us it’s all fair.

You know why this still stands? Money. MLB owners give campaign donations on both sides of the aisle, ensuring no politician actually pushes repeal. Every so often, Congress will huff and puff, hold a hearing, maybe drag Rob Manfred in for a scolding. But nothing changes. Because nobody in Washington wants to be remembered as the guy who “hurt baseball.”

Both Democrats and Republicans have tried to sound tough. Senator Bernie Sanders has gone after MLB for exploiting workers and killing minor league towns. Republican senators have threatened the league after political disputes like moving the All-Star Game out of Georgia. But the threats always fade. Money talks. Fans forgive. The owners keep winning.

I love baseball. I love the smell of cut grass, the pop of the mitt, the way a night game under the lights feels eternal. But I’m not naive anymore. The league is built on a century-old legal fiction that fucks players, fucks fans, and fucks communities.

The exemption should have died long ago. It’s anti-competitive, anti-worker, and anti-fan. It’s not a quirk of history, it’s the foundation of baseball’s business.

And when I think about those old Baseball Joe stories, I can’t help but laugh. A hundred years ago, even in pulp fiction, kids were being told that players had no power and owners held all the cards. The fact that it’s 2025 and we’re still dealing with the same dynamic, that’s not tradition. That’s failure.

Baseball sells fairness on the field while practicing monopoly off it. That’s the great con. And until Congress finds the courage to finally rip the exemption away, the game will stay tilted. Not against hitters or pitchers, but against anyone who isn’t an owner.

So yeah, I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep loving the game. But I’ll also keep calling it what it is. A monopoly dressed up in nostalgia. A pastime protected by politics. A loophole that’s lasted too damn long.

And if you’re not pissed off by that, then you’re not paying attention.

In 2005, the median full‑time worker earned about $1,218 a week. Today that same worker brings in around $1,196 a week. That’s right, earnings have actually dropped over two decades when you account for inflation.

Meanwhile, the price of a ticket? $55–$60 before the apps take their pound of flesh. I hunt for the cheapest seat I can find and still end up paying $50 after the “service,” “processing,” and “convenience” fees. Parking costs vary by city: $60 in Boston, $50 elsewhere, $20 in Milwaukee if you’re lucky. A single bottle of water is $7.50. Grab a hot dog and another snack, and you’re looking at an extra $20–$25. I average $75 a game, and I go to 15–20 games a year across the country. I can afford it, I budget for it. But I can’t fathom how most people keep showing up.

Here’s the kicker, in 2005, the Fan Cost Index - the total for tickets, parking, and snacks for a family of four, was about $164. Now it’s pushing $240 before you even glance at the merch table. That’s a 46% price hike for the same experience, and yet attendance hasn’t tanked.

Why not? Because the game still sells itself on TV. What’s changed is who’s taking those seats.

Meanwhile, the average MLB franchise value has exploded. In 2005, an MLB club was worth roughly $332 million. Today, the average team is worth around $2.6 billion. The richest clubs, Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs, hover in the multi‑billion‑dollar range.

While fans get squeezed, owners reap a jackpot. The minimum-wage fan who used to roast in those iconic bleachers with a glove in one hand and mustard on his shirt? He’s outside now, checking scores on his phone during a double shift. He watches highlights later instead of chasing foul balls live. His connection to the game hasn’t broken, but it’s caught behind glass.

Baseball didn’t padlock the gates. It priced them out. The cheap seats still exist, but they don’t carry the same smell of summer and nostalgia. They smell like corporate “experiences,” $15 pretzels, and overpriced hydration. The voices that gave the stadium its soul are purging out. And one day, when only the ones who treat the park like a luxury market remain, that soul will be gone. You’ll sense the hollow. Even when the box score looks normal.

Cue the slobbering. The hot takes. The manufactured storylines. The endless loop of grainy practice clips that get dissected like Zapruder film. And of course, the fans. Jesus Christ, the fans.

Seventy-five thousand people showed up in Green Bay to watch a fucking practice.

Not a game. Not even a scrimmage. A practice. In shorts. In July. The same drills you could watch at your local high school, but this time everyone’s wearing $180 jerseys and acting like they’re part of the depth chart.

Give me a fucking break.

Because I’m tired of watching the country lose its goddamn mind every time someone throws a spiral in a controlled environment. I’m tired of the “football is back” hysteria like we’ve all been starving in the desert and finally found water, when in reality, we’re just lining up to be spoon-fed the same predictable shit as last year.

I’m tired of the meathead cosplay.

The adults walking around in jerseys like they’re getting the start on Sunday. The guys pounding beers at 10 a.m. and yelling “WE need to protect the quarterback better,” like they’ve ever taken a snap in their life. You’re not on the team. You’re not in the locker room. You’re a consumer wearing a costume.

And yet this is the audience baseball is trying to impress.

This is who MLB is reshaping the game for? The kind of fans who break TVs when the Cowboys lose and cry about their fantasy team while ignoring their kids. These are the people baseball is chasing with pitch clocks, fireworks, and goddamn jumbotron trivia games.

Trying to be football is the most humiliating, insecure thing baseball has ever done. And it’s why we’re losing the soul of the game. I will say it again! Trying to be football is the most humiliating, insecure thing baseball has ever done. And it’s why we’re losing the soul of the game.

Baseball used to be the one sport that didn’t need to perform for you. It didn’t care if you got bored. That was your fault. You didn’t get it? Tough. It didn’t shout. It didn’t sell itself like a product in a Super Bowl ad slot. It just existed. Unapologetic. Rhythmic. Patient. Beautiful.

Now it’s bending over backward to get the attention of dipshits who think a game’s only exciting if someone gets carted off the field.

You’ve got Rob Manfred acting like some insecure junior exec trying to win over the boardroom. “Let’s make the game faster.” “Let’s add more playoff teams.” “Let’s light up the sky every fucking time someone hits a single.” Do you even like baseball?

They’re shaving minutes off games like that’s the problem. But the real issue isn’t the length of the game. It’s that the people running it have no spine. They don’t believe in the product. They’re scared of the silence. They think the fans have the attention span of a flea, and they might be right, but instead of demanding more from the audience, they’re feeding them digital cotton candy and calling it a meal.

You ever watch football with these people? It’s a fucking circus.
The average NFL fan doesn’t care about nuance. They care about gambling odds, fantasy points, and parlay bets. They scream at the television like it owes them something. They break their flat screens over a pick-six and act like it’s the most rational thing in the world.

And let’s not even start on the grown-ass adults who scream “LET’S GOOOO” when a preseason fourth stringer runs for seven yards in a practice game that doesn’t count. Then they drive home feeling like they accomplished something. You didn’t do shit. You got sunburned and spent $240 on concessions. Congrats on being a walking ad for the league.

That’s the crowd baseball wants now?

Baseball, the game of depth, of rhythm, of daily grind, is begging for scraps from a culture that can’t sit still for a full inning. What a goddamn disgrace.

You can’t teach people who don’t want to think. Baseball was never meant for followers. It was meant for people who could handle tension. Who didn’t need a buzzer or a goddamn RedZone channel to tell them what mattered.

A slow walk to the mound in the seventh, that meant something. The shift of the outfield. A guy fouling off six pitches with two outs and the tying run on second. That was drama. Not screaming over a fantasy touchdown from some dude you drafted because ESPN told you to.

But hey, let’s just slap a fucking clock on everything. Let’s turn the game into a fireworks show. Let’s mic up every player and turn the dugout into a podcast. Because we’re not allowed to lose viewers to the machine. We’re not allowed to ask for patience. Not in America. Not anymore.

And still, I’m here.

I’ll be watching until the last out of the season. Because this game still speaks, even buried beneath the corporate garbage. Even with the pitch clock. Even with the LED ads and the “rivalry weekends” and the forced hype.

Because baseball still matters. It still means something. It still makes room for silence. It still rewards you for paying attention.

But I’m done pretending it should change to win over the fans who left. They can stay gone. Let them chant “DEFENSE” with a fucking chicken wing in their mouth. Let them scream at a TV because their team’s kicker missed. Let them put on their $150 jersey like they’re about to suit up.

They don’t deserve this game. And they never did.

There it was. A franchise player, $330 million man, standing at his locker and calling it like he sees it. Harper said he chose Philadelphia because the Phillies weren’t afraid to spend. He likes it that way. He sees spending as a sign that a team wants to win. And on the surface, who could argue with that?

But step back for a minute. Look around the league right now.

The Brewers, a small market team with a modest payroll, have one of the best records in baseball. The Orioles and Guardians are right there too. The Rays continue to work their weird voodoo with a spreadsheet and a staff of interns. The Royals are even showing signs of life again.
Meanwhile, the Cubs are somewhere between a retool and an identity crisis. The White Sox? They’re a full-on disaster. Top to bottom. From front office to field, it’s hard to find a coherent plan, let alone execution.

That’s where this conversation gets complicated.

Because if you’re looking strictly at 2025 standings, it’s hard to argue the league isn’t competitive. Teams like Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Baltimore shouldn’t be thriving in a league without a cap, yet they are. And it’s not just dumb luck. It’s scouting, development, culture, and yes, a little timing.

So what exactly is broken?

That’s the question Harper seems to be asking. From his view, the system worked. Big market. Big paycheck. Big chance to win. But that same system that gave him a shot at immortality has created some strange dissonance.

The Mets spent half a billion and fell apart. The Padres doubled down and tripped over themselves. The White Sox front-loaded a rebuild and got stuck with a car that doesn’t start. The A’s flat-out quit trying. The Pirates might have a future again, but they always seem one losing streak away from selling it off.

And then there’s the Cubs. A team with a marquee market, a shiny new ballpark district, a massive fanbase, and a whole lot of maybes. They spend, but carefully. Just enough to say they tried. Not enough to scare anyone in October. They’re stuck in the middle. Not bad. Not great. In a capped world, that’s exactly where teams like the Cubs might live forever.

That’s what salary caps tend to do. They flatten the extremes. They make being very good harder, but they also make being completely dysfunctional slightly more survivable. It rewards competence. It punishes risk. It makes everything feel a little safer.

And maybe that’s the real threat. Not to the players’ wallets, but to the soul of the game.

Baseball, for all its traditions and stubbornness, has always been a game of imbalance. It’s never been fair. That’s part of its weird beauty. A team like the Royals can win a World Series once every 30 years and have it mean more than three Yankee pennants. The Pirates can shock the league for one year, then fade back into purgatory. The Brewers, always hovering, finally get hot at the right time and suddenly look like contenders. That's baseball.

When you start introducing a cap, you’re not just capping spending. You’re capping volatility. You’re capping chaos. You’re capping dreams in the name of "parity."

And here’s the irony. Right now, in 2025, the game already feels more balanced than it has in a long time. You can’t buy your way to October anymore. Ask Steve Cohen. You have to build, blend, gamble, adjust. The Phillies spend. The Rays don't. Both win.

So what are we really trying to fix?

The players think it’s about control. The owners say it’s about sustainability. The fans? Most of us just want our teams to try. To actually go for it once in a while.

Right now, the Brewers are doing that. The Cubs seem unsure. The White Sox have completely lost the plot. In Philly, Bryce Harper’s still swinging hard, on and off the field.

I don’t know where this all lands. But I know this. Baseball's politics always get loud when the standings are quiet. As long as small-market teams keep winning, the owners will point to them as proof that the system works.

Payroll imbalance isn’t the problem. Apathy is. When teams with resources choose not to care, or when teams without them are forced to fake it, that’s when baseball loses something essential.

Harper might not like caps. Manfred might want cost certainty. But what the rest of us want, especially in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, is for our teams to actually show up.

Whether you spend $300 million or $90 million, just make it count. I root for the Dodgers who spend big and the Brewers who are frugal, both win.

I’ve picked it apart, the rule changes, the branding, the empty rituals dressed up as engagement. I’ve pointed at the pitch clock, the ghost runner, the mic’d-up banter, and said, this isn’t what I signed up for. And I meant it.

But I keep watching.

Because beneath all the noise and polish, there’s still something in the game that hasn’t left me. Not completely. Not yet.

It’s 9:10 p.m. Central and the Dodgers are just getting underway out west. The country’s going quiet, the texts slow down, the work is done, the world starts to unplug. That’s when I flip on the game. No fanfare. No agenda. I just want it on.

And once it is, everything else fades.

The sound of the crowd. The booth guys chatting about pitches or sunflower seeds or some minor leaguer who’s making good. The rhythm of it. The pacing. The way the camera cuts to the pitcher adjusting his cap between every pitch. I don’t even realize how much I’ve missed that until I feel myself relax.

The comfort of the game isn’t just that it’s baseball, it’s that it’s still baseball.

It hasn’t been taken away from me, not entirely. Yeah, the league has changed. The culture has changed. And I’ve called it out because it matters. I believe in integrity. I believe in rhythm. I believe the game should mean something more than clicks and content.

But love doesn’t mean silence. Love means paying attention. Love means pointing to the parts that are fading because you don’t want to lose them.

That’s what I’ve been doing all along. And it’s why I still show up.

I’m not watching to argue about launch angle or pace of play. I’m watching because the Dodgers are on. Because the sound of a game at night still feels like a hand on my shoulder. Because in a world that’s louder and faster and more curated than ever, baseball still knows how to be there.

Even if I don’t make it to the final out, I sleep better knowing it's playing.

Some nights the Dodgers win. Some nights they don't. And some nights I don't even remember what happened. But I remember how it made me feel (Maya Angelou), grounded, present, okay.

That matters more than the box score.

So yeah, I’ve torn the game apart when I needed to. I’ve questioned where it's headed. But I haven’t walked away. Because for me, baseball isn’t just a sport I follow.

It’s the ritual I return to.
It’s the sound of home.
It’s the quiet in the noise.

That’s the comfort of the game.
And that’s why I still love it.

Not the score. Not the box score. Not the highlight reel.

I’m talking about the thinking part of baseball. The tension. The adjustments. The slow-burn chess match that rewarded memory, intuition, and attention to detail. That quiet layer between the pitches, between the innings, between the obvious.

And now? It’s being flattened. Cropped. Clipped. Edited in real time for people who only want the payoff.

The robo-ump is looming. They tested it in the All-Star Game, and it’s only a matter of time. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming. And when it arrives, another level of the game dies. I’m not against accuracy, I want umpires to get calls right. But I love that each umpire has a unique zone. Some favor the high strike. Some squeeze the corners. Some change their rhythm when the game gets tight. Knowing that mattered. Adjusting to it was the game. Pitchers had to work the edges. Batters had to anticipate tendencies. Catchers had to earn calls, frame borderline pitches with just the right glove tilt, just the right stillness. It wasn’t just physical. It was mental. It was an art.

But the game doesn’t want art anymore. It wants speed. It wants simplicity. It wants more plays and fewer pauses.

The pitch clock has taken over. There’s no more time to breathe, to think, to feel the weight of a moment. No more long battles between pitcher and hitter. No more cat-and-mouse. Just wind up, throw, reset, repeat. If you don’t? Here’s a ball. Or here’s a strike. Move along.

The shift is gone too. Because watching a hitter try to beat it, watching a defense dare him to do something different, was apparently too much. The field has been leveled in the name of fairness, but at the cost of complexity. Strategy replaced with predictability. We no longer ask the hitter to adapt, we just change the rules so he doesn’t have to.

Mound visits are capped. Pitching changes are restricted. The three-batter minimum means no more righty specialists, no more cat-and-mouse games in the sixth inning, no more managing with nuance. Extra innings have been shaved down with a ghost runner, making the end feel like a video game bonus round instead of a test of endurance and execution.

Even between innings! Once a moment to absorb what just happened, talk to the person next to you, relive a great play, or just sit quietly in the summer air has become background noise for betting odds and hype videos.

MLB says this is about making the game more exciting, more watchable, more appealing. Maybe it is. But more exciting for who?

Because if you loved baseball for its layers, for the way it asked you to think, remember, anticipate, feel, you’re being nudged aside. The game is being rebuilt for the casual glance, not the focused gaze.

There was a time when you paid attention to the ump behind the plate because it told you something about how the game might go. You watched how the catcher set up and read his body language. You saw a manager slowly walk to the mound and felt the weight of the decision he was about to make. You didn’t need graphics or prompts, you fucking understood the stakes.

That was the game within the game.

And it’s disappearing.

I’ll still watch. I always will. Because it’s still baseball, even now. But I’ll miss what it used to ask of us. I’ll miss the umpire with the wide zone. I’ll miss the catcher who worked every pitch like it was a painting. I’ll miss the middle reliever brought in just to get one guy out in a high leverage situation. I’ll miss the pauses, the pacing, the presence.

Because baseball didn’t need to be faster.

It needed to be understood.

I sit there and wonder, how much more of this beautiful, subtle, thinking person’s game are we willing to give away just to make it easier for people who never really wanted to understand it?

Bud Selig wanted a ballpark. Not just any park, a monument. Something with a roof, something modern. He said the Brewers needed it to compete. He didn’t have to say the rest out loud. We all knew the threat, build it or we might not be here much longer.

And people listened. Fear works. Nostalgia works even better.

So the state passed a 0.1% sales tax across five counties, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha, Racine. No vote. Just a deal. One vote in the legislature made it happen, George Petak flipped, and Racine voters recalled him. It didn’t matter. The tax passed. The park got built.

And we paid for it. Every fucking time we bought a pop or filled up our tanks, we chipped in. It was supposed to be temporary. It lasted 23 years. Twenty-three years of quiet extraction, of everyone carrying a piece of the stadium whether they bought a ticket or not.

And yeah, I went to Miller Park. I still go. I love the game. The view from the concourse, the sound of the crowd, Uecker on the radio—it still hits. And I like the Brewers. I root for them when they’re not playing the Dodgers. But I’ll be honest because of all this, I chose the Dodgers over the Brewers. I never loved the way it went down. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we got cornered. That it was civic blackmail dressed up as pride.

I’m glad the team stayed. But the way it happened? It made it harder to cheer without choking on it a little.

This was a play. And Bud ran it perfectly. He knew exactly how to work public sentiment. He’d seen what happened when a team left. He knew people would do anything to avoid living that again. And he knew they’d forget the details as long as they had a team to root for and a park that didn’t suck.

He was right.

They told us the ballpark would drive growth. That it would revitalize the area. That it was an investment. What it became was a branded fortress surrounded by parking lots. And now that the tax is finally dead? The Brewers are asking for more public money. Again. For renovations. For upgrades. For “the fan experience.”

It's the same pitch in a new voice. And it's just as hollow.

Look at what’s happening in Oakland. The A’s owner, John Fisher, ran the same play only louder. He gutted the team, raised ticket prices, treated the fans like garbage, and let the stadium rot. Then he pointed at the mess and said, See? Oakland doesn’t support baseball anymore.

It was never about support. It was about leverage. And Vegas offered it.

Now they’re headed to a city that’s never supported baseball, to play in a stadium that doesn’t exist yet, using hundreds of millions in public funds. Same game. Different city. The people of Oakland get left with nothing not even a fake goodbye. Just the echo of what used to be a team.

That’s the modern MLB model, threaten, extract, relocate. Wrap it in sentiment and shove the bill under the rug.

I love baseball. But I’m not naive.

This wasn’t a gift to the community. It was a shakedown in team colors. A stadium built on borrowed money and sold as civic duty.

Next time someone says a ballpark is “for the fans,” ask them why the fans don’t get to own any of it.

Then ask who’s stuck holding the fucking bill.