Bill Madden: As Yankees-Astros appear headed toward inevitable October clash, MLB’s competitive balance again in the spotlight
We have arrived at the traditional July 4 juncture of the baseball season and besides the Yankees being off to their best start in history and the potential for 4-5 epically bad teams, one other thing has become patently clear:
Houston, you’re creating a problem.
As the Yankees were running roughshod through one of softest schedules in baseball, including series against two teams, the A’s and Royals on target to lose 100 games, and two others, the Tigers and Cubs, not far behind them, it evoked grand dreams of the first World Series at Yankee Stadium since 2009. Similarly, the Mets, off to third fastest start in their history, have their fans thinking World Series as well for the first time in a while. Hell, maybe even a Subway Series with the Yankees! How cool would that be?
And then, beginning on June 21 and extending to the end of the month, they both ran smack dab into Dusty Baker’s unheralded but quite formidable Houston Astros and went a combined 2-7. Although the Yankees remain on track for their greatest regular season ever, better than 1998 or 1927, it would seem the Astros — who went 3-2 against them in those first five meetings, including one win in which they no-hit them and are right behind them in leading the majors in ERA — are going to have a big say about who’s going to the World Series this year. After watching those compelling five games, most fans probably agreed the Yankees and Astros might just as well skip the rest of the season and report directly to the ALCS. For one thing that is also painfully clear is that the Yankees and Astros are in a class by themselves and the gulf between them and so many other teams is embarrassingly enormous.
Which brings about another problem: The age-old baseball dilemma — competitive balance — which, thanks mostly to tanking (Nationals, A’s, Reds and Cubs) is worse than ever this year. Presently, you have four teams — the Yankees, Astros, Dodgers and Mets on pace for 100 wins and four others, the Blue Jays, Brewers, Padres and Braves, with winning percentages of .570 or better. After that you have a bunch of teams — Twins, Guardians, Cardinals, Giants and Red Sox — with decent records that will mostly all win spots in the expanded 12-team postseason but don’t appear to have near the pedigree of potential World Series teams.
And then you have the Tigers, A’s, Royals, Nationals, Cubs and Reds, all of which are monumentally awful and an embarrassment to baseball. In the first three months, the Yankees went a collective 14-1 against the Tigers, Royals, A’s and Cubs and thanks to the friendly schedule maker draw three home games against the equally dreadful Reds in two weeks.
Just how bad are these teams? The Tigers have seven players in their starting lineup batting under .230, three of them under .200 while their 12 home runs in June were equaled by the Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber alone. The A’s also have seven starters batting under .230 and three under .200. (To be sure, batting is down all over in baseball, the league average of .237 the lowest since 1968, the year of the pitcher.) The Royals, beset with major injuries to two of their best players, Salvador Perez and Adalberto Mondesi, and ready to trade their leading hitter, Andrew Benintendi, are 27th in the majors in runs, 29th in homers and 28th in ERA with not a single starter under 4.00. Over in the National League, the Reds and Nationals are 29th and 30th in team ERA while the Cubs, 26th in the majors in ERA will soon continue their tanking by trading All-Star catcher Willson Contreras and switch-hitting left fielder Ian Happ.
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred will no doubt be very happy to have both New York teams in the postseason for the first time since 2015, but he can’t be pleased by the enormous disparity that exists between the three highest payroll teams — Mets, Yankees and Dodgers, along with the Astros — and the six bottom rung dregs, A’s, Tigers, Nationals, Reds, Royals and Cubs, none of which figure to get better any time soon.
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
If you were wondering if there had ever been a full uninterrupted season before this one when the Yankees were off both on Memorial Day and July 4, according to the Elias Bureau you have to go all the way back to 1915 and 1909 — and even those two years were sort of a fluke in that both times, the two holidays fell on a Sunday when most of the teams back then did not play Sunday baseball. So there’s that…
When Freddie Freeman returned to Atlanta last weekend for the first time since his unceremonious departure as a free agent back in March, he let it all hang out. Tears and emotions flowed after Braves fans saluted him with a sustained standing ovation as Braves manager Brian Snitker presented him with his World Series ring. But Freeman’s new Dodger teammates were somewhat taken aback when he heaped praise on his former Braves teammates and the Atlanta management, making it very clear he wished he was still there. And then a few days later Freeman fired his agent Casey Close. What happened here was a clear case of a failure to communicate. Throughout their negotiations last winter, the Braves held firm on a five-year offer for their 32-year-old franchise first baseman while Close kept pushing for 6-7 years. When it was clear to them, Close and Freeman weren’t going to settle for a five-year deal, (ultimately bumping it from $135M to $140M), the Braves pivoted and traded for the A’s Matt Olson and Freeman subsequently signed a six-year/$162 million deal with the Dodgers. The miscommunication was that Close was acting as an agent trying to get the most money for his client and Freeman let him do that while neglecting to tell him: “I don’t care how much money you get me as long as, at the end of the day, I’m still a Brave.”…
There were shockwaves throughout baseball last week when Wes Johnson, the much-acclaimed Twins pitching coach, announced he was leaving the team to take the position of pitching coach at LSU — shockwaves because no one could believe why he would leave a first-place team in the middle of the season for a college job. Had to be money, right? And, if so, how embarrassing was it for baseball to have college teams paying more for coaches than they are? In its initial story, The Athletic reported that LSU would be paying Johnson $750,000 a year as opposed to his $400,000 with the Twins. It looked like one of the all-time greed grabs, Johnson bolting on his team in the middle of the season to nearly double his salary. But as it turned out, this wasn’t quite the case and so determined was Johnson in his insistence that this was a move based on family considerations he released the terms of his LSU deal which call for a base salary of $380,000 along with a vehicle allowance of $800 a month and a relocation incentive of $25,000. When Johnson was hired by the Twins from the U. of Arkansas in 2019 he was the first college pitching coach in nearly four decades to jump directly to the major leagues. For the record, it is worth noting that college baseball has in fact become big business with many of its coaches earning as much or more than major league coaches. Johnson’s boss at LSU, head coach Jay Johnson, for instance, is paid $1.2 million a year, and at least four other SEC head coaches earn over $600,000…
It’s beginning to appear that MLB’s decision last winter to contract 40 minor league teams could bite them in the behind with Congress readying to strip them of their anti-trust exemption which they have enjoyed since 1922. A bipartisan effort led by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is looking into how baseball’s antitrust exemption is impacting minor league players’ salaries and jobs. As Durbin tweeted back in March: “It’s time to reconsider baseball’s antitrust exemption” while Lee, upon introducing a bill called the Competition in Professional Baseball Act said: “There’s no reason Major League Baseball should be treated any differently than the NFL, the NBA or any other professional athletic organization. What got the Senators’ attention was the outrage in so many of their communities after MLB stripped them of their minor league teams. Grassley, for one, saw two Iowa teams, Clinton and Burlington eliminated in the Class A Midwest League purge, Durbin lost a team in Kane County while the Norwich team in Blumenthal’s Connecticut is a part of a four-team lawsuit (including Staten Island) filed against MLB seeking restitution for being eliminated.