Dogs, Baseball Owners and Books

Let’s empty the notebook on what might be a snowy day here in Charlotte. You can’t leave the house in Charlotte when it snows anyway — it’s a local ordinance — except to walk outside and make a pitiful-looking snowman out of the dusting.

First, a couple of announcements.

I’ll be in Washington, D.C. this Sunday — well, specifically, Rockville, Maryland — for a Franks and Football event at the Bender JCC of Greater Washington. Washington Commanders announcer Bram Weinstein will be moderating, and we can talk about how Washington sports ended up with the worst nicknames in sports. Right? Commanders? Wizards? Nationals? Mystics? Terrible. But hey, we’ll talk about all sorts of things. It will be a blast. Plus, I think there will be hot dogs. Come on out!

Mike and I recorded our final sports card opening charity PosCast of 2025 on Tuesday, and we did it with the incomparable Flula Borg! It’s one of my favorite ever PosCasts, filled with talk about Mike Singletary’s pants, the acting ability of Detlef Schrempf, and the sheer wonder of this particular 1990 NBA Hoops Mark Jackson card.

For those of you who don’t know why this card is famous, yes, on the left, those are the Menendez Brothers.

Anyway, that PosCast will be dropping anytime now. And in the meantime, our fourth Card Opening PosCast is now on the YouTube Channel.

Baseball Already Has a Salary Cap

Washington Nationals owner Mark Lerner is the latest billionaire to grump about having to pay good players lots of money. “You could get nauseous thinking about it,” he told Barry Svurluga about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a player, though Barry did say he was laughing as he said it so that makes it better.

I’m reminded of something in baseball that just doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Baseball already has a pretty good salary cap in place.

You probably know that the owners seem ready to go to war again over a salary cap. All of America’s other team sports — football, basketball, hockey — have salary caps, and, by gosh, baseball owners want to know why they can’t have one too! Why can’t the league simply stop those greedy owners who want to win from spending as much money as they want?! Why can’t baseball’s billionaires get the same price controls those other billionaires get? I mean, it’s downright unfair!

Let’s do something. The folks over at MLB just used a projection system to predict the top player for every team in 2025. Let’s take a look at those players and throw in how much they will be paid.

American League East

• Baltimore: Gunnar Henderson. He made $756,000 for his incredible season last year and will make about that much this year.

• Tampa Bay: Junior Caminero. He will make about $750,000 this year.

• Boston: Garrett Crochet. He’s slotted in for a little less than $4 million. Their WAR leader last year, Jarren Duran, will make even less.

• New York Yankees: Aaron Judge. He will make $40 million. He took a discount to stay with the Yankees.

• Toronto Blue Jays: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. will make $28.5 million, and already the Blue Jays are crying that they can’t afford him going forward. There are rumors about them trading him.

American League Central

• Cleveland: Jose Ramirez. He will make $19 million as he signed a wildly undervalued contract to stay in Cleveland.

• Kansas City: Bobby Witt Jr. will make $8 million and will not actually get paid his true value until 2028.

• Detroit: Tarik Skubal. He was paid less than $3 million for his incredible Cy Young season in 2024. Because he was arbitration-eligible, that salary jumped up to $10 million this year. He’s worth at least four times that on the market. Just as an addition, their best everyday player is Riley Greene: He’ll be paid about $750,000 this year.

• Minnesota: Carlos Correa. He will be paid $37.5 million.

• Chicago White Sox: Luis Robert will be paid $15 million.

American League West

• California Angels: Mike Trout. He will make $37 million this year. Anthony Rendon will make $38 million. This is what happens when you go a decade without developing any of your own players.

• Houston: Yordan Alvarez will make $15.8 million.

• Sacramento: Brent Rooker will make $4 million.

• Seattle: Julio Rodriguez will make $20.1 million. He’d make a whole lot more on the open market, obviously.

• Texas: Corey Seager will make $32.1 million.

National League East

• Atlanta: Michael Harris II will make $8 million.

• Miami: Sandy Alcántara will make $17 million. The Marlins’ likely best everyday player, Jonah Bride, will make $750,000.

• New York Mets: Juan Soto will make $68.8 million. You might have heard something about that.

• Washington: James Wood will make around $750,000, which is just how Washington owner Mark Lerner likes it.

• Philadelphia: Zack Wheeler will make $42 million.

National League Central

• Milwaukee: William Contreras will make $6 million.

• St. Louis: Sonny Gray and Masyn Winn. Gray will be paid $25 million. Winn will be paid around $750,000.

• Chicago Cubs: Kyle Tucker will be paid $16.5 million.

• Pittsburgh: Paul Skenes will be paid about $750,000. So will Jared Jones. So will Oneil Cruz.

• Cincinnati: Elly De La Cruz will be paid about $750,000.

National League West

• Arizona: Ketel Marte will be paid $16.6 million.

• Los Angeles Dodgers: Shohei Ohtani will be paid $28 million with the bulk of his salary deferred many, many years into the future.

• San Francisco Giants: Patrick Bailey will be paid about $750,000.

• San Diego Padres: Fernando Tatis Jr. will be paid $20.7 million and will not be paid his full value until 2029.

• Colorado Rockies: Ezequiel Toval will be paid $4.2 million, which isn’t much in baseball terms, but I don’t think he will be the Rockies’ most valuable player. I think it will be Brenton Doyle. He will be paid about $750,000.

Here’s what I see: Most teams in baseball are wildly underpaying their best player. Well, of course, they are. Baseball’s salary structure makes it so. Sure, once a player becomes a free agent, the sky’s the limit, and the top ballplayers — Soto and Shohei and Judge and the rest — make more than just about anybody in sports.

But they do not make up the core of MLB. No, the core of MLB is made up of young players who are strictly cost-controlled. Heck, for their first three years in the big leagues, teams can pay them the league minimum. It only slowly rises from there. The player doesn’t get to even test his full value until after six years (or seven if the team is good at manipulating service time).

So yes, it’s true, the Mets gave Soto $765 million for 15 years, it was in all the papers. The owners talked about how the sky was falling. Funny, though, they didn’t seem to mind when Soto got paid $568,000 for his dazzling 2019 season when he helped carry the Nationals to the title. They didn’t care that he was paid less than $9 million for his absurd 2021 season when he finished second in the MVP balloting.

Baseball owners want it all. They always have. They want to pay their young stars nothing, AND they want to legislate a limit on how much other owners can spend on those players once they become free agents. They want players to give them hometown discounts (discounts they have never given anyone on their way to billionaire status), AND they want sympathy from the fans because it costs so much money to put a competitive team out there!

Oh, and they also want YOU to build them their stadiums. Yes, you.

You could get nauseous thinking about it.

Westley

Westley is our standard poodle. He’s turning 13 this year. His black fur — he is named for the Man in Black in “The Princess Bride” — is going gray. Westley spends much of his time these days at the bottom of stairs, looking up and considering whether or not it is worth the effort. Mostly, it isn’t. Right now, he’s standing about 3 feet away from me and staring off into space.

“Westley,” I say, and he snaps out of his reverie and looks at me thoughtfully, as if he’s saying, “Oh, hi, sorry, I was just pondering some of the mysteries of the universe, such as dark matter and peanut butter and why Burger King won’t abandon that horrendous “Have it your way” song on their commercials.”

Westley doesn’t play much anymore. He was never especially great at games — he was pretty good at chasing tennis balls but absolutely terrible at bringing them back — but he used to love getting chased around the couch. That was, like, his favorite thing. He would constantly bump into us and give us that look that said, “It’s now time for you to chase me around the couch.”

These days, when you try to start a chase, he just stands there, frozen, and he looks at you, and those dark eyes now say, “Aye, laddy, there was a time.” I don’t know when he became Irish. Then he wanders over to one of the 734 dog beds scattered all over the house — a family collects a lot of dog beds over 13 years — and goes to rest.

The other day, though, I was sitting in the recliner working on my laptop when Wesley wandered over and poked me with his paw. “I just took you out,” I said to him and went back to writing.

Then he poked me again. “What?” I asked, a bit annoyed.

And he poked me again. It’s actually quite funny when Westley decides to poke a person. He reaches out and throws a little doggie jab, like he’s Muhammad Pawli. So I stood up and got ready to take him out again, only he didn’t want to go out. Instead, he walked over to the couch and stood there expectedly.

“Oh,” I said, surprised, and I took off after him, and he bolted around the couch twice. I stopped, pretended to ignore Westley, then I took off again, and again he bolted around the couch twice. This is when I started whistling. Wesley used to love when I started whistling as if to feign disinterest. Then I took off after him and one more time he bolted around the couch twice.

And that was it. He was out of breath, and he looked at me in a satisfied way. Then he walked over to his biggest doggie bed, curled up into a ball, and went to sleep.

The JoeBlogs Nonfiction Book of the Month

I have mentioned that we’re going to be trying a whole bunch of fun new things on JoeBlogs over the next few months. One of those things: We’re starting a JoeBlogs Nonfiction Book of the Month. Starting in March, I’m going to be picking a JoeBlogs Nonfiction Book every month. It should be a blast. We’ll have an interview with the author, maybe. We’ll see if we can partner with some bookstores to get you discounts. We’ll have some discussions, maybe. It’s still open-ended.

What I’d like to do is create a small JoeBlogs Book of the Month panel of readers who will serve as JoeBlogs Nonfiction Book of the Month advisors. Basically, I’ll be looking to these folks to recommend some nonfiction books, maybe offer some thoughts, maybe have a monthly call. It will be a pretty small panel, so if: (A) You’re a big nonfiction reader (and not just sports; there will be some sports, but this will be all of nonfiction) and (B) You’re someone who wants to keep up with the new nonfiction books, I’d love for you to apply.

Just send along an email with two sentences (and only two sentences, please) explaining why you would be a perfect person to be on the JoeBlogs Nonfiction Book of the Month panel.

Rafael Devers wants to play third base

Here’s the second-least surprising bit of baseball news this week:* Boston’s Rafael Devers doesn’t want to move off third base. Gee. Never saw that coming.

I know there are a lot of Boston fans — a lot of baseball fans, in general — who are not especially sympathetic to Devers on this one. Even my pal Joe Sheehan, who is normally as staunch a player advocate as anyone, admits that when it comes to situations like Devers’*, he turns into famed management thug Dick Young. His feeling is that Devers is getting paid a whole lot of cash to play where the Red Sox think he should play. “That’s what the money is for,” he writes, quoting Don Draper.

Sure. I get it. Devers is not a good third baseman. He leads the league in errors every year, and his advanced numbers are pretty much in baseball’s basement. The Red Sox just signed Alex Bregman, who is an excellent defensive third baseman, and the team would be better on paper if they just put Bregman at third and put Devers at designated hitter.

Devers should, in theory, do what’s best for the team.

But, for me, anyway, it’s not that simple. At the beginning of 2023, the Red Sox signed Rafael Devers to an extension just before he was about to become a free agent. The Red Sox were in a weird spot. They had already parted ways with pretty much everybody from their awesome 2018 World Series championship team. They traded away Mookie. They didn’t pay Xander. They didn’t pay J.D. Martinez. They didn’t pay Eduardo Rodriguez. They didn’t pay Rick Porcello. They gave up on Andrew Benintendi. Some of these decisions were good, some were not, but all moved the Red Sox away from the dominant force and essential team they had been.

And in that raw moment, they asked Rafael Devers to sign with them rather than become a free agent.

Sure, it was a different group of Red Sox executives then, but they promised Devers that he was their third baseman for as long as he wanted to be. Sure, they paid him a lot of money, but he was going to get a lot of money, that part was never in question. Heck, you never know, he might have gotten MORE money had he gone out on the market. The Red Sox asked him to stay. “We’re building around you,” they told him.

He trusted the Red Sox.

Two years later, they sign Alex Bregman and start making noise about what a lousy third baseman Devers is? Everybody everywhere talks about how he has to become a designated hitter and probably for the rest of his career? None of that seems right to me.

There’s also something else about this that I think people are missing: While it might be technically true that the Red Sox are better with Bregman at third — according to Statcast, Bregman prevented five runs above average while Devers cost his team five runs — I wouldn’t trust that math. Yes, those 10 runs suggest an extra win or two.

But how do you calculate the number of runs it might cost the Red Sox to have a ticked-off Rafael Devers? How do you calculate the number of runs it might cost the Red Sox to have other players see how the teams treat a player just two years after he gave up free agency to be their star? Already, Triston Casas has said publicly that the Red Sox should leave Devers at third base. You know a bunch of other Red Sox feel the same way.

Sure, I think signing Bregman was smart because he’s been perfectly open about his willingness to move to second base, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he could be great there. So just move him there. I’ll bet that’s what ends up happening anyway. For the Red Sox to turn this into a drama, yeah, that’s a dumb self-own by the Red Sox, in my view.

Yes, I understand that baseball is a business, and winning is a business, and feelings are for chumps, and Devers gets paid a lot of money to play where the Red Sox believe he’s best suited. I understand. But that’s not how I would treat a loyal and beloved 28-year-old superstar. I love me some Don Draper, but I wouldn’t want him as a boss.

Obscure Movie Scene Gripes!

Let’s start a new segment here called “Obscure Movie Scene Gripes.” Today’s scene comes from Field of Dreams when Ray Kinsella mentioned the interview that Terrence Mann gave about how he always wanted to play at Ebbetts Field.

Mann: "I never said that.”

Kinsella” “You didn’t?”

Mann: “I don’t even remember thinking it.”

That last line, “I don’t even remember thinking it,” has bothered me for more than 30 years. What does that even mean? He didn’t say it, but he might have thought it, but he doesn’t remember thinking it? Might he have thought it, but he doesn’t remember thinking it, but he definitely never said it? Once he said, “I never said that,” does it add anything to say, “I don’t even remember thinking it?”

It’s just a very strange thing for him to say in that situation.

And that has been today’s Obscure Movie Scene Gripe!

Have some thoughts. Share in the comments!