NATS (5-1) BETTER THAN BRAVES YESTERDAY

 Ultimate Harper 
 knocked in both Nats runs bottom 
 of the 8th inning 

 an amazing player who 
 will look stupid in pinstripes 

NATS RISE TO GLORY game forty-one

(would've preferred a pic of Matt Williams HIGH-larious

sweeping of his cleats across home plate, which was very

Billy Martin-esque, but hey, this is a nice action shot

of dickhead ump throwing dork gang sign)

Yesterday I found out there's a FM radio station the next county over (meaning receivable at my home) that carries Nats radio, which means I can sit outside at the picnic table and probably listen to games watching fireflies and shit like that. But I didn't get around to it in time yesterday night, was too busy harvesting red clover flowers for the ol' lady's herbal witchcraft shit. I tune into that shit though, and start picking wherever I hear bees, because that means it's the bomb ass flowers, while also leaving plenty for the bees, because those motherfuckers got more important shit to do with red clover flowers than I do.

Anyways, I did get inside and catch an update on the game RIGHT AS BRYCE HARPER WAS HORRIBLY EJECTED. Seriously, people upon the social medias were flipping out, so I cut on the radio real quick (the station worked!) and the radio dudes likewise were flipping out. Now understand Nationals radio, as with all home team broadcasts, probably are just ever so slightly biased, but what I took away from the situation is umpire Marvin Hudson is a huge dick who has always been a huge dick and everybody hates him and he is jealous of every man who has an actual functioning penis, so he threw Harper out to make all the children who came to see him play cry.

Of course, Matt Williams came out and got tossed too. This happened like a week ago. They ended up winning that game, so of course they ended up winning this game. Denard Span had an RBI single in the 7th that put the Nats on top, and they held that shit. But you know who is having a Harper-esque week of solid goodness? Ian Desmond, who hit his second homer of the stretch last night in the 1st inning. Also, at one point I remember being like, "WHERE IS THE OFFENSE?" but then suddenly you look, after this amazing hot stretch, and Span and Harper and Wilson Ramos and Yunel Escobar are all stroking well over .300.

And after giving up 2 to open the game, Jordan Zimmermann was again a tricky, conniving bastard on the mound. In a starting rotation of a pair of hired guns (Maximum Scherzer and Doug Fister) as well as fan favorite pair from before (Stephon Strasborg and Gio Gonzales), he might actually be considered the perfect 3rd dude glue that helps hold it all together. Like I don't ever remember thinking angrily "Fuck Jordan Zimmermann" at any point in my tacit support of these Nats. And usually I am like "fuck everybody".

Nats are 24-17, and alone atop the NL East.

NATS RISE TO GLORY game twelve

Sigh. Saturday game was no win and Phillies broke a six-game losing streak. The Ultimate Harper smashed another HR though, obviously channeled into universal magnetics and feeling the voices of the elders advise him on what's coming from the mount. He also is starting to get walked a lot according to box scores. Mufuckas afraid of The Ultimate Harper. Too much uncontrolled raw animal manliness in there. It can be dangerous. Look at how it turned into demons that consumed Jorsh Hamilton. Look at how Barrett Bonds sacrificed his own morality to enhance his ability to achieve such a physical status upon earth. The Ultimate Harper is young. He worries me, not so much that I'm afraid he won't be a universal force in a stupid earth man game, but I don't know, he seems tailor made by the Baseball Evil Gods to end up signing a ridiculously high dollar contract to play for the Yankees, and have his universal force obscured by the glaring lights of such a thing.
Of note in this game is Jonathan Papelbon got the save for the Phillies, and I didn't see it, only read it, but I have always thought Papelbon's mouth looked like an anus, and I tend to laugh at dudes with mouths like anuses. What sort of life leads you to that look? What genetics and psychologies combine to clench lips into eternal pucker of shit existence? People are weird looking. Granted, about three times a week, I slip into brain mode of Oscar Zeta Acosta and Hunter S Thompson in the bar in Las Vegas where everybody looks like alien lizards and it's hard to handle that shit. Actually just yesterday, my family was on a short road jaunt, and I stopped at the Sheetz for a large cup of what is considered coffee (proud aficionado of gas station coffee right here, bruh), and everybody started looking like lizards and it was very unsettling and I'm not sure how people exist without freaking out to be honest. Anyways, Nats lost, with reaching .500 for the first time this season on the line.
Nats are (were) 5-7.

Blue Jays 11, Indians 9; Blue Jays 3, Indians 0: First Bats, then Arms

such dudes man just SUCH dudes

Hey, a great big hot mess of an 11-9 game is just the ticket for a hot Saturday afternoon in July, but let's hear it for the ever-dependable Carlos Villanueva who took the hill Sunday and allowed but three hits over six innings. Jason Frasor, who has been OK, put in a scoreless seventh, and Darren Oliver, who has been astounding, worked two shutout innings to close it out with his pretty dang choice 1.38 ERA. Pitching! Let's have some more of that! Maybe right away, too, since it's the New York for three! Boy, the Yankees are really running away with the division, aren't they? But I'm way less interested in the 9.5 games that separate the Yankees and the Blue Jays than the 1.5 games that separate the Blue Jays from the second Wild Card. And yeah, there are bunch of teams clustered together right there in the standings, but many of those teams are clown teams bro and therefore of no lasting concern. 


Playoffs? Almost certainly not, and yet: playoffs.


KS

Metaphysical Statistical Hyper-Analysis

For approximately 17 hours the past two days, I have been feeding various forms of data culled from a multitude of sources into a 37-tabs Excel spreadsheet with highly complicated formulas. This data goes back to 1978, in regards to baseball as well as U.S. Census Bureau GMA statistics, and has been taken from online databanks as well as actually mildewy books from the library four blocks from where I work, which are reference only meaning I had to sit there and take notes into a dollar store composition book. Non-statistical sources include four in-depth phone interviews, one with a childhood friend's father who has an excellent unpublished manuscript completed about Negro League baseball, one with a local sports radio figure who spent years in sports journalism at a regional level, a former AAA ball player who flaked out Zen Buddhist style and now teaches Hsing-I martial arts in a former boxing gym, as well as a guy I used to get high as fuck with at baseball games (he always had an uncanny ability to see things develop before they did, being blessed the natural intuition of an old school scout, just scummy as fuck and covered in stereotypical tattoos thus unemployable). After having let all this data ferment together overnight on a lime green thumb drive kept in a zipper-lock sandwich bag underneath my oldest rooster's coop overnight, I plugged it into the ol' Mini-Mac this morning, opened up the main file, and the end result was that the New York Yankees fucking suck more than any other thing in sports could ever hope to suck. Not just on a baseball level, but a sports plane, that goes internationally, only really threatened as the most suck by two European-based football/soccer clubs. The franchise and the fans help highlight all that is bad with New York City, baseball, sports in general, humanity in general, people with the last name Rodriguez, Italian-Americans, and many other items far too numerous to even bother listing or we'd be here all weekend. Suffice it to say Go Nats!

Perhaps you are asking yourself what baseball teams was the second most suck in the end results of my data analysis? That's a clown question, bro.

Yankees 7, Blue Jays 2: So Dies The Dream

Alas.

My dreams of a four-game sweep of the Yankees and a return (return?) to almost-relevance in the wild card race have been shattered. Phil Hughes was actually, like, good yesterday, and that's pretty much all it took, because Villanueva, bless his heart, was not at his best. But whatevs: Jose Bautista comes back Tuesday night, and we will utterly ruin the Mariners. 


Probably. 


KS 

Yankees 4, Blue Jays 1: I Have No Real Problem with This

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fat.

Hey. Sometimes a guy with thirteen wins by the middle of July is going to lock the door after giving up a run in the first, and that's going to be it. What are you going to do? Nothing, is what. C. C. Sabathia was awesome, allowing a mere three hits and three walks in eight innings, and although Mariano Rivera made things somewhat ticklish in the ninth, Travis Snider was unable to repeat the walk-off heroics of their encounter earlier this season (which was, of course, the coolest thing Snider has done all year, even cooler than getting sent down). Ricky Romero hadn't pitched in sixteen days, and you know how it is when you come back from vacation: sometimes you hit the ground running, completely re-energized and revitalized, and other times you come back and seem to have entirely forgotten what it is you do. Romero was closer to the latter yesterday, just missing his spots. Four runs through five is not so hot. 


Fun fact: in Ricky Romero's nine losses this year, the Blue Jays have scored a combined thirteen runs. 


KS

Yankees 7, Blue Jays 3: Spare A Thought for Jo-Jo

You don't know how it feeeeeels . . . to be Jo-Jo.

What can I say -- what can anyone say -- about Jo-Jo Reyes' record-tying 28th yeah 28th straight start without a win other than that it sucks to be Jo-Jo? Lately, he's been pitching more than well enough to win and it just hasn't happened, but yesterday Jo-Jo got lit up: five runs in only three innings on a couple of home runs plus some other stuff. A deserving loss, yesterday afternoon.


So Jo-Jo now shares this strange mark of futility-yet-persistence with Matt Keough (baseball card here, mugshot here), whose non-winning streak for the Oakland Athletics lasted from September 6, 1978 through August 8, 1979, a period of time over which I was conceived, born, and began to wreck shop. When will shop next be wrecked by Jo-Jo? Hard to say. I kind of hope he sets this record first, though. It would be an oddly compelling distinction, I think.


Anyway, the last-place Toronto Blue Jays roll into Chicago tonight and it would be awesome if they could win a couple because the White Sox are pretty awful. And in case you were wondering, Jose Bautista went 1-3 with a HBP and he threw a guy out at second yesterday. On a related note, if you were wondering who the best baseball player is, it's still Jose Bautista.


KS

Yankees 5, Blue Jays 4: Baseball is The Worst and I Hate It

GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

In truth it isn't, and I don't, but that ninth inning cut me deep. Ricky Romero had gone seven innings in Yankee Stadium, pitching his way around seven hits and three walks to allow only one run (Jeter grounding into a 5-3 double play in the seventh did not not hurt one bit). An improbably bat-around fourth had the Blue Jays up 4-1, and were it not for C. C. Sabathia's continued dominance over Jose Bautista, who knows what might have been? But here's what was: Frank Francisco fucking blew it.


If you were going to be charitable about it, you could say that this was only Francisco's second blown save of the year. But if you were of the opinion that the save stat is itself super dumb, and has poisoned yes poisoned bullpen usage for more than a generation now, you would instead point out that Francisco is just plain awful: a 6.23 ERA in his thirteen innings pitched, with twelve hits and eight walks allowed. And that's not the half of it. Well, it's definitely the half of it, and maybe more, but here is totally another thing: you can seriously run on this guy, as much or more than you can run on any other guy in the American League right now. Am I right, Curtis Granderson who is currently do it all?

Yes, you can run on this guy. And I AM currently doing it all, thank you.

 If you don't believe me, believe Curtis Granderson, who has earned that much.


None of this has been a secret. Everyone who is trying to be diplomatic about it has been saying things like, "The bullpen has been excellent this year, with the exception of Francisco, who is an adventure out there," which is the nice way of saying this guy is junk but we keep running him out there despite everybody knowing he's junk. But he's the closer so you can't just, you know, replace him with somebody who is any good, like any of a number of guys, until you decide that that new guy is fit to be deemed the closer. 


That this meltdown happened against the Yankees obviously makes it that much more galling, but if I take three deep breaths I am afforded enough perspective to realize that all this means is that the Blue Jays now sit 2.5 games behind New York for the AL East lead rather than a game behind Boston, and in the big picture -- and not even the actual big picture, but the big picture of a season of professional baseball, which, I mean, come on -- nothing is really any worse right now than it was yesterday. But when the closer everyone knows to be junk blows a save as the ball kicks off the glove of the loathsome Juan Rivera at first, it is hard not to at least entertain the thought that maybe I hate baseball, and maybe the reason I hate it is that it is the worst.


KS

Blue Jays 7, Yankees 3: Everybody Loves Intentional Walks

Bartolo Colon: way too fat for this nonsense.

Through five innings, the only runs on the board in this well-pitched affair came off a Robinson Cano sac fly that plated Granderson in the fourth and a pretty spectacular Jose Bautista lined shot to left centre in the first, the nineteenth home run of his hater-confounding 2011 campaign. That Bartolo Colon was getting it done was not shocking; that the spot-starting Carlos Villanueva was doing likewise caught me a little off-guard, which is really a shame-on-me scenario because he's been awesome so far out of the pen (1.48 ERA), and it's not like he's never started before, so who am I to doubt Carlos Villanueva?  


Then, in the sixth, things got pretty wacky: Corey Patterson -- who doubles often, bless him -- doubled. In a tie game, with nobody out and a runner on second in the sixth, they walked Bautista, which is what is going to happen now, I guess, and so be it.  Adam Lind is still rehabbing his bad back, meaning we are utterly and completely without a cleanup hitter, and so it fell to Yunel Escobar to drop the sacrifice bunt, the first time a Blue Jay batting fourth has dropped a sac bunt since . . . Dave Winfield in 1992! Why would anyone have ever asked him to do that? Cito, man. A character. Anyway, that puts runners on second and third with one away, so Girardi decided to walk Juan Rivera to set up a potential inning-ending double play, and I get that, but man he must have been kicking himself when Aaron Hill singled in a run, Eric Thames worked a bases-loaded walk, and J. P. Arencibia ripped a three-run double. Kicking himself.


The home half of the sixth was starting to look pretty nutty too when Escobar botched a double play ball, allowing a run to score and making things at least a little ticklish for a minute there, but as bad as things might be going for you as a pitcher facing the Yankees, you know that sooner or later Jorge Posada is coming up so everything is going to be cool. Twice last night, Posada grounded out to end innings with two runners on. As an aficionado of this great sport, you have probably already heard about how Posada got all mad about batting ninth the other day, and then asked to be taken out of the lineup completely for a game, and then felt kind of silly about the whole thing and apologized? If not, that totally happened, and if you were wondering just how bad he's been, last night Jerry Howard said that Posada was 0-26 on the season batting from the right side. I'm not going to look that up, but if that is what passes for switch hitting these days then shit I'm a switch hitter, too.


Just how bad has Posada been? And please note that I have no problem with Jorge Posada, who has had a totally admirable career: totally passable defensive switch-hitting catchers with power from both sides of the plate are basically the bee's knees. But this season, he is the 25th worst player in the American League by WAR at -0.4 (he's 253rd if you are counting in the other direction), and I really like WAR as a stat for measuring awfulness because of its cumulative nature. It gives you a better picture of awfulness than rate stats: to put together a seriously negative WAR you've got to be out there actively sucking, not just be theoretically bad and sitting on the bench, you know? 


Also while plumbing the stygian depths of the Baseball Reference WAR leader board, I can't but notice that Travis Snider -- who hasn't even been in the league for a pretty good little stretch now -- was every bit as bad as it seemed: he's rocking a 6th-worst/272nd-best -0.8, and E5, who I had recently speculated might be the worst major league player getting regular playing time right now, is in fact only the 4th worst! Carl Crawford is still somehow faring even more poorly, and I had no idea Joe DiMagglio was having the kind of year he's having. Vernon, we knew he was this bad. And there's your top four. Bottom four. You know what I'm saying here. 


Finally, if you still totally hate J. P. Ricciardi (and who doesn't?), it's perhaps worth noting  that two of the worst nine players in the American League right now are being paid a combined $35 million this season on deals originally signed by the Blue Jays but mercifully foisted onto others since. When J. P. Ricciardi was all you think you know baseball in this city but you don't, we were wrong to doubt him.


I don't want to end on so sour a note, so in closing I offer this image of Jose Bautista's swing, which at this point should really be filling all of us with joy, regardless of rooting interest, because it is so awesome. And he is so awesome. And baseball? Unfailingly awesome, even at its ruinous worst.

Yep.

KS

For just a second there, I think I kind of got being a Yankees fan, but then I stopped caring

I know it's been years but I don't man I just love that picture.

I'm not an especially virulent Yankees hater.  I don't take a particularly strong stance against the Yankees, as stances against the Yankees go.  I do, however, have a lot of problems with Yankees fans.  Not the completely legitimate, from New York, cradle-to-the-grave Yankees fans, because, well, fine.  And I'll give an exemption to anyone with a plausible family tie to Yankees fandom, even, as in, ok you're from wherever but your grandmother from upstate New York is a Yankees fan and you love your grandmother, ok, I get that, fine.  But the Yankees fan of convenience is basically the most loathsome of creatures, in that they have essentially chosen to support power for the sake of power.  It is not inherently fascistic to be a Yankee or to be born a Yankees fan, but it is a clear expression of a totalitarian mind to have willingly and consciously chosen to be a Yankees fan.  You will find me pretty unshakable on this point.

But I work with a guy who I totally like who is also a Yankees fan.  A bit of a tricky case, because he's from Atlantic Canada, and so naturally one would think Blue Jays, except that he's older than that, so you'd think Expos, except he's not, so you'd think Red Sox (we are part of their mlb.tv black out zone, as part of Major League Baseball's plans for nobody to see the teams they could potentially like), but no, Yankees.  I suppose you could just say, well, if everybody around him grew up Red Sox fans, which is entirely plausible, maybe Yankees as a kind of youthful contrarianism or something?  I don't know, I really like this guy, he's great, so I kind of let it slide.  Anyway, me and this other guy -- a third guy, who is actually now a wandering, mournful, teamless Expos fan, and you would know this instantly just by the look on his face whenever he talks about baseball, which is a lot  -- were getting pretty worked up about the prospect of another awesome baseball season, and this Yankees fan friend of ours just wasn't (baseball) feeling it, and we asked why.  "No pitching this year.  No chance."  

And yeah, the Yankees starting five is really a starting two, and unless some 2001 Randy Johnson/Curt Schilling scenario plays out, this will not necessarily be the awesomest of years to be a Yankees fan.  But do you think they'll win less than 90 games?  I'd totally be surprised. But that might only get them third place, though, and you hear it all the time but it's really true: if the Yankees don't win the World Series, that season is truly a failure, because what's the excuse?  They have absolutely no disadvantages, and every conceivable advantage.  So if you're a Yankees fan, and they go on nearly a decade-long dry spell like they totally, totally did between 2000 and 2009, that's absolute misery.  Because there's nobody to blame, nobody external.  The only reason the Yankees ever lose is that they did at least one thing and probably many things horribly wrong.  There is a potential for self-loathing and recrimination in Yankees fandom that I think is probably singular in all of sports, and I honestly felt at least for a moment that it is a misery not to be wished on anyone.

Then I thought about how the Blue Jays haven't won ninety games in eighteen years and pretty much decided that this guy and everyone like him can go to hell.

KS

Still on the subject of 2010 payrolls . . .

Inspired by Raven's payroll breakdown, which was awesome:

I actually really, really like thinking about payrolls and roster makeup and all of that -- WHO DOESN'T? -- but I think you will agree that it is almost indescribably fascinating that despite this interest, I don't care about payroll disparity as An Issue Facing The Game at all, like not even a little, because it's fake and dumb.  And my team plays in the AL East, which is an actual honest-to-god division and not some bullshit like the Central, so when I say this, you really have no option but to take my position more seriously than literally anyone else's position ever.  As Raven's post shows, there is no simple correlation between payroll and wins, but still all kinds of people who should know better won't shut up.

Competitive balance is no better in the other, worse, borderline communist sports that have salary caps.  It just isn't.  This can be arrived at using numbers and math but also just by thinking about it for a minute.  It's especially not better in the NFL, which for some reason is the counterexample everybody wants to point to, despite the fact that the dominant NFL teams are way more dominant than the best baseball teams and the awful teams are just as awful (arguably more awful).  When you say this to the people you work with who like to talk about how their fantasy teams are doing (why don't I like fantasy baseball? I play Baseball Mogul but hate fantasy baseball, explain that), they deny it, and then you talk about it a little more, and you get legitimately frustrated with each other for a minute before you realize you are both ridiculous people and you just go back to being bros because break is almost over and you should never go back to work angry man it's just not worth it.  

What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is that some people have a kind of moral objection, really, to the idea that the Yankees can spend so much more money on baseball players even though they have the most baseball fans and take in the most baseball money. That seems just inherently, morally wrong to some people -- and I get that, I'm not dismissing that outright as a baseball feeling, I'm seriously not -- and to other people like me it seems either (i) fine, actually, or (ii) just not worth thinking about in any case because lol yeah a salary cap in baseball ok sure thing no problems with the union on that one everybody will be cool.  


There exists this idea that it would be good for baseball if, say, the Royals were good again.  No it wouldn't.  It would be nice for people in Kansas City, just like its nice for anybody when their team is good, but that's it.  Nothing else would be even slightly better for anyone, except for boomer sports writers who get boners about the weirdest stuff.  Not that there is any risk of this happening for the Royals, and that's fine.  It's almost good. They have hardly any fans and their management is awful.  As such, the Royals will be terrible forever.  And that's fine, that's baseball.  And it's only been twenty-five years since they won the World Series (interestingly, I will always love the 1985 Blue Jays, but I will never forgive them), which in baseball years is really like a month.  Ask the Cubs or the Indians or the pre-really-annoying Boston Red Sox or the Giants before this year. 

Anyway the real reason I don't care about payroll disparity is actually just that every single year that the Yankees spend way more than anybody else and don't win, it's awesome.  And this of course happens most years.  So most years are, at least in this one limited but very real sense, awesome.  I definitely get more out of that than I would get out of the Royals or whoever having a microscopically better shot. But to even believe that they would have a better shot, I would have to ignore all the  evidence of competitive balance and imbalance from the leagues that already have salary caps and are dumb.  But even that would be too much work, and not really what I'm after here: I like that the Yankees are rich but don't always win and then all the hideous Yankees fans who have no geographical or historical reason to follow the team but do so instead because they are contemptible people are sad. That's the long and the short of it.  Here's a cool thing Craig Robinson made.


KS

2010 Payroll per Victory Nerderies

I do not expect that Baseball Feelings will degenerate into nonsense interwebmetrics too often, as the spirit of this place seems to be spirit, not 0s and 1s. Nonetheless, I have for a few years busted out my calculator at the end of another long ass season to see just where teams stacked up in regards to how much payroll they shelled out per victory during the regular and post-season. This is not so much an exercise in some sort of metric system to evaluate how well a team performs per dollar, although you could certainly take it that way. Mostly I do it because it’s fairly ridiculous how much actual fake American money is spent per actual baseball field 9-inning (or more) victory achieved. Ridiculous. So indulge me a stroll through the 2010 season’s teams listed in the order of who paid the least amount of payroll per victory = total payroll on opening day divided by (regular season wins plus postseason wins where applicable). So yeah.
#1: SAN DIEGO PADRES – $419,992.22 per win. Just barely missed out on winning NL West due to end-of-season collapse. #2: TEXAS RANGERS - $563,781.07 per win. Won the AL West due to Nolan Ryan threatening to send underperformers to “the glue factory” and knocked off both the allegedly upstart Rays and ominously omnipresent Yankees in the playoffs before succumbing to the Giants in the World Series that time forgot. #3: PITTSBURGH PIRATES - $613,943.00 per win. Pirates never spend much, but still win some games, making me think that if you didn’t even pay players and just took volunteers, you could still win 35 games in the Major Leagues. #4: OAKLAND ATHLETICS - $637,714.81 per win. The birthplace of cybermetrics, so you would expect them to show well in anything involving calculators. #5: FLORIDA MARLINS - $695,518.75 per win. I’ve done this type of list for nearly a decade, and the Marlins have never been lower than the top 5 as far as I can remember, even winning a couple World Series in the process. What does this say? I don’t know. They don’t have a definitive fanbase in Miami, and they don’t exactly consistently make the playoffs, though they do always remain competitive beyond what one would expect from looking at them on paper. If the goal is to win titles, then perhaps this is the method to go, as they have done that, more than many older franchises (lulz to you Cubs and Indians). But as a successful business model, it doesn’t work. Then again, as we go through this list, I find it hard to believe more than like four of these teams are an actual successful business model. Baseball should just stop pretending to turn a profit and get owners who are just rich fuckers who want to be dicks to the world and blow money to win $1 bets with their 33rd Degree Freemason ski lodge cronies in upstate New Hampshire.
#6: TAMPA RAYS - $733,912.97 per win. Won the AL East, but then crumbled at the hands of the Rangers in the wild card round of the playoffs. The Rays are another team that operated on the Marlins gameplan for a while, full of young talent and always having someone to step in place of whoever disappeared. But in recent years they’ve made the switch towards saying, “We are a respectable team; we have everything we need now; so we will keep our players, pay far more money to people than we have been, and will still be successful. We have turned the corner.” Usually it seems when teams with fickle fanbases do this, it takes a couple of years before they are complete shit and destroyed financially for the next decade. It’s kind of like a regular person buying all their Christmas presents by maxing out a credit card, thinking, “Well, I’ve been steadily employed for a while now, everything should be solid, and I’ll be able to pay all this back.” You won’t. You’re fucked. #7: TORONTO BLUE JAYS - $737,521.85 per win. I did not translate dollar values to Canadian sheckles or give’rs or whatever they get paid up there, so we will assume it’s the same as American money for the sake of me not having to figure that shit out. #8: CINCINNATI REDS - $795,456.53 per win. Actually won the NL Central this past season, to shake a long stretch of ineptitude. Of course, winning the NL Central, when the Cardinals are in a down year, is not a large hurdle to clear. #9: CLEVELAND INDIANS - $887,014.01 per win. The easy thing to do would be to make a Major League the movie reference, except that just reminds me of how racist Hollywood is. Wesley Snipes is abandoned, framed on tax evasion, and has to go to jail. Meanwhile Charlie Sheen is fucking porn chicks and that nazi tattooed girl that the biker beard Sandra Bullock wore for a while was shagging as well, and getting drunk in Vegas and generally being a perverted nuisance to normal society, yet no one cares. #10: WASHINGTON NATIONALS - $890,217.39 per win. The Nationals are my home team so to speak, that I adopted for my personal loyalties when they moved to D.C. from Montreal. This has not brought me much pleasure in life thus far, beyond reading futuristic predictions from the year 2017, but hey, that’s baseball.
#11: ATLANTA BRAVES - $917,648.55 per win. Won the NL wild card berth into the playoffs, where they losted to the Giants. A consistently restocked franchise for nearly two decades now, featuring occasional purges of traditional talent, which is usually followed up by a blossoming of fresh, young talent. I have always hated the Braves, because my dad was a Braves fan and my dad was an unemployable abusive drunk. But I cannot deny when it comes to grooming new talent, they are one of the better franchises at such things. #12: ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS - $934,125.65 per win. I’m not sure I could name one player on the Diamondbacks at this point. #13: SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS - $949,794.50 per win. Won the NL West, beat the Braves then upset the Phillies in the NL Playoffs, and then beat down the Rangers to be World Series champions. When I was 8 years old, my first baseball team was called the Giants and I was like the shittiest bad kid on the team, meaning I played CF and wasn’t one of the kids that played the 2 inning minimum. But in my little naïve mind, if I played good and learned the game, there was a direct line from my minor league Farmville, Virginia, Giants team at a private school organization that didn’t allow black kids to play (seriously, this was in like 1981 too, not some ancient black-and-white days, but there was no alternative league), so they were always my favorite team for most of my life. I was there those awesome years with Kevin Mitchell and Will Clark making baseball’s most Odd Couple, and they always came up short, or got edged out by the Braves. I stuck with them during the Barry Bonds days, but grew tired of the bullshit in regards to Bonds. Plus, I live in fucking Virginia, how do I follow a goddamn team from California? Baseball is boring as fuck to watch on TV, more than acceptable live in person, and completely doable on radio, so when the Expos moved to D.C. and the local AM station carried Nats games, they became my team. What this all means is last year when the Giants made their run, I was caught up in it, feeling like a bandwagon fan or at least fair-weather one, and not being able to truly enjoy the successes without feeling like a chump. And then they won the World Series. It was kinda like a longtime ex-girlfriend getting elected Queen of Polynesia or something – I was happy I guess, but did not feel like it belonged to me anymore, so I was left feeling kinda weird. #14: COLORADO ROCKIES - $1,014,783.13 per win. The Rockies are the first team to cross the million dollar per victory barrier. Sadly enough, we will also cross the two million dollar per victory barrier before we are done. #15: MINNESOTA TWINS - $1,037,863.48 per win. They won the AL Central, but got punked by the Yankees in the wild card round of the playoffs, yet again. What can you do? They’ve locked down their supposed superstar talent, but what’s left to try and get to the next level? I guess they just keep plugging along and hope they stay afloat.
#16: MILWAUKEE BREWERS - $1,053,354.27 per win. Honestly, I think Bud Selig is a huge asshole and a general negative swirl of energetic influences over baseball, and being he secretly still owns the Brewers, fuck the Brewers. Also, they got Greinke from the Royals, and I was hoping he’d come to D.C. #17: KANSAS CITY ROYALS - $1,078,622.54 per win. For calling themselves a small market team, their still shelling out over a million per victory. The Nationals, Marlins, Pirates, etc. show that it’s hard to not at least win a few games. So somehow the Royals are a financially unstable mix of blowing money and blowing games. Those powder blue throwbacks are tight though. #18: ST. LOUIS CARDINALS - $1,087,683.17 per win. I usually associate supreme baseball nerdery with the northeast, which is easy to dismiss as a vast sprawling wasteland of idiocy. However, St. Louis proves that wrong, because there’s crazy baseball nerdery swirling around the St. Louis franchise, that goes back to the days of ticker tape parades using actual ticker tape because banks had that type of machinery in use. This upsets my geographical stereotypes of the world around me, which is upsetting, thus I can’t stand the Cardinals. They are truly the favorite baseball team of college professors. #19: LOS ANGELES DODGERS - $1,186,818.96 per win. It would be awesome if in the McCourt divorce, they both got like half of the team, so like maybe the wife got the pitchers and catchers and the dude got the rest of the field, and she sold her part to some crazy Japanese demented baseball genius, so that the Dodgers ended up being a team with really shitty hitting and fielding, but like this insane pitching rotation of guys who were never that great before who all pitch gyroballs and wacky Jap shit and like they cloned three Fernando Valenzuelas – one white, one black, and one Mexican – who come out the bullpen and shut shit down, rolling their eyes up to the sky, all pudgy and loveable and brining the great Los Angeles area together in racial unity through mad science. That’s what I wish would happen. #20: HOUSTON ASTROS - $1,215,203.95 per win. Until the world admits those rainbow uniforms as wore by J.R. Richard while having strokes on the field are awesome, there will be no peace.
#21: CHICAGO WHITE SOX - $1,230,377.24 per win. I will be honest – sometimes I outright get down on baseball and lack feelings beyond hatred for it. Not because of my team’s lack of success, but because I don’t get it. So boring and so statistical and so long-winded. But even when I get into those negative moods, there’s still about seven things I love about baseball. One of those seven is Ozzie Guillen. He is a national treasure, for wherever he is from. #22: BALTIMORE ORIOLES - $1,236,553.03 per win. Being Peter Angelos really screwed D.C. for years, and even squeezed a cut of their profits for himself with the stupid regional baseball TV thing, I do not like the Orioles. They cannot suck enough to appease my vengeance, which is really saying something, because they have really sucked for a long time. And they actually halfway spend money like they are still trying, but not really that hard. One time I was a wine-tasting room place in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, and I’m pretty sure Cal Ripken was there. But I didn’t care enough to go say “What’s up famous baseball player who I don’t know? How’s it going?” I mean, if it was Kevin Mitchell or Albert Belle or somebody awesome, I would’ve gone up and gave some daps, but it was just stupid uber-white Mr. Oriole Cal Ripken. #23: LOS ANGELES ANGELS OF ANAHEIM - $1,312,670.84 per win. Please just go back to being the California Angels. This is ridiculous. #24: PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES - $1,391,444.91 per win. The Phillies won the NL East, swept the Reds and then lost to the Giants in the NLCS. The Phillies are straight up going about things like the Yankees and Red Sox at this point, buying up free agents and rolling with it, to the point that anything less than a World Series title will be a disappointment. The thing in their favor is they’ve accumulated pitching and not sluggers, which is probably the better route towards success. That fucking rotation… man. #25: DETROIT TIGERS - $1,516,850.98 per win. The Tigers are a few years beyond that thing I spoke of in regards to the Rays, where you start to say, “Hey, we are now legit. Let’s spend money and be confident.” Whereas a decade ago, going 81-81 would’ve been seen as a decent year for the Tigers, there are expectations with a payroll of $122 million, and a perfect .500 does not answer those expectation.
#26: SEATTLE MARINERS - $1,612,732.24 per win. We are not getting into the most immensely fucked franchises when it comes to blowing money. And the Mariners are the only one in the bottom seven of this list who spent less than $100 million on opening day payroll, but all they could muster up was 61 wins last year, in the not entirely glorious AL West. #27: NEW YORK METS - $1,679,765.13 per win. The Mets, when you look at the amount of payroll they spend year after year, have to be the most disappointing franchise of the past ten years. They are consistently outperformed not only by other big payroll division rival the Phillies, but by the Marlins, who usually are spending about half what the Mets spend. Being someone who has listened to 660 the Fan on night time AM radio during long car trips, and hearing Mets fans talk, I have no problem with this trend whatsoever. #28: BOSTON RED SOX - $1,828,621.72 per win. Missed the playoffs last year, and Big Papi looked lost without steroids. Plus that little midget Pedro Martinez died last year, which I think was the final ending of their magical rebirth from the Curse of the Bambino. #29: CHICAGO CUBS - $1,958,120.00 per win. Really, the Cubs are one of those teams with a history – both long-term and recent – that you can’t even make fun of, because reality is worse and more hilarious than anything you could say. #30: NEW YORK YANKEES - $2,042,904.84 per win. Earned the AL Wild Card, swept the Twins, and then got knocked off by the Rangers. The Yankees define the financial excesses of Major League baseball, and really I try to ignore their existence. Seeing them fall every year is always something I am rooting for, but I can’t even watch them play. The fact they won over a hundred games (counting postseason) and still spent over $2 million dollars per victory is ridiculous. And the fact that a good portion of the rest of MLB is basically the Yankees quadruple-A farm team to develop talent for them to buy up, that’s frustrating as well. That’s my biggest problem with baseball is how awkward the money situations are. It’s not even like salary caps would fix it, because I’m not necessarily for that. You don’t want to stifle crazy billionaires who want to succeed. It’s just no one is really quite nearly as crazy as what George Steinbrenner put into place before his death. We need more crazy billionaires I guess.