thelesterlee
For most sports, the offseason is one of most exciting parts of the calendar as big-name players become free agents and dictate the shape of the upcoming season with their decisions to play for whatever teams give them the bag but Major League Baseball has been run so oddly as of late that it’s a real struggle to give a shit who signs where anymore.
You can start with the fact that most teams don’t even care about wins and losses and exist as assets of a financial portfolio for their owners. The Baltimore Orioles lose 100 games routinely under the guise that they are ‘rebuilding’ when ultimately, the owner just likes that he owns the Baltimore Orioles and whatever clout comes with that. Winning doesn’t elevate that fact. Losing doesn’t diminish it. There are 30 owners in a special club that no one can take away from them.
So many franchises have gotten away with tricking their fan bases into believing that they’re a ‘small market’ team incapable of spending money as if the owners of these franchises aren’t Scrooge McDucking into pools of cash first thing every morning before ignoring calls from Max Scherzer’s agent.
It’s become so common that even the New York Yankees are behaving as if the team executives will be sleeping on subway cars if they sign a big free agent when we all know at least one person in our phone contacts we could FaceTime right now and they’d be wearing a Yankees cap.
I should be typing about how the Angels will be a different team with Noah Syndergaard joining Shohei Ohtani in the starting rotation or Corey Seager and Marcus Semien joining the Rangers gives Texas the best infield in the AL but I’d be pretending like I wasn’t fully aware that these teams will trade away everyone else around them in order to save a penny here or there and they’ll be right back to mediocre by the All-Star break.
And it’s fairly easy for these executives to think of themselves as holier than thou when they constantly get away with being racist as fuck and insanely horny sex perverts. If you thought the Jon Gruden emails were a lot, you’d be shocked to see what these assholes are saying in “private”.
I won’t even get into how Major League Baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, totally mishandled one of the biggest cheating scandals in professional sports by giving the Houston Astros a slap on the wrist after they stole a World Series title.
It should shock no one that that same genius totally mishandled the Braves fans ‘tomahawk chop’ allowing the former president to come and rile up his low Iq special needs supporters.
Oh, and literally as I’m looking up this stupid tomahawk chop story, I find a new story from this week about Major League Baseball casually using two different baseballs this season without telling the players.
The owners have zero incentive to spend on talent or take any real risks to improve their teams and have no regard for the fans that fill their stadiums to watch them lose while the commissioner has the self-awareness and tact of a bull in an Apple store. I believe that analogy works for both stores that sell iPads along with stores that exclusively sell granny smiths.
I wish I was scrolling through Jeff Passan’s tweets eagerly awaiting news about where Freddie Freeman signs but instead, Major League Baseball doesn’t give a shit about me. None of this matters.
Congrats to the Dodgers for making the World Series again next year. The rest of us are waiting for our 2018 first-round draft picks to make it to AA this season.
