Challenging the Great Baseball Mammon Deceit

I've shared before that my favorite baseball team is the San Francisco Giants. I grew up with them and went to dozens of games at Candlestick (and a few at their newer Mission Bay ballpark). I also do enjoy the game of baseball yet absolutely revile what the Major Leagues have done with it.

One of the main wretched things is free agency, which has merely been a tool for the powers-that-be, whom I've called the "MLBers," to ensure substantial advantages are afforded the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. Yes, those two teams, no others. All of the major league baseball people know this is happening, implicitly but very practically. It is simple, these two teams must win every year for the entire enterprise to survive. I've already gone into detail about that in my last post -- indeed for years I've been sharing this truth in other web places but ones that get little attention. It would be nice if people knew and truly wanted something done about it, but sadly there just aren't enough of them.

As long as the Dodgers and Yankees are winning, with a few upsets every once in a while to keep up appearances, everything is fine.

My friend just today even sent me a photograph of a banner behind a plane that I assume was flying over some major league baseball stadium featuring some scheduled game that said, "The Dodgers have ruined baseball." Yes, they have to some extent, but it is more the competitive duplicity sustained by the MLBers that ruined it years ago, much because of the destructive principle of free agency.

Again, I'm not going to get into the veritable whys and wherefores here in this blog post. What I did want to do is just riff a bit on what the Giants can do short of the main thing, which again is joining with whoever is principled enough to end the Dodgers and Yankees-favoring duplicity and restore genuine competitive integrity throughout the sport. In some ways that really is the main thing.

Otherwise, what else? 

The pretext for all of this now regarding my Giants, is that for one they have presently been agonizing through a miserable season. They have played far below their abilities and right now wallow close to last place in their division, holding one of the worst records in the entire league. The other day was the trade deadline when all major league teams must make the trades it must to have acquired players eligible to play in the postseason.

The Giants made a number of moves, essentially selling off several of their better players to acquire younger players who would be more likely able to help them compete in the future.

So then, here is what we can do. In fact, this is what we must do if we care about succeeding in this daunting challenge.

One, let Buster Posey make the decisions he needs to make to get us back into contention over the next few years. Posey was our excellent World Series champion catcher from 2010 and beyond, and he is a ferocious competitor and a very smart baseball man. From what we've seen so far, he means business, and his strong leadership and deep commitment to excellence should get us where we need to go.

Two, if our field manager Tony Vitello is as good a rah-rah guy as they hired him to be, and he does indeed have something of an instinctual, intuitive sense of how to get the most from his players and win, I think it would be good to give him time to gain major league experience. It seems like he's on that steep learning curve right now, and if he valiantly keeps at it we should be really good in a couple years.

Three, do the "Moneyball" thing with the Giants team makeup. It blows my mind that just about every team just has guys swinging for the fences and striking out way too much. Yay home runs! Lots and lots of home runs puts people in the seats! Yay for that!

Ahem. The winning philosophy is this:

(1) Not really a Moneyball thing directly, but still the most important item of the three: Draft gobs of pitchers. Gobs and gobs. Every year. Buster kind of did that this year when of his 21 picks in the June draft he took 12 pitchers, including the very best rated one of all. Very nice.

The idea is simple. Who cares if all your minor league teams are stocked with pitchers playing and batting wherever. For the big club: Find and develop six or seven studs every three or four years, and lock on to them. If every year your staff has six or seven lockdown guys for mound work, you'll be unstoppable. Drafting lots and lots of pitchers gives you a better chance to find those gems.

(2) One of the key Moneyball things: Get batters who get on base. They either make contact or they walk. Excellent. They just don't strike out. They actually hit the baseball, make the other team work. The more guys get on base, the more likely runs will be scored. This is just not rocket science. 

(3) Get excellent fielders. You can save gobs of runs if your fielders are making outs. 

After you've drafted mostly pitchers and you're stuck with filling your lineup with contact hitters and fine fielders, you really should be able to pick up any number of them from other team's rejects. Find contact hitters you can teach to field -- one of the best Giants players traded away the other day was Luis Arraez, an outstanding contact hitter who actually improved his 2nd baseman play. Wonderful! Likewise find excellent fielders you can teach to make more contact at the plate. 

If they can't be taught, get rid of them. Get others who can. Unless of course any given player is truly exceptional and winning games for you with what he can do. This is why I like Rafael Devers. He's an excellent power hitter who, yeah, may be underperforming, but he's had a good attitude with a losing team, and it'll be nice when we can put some solid contact hitters around him.

Yes, I know it is best to have these guys if they are good enough. True, I get that. But why not increase your chances to succeed by doing these things? They've been done, they've been successful -- in fact look at the two teams playing in the 2014 World Series. The worst thing that happened to major league baseball was the nobody-cares-about-the-Giants facing the even-fewer-care-about-the-Royals. They were not in any way the Dodgers or the Yankees.

However, both the Giants and Royals did those things that made them uniquely successful. They had guys who could get on base. They had exceptional defenses. And they had terrific pitching staffs -- the Giants had a once-in-a-lifetime manager (Bruce Bochy) who was a genius with how and when to use his arms, and the Royals had a once-in-a-lifetime bullpen that essentially turned sixth-inning leads into automatic wins.

Then, really (4) another critical Moneyball thing: Since you don't have a break-the-bank approach like the Dodgers and Yankees are allowed to have, find the 20 or so guys you just know are going to produce, and sign them to long-term deals now. Wrap them up for the next seven or eight years, at least. And just go crazy treating them like the very best you think they are and teach them and coach them and teach them and coach them and make sure they know being a Giant is the best thing ever.

Part of that is, if after three years or so, any one of them starts regularly hitting 50 home runs a year or consistently sporting a WHIP of 0.50, then change his contract and pay him. If he was making a million dollars a year, now pay him 20, 30. Reward him for his hard work, prove that you value his exceptional production, and in doing so -- ta-da!...

Make free agency meaningless.

All of this would be utopia for Giants fans... and a return to baseball respectability and certainly a string of postseason runs.

Thing is, I hear major league baseball is about to shoot itself in the foot, and arm and head and chest for that matter, and they are regurgitating the old things they thought they needed to fix the "competitive balance" problem. Oh my. They say there will be a lockout in the spring if there isn't a salary cap imposed. Oh my oh my.

Utter folly.

Once again, and why I can comfortably put this blog post here in Reality Salon because it is indeed, about a grave deceit. 

The contemptible folly once again, for review:

(1) We need to make more competitive balance.

(2) To do that we must have a salary cap.

Both ideas are flat-out stupid. Sorry, excuse me. Disrespectful? To employ the word stupid? Yeah, probably, but it fits, and please, the MLBers have done things to the game that are beyond stupid anyway. Why can't I speak stark truths here? I see so few others openly sharing them, sadly.

Here's why.

We don't really want competitive balance, we want competitive integrity. There is a huge difference. Competitive balance is just more manipulating the game to try to get some artificially arranged result -- even if it is every team finishing 81-81. No, sorry, that's stupid.

No, you want competitive integrity. Just give every team the fair and equal chance to build the winner it wants to. Summarily remove the advantages the Dodgers and Yankees have, period. But again, the MLBers are so reluctant to do that because yet again those teams' winning means more for everyone.

So then, how about a salary cap, yeah? No, that's stupid too. That too keeps teams from being able to pay the players they want to keep what they are worth. 

Come on, I'll be honest, I want my Giants to draft and develop a team of All-Star Future Hall-of-Famers to go win World Series after World Series after World Series. Why do I want anything to keep that from happening? Free agency, salary caps, competitive "balance" manipulations, all the other idiotic revenue sharing and luxury tax requirements and whatever else -- all of them mess with any team's ability to do fairly and equitably do what they may do with their skills and talents to make a genuinely good baseball team. All of that takes away what makes the game authentic baseball in a healthy environment of competitive integrity.

And really, even if the Giants can't do it, then it is just as good that any other team does no matter how large or small their fan base is, just as long as it is all on the up-and-up.

So yeah, this blog effort is about this question: What is keeping people willfully deceived, and is there anything that can happen so truth prevails?

I know this is just baseball, and I haven't even touched on all the other insane things like how much they have to wrestle with the woke mafia telling them about having "Pride" nights and things like that. A couple months ago the Giants even got in the mainstream regular news when some principled players made very truthful but very gracious expressions related to their refusal to acquiesce to those things. I was going to get into that in this post, but it is already full -- just to share some truthful things about this game I kind of like.

And add this one simply note.

Check out The Kingdom. The Place where Christ reigns.

There is where The Grace and The Truth prevail.

That is truly what gets me through the times when I shake my head off my shoulders with these baseball things, and all the other deceitful destructive things out there.

Might want to find the Real Sanctuary in Him.

Good call.

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Here is a recent post at my Kansas City Chiefs blog that gets into this even a bit more. I also can't neglect to add the following images. The first is that banner that when clipping it from the web I see it was flown over Wrigley Field in Chicago. The second is a screenshot of renowned baseball broadcaster Bob Costas in an interview conceding that some teams -- you know which ones and they do too -- do have advantages they should not have.

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A Great Mammon Deceit

Many wickedly institutionalized deceits are ravaging everything out there, and I sometimes write about them when I have time. Because there are so many I just can't get to all of them, and besides, some I don't know as much about and others are mostly just trolls -- stupid things people say or do to get a response in the cybersphere or even in mass media. I don't want to be an ill-informed, manipulated trollee.

(You may check out more of my takes at my other blog, Wonderful Matters.)

This one, however, is one I must write some things about, and indeed I have touched on this quite often before though not in this particular blog effort. I share the disclaimer because it doesn't seem like it is a bad as others, and I agree, it isn't, but I do like the subject and it is quite symptomatic of all the other more lethal deceits all around.

I'm writing this because I like baseball, and I like a favorite team in baseball. I also like competitive sports kinds of things, both to watch and to play.

A day or two ago the Los Angeles Dodgers professional baseball team garnered a lot of attention because they once again signed a major baseball star to a massively massive contract. They had already signed a number of free agents over the years, the very best players available so they could have a team that has indeed gone on to win the last two World Series titles in Major League Baseball.

I also recently noted there is a bit of attention to this perceived inequity, and some are seeking ways to keep this from happening. The idea is that it is simply too unfair that one team should have so many of the best ballplayers and dominate the game like this. I've seen some attention to the idea of a lockout, the owners putting a pause on baseball until this can be rectified. Then there is the inevitable cry for an imposed salary cap and other rules to keep these teams from doing this.

All of this is terribly misguided, and it isn't because the situation isn't horrifically unfair. It is unfair. But the answer is not a lockout or salary cap or any of those ineffective even debilitating things people think is the answer.

The answer is ending free agency altogether.

Yes, the answer is to restore an environment where the teams could draft and develop players and be able to keep the best ones for as long as they want so their team has a genuine chance to compete for however long those players contribute to that team's success. If a team wants to trade a player, they could. If a team wants to release a player they could, and then another team could sign that player -- they could sign that player for a bazillion dollars if they wanted to.

Yes, I know, it is very unlikely that will happen because this idea, the idea of the evil "Reserve Clause" has been made so objectionable, much because it is considered to keep player salaries artificially low and that just flies in the face of the beloved capitalist ideal that must be upheld no matter what.

The problem is it doesn't impede any players ability to make excellent money, and a professional sports league by its very nature must be managed differently than the wild-west market out in the outside-world streets.

This is because of the value of competitive integrity.

This just means every team has a fair and somewhat equal chance to win any given game merely based on the hard work they've done and the talent they cultivated. Everyone is now starting to see that competitive integrity in Major League Baseball has been shattered. The reason is simple.

Mammon.

The Major Leagues and all its players (and owners and other stakeholders too!) simply want to make as much money as they can, and they've shot competitive integrity in the head to achieve that. This is not to say making as much money as you can is bad, no, the position of this blogger is that anyone should be able to make whatever money they've honestly earned paid them by people who do so because they've received some honest benefit from that payment.

Serving Mammon though is different. It is taking money when profound institutionalized deceit is involved. It is exactly the same as selling an item to someone the seller knows is defective, or simply not what they say it is.

The issue here is the MLBers, we'll call them all MLBers for short, all realize that for that to happen, teams like the Dodgers and Yankees (who play in New York, the one market larger than Los Angeles) -- and yes, those two teams in particular -- must be winning on a regular basis for the money to come in. If they aren't, the money dries up. For years, indeed for decades when you look at it, the Dodgers and Yankees have been given advantages that enable them to regularly win, advantages other teams are not afforded.

The deceit is that they try to convey the idea that competitive integrity is still in place.

It isn't, and it hasn't been for most of Major League Baseball's history. (I'd love to detail that history, but you can look at it yourself. This one blog effort, though, simply doesn't have the size for that now.)

The simple truth is the way it is now, you can either have players (and owners, yes) making inordinate amounts of money, particularly for teams like the Dodgers or Yankees, or you can have competitive integrity.

You cannot have both.

Now there is one single caveat to this reality, and that is if there are indeed enough fans who appreciate a Major Leagues where the Dodgers and Yankees may very well suck for long periods of time, and teams like the Pirates and Rays frequently appear in the World Series. Really, if the Pirates and Rays -- just as examples of teams that are in much smaller markets than the Dodgers and Yankees -- are successful at drafting and developing players so they are genuinely the very best teams in the Majors, then great! Everyone even making lots of money, great! More power to them.

But can you see the problem with this from a Mammon standpoint?

The money vanishes because 28 teams simply do not have the fan-base size that the Dodgers and Yankees have.

The owner and major stakeholder of every other team not the Dodgers or Yankees do definitely want their team to win. That's great. They do what they can to be that one team to upend the dominant major market success apple cart -- and indeed some teams do! Woo-hoo! Royals in 2015. Nationals in 2019. Rangers in 2023. Every once in a while it happens and the MLBers are great with that because it keeps the deceit alive and well.

But everyone knows if the Dodgers and Yankees are not regularly winning and at least making the playoffs, and yes, doing so every single year, then the money dries up for everyone.

In other words, you do want your team to win, but if it doesn't, you definitely want the Dodgers and Yankees winning.

This destroys competitive integrity. Sorry, it does. Competitive integrity is simply not there. It isn't.

What is happening now is that because the Dodgers have been so brazen about their exploitation of free agency, the MLBers have overplayed this reality and there may be a critical mass of people seeing through it all.

It is interesting that people will squawk about the massive television contract the Dodgers have and that is how they can afford those players, interesting because it is assumed this is the thing. The television deal certainly generates the money, but the main thing is why? It is simple: The Dodgers have a gargantuan fan base and with it all the money those in it will spend on Dodger winning -- but only Dodger winning.

Again, the most important point here is that this is not just good for the Dodgers, but good for everyone.

Excccept the fans of the teams not the Dodgers and Yankees... whooo are spending their hard-earned dollars on the institutionalized deceit with the idea everything is on the up-and-up.

Back in the 1990s when there was some squawking about the wild Yankees success, the MLBers implemented something they call a luxury tax. The Dodgers and Yankees, largely because they generate the most money and can afford to buy the best players, were and still are expected to shell out gobs of that money to other teams so they have a chance to buy players too. It sounds really good, but it does nothing to uphold competitive integrity, and much of that is simply because the Dodgers and Yankees still must be afforded those advantages to be regularly winning in order for the other teams to be subsidized!

Once again, there is one single solution to this problem.

End free agency.

This doesn't mean a team can't do all they can to be the best and generate the most revenue they could! Go work very very very hard in the front office, in the dugout, on the field, at the ball park, and be a winning team that fans like! And if you have players that deserve to get $60 million a year, then pay them that! Wonderful! Go for it, make a small market team into a juggernaut, winning World Series after World Series -- that's great if they've worked hard and put good players on the field fairly and squarely!

And everyone would genuinely appreciate it!

But the MLBers right now feel that can't happen because no team has the fan base and commensurate money generation for everyone that the Dodgers do. The very reasonable fear is that the Major Leagues would collapse economically if the Pirates or Rays put together a dynasty and the Dodgers had the same empty stadium half the Major League teams have every night of the regular season.

I don't know if what has happened recently with the Dodgers will get people to truly, seriously, actually face the reality of what is shared here in this post. I do think many have, but they have been irrevocably mesmerized by the trope that you can't touch free agency -- it is kind of the third-rail of professional baseball.

But maybe that's just it.

Maybe most fans just don't want it touched. Maybe they're fine with things this way. They don't really want competitive integrity, maybe they are just okay with the Dodgers and Yankees always made to win, and that is because they know the MLBers know it would look bad if the Dodgers or Yankees won every single year, the MLBers do bless us with those few times another team will win and we'll all be just fine for my team to have that one little chance to win that one time. Maybe my team this year can be that 2015 Royals or 2019 Nationals or 2023 Rangers that'd just be great just for right now! Next year the Dodgers and Yankees will win again, but for now I get my thrill from my team winning WOO-HOO!

How sad. Really, how sad. That so many are just so taken by this grave deceit.

Again, maybe the MLBers have gone too far. Maybe right now the jig is up.

We'll see. 

It hasn't changed for many decades. There has been a lot of window-dressing to make it seem like they really want competitive integrity, but they don't. They'll just try some other imaginative ruse to keep the Mammon happy. Again, as I have for 30, 40 years now, I'm always hoping enough fans see through it, finally. I don't know, will things actually change now?

We'll see.

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I was taken by writing this piece some because of this piece written in the Kansas City Star. I wrote about all this often in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and one such piece was included in my good friend's San Francisco Giants blog EEEEEE! titled "What's Good for the Yankees is Good for Alex Rodriguez." It was in March of 2001, three years before Rodriguez was actually traded to the Yankees for essentially a box of Fig Newtons. See how this works?... Anyway, you'll have to find it at my friend's site archived, hope you can. Whupp, well guess what, I found it for you, it is here. Hope it is edifying.

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