“Sooner or later, it all comes down to money.” Bruce.
Not to contradict the Boss Man, but here is why it may not always be all about the greenbacks – at least in baseball.
MLB’s All Star Game, set for 7/11, is generally recognized as the season’s mid-point. However, in a 162 game season, Catholic school math has me landing on 81 games played as the half way mark. All teams passed that total this past weekend.
I am going to avoid talking about the O’s because I’m superstitious and still wary of their success to date. They seem to have a bad habit of not hitting when they get good pitching and not pitching well when they score a lot of runs. Something needs tweaking and I have a solution for them that I’ll reveal in a moment. First though, let’s pull a Buzzy and talk about money as in “You got to pay to play.”
In the MLB the common myth is that he who has the gold rules. The theory goes that bigger market teams, with more lucrative local TV contracts, have more money to pay their players and hence better position themselves to win more games. I say that this is a myth because as often as not, MLB teams at the bottom of the payroll rankings manage to do quite well (click here.) The first half of this season is a good example of this.
Here is a ranking of 2023 MLB payrolls where I have added the current records of the top 5 teams and the lowest 5 teams. See what you think:
Here are the 5 lowest salaried teams and their records to date.
OK, so maybe the A’s are the exception here in that they are the lowest salaried team and they do have the worst record in all of MLB. For a good explanation of how all that Moneyball business is no longer working its magic for them and why the A’s are such a disaster (click here.)
Note that the A’s total team salary comes in at $42 million which is roughly half of the $86 million that Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are getting from the Mets.
And that brings me back to the O’s who have some young players to trade and money to spend. There are rumors that the Mets at 19 games back are talking clearing house and getting ready for next season. Scherzer could be on the move.
There is an old saying in sports “Never get hit by a falling star” but I’ve always liked how Max plays the game and consistently competes whenever he’s on the mound. Even in the twilight of his Hall of Fame career, I think he’d look good in the Black and Orange. I say – go get him!
Speaking of moving on, one of the fastest moving songs up the country music charts is Fast Car by Luke Combs. Great song and I like how Luke covers it to the point that I may even like it more than how Tracy Chapman originally did it.
However, I got one little hangup with it that I need to work my way thru: it’s a chick song and a dude singing it just doesn’t sound right to me at least thru the first couple times that I have now heard Luke singing it. For instance, being the sexist that I am, imagining HIM working at the convenience store while SHE’s out riding around partying with her friends just doesn’t sound right to me. HE’s the co-dependent and SHE’s got the fast car!? Uh, no.
In my defense, Tracy did such a great job in her version that I just can’t move on from thinking about how she nailed it and how Luke doesn’t quite sound right when he does it. (Just learned that there is a whole discussion to be had about “Gender swapping” songs (click here.) This one would definitely be on my list of such songs.)
To read a good article on how Luke came to cover Fast Car (click here.)
