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Not like that, though
Baseball Prospectus published a piece on Tuesday, written by Craig Goldstein, that explained how the Dodgers are ruining baseball. Not in the offseason “oh no, a team is spending money!” way that the worst columnists you know latched onto last winter, however.
Goldstein explained that the way the Dodgers treat the regular season — with bored indifference, as a preamble to the postseason they expect to get to as a baseline — is what’s causing problems.
And that kind of thinking can make a certain kind of sense. The league has devalued winning the division, especially if you’re not a top-two seed. The Dodgers likely look at the benefits of being the third-seed division winner compared to the fourth-seed top Wild Card and…shrug. It’s home-field advantage in the Wild Card round either way, so why press things? And that’s precisely the issue. Incentives, famously, are not mandates, so this doesn’t fall solely at the feet of the league. Roberts and the Dodgers own a piece of this too. Their insistence on some sort of extreme utilitarian long view when it comes to chasing a championship has become a detriment to the on-field product, and perhaps crucially, the on-field results. The product can suffer when the results are there (see: Kimbrel, Craig), but when both are diluted it becomes a bigger problem. The club is at least as much of a symptom as a cause, though. If teams show minimal interest in the regular season and its related stakes, it threatens the entire project.
Continuing to roll Tanner Scott out there in high-leverage situations in order to get him right for later, even if the cost is that Tanner Scott could fail two out of three times and let the Dodgers’ opponents walk him off, as he did on Friday and Saturday before getting the job done on Monday, is one example that Goldstein brings up in the piece. The whole thing is worth reading, however, and fits in neatly with what we discussed in this space last week: the postseason is already too big, in terms of the number of teams allowed, and it grants teams like the Dodgers permission to put on less entertaining and meaningful regular season contests. If the playoff field is expanded even further, you might end up with even more teams shrugging their shoulders for six months, and doing so without all the kind of expensive prep work that the Dodgers at least bother with.
Help Rio Foster. Arte Moreno isn’t.
Rio Foster is an Angels’ prospect, and he was a passenger in an accident last week that sent him to the hospital and necessitated brain surgery. A GoFundMe was set up to help pay for medical bills and the cost of transporting Foster back home to his family, and as you can imagine it’s going to need quite a bit of money in order to reach its goal.
The minors might be unionized, but Foster is in critical (but stable) condition, and again, had to undergo brain surgery and has more procedures lined up — even the improved salary he’s on compared to what minor leaguers made even a few years back isn’t nearly enough to cover what’s going on here. Somehow, the Angels aren’t just handling the costs of this: owner Arte Moreno is worth $5 billion, per Forbes, and yet its Angels players like Yusei Kikuchi ($10,000) and Jo Adell ($5,000) contributing heavily to this GoFundMe with a $75,000 goal, rather than anyone in the organization for which covering the entire thing would be a rounding error. MLB players have plenty of money, too, sure — Kikuchi is making over $21 million this season — but there’s both a gap in resources and in responsibility here, and that the Angels aren’t just handling the costs here just out of compassion is disappointing.
Hopefully enough people make noise about this that the Angels even do it out of shame, instead: the money will be green either way. And if they don’t come around, then at least the GoFundMe will be passed around even more, allowing for additional donations to come in from people who aren’t in the same position to help to the degree that the Angels and Arte Moreno could.
Leaving the Garden?
Neil deMause has a worthwhile breakdown of recent whispers and rumors that the new Boston Celtics owner, Bill Chisholm, could be looking to build a brand-new arena for the team. It breaks down the genesis of these rumors and contextualizes them, while explaining why we might be seeing them, and if there is any merit to the arguments in favor. Good stuff, important things to know about in this age of everyone wanting their own expensive toys without wanting to pay for them, even if they are best-suited to do so.
The rest
My next Baseball Prospectus piece will publish later this week, and it’s on players with 4,000 hits in their career. That might sound like a short and obvious article, but I promise that it is neither of those things, for reasons you’ll just have to tune in for.
Elsewhere, my Wednesday column at Endless Mode continues on — last time out, I wrote a not-a-review about the downloadable content for one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and how it’s an extension of the base game. And why that’s perfectly acceptable and even welcome. Next up? A little celebration of the Playstation’s 30th anniversary, in the form of a bunch of its games that should be re-released in the present.
At itch.io, there’s a “Games for Palestine” bundle that includes 382 games — for a minimum of $8, you can pick up over $1,100 worth of games for your computer, with all proceeds going toward humanitarian aid for Palestine. Straight from the source:
The people of Palestine continue to be subjected to hostility, destruction of homes, critical infrastructure, and devastating loss of lives. We, as a games community, will bring together our incredible games from across the world, for a charity bundle with proceeds that go directly to Palestine aid and relief.
We are partnering with UNRWA USA, who will receive the funds and grant them to UNRWA (UN agency) in support of direct humanitarian aid in Palestine. Together, the game dev community and UNRWA USA will raise awareness on the situation in Gaza, spotlight our communities, and the devs participating in this charity drive.
It takes a long, long time to set these kinds of bundles up, between getting artists and creators to submit their games for them at a 100 percent discount, and negotiating with a United Nations’ aid agency for the collection and dispersal of funds. As of this writing, with over 13 days to go, the bundle has hit 33 percent of its $200,000 goal. Chip in $8 or more if you’ve got it; itch.io puts your bundles into a separate space from your other purchases, so you can pick and choose which of the nearly-400 games you want to download at a given time, so don’t feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume. Just know that your money is going somewhere that it’s needed, and that you get something great for it even beyond a feeling of knowing that you’ve helped.
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