Baseball's Predictable October

Makes a mockery of dreaming

Welcome to FreeForAll Thursday, when the printed brilliance in This Space, like John Blutarski’s frat-house beer, don’t cost nothin’. Those wishing a deeper imbibe can pay $8/month or $80/year. More than 1,000 paid subscribers will attest to the value in that. Enjoy.

Aaron Judge makes fans of other baseball teams ask what’s the point.

Showtime Ohtani has the same effect, the main difference being we Eastern Time Zone-ers don’t get to see Shohei as much.

The fact that Judge and Ohtani could only play where they play now makes it worse. Unless you believe, I dunno, the Pirates are going to make a big run at either. Judge to Pittsburgh, for the Steelers, the Duquesne Incline and a Primanti Brothers franchise.

Incline to Yankees, for Aaron Judge and an egg cream

We here in the Republic of Cincinnati can react to this old news in one of two ways: Bitch about it or not watch it.

Since bitching is hopeless and useless and sounds stupid, we’ll do the latter, thankyouveddymuch. It’s no coincidence that the Fox Network chose to air the NLCS on FS1 Wednesday night, while putting The Masked Singer on the big network.

The what?

The Masked Singer. I didn’t know what that was, so I Googled it and came up with this, from something called Deadline.com. I don’t know what that is, either, but here’s what it said about The Masked Singer:

The Season 10 premiere brought several exciting surprises including the return of fan favorites like Joey Fatone and Bow Wow.

Bow Wow, in the flesh. Arf.

Bow Wow. Yes.

That’s like CBS replacing the AFC title game with Next Level Chef. It’s also where baseball ranks these days. The problem is, it’s an unsolve-able problem.

If MLB could recreate the NFL model, it would have. It can’t. Its players won’t vote for it, its owners are too splintered to join forces for it, its economics won’t allow it. And no one has the guts to try to break the players union to do it.

What we’re left with is rooting for a Have Not to ignite in October and take down the Yankees. This year, that’s the Guardians, who are now down 0-2 to Judge and Co.

It’s pathetic.

The Reds were able to keep Joey Votto for a decade. All it cost them was a top-heavy payroll that eliminated their ability to compete. There will never be another Votto, not in Cincinnati. Enjoy Run-DLC while you can.

Winning is as easy as 1-2-3. Those would be the payroll rankings of three of the four corporations playing in the two championship series. The laggard Guardians are outlying at No. 28. They have a pauper’s chance at living in the mansion.

For many seasons, Bob Castellini spit into MLB’s economics wind. He believed he could change things. He was in former commissioner Bud Selig’s ear about it. Castellini even fostered hope that his fellow owners could be swayed to fight for a fairer economic system.

The Big Man briefly joined the Payroll Wars. The Reds were spenders for a time. Not in the Swag Mountain Division, but credible enough to be taken seriously. In the four years between 2013 and 2016, The Club ranked 13, 12, 14 and 13 in payroll. Not bad for a small-money outfit.

It was only when Castellini realized his efforts at payroll equity were hopeless that he began on the current, familiar, Rays/Orioles/Brewers path. We all hope it works in 2025. Meantime, we’ll watch the Guardians flail against the Yankees. It beats watching The Masked Singer.

Hope is vital to the baseball myth. Without it, people stop caring. And watching.

AND FURTHERMORE, some rotten timing. Because of Duke Energy Convention Center renovations, the Reds have canceled RedsFest at a time when they have good reasons to promote themselves.

Now, then. . .

THE BROWNS ARE SO FAR FROM BEING ACCEPTABLE, even a full-on tank job can’t resurrect them. It’ll take multiple years of what a Yahoo writer called “quiet quitting’’ to complete the task. Here’s how the scribe described the black hole in Cleveland:

The Browns are a bad team with a failing infrastructure and one of the worst starting QBs in league history. They made this bed, it’s going to cost people their jobs and they face a LONG road back to positive relevancy. Even after the Watson saga ends, they’ll still have to draft and develop a quarterback of the future, which takes a long time in its own right. Hopefully, for their fans and the league, the Browns can return to relevance before the next decade starts. It really might be that long.

Other than that. Mr. Modell, how was the truck ride to Baltimore?

If the Men lose Sunday, their season really is over. They won’t lose. Chubb and Garrett aren’t enough to take down the Burrow Gang.

Bengals 23, Browns 10.

I DON’T KNOW Adrian Wojnarowski, late of ESPN. He covered the NBA like a London fog, worked tirelessly, made millions. And just recently, chucked it all to become the general manager of the men’s hoops team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure.

He has all the respect I can muster.

From Front Office Sports:

“Congratulations, but I don’t give a s***.”

That was Wojnarowski’s response to an NBA exec who attempted to give him a scoop following his retirement from ESPN. He added he wasn’t even “remotely tempted” to break the news. 

True freedom belongs to those gutsy and unfettered enough to leap and not look back. That’s what this guy did. He exchanged money and fame for passion. No one who makes this deal ever regrets it.

I don’t know why Woj did it. I’m fairly certain he’s about a million pounds lighter because of it. And free. Decidedly free.

THE RAMIFICATIONS of playing in a bi-coastal league should be seen Saturday at Nippert Stadium, where UC hosts Arizona State. The Bearcats are favored, partly because ASU has to travel three time zones and play at what to them will feel like 6 AM.

How consequential is this?

Last month, Penn State coach James Franklin suggested the school needed to build a longer runway at the State College, PA, airport to accommodate the new travel stress. Without it, teams playing out West would have to leave a day earlier than normal. AP:

Given the two additional hours needed to bus the Penn State football team to Harrisburg for the flight instead of flying out of State College Regional Airport, Franklin noted that travel would essentially take an entire day for the team, requiring the change in schedule to fly on Thursday instead of the traditional Friday.

Franklin noted that the change to Harrisburg was “based on runway length, size of plane, weight of plane, fuel of plane. That’s one of the things we have to discuss is increasing the size of the runway here and the size of the airport.”

And finally. . .

I’D WATCH ‘EM IN DUNEDIN, AND LOVE IT. . . Hurricane winds ripped the roof off Tropicana Field in St. Pete. The Rays almost certainly will need temporary crib in 2025. Dunedin is a gem of a town and hosted some Rays games during the ‘21 COVID season.

Another option is Port Charlotte, where the Rays spring-train. Another delightful place, a few hours down the coast.

This resurrects one of my biggest pipe dreams: That MLB’s cold-weather teams open their seasons at their spring-training sites. Instead of 45-and-miserable at the Small Park, the Reds begin the season with a 6-game homestand in Goodyear, AZ.

This would work for the Rays in Dunedin. After all, their reg-season games at The Trop are poorly attended. The 8,500 capacity of TD Ballpark in Dunedin could be expanded to, I dunno, 10K or so. That’d meet the Rays needs.

Again. . . How cool would it be to watch a major-league game up close, in a jewel-box ballpark where it’s not rainy-day awful?

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . We tackled fast-dance tunes yesterday. Today, slow ones. What were your most memorable slow-dance tunes? Mine in no special order:

Crystal Blue Persuasion, Tommy James and the Shondells, with my 6th-grade girlie Karen Frey. She’s the one in the class photo, rockin’ the high-top Chucks.

Color My World, Chicago, one of the worst songs ever recorded, but delightfully slow for a high-school junior seeking attention from whoever.

So In Love, the Tymes or Timothy B. Schmidt, with my wife.

Honorable mentions to The Way You Look Tonight (Steve Tyrell) and Springsteen’s Let’s Be Friends.

This is #1 though. Jillian and I danced to it at her wedding.