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It is a team that could turn Ted Lasso into Bobby Knight, and make Kevin Costner say to hell with it, it’’s just a cornfield. To understand the Angels, one had to experience Tuesday, when a mere change of ownership spread hopium throughout the fanbase.

It wasn’t that Stan Kroenke was buying them for $4 billion, it was that Arte Moreno was selling them, and that his 23-year race to the bottom was finally over. The fact that the Angels still need about 22 legitimate major league players, a savvy general manager and a dugout leader was fodder for the back burner, at least for a day.

Moreno was like a golf fan who was invited out of the gallery to tap in Scottie Scheffler’s last putt and thus thought he deserved a green coat. By the time his purchase was approved, the Angels were world champions. All the pieces were there. Between 2003 and 2019 the Angels drew 3 million fans every year. They made the playoffs in six of eight years beginning in 2002. Manager Mike Scioscia and general manager Bill Stoneman were in charge of the players who were on hand, and farm director Eddie Bane and his staff kept the line moving. Free agent Vladimir Guerrero won an MVP and free agent Bartolo Colon a Cy Young.

So Moreno spent his time marking down beer prices and kicking Anaheim off the official team name and replacing it with Los Angeles, and contemplating moves that would finally bring him credit. When he bought free agents Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton, Shohei Ohtani and Anthony Rendon, he was the wheeler-dealer he always wanted to be. When none of those moves brought team success, he became embittered with nearly everything, including the town he had disrespected and now didn’t really want to build him a new stadium. The Angels in some ways should be a superior landing place to the Dodgers, especially for players with families who crave their privacy, but now free agents don’t even pretend to be interested. Losing is an invasive species, like a Burmese python, and it has taken over every creaky pillar of Angel Stadium. Moreno, who bought the Angels for $184 million, eventually said the fans just wanted safety and entertainment, and winning wasn’t a priority anymore. More accurately, they couldn’t visualize such a thing.

They have not been in the playoffs since 2014 and have not won a playoff game since 2009, in the American League Championship series. Scioscia, whom Moreno eased out after the 2018 season, is the only manager who’s ever won a playoff series with the Angels, who were founded in 1961. The only Angels club that has finished below .400 was the 2024 edition, but this one is on track to join it, and the last winning season was 2015. Since then, they have finished a cumulative 236 1/2 games out of first place.

A former general manager familiar with the organization was asked how he might go about repairing the Angels. He rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t know,” as if he’d been asked to solve the problem of the unhoused. Indeed, there’s little to anticipate. There are two bobblehead-type giveaways involving Jo Adell, who hit 37 home runs last year, but, alas, the Angels already traded him to Cleveland. Their hitters are next-to-last in American League walks and have struck out more than anyone, and their relievers have lost 35 games and blown 25 saves, with nine walkoff losses. The Angels are 4-12 in extra innings and 16-24 in one-run games. Last year they brought in Kurt Suzuki to manage and guaranteed him one year. Since he obviously enjoys fighting fires with an 8-ounce Arrowhead bottle, he took it.

They still have Mike Trout, and they still owe him $37 million a year through 2030. Trout’s fealty to the organization is refreshing, if incomprehensible, and he let a little truth slip out Tuesday when he said new ownership was “needed,” although he quickly praised Moreno. He has 20 homers and is predominantly an outfielder again, and he’ll likely play more games than he has since 2018, but he’s 34. When he was in his own category between 2012 and 2020, and when he was finishing at least fifth in the MVP voting for nine consecutive years and winning it three times, who would have ever imagined he’d become a sympathetic figure?

There is some talent here. Reid Detmers can be a No. 1 starting pitcher. Zach Neto is rough around the edges at shortstop, but has rare speed and power for the position. Some of the young starting pitchers have a chance.

But mostly the Angels needed a directional change. Kroenke is at least as media-averse as Moreno, but he’s a big thinker and has real money. He also finds winning habitual. His Avalanche won the NHL in 2022, his Nuggets won the NBA in 2023, his Rams won the Super Bowl in the 2021 season, and his Arsenal won the English Premier League this year. From afar, he seems to hire sharp people, stick with them, and let them float or sink. Rams’ general manager Les Snead feels comfortable in dealing first-round picks for older NFL players. The Avalanche just made Cale Makar the NHL’s first $20 million a year player.

And if you doubt that Kroenke will find a ballpark deal, drive by SoFi Stadium one day and realize how L.A. was stuck in stadium purgatory before he envisioned a place for the Rams, and for every concert and sporting championship he could think of.

Kroenke knows money hasn’t been the problem. From 2004 through 2023 the Halos had a top ten payroll each year. It’s leadership. The Angels keep running through general managers and managers, keep changing their approach. Even though ex-players aren’t prospering in roles of authority, they would do well to ask Torii Hunter, one of their better free agents, to be their general manager or even manager. Hunter is approachable and magnetic, and also explosively demanding if need be. When he was with Minnesota he advised Denard Span to “play pissed off.” Yet, as a team leader, he knows each player wants to be seen. At least he would bring the energy, the kind that is being saved when the Big A, the symbol of victory, isn’t lighting up.

Beyond that, they need to quit signing sore-armed pitchers, quit scrambling to plug roster gaps with Quadruple-A players.

And they need their players to learn some history. The White Sox lost 121 games two years ago. Today they’re probably headed for an A.L. Central championship, without a true MVP or Cy Young candidate. It doesn’t need to be a six-year plan. But it does require a recognition of how deep the hole is, and requires Kroenke to do what Moreno never could. Own it.

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The Milwaukee Brewers still aren’t ready to share their secrets about Pete Crow-Armstrong. Then again, their instructional video won no subsrcribers Monday night.

Crow-Armstrong went 1-for-5 for the Cubs. He has only two hits off the Brewers this year, even though he’s the book favorite, at 24, to become the National League’s Most Valuable Player. The operation was a success for the Brewers but the patient died, or at least was badly bruised by nine home runs launched by other Cubs in Wrigley Field, including three by Alex Bregman. The 17-3 victory only cut Milwaukee’s N.L. Central lead to seven games, but the two play each other six more times in nine days.

Crow-Armstrong might have been fatigued. He had bashed five home runs in the two previous games and has 38 for the year. He still leads the league in slugging and OPS, and, defensively, continues to push the boundaries of center-field. He is uninhibited, quotable and often bleepable, with no checkpoints between brain and mouth, and Chicago has hugged him with every molecule of its big shoulders. He hangs out occasionally with the city’s other sporting Mozart, Bears’ quarterback Caleb Williams, and whenever he pokes his head in public he hears two acronyms: PCA and MVP.

When the Cubs played in Crow-Armstrong’s home of Los Angeles, he said he preferred Cubs’ fans because they truly love the game and don’t “just come to take pictures” like Dodgers’ fans. Of his struggles during his first couple of years, he said, “I had to come up here and suck.” But when a White Sox fan indeed reminded PCA that he “sucked,” he loudly suggested that she did the same and got a little too specific about what and how. That prompted one of his few apologies. “I’m sure I come off as a douche sometimes,” he told Chicago Magazine.

But most people pray that Crow-Armstrong never puts up shutters in front of his emotions, in an age when most players, and people, lean toward personal robotics. It’s not hard to see why, with the cameras and all the internet denizens, perched to rip apart any frailty.

The Cubs felt a turning point in his development came in Triple-A, when former major league pitcher Wily Peralta dusted him a couple of times. Crow-Armstrong mouthed back, then drilled a long home run, flipped the bat violently, lectured Peralta’s Indianapolis teammates, and stuck out his tongue in his joyous tour of the bases. A little fire, when controlled, can rouse a 162-game season out of its numbness. But Crow-Armstrong also had enough self-awareness to take responsibility for the rough times. He was 0-for-13 in his first tour with the Cubs. In 2025 he hit 31 home runs, but only seven in the second half, and his batting average dwindled from .273 to .247 in the last two months. This year he was a .214 hitter with a .572 OPS after 22 games, and manager Craig Counsell was batting him eighth.

That brought up another red-letter day. Bregman, in his first year with the Cubs, told Crow-Armstrong he should narrow his gaze at the plate, decide which pitch he wanted to crush, and not change anything until he saw it. That led to a spectacular June, with 40 hits, a .381 average, a 1.249 OPS, and a .781 slug percentage. Crow-Armstrong was the leadoff man by then, and Chicago won 16 of 26 and has been comfortably above the playoff line ever since.

This has been a welcome story everywhere except Queens, N.Y. The Mets were the ones who drafted Crow-Armstrong in the first round of the 2020 draft, buying him out of a commitment to Vanderbit. Thirteen months later they dealt him to the Cubs for infielder Javier Baez. They were already four games ahead in the N.L. East and wanted to get stronger for the postseason. Interim GM Zack Scott made the call, one of his last, and club president Sandy Alderson okayed it. The Mets promptly went 22-37 and missed the playoffs altogether, and Baez signed with the Tigers in the off-season.

Scott takes responsibility for the deal but still has his reasons. Catcher Francisco Alvarez, he said, was the better bet, and that Hall of Fame-bound executive Dave Dombrowski once told him that he should isolate his very top prospects and use the rest as a resource. But the Mets couldn’t have known that much about Crow-Armstrong. He had torn his labrum during a slide in the Florida State League. The Cubs had scout Tom Myers, who had gotten to know PCA at Harvard-Westlake High. Myers, now with the Dodgers, kept those notes.

Some trades get worse. Some metastasize. This one could become every bit as infamous as Boston’s giveaway of Jeff Bagwell in exchange for Houston reliever Larry Andersen, or Atlanta’s plucking of John Smoltz while giving Doyle Alexander to Detroit.

In fact, the probable MVPs might fulfill an amazing daily double this year. The Dodgers and Mets spend more money than anyone, and yet the Dodgers dealt Yordan Alvarez to Houston for replaceable reliever Josh Fields. Again, you play the game with bats and gloves, not financial statements.

Crow-Armstrong would have brought untold charisma to New York, had he stayed. He is the only child of actors who, he said, “were cool parents who let me be myself.” Ashley Crow played the mom in “Little Big League,” which featured a kid who inherited the Minnesota Twins from his grandfather and wound up managing the club. Matthew John Armstrong was a lead player in the TV show “Heroes,” which also featured Hayden Panattiere, the 36-year-old actor who died last month. Panattiere was occasionally PCA’s baby-sitter.

Armstrong grew up in Naperville, Ill.,, so the wall of the family’s impromptu backyard ballpark was ivy-covered. Father and son both cried with joy when they learned of the trade.

Harvard-Westlake featured competition from sunup to dusk. PCA was preceded by Lucas Giolito, Max Fried and Jack Flaherty, all of whom still pitch in the majors. His contemporary was shortstop Drew Bowser, whose mother Yvette is the first Black woman to create a network sitcom, “Living Single.” Outfielder R.J. Schreck was Crow-Armstrong’s avatar, who stayed ahead of the kid even though he didn’t have the same tools. “I always was chasing him,” PCA said. “And it used to piss me off to no end.”

“He wasn’t necessarily interested in acting,” said Jared Halpert, the Harvard-Westlake coach. “But you’re a performer, right? You’re in an arena and people are watching you. He has a lot of fun with that.”

If the fun can ithstand all the force of the money that’s swiftly coming, PCA will give Chicago all the razzmatazz it can stand. In fact, it’s too bad he didn’t get to Wrigley Field in the late 80s. It might not have needed lights.

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When the PGA Tour goes to its new and improved format, maybe it will put a handicap on Scottie Scheffler. Maybe he should carry the clubs for the first couple of holes, or allow the rest of the field to use lift-clean-and-cheat rules even when the course is bone dry. But the problem is that Scheffler already imposed governors on himself in 2026, and he still wound up with the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup and a very probable Player of the Year award, for the fifth consecutive year. And his competitors realize, rather grimly, what will happen when Scheffller figures out Thursday.

Scheffler had the best scoring average this year on Fridays and Sundays. He was second on Saturdays. He was 16th on Thursdays, which is certainly fine, but he kept giving everyone else a head start. At the Masters he shot 70-74 and was 12 strokes behind Rory McIlroy. He wound up second to McIlroy with 65-68 on the weekend. At Pebble Beach he was even-par 72 in the first round and finished 20-under and in fourth place. At Phoenix he was two-over-par 73 in the first round and finished 15-under and in third. At Los Angeles he was 3-over after one round, 11-under at the end, and finished 11th. But in the three events Scheffler won, his Thursday scores were 63, 68 and 65.

And even with that, Scheffler was a runnerup five times, twice losing playoffs, and had a third place and four fourths, including the U.S. Open and the Open Championship. He issued only one cut, at the Scottish Open. If the dimples had landed more kindly, he could have duplicated the six wins of 2025 without a problem.

It was a very full year on the PGA Tour, with violins swelling for the wins by GaryWoodland and Brandt Snedeker, and trumpets heralding the youth of Jackson Koivun and Michael Thobjornsen, and warm applause for the grinding major victories by Aaron Rai and Ryan Fox, and audible smirking when the LIV Tour approached its death spiral. When everyone got to Eastlake in Atlanta for the Tour Championship, the POY was up for grabs. Wyndham Clark had the U.S. Open trophy and two other wins, and Cameron Young was third at the Masters, second at the Open Championship, and a dramatic winner at the Players Championship. Chris Gotterup and Matthew Fitzpatrick had a chance to buttress their three Tour wins. But Scheffler birdied No. 2 and No. 4 on Sunday to get to the lead, and although Viktor Hovland nosed ahead a couple of times, his own crooked drives were a disqualifier.

Scheffler shot four-under-par 66 and won by three, and his $10 million winner’s check moved him past Tiger Woods as golf’s alltime money leader, with over $130 million. It was also Scheffler’s 22nd victory, notable because his first one didn’t come until February of 2022, the day the Rams won the Super Bowl. Maybe the sight of Scheffler made Aaron Donald nostalgic. The former El Jefe of NFL defenses announced he would end his 2-year retirement and line up next to, or near, Myles Garrett for the Rams this season.

More than anything, Scheffler is the one player in the world who shows up each week with the knowledge that he’ll be on the leaderboard. The others know it, too. But they can’t speak for themselves. Hovland won the Tour Championship in 2023 and beat Scheffler in a playoff at Hartford this year, but his habitual shuffling of swing coaches has raised doubts, especially since Scheffler has only worked with Randy Smith since he was learning multiplication tables. Observed Colt Knost of CBS: “I think Viktor hates his golf swing more than any good player I’ve ever seen.”

“He knows where the ball is going,” Hovland said of Scheffler. “I think he knows he has an edge on most guys out here. So he doesn’t have to do anything crazy. He can play smart and just kind of pick his spots. Today it wasn’t like anyone else played all that great in contention. That’s what you saw, a lot of guys gagging and throwing up and that’s where he just kind of stays in it and shoots a nice score. That gets the job done.”

There are five major strokes-gained statistics on tour: Tee-to-green, off-the-tee, approach, around-the-green and putting. Scheffler was in the top eight in all of them and led in tee-to-green. He was sixth in putting, but that’s the one note he doesn’t always hit. He was 71st at the PGA in putting and 60th at the Open Championship, even though he was fourth in approach.

He led the tour in greens in regulation (72.9 percent) and scrambling (67 percent). In other words, Scheffler missed greens 27.1 percent of the time, but when he did, he saved par on two-thirds of those holes. Think about trying to compete with that.

He is also 10th in “bounce backs,” or following a bogey or worse with a birdie or better, and he 3-putted only 23 times all year.

So Scheffler can only be compared to ghosts, particularly Woods, who had won 10 majors before his 30th birthday. Scheffler turned 30 in June and has won four. Woods had an insane winning percentage of 21.7 on tour, and Scheffler is at 13.0. But they aren’t far apart when it comes to week-to-week representation. Woods made 89.6 percent of his cuts. Scheffler is at 88. They both have finished in the Top 10 in 52.6 percent of their starts, and Woods made the top five in 43.1 percent, compared to Scheffler’s 40.8. No one, particularly Scheffler, is suggesting the two belong in the same orbit. But Scheffler, who has dodged significant injury so far, has 10 to 15 prime years to close the gap. Or maybe more, since Adam Scott continues to play strongly at age 46, which was Jack Nicklaus’ age when he won the storied 1986 Masters, and the world reacted as if Nicklaus had escaped assisted living for four days.

But if Scheffler allowed his mind to wander into the next tournament or even the next range session or gym workout, he wouldn’t be standing on everyone else’s neck.

“In order to be good at this game you have to realy enjoy the harder parts, the ones that are a little more mundane,” he said. “Whether it’s working on my endurance or working out when I don’t want to, I feel like, late on Sundays, stuff like that has a tendency to show up.

“It’s an endless puzzle you’re always trying to solve. I hold myself to a high standard, which can be good and bad. I feel at times I probably could be a bit of a pain to be around when things aren’t going the way they should. It’s a gift to play out here on the PGA Tour, and I don’t want to take it for granted. But at times this year I could have been better, could have been sharper. I think sometimes taking a macro view of things can be a little more helpful. When you’re in the middle of finishing second three times in a row, you’re kind of like, all right, man, let’s get off this.”

When it was over on Sunday, and when he realized a long off-season was finally yawning before him, Scheffler ducked inside an air-conditioned bar. There was a bartender there with a beer tap. It would have been an impulse buy, except he didn’t have to pay for it. The world’s No. 1 took the leap and ordered a beer, to the surprise of his wife Meredith.

“She and my manager said, wow, we haven’t seen you with a beer in a long time,” Scheffler said. “Well, season’s over now. I’m going to have a beer. Well-earned beer.”

That was Scheffler’s version of Roger Maltbie losing his winner’s check in a Massachusetts tavern, or Alex Ovechkin taking the Stanley Cup to every watering hole in D.C. But Scheffler reported that the beer tasted great. Now, back to regularly scheduled programming, and trying to fix all those given Thursdays.

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The coaches call them “exceptions.” It’s not a compliment. If you are a 280-pound guard and your football program has a template that demands a 300-pound guard, you’re an exception. Same thing if you’re a cornerback and you run 40 yards in 4.62, when your coach wants 4.5 or better. You can tolerate an exception here and there, like the too-short Drew Brees or the too-slow Le’Veon Bell. But if you have more than two on your starting 22, call Mayflower. Someone else will have your job soon.

Or as Damon Runyon said, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. But that’s the way to bet.”

Nobody put a nickel on Sam Mills’ chances to get out of Long Branch, N.J., at least not in a football sense. Mills was 5–foot-9. He was a terrific high school wrestler but he saw himself as a linebacker, and was politely stubborn enough to retain that belief his whole life. One by one, in frustratingly deliberate speed, Mills embarrassed the high school, college and pro coaches who not only doubted him but refused to consider him. He is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where the busts of 22 undrafted exceptions gatjer and, according to John Madden, talk to each other when the lights go out. Those Hall of Famers who were tackled by Mills probably don’t call him “Shorty.”

This is truly one of the most spectacular stories in NFL history, and Paul Domowitch has all the details in his book, “Just Give Me A Chance To Fail.” As one of Mills’ early coaches said, there was nothing small about him. He had devastating hands, and Herschel Walker once said Mills hit him harder than anyone else had. He was just short. All that sinew and fast-twitch ability was trapped in a economy-sized body, and, unfortunately for the opponents, Mills spent many a Sunday letting them all out.

Mills played 12 NFL seasons, nine with New Orleans, three with Carolina. He didn’t retire until he was 38. He started 173 games, forced 24 fumbles, recovered 23 and had seven seasons in which he contributed to 100 tackles. Five times Mills made the Pro Bowl, and was first-team All-Pro when he was 37. And even though he was the prototype run-stopper, he found time for 20 ½ sacks.

But Mills always had a soft spot for the three years he spent before that. He joined the Philadelphia Stars of the fledgling United States Football League, which played in the springtime. He wasn’t drafted when he got out of Montclair State, of course, but he went to Stars’ camp and just kept knocking people down until all the resistance dissipated, and there was plenty of it. Jim Mora was Mills’ head coach in Philadelphia nad New Orleans and became his biggest advocate, but in the preseason meetings with the Stars in 1983, he flatly said he wasn’t giving Mills a chance to fail because it would obviously lead to his own failure.

Vince Tobin, the defensive coordinator, made Mills his personal cause. Every time Mora asked him to rate his linebackers in a staff meeting, Tobin put Mills at the top, to which Mora would lament, “We can’t do this. People will laugh at us.” Tobin never relented, and Mills kept getting his chances to fail and kept turning them down. Mills was All-USFL that first year, and the Stars won two of the three USFL championships that ever were played, and got to the finals in the other.

Teammates began joking the Stars’ running backs kept getting shorter because Mills kept belting them in practice. “Everybody thought Sam was an overachiever,” Mora said, “but he wasn’t. He had a lot of ability. He could run, he could cover, he could play the run. He was just an amazing guy.”

Before that, Mills thought he had made the Cleveland Browns’ roster out of nowhere, but at the very end, defensive coordinator Marty Schottenheimer decided he couldn’t. Schottenheimer would win 200 games as an NFL head coach, thanks to decisions far better than this one. Then Mills tried out for the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL and came up empty again.

It was the moment of truth. Even though Browns’ head coach Sam Rutigliano had told him to keep his eyes and ears open, Mills took a job teaching black-and-white photography at his local high school. Before that he had worked as a security guard on the Long Branch pier. Without the USFL, it’s virtually certain that Mills would have been a very good 5-foot-9 high school football coach and maybe gotten a chance at college someday. Instead, Mills used the USFL to make a reputation, played for Mora and several other Stars’ coaches in New Orleans and teamed with Rickey Jackson, Pat Swilling and Vaughn Johnson in an All-Pro Bowl linebacking corps. But even then, Mora had his doubts that Mills could cut it in the big-boy league, and when he overccame those he had to convince general manager Jim Finks. In a searingly hot prctice in Hammond, La., Mills stopped every Saints running back in his tracks, and Mora and linebackers coach Vic Fangio caught each other’s eye and smiled.

When the Saints’ run ended, Mills was the most popular and most community-oriented player they had. But he began telling people that he was actually beginning to think he was an elephant, “because the Saints pay me peanuts.” That rare burst of discontent led Mills to sign with the Panthers, an expansion team, as a free agent. Bill Polian ran the Panthers and, with the Bills, had been one of the many who had disqualified Mills on the basis of insufficient verticality. He embraced this chance to redact that mistake.

Carolina went to the NFC Championship Game in its second season, losing at Green Bay. Mills retired after the third year, although he didn’t turn it into a farewell tour. He was on the coaching staff the next year.

And that should be it, right? Maybe Mills becomes the defensive coordinator or even the head coach. Maybe he becomes the community relations director and exploits his own popularity. Instead, he went to a doctor after a couple of low-energy days, and there it was, cancer in his small intestine. He was given a few months to wrap things up, but it actually took him a couple of years, and he was on the sideline when Carolina lost the Super Bowl to New England after the 2003 season.

The Panthers had Dallas coming to town in the first round of the playoffs, and Mills, uncharacteristically, gathered the team the day before for a speech. The theme was “Keep pounding,” no matter the score, or the rejection notice from the coaches or the cancer results. The Panthers indeed pounded the Cowboys, and it became a motto that the Panthers use to this day, and it adorns the statue of Mills that owner Jerry Richardson ordered, upon his retirement.

Mills died at 45 and joined the Hall of Fame in 2022. He joins Kurt Warner, Dick “Night Train” Lane, Warren Moon, John Randle and others who never heard their name called by a commissioner. Undrafted players are all over today’s rosters, despite the forensic methods every team uses during the draft process. Sam Mills is one of their north stars, and Domowitch’s detailed, faithful book is their instruction manual. Square pegs, when they keep pounding, make their own holes.

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The final month of a baseball season isn’t about the limelight. It’s about the floodlight. The most imperative at-bats of the season are coming, and everyone’s name is on the roll. Hiding in the far corner in the dugout is not an option.

The following players are among those who have greeted the exposure like a long-lost letter from home. There will be others.

Jake Bauers, Milwaukee

Bauers came to the majors in 2018, at age 22. Right on time, in his mind. He made his debut for Tampa Bay and hit 100 mph on his first three fair balls. All were caught by Seattle Mariners. It was the first hint that this big-league stuff might be a little complicated.

Last Saturday, Bauers squared off against Atlanta lefthander Martin Perez. He lengthened the plate appearance to 12 pitches, including seven consecutive foul balls. The 13th landed over the left-center fence in Milwaukee’s ballpark.

In between, Bauers has been a frustrated nomad, going to Seattle, Cleveland Cincinnati and the Yankees in search of whatever it was that made him a Top 50 prospect. Three years into his Milwauee tenure, Bauers has tracked down that answer and bottled it. He has 23 homers and 75 RBIs, along with 70 walks and an .884 OPS. All are career-highs for the 30-year-old, as are 119 games and a .501 slugging percentage. He is the most consistent hitter on the best regular-season team in baseball.

Bauers credits it almost solely to a brain flip. At some point over the past two years he surveyed his life, deemed it good, and decided to quit defining it by whatever was happening at the plate. He said he had been preoccupied with hitting and sticking as a major league player. Having two kids might have jostled that preoccupation. Now he puts his baseball day in one compartment and puts his personal day in another. Along with concentrating on hitting baseballs instead of swinging the bat and getting hung up on all the technicalities within, it seems to have worked.

Bauers is striking out only 25.6 percent of the time, as opposed to 35 percent in 2023 with the Yankees. He also is hitting to the opposite field more often than he has since 2021. It’s part of the Brewers’ contact-first philosophy, but Bauers has so far reached his best home run-rate as well.

One of the Brewers’ many mascots is Barrelman, a guy who looks like he’s either swallowed a barrel or spent a year in one of Milwaukee’s saloons. Bauers’ 2-year-old daughter Marlie doesn’t like Barrelman, the mascot, but she’s started calling her dad Barrelman, which goes nicely with the part of the bat he’s been using. Naturally the T-shirts followed. Bauers, who is making $2.7 million this year, can be a free agent next season. To most people, that would mean a lot of cash on the barrelhead. To Bauers, it means his first multi-year contract.

Mickey Gasper, Boston

It’s one of those charmed seasons in Boston, in which every prospect in a Red Sox uniform hits the win-a-free-suit sign in centerfield and then buys a winning Powerball ticket. The latest is Gasper, son of New England and, richly, a reject from the Yankees.

In 2024, Gasper got a 13-game cup of coffee with the Red Sox and spilled it on those home whites, going 0-for-18. Last year he hit .158 in 45 games for Minnesota. But in August the Fenway fans have learned to wait for his at-bats, rather than hitting the chowder station. Gasper is 10-for-24 this month with five home runs and only one strikeout. He will make his presence felt sometime during a four-game home series with the Yankees, beginning Friday night, the type of epic that Christopher Nolan might direct.

Gasper is from Merrimack, N.H., one of 10 Granite Staters to ever play in the big leagues since 2000. He wound up at Bryant College in Rhode Island, and turned heads in the summer Cape Cod League with his live bat and his teammate skills. The Yankees took him in the 27th round, when the scouts are looking at notes they’d scribbled on napkins, and left him unprotected in the Rule V draft. And even though he did enough to surface with Boston, the Red Sox dealt him to Minnesota. The Twins cast him aside this winter, and Washington picked him up, figuratively shook him for a minute, and sent him back into the pool. Boston took Gasper off waivers and figured he’d help Worcester win a few Triple-A games. The manager there was Chad Tracy.

Gasper was always enough of a by-the-book guy that he wore a sport coat to Fenway when the Red Sox called him up in 2024. Then-manager Alex Cora said that was a first for him. Cora was fired this year when the Red Sox lost 17 of their first 27. Tracy took over on a strictly interim basis which, considering the way Boston was playing, was probably fine. He had a vacancy when Masataka Yoshida got hurt, and he knew Gasper. Maybe he didn’t know the Gasper who could digest a major league month with one bite, but Boston has a 63-43 record since the manager change.

“Mickey’s got the best mustache in baseball, straight out of Jersey Shore,” said Tracy, who is hoping his gig becomes just as indelible.

Derek Hill, Philadelphia

They say pitchers eventually catch up with hitters, but does the mail ever catch up with Hill?

Since Detroit sent him packing in 2022, Hill has been with Washington, Texas, San Francisco, Miami, the White Sox and now the Phillies. He has paid taxes in seven states and he’s only 30.

In none of those places did Hill play more than 57 games.

It could have been traumatic if Hill hadn’t had a father who was in no mood for sob stories. Orsino Hill played 12 minor league seasons for seven different organizations. Like Derek, he was a first-round draft pick which, as he discovered, becomes a deactivated key upon delivery. As Orsino told Derek, “If you’ve never been through anything in life, the minor leagues will absolutely chew you up and spit you out.”

Derek has borne a few tooth marks over the years, but his desire makes him difficult to swallow. He was biding his time with the White Sox on June 11 when the Phillies traded two minor leaguers for him. Little did he know he would become the toast of a town that is more inclined to burn.

On June 23 Hill launched a 2-run, pinch-hit home run to beat Washington. The next night he had another homer to lengthen the Phillies’ lead in a 10-5 win. On Aug. 3 Hill hit a grand slam as the Phillies came from behind to beat the Nationals, 6-3, and he also made a diving catch in centerfield. But that didn’t come close to duplicating his leap at the wall to retrieve Juan Soto’s first-inning home run bid on June 25, one that helped the Phillies get past the Mets, 2-1, and brought a rare smile to pitcher Zack Wheeler.

Like the Red Sox, the Phillies stalled out when the bell rang, and were 9–19 when manager Rob Thomson was fired. Futility isn’t tolerated in Philly, but lifelessness is an original sin, and the Phillies played older than their birth certificates. Adolis Garcia, who came in to solve the Phillies’ outfield weaknesses, wasn’t the answer, and later got hurt, as did Johan Rojas. Hence the urgency to get Hill. They knew he could hit lefthand pitchers and run down fly balls, but as the Phillies began to drag themselves into contention, they needed his unadulterated joy. They won 16 of their next 20 and are pushing Atlanta for the N.L. East lead.

Orsino is from L.A., scouts for the Dodgers and is Darryl Strawberry’s cousin, and over the years he would recruit acquaintances like Barry Bonds to assess young Derek. But Derek was born in Des Moines, and he became the first Iowa native to play in the Field Of Dreams game when the Phillies met the Twins, which meant he got to walk through the cornfield that lies beyond the fence. He’s conquered deeper underbrush than that.

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You see them at every NFL training camp. Giant mushrooms, on all the heads. They are called Guardian Caps, named after the company that sells them. They are supposed to shield the brains of football players and are standard equipment during practice. A few players, including Houston’s notably violent nickelback Jalen Pitre, wear them during games.

On Tuesday morning the Guardian Cap became a metaphor for the sport. It hides what’s underneath. The New York Times, citing a British Medical Journal survey, reported that CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) is present in the brains of football players to an extent feared but never enumerated.

The study focused on the 878 NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. It found that 215 had CTE, which comes out to nearly one in four. There were 643 brains that were not examined, and the reasonable assumption is that many of them contained CTE, too. Of 235 players whose families donated their brains, there were 215 cases of CTE.

In 202 of the 338 brains that were donated between 2008 and 2021, almost 60 percent contained dementia, including nine of 23 that did not have CTE.

Such headlines were dominant in the days of the movie “Concussion,” and the players’ suit against the NFL that reaped $765 million. That was in the middle of the previous decade. Since then, the NFL has instituted ejections for targeting, and the helmet companies claim they have modernized and de-weaponized their product, and players with concussion symptoms are spotted and forced to leave games. There is little taste for the revival of the narrative that consumed football not so long ago. ESPN.com had removed it from its headline list on its football page by Tuesday night. We can’t be thinking player safety when there’s fantasy rosters to set.

Meanwhile, the perky sideline reporters and ESPN’s opionated studio aren’t stationed at the memory care facilities, when another NFL alumnus is led by the hand into the lobby.

Until there’s a survey that measures the health of today’s players, we can’t know if the NFL’s measures are effective. CTE still isn’t detectable until the patient dies. The league claims the Guardian Caps reduce the force of head contact by 10 percent. Stanford and Wisconsin have produced studies that say the Caps don’t really reduce concussions, but the sample isn’t big enough for strong conclusions. Helmet companies, particularly Riddell, say the Guardian Caps interfere with their warranties. Thank God that they’ve discovered the team logos and other stickers can be attached to the Caps with no problem.

But the Caps aren’t just there for optics. They protect players from the helmets, and prevent players from using their own helmets to harm others. They’re also much lighter than they look. Pop Warner Leagues are permitting, but not mandating, the Guardian Caps for their little tacklers, some of whom get hit at age seven.

Those who don’t believe football is synonymous with fracture are playing flag football, which will be an Olympic sport for both men and women in 2028. The NFL is driving that bandwagon, claiming that 20 million are playing flag football worldwide. Somehow it has discovered that the flag game can install the same teamwork values that the savage game does. High school 7-on-7 tournaments, with all passing and no hitting, are the big events of the summertime. It’s where recruiters judge quarterbacks and receivers. It’s possible to get hurt in those games, too, but much harder to plant the seeds of Lewy Body dementia.

Unfortunately, commercial football is getting bigger and more grotesque. College playoffs are getting longer, and one can easily foresee 20-game schedules once the Big Ten and the SEC break away from the parasites in their midst. The richest high school teams jet cross-country to play each other, primarily because the teams in that area see no point in getting abused.

The NFL is inexorably gaining on its 18-game schedule goal, the one that its Players Association said it would never accept. The Super Bowl will coincide with Valentine’s Day at SoFi Stadium. The international schedule is nine games long, including an utterly preposterous date in Australia on Sept. 10, featuring the Rams and 49ers. There is nothing to gain and a lot of sleep to lose, and it deprives one market of a significant divisional home date. A floating stadium in the Strait of Hormuz looms.

Thursday games on three days’ rest…..a year-round schedule of OTAs and mini-camps and “being the first in the building and the last to leave”....the annexation of Christmas Day to go with Thanksgiving….more and more games disappearing from the view of the workaday fan and into the world of streaming, The NFL doesn’t need to test the limits of its excesses to remain the nation’s most successful business enterprise. It just does it because it can.

At the very least, the NFL should require the hired help to wear the big mushroom in its regular season games, just to establish the data. Teams should be permitted to dress all their practice-squad players in games. If 18 games are necessary, two bye weeks should be, too.

You say the game will always be about wreckage and risk. Auto racing used to be that way. Thanks to improvements in neck restraints and the composition of walls, no one has died in a NASCAR event since Dale Earnhardt, 25 years ago. No driver has died in a regular Formula One race since Jules Ferrer in 2015. No Indy Car driver has died in action since Justin Wilson in 2015.

If racing can do it, football can do it, regardless of the discrepancies. If football doesn’t fix this, it’s only postponing the day when someone else, beyond its control, does.

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If you can’t wake up and smell the coffee when you’re in Seattle, you might not have a pulse, which explains the Mariners’ whole flatline season.

Within a 6-day stretch they lost 22-0 to Milwaukee and 19-2 to the Cubs. Since July 4 they had losing streaks of six, five and four games. Among the 30 teams, they rank 30th in batting average, 29th in OPS, 29th in slugging and 30th in runs scored, only 3.52 per game. The team that finished 18 games over .500 and got to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series last year found itself seven games under .500 on Monday morning.

Certainly these conditions could not stand. Sure enough, on Monday, an American League West general manager was fired. He was Dana Brown. Of the Houston Astros, who were tied for first place.

That’s sort of the theme of the A.L. West, a group that unfortunately is forced to provide at least one participant to the postseason. It’s like watching six months of SNL skits that aren’t even close to funny.

Jerry Dipoto, the man upstairs with the Mariners, is still in place. He has been Seattle’s general manager since 2016 and was the Angels’ general manager for three and a half years before that. His career is unsellied by World Series appearances. Two Augusts ago, he fired manager Scott Servais, his longtime manager and friend, and Servais learned about it on the ESPN crawl. He’s also the guy who warred with Mike Scotscia, the only Angel manager ever to win a postseason series, and finally gave owner Arte Moreno a him-or-me ultimatum. In a rare moment of clarity, Moreno said, “Him.”

Dipoto replaced Servais with Dan Wilson, the Mariners’ catcher during their playoff days. Wilson guided the M’s down the stretch last year, but this year has been tougher, with more criticism. The club’s solid pitching rotation has strayed, with Bryan Woo fighting inconsistency and a shoulder problem, and George Kirby leads the league in hits allowed. Luck has fled the scene, too. The Mariners lost shortstop J.P. Crawford, brought up Colt Emerson and watched him approach his promise for a while, and have now lost him too.

The only thrill was the arrival of 21-year-old Kade Anderson, the former third-overall pick from LSU. Anderson started against the Cubs on Saturday and left in the sixth, down 3-2 after home runs from Alex Bregman and Michael Busch. Still, the lefthander struck out five and showed why he was the Roy Hobbs of the Double-A Texas League while at Arkansas. He pitched 93 innings, gave up 47 hits and 13 walks, struck out 135 and went 10-1 with a 1.06 ERA and an 0.643 WHIP.

But then it was back to wondering what happened to the comet that Julio Rodriguez was riding in his first two seasons, as the 25-year-old centerfielder suffers career lows in batting average and OPS.

And back to trying to reduce the civic nervous breakdown about Cal Raleigh.

Last year the assembled numerologists of baseball were furiously scrolling to see if any catcher had approached what Raleigh is doing. This year they’re measuring the launch angle of his fall. Raleigh had 60 home runs for Seattle in 2025. He came into Monday night with 55 hits for the season.

By now you know that Raleigh threw away the crutches, like a pro wrestling babyface who gets that one last surge of vengeance, and clubbed three home runs in an 8-2 win over the Phillies Monday night. He had never hit three homers in a game before. He had only 14 home runs for the season, and his OPS of 2026 fell short of his slugging percentage of 2025 (.579 to .589). For those who don’t know, and there’s no reason you should, OPS is calculated by adding the slugging percentage to the on-base percentage. That, along with the swandive to a .159 batting average, has added to the detritus at Raleigh’s feet. It is one of the most futile offensive seasons in baseball history, but Raleigh earned the right to endure it because, in 2025, he hit more home runs than any switch-hitter and any catcher ever did.

Raleigh has neither dodged, denied or spun his situation. Time and again he has taken the brunt. “I’m awful,” is how his explanations usually begin. He also has swatted aside the excuses, as in the oblique injury he had in the spring, or his participation in the World Baseball Classic. Raleigh didn’t have a hit in the WBC and was benched in the final two games.

He hasn’t hit many pitches with much authority, but he’s a particular hostage to the modern, supersonic fastball. He is hitting .137 against the heater, and so he is seeing it, or not seeing it, more often. But then Raleigh never was a threat to Tony Gwynn, and his .247 average in 2025 was by far his career high. He’s a .217 hitter, lifetime. The sudden power outage is the riddle. That could be explained by burnout, since Raleigh led the league in games caught in 2023 and 2024 and caught 121 last season. But Monday’s outburst might represent a second wind.

Raleigh jumped on Zack Wheeler’s second pitch, a fastball, for his first homer. Next time, Wheeler threw only one fastball to Raleigh,, who homered off a cutter. Raleigh’s third blast was off a cutter thrown by Chase Shugart.

“I’ve been feeling better,” he said. “I’m trying to get my hands back sooner. Mentally, it’s just been about that hope and belief and optimism that things are going to get better every day.”

And the truth is that the most disappointing team in baseball is probably a six-game win streak away from taking the division lead. Houston and Texas were one game below .500 as they led the West. The Athletics and Angels are 63-161, not surprising because the Athletics are in the midst of a 3-year layover in Sacramento before they get to Vegas, and the Angels claim to be Los Angeles’ American League team, a presumption that has dawned on few Angelenos. Such confusion makes it hard for to either team to start its home games on time. The fact that they both stink also factors in.

Still, it’s difficult to understand why Houston owner Jim Crane stepped in at this moment to fire Brown, who took over before the 2023 season.

Crane is not sold on the importance of general managers. He fired Jim Click after Houston won the World Series in 2022. He also promised the Astros would not fall victim to the performance cycles that tend to bring down champions. He said the “window” was always open.

The window was shattered by a 3-6 homestand against the Mariners, A’s and Angels. Until then the Astros were playing as expected, if not a little better. Josh Hader was the dominating closer, Jeremy Pena was one of the game’s best shortstops, and Brown had resurrected Peter Lambert, a washout in Colorado but now Houston’s second most-consistent starter. Brown also got a nice haul from Chicago, including third baseman Isaac Paredes, in exchange for Kyle Tucker. The Astros weren’t rich enough, or interested enough, to try to keep Bregman, who signed with Boston.

But Brown was knocked for failing to sign Pena and starting pitcher Spencer Brown to longer contracts, and for signing Cristian Javier to that same type of deal, before Javier got hurt. The Astros lack young, talented outfielders, and they keep hoping for a late-life renewal from 36-year-old Jose Altuve, whose OPS of .705 is his lowest since he was 21.

Brown’s record, therefore, is mixed. But the new decision-makers won’t have time to re-engineer the franchise before October, and the current Astros still aspire to be playing then. Among the advisers Crane might hire as the new GM is Jeff Bagwell, the Hall of Famer. He certainly knows where the secrets are. But maybe Crane should check with the Giants, who turned over their operation to their own success symbol, Buster Posey, and haven’t enjoyed the result.

Seattle’s fate depends on how often the fans get reacquainted with Raleigh’s persona as the Big Dumper, an observation on Raleigh’s physique from then-teammate Jared Kelenic. You haven’t heard the nickname very much in Raleigh’s season of carrying the bat back to the dugout. In the all-forgiving A.L. West, Raleigh has ample time to leave it all behind.

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There’s all that loudspeaker noise, and of course there’s lots of applause from Brewers’ fans, and there’s the slamming-door sound when a 104 mph pitch hits the catcher’s glove.

But the Jacob Misiorowski experience is fairly quiet. There are few cracks of the bat. There hasn’t been a crack in that right elbow either, at least not yet.

Misiorowski’s accumulated numbers look like a best-ball score in golf. One man cannot be expected to strike out 210 in 139 innings while walking only 31, or pairing a 1.68 ERA with a 0.748 WHIP. He is giving up a .151 batting average and a .460 OPS, and he has struck out nearly 40 percent of the batters he’s faced. On Friday Misiorowski took the Milwaukee mound against Atlanta and Chris Sale, the lefthander whom Misiorowski used to monitor. He won, 2-1, as he averaged 100.1 mph with his fastball. That was the eighth-slowest average in his 24 starts. “A tick down, huh?” repeated closer Trevor Megill when the reporters converted. “You guys are spoiled.” Still, it was the 20th consecutive time an opponent failed to score more than three runs against Misiorowski, and he threw 100 or faster 32 times.

Then the Brewers hooked him after 96 pitches and six innings, leading 2-0. That was risky because Aaron Ashby, as valuable a setup man as anybody in baseball, wasn’t available. Anthony Senzatela stumbled through the seventh and eighth and gave up one run, and Megill finished up. It showed that the Brewers feel the same thrill and shudder that everyone else does. They have only let him throw 100 or more pitches three times. Of course, Misiorowski only needed 91 in a one-hit, no-walk, 15-strikeout complete game against the Phillies on June 12. Depriving him of nine innings, on nights when everything is firing, seems a disservice.

Misiorowski has faced 96 hitters this year after throwing his 70th pitch. They are hitting .110. The usual concern about the treacherous third trip through the order, as if it were the Strait of Hormuz, doesn’t really apply to a guy whose 4-seam laser might be his second-best pitch. On Aug. 15, Misiorowski was in a spot of trouble in Los Angeles, so he struck out Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman to get out of it. He got both lefthanded sluggers with sliders.

But you don’t have to agree with the protectiveness to understand it. Misiorowski is 24 and his arm has no surgical scars. He is a rare-earth gem. Unfortunately, the only sure way to avoid pitching injuries is to quit pitching. The arm was not designed to go from zero to 105 in a tick of the pitch clock. It wasn’t designed to throw 80 mph baseballs either.

Nolan Ryan threw 5,386 blazing innings. Aroldis Chapman, who still has the record with a 105.8 mph pitch, is still dealing from the Boston bullpen at age 38. Justin Verlander used to touch 100, back when it warranted oohs and ahhs, and he also started 566 games.

Jacob deGrom might seem like a bad example, since arm trouble basically knocked him out of five seasons. But on Thursday he became the second-fastest pitcher to reach 2,000 strikeouts, at age 38.

Misiorowski also has physical advantages that none of them did. He is 6-foot-7, and when his foot lands at release, he has gained seven feet, seven inches on the hitter. That’s a 53-foot pitch, essentially. He has learned, or is learning, that his sliders and cutters are particularly nuclear when the hitter is tensed up for a fastball unlike any other.

“I told him if I could throw like that, I wouldn’t throw anything but a fastball, ever,” said teammate Brandon Woodruff who, before his shoulder went bad, could almost throw like that.

“He’s like Forrest Gump,” manager Pat Murphy said. “It’s a compliment to a guy who doesn’t put any limits on himself. His naivete was a factor in a positive way. He wasn’t even aware of outside forces.”

Yet Misorowski is no gee-whiz kid. His dad Dave, a former electrician, has fought Parkinson’s since before Jacob was born. Misirowskihimself was a gangly, incomplete kid growing up in a Kansas City suburb, but he showed enough to get a scholarship offer from Oklahoma State. Covid-19 intervened, and Misiorowski decided he didn’t want to wait the required three years to go from a Division I school to the pros. He chose Crowder JC, in the Ozarks, where baseball filled all the voids. After he missed his freshman year with a knee injury, Misirowski gathered himself for a big sophomore year, striking out 18 of 27 hitters in an NAIA playoff game. When he hit 98 for a Brewers scout, he became a second-round pick, and pretty soon the crowds began gathering in Biloxi and Appleton and his other minor league stops. He struck out 320 in 233 innings before the Brewers called.

Misiorowski made the 2025 National League All-Star team after only five starts last year, which frosted several players. “This is getting to be like the Savannah Bananas,” said the Philies’ Nick Castellanos, noting that teammates Cristopher Sanchez and Ranger Suarez had been pitching at an All-Star level all year. And Misiorowski did slump in the second half. He wound up with a 4.36 ERA.

But Misiorowski was building the foundation in the weight room, with a core program that allowed him to speed up his body while he maintained control. Now, if all goes well, he has a shot at matching Randy Johnson’s 334-strikeout season of 2002.

Certainly it’s a fine time to be a Brewer. Milwaukee won its 80th game Friday, and has baseball’s best record, just as it did last year. It trails the National League in homers but is third in scoring, and tied for first in on-base percentage, and the more that baseball economics force the Brewers to lose pitchers, the quicker they replenish. Today’s rotation includes Logan Henderson (7-2, 0.868 WHIP) and Kyle Harrison, who came over from the Red Sox and is 10-3 with a 2.84 ERA.

In Misiorowski’s final inning, Atlanta’s Matt Olson propelled a drive to left center. Luis Lara, a 21-year-old rookie, launched himself into the flight path and made the catch. Lara has done that a few times, so Misiorowski just looked out at Lara and smiled.

“We ought to call him Air Lara,” he said later, after he’d survived another day in a profession unsafe at any speed.

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“Football doesn’t build character, it reveals it,” Terrion Arnold said, on the tape from the 2024 NFL combine. In Seattle last week, John Schneider grinned and brought other Seahawks officials in to watch it.

The general manager of the Super Bowl champions didn’t care about the irony. Arnold was a first-round cornerback, a beloved Alabama star who was tight with both Nick Saban and his wife Terry, and now he was on the market, on the cheap. Arnold had given the Seahawks one of the best interviews they’d ever had. Schneider checked with the ‘Bama players in his locker room, for character references. They all came back with thumbs up, but Schneider was already in the mood to be sold.

But there was a bit of a complication. Florida authorities have charged Arnold with the following: three counts of armed robbery, three counts of kidnapping, and two related conspiracy charges. A guilty verdict on all of those could imprison Arnold for life. Detroit, which picked Arnold in that draft, released him, and the Seahawks weren’t the only team to pursue him. But they went ahead and signed him for one year.

Whether he plays or not in 2026 depends on the length of his time on the Commissioner’s Exempt list, which allows Arnold to get paid but prohibits him from practicing or playing. His salary will count against Seattle’s cap whether he plays or not. Clearly, in Seattle’s estimation, the reward is greater than the reveal.

How do you deal with a player who puts himself in criminal situations, even if no one has found him guilty? Teams and leagues struggle with this all the time. A spot on one of the NFL’s 32 rosters is a privilege, not a right. Yet Arnold has been an exemplary actor throughout his career, going back to his 3.8 GPA at John Paul II High in Tallahassee.

“He’s special,” Saban said, the night Arnold was drafted. “He sits next to me in every defensive meeting.” Saban later wrote a letter to Judge Christopher Sabella, extolling Arnold, and Sabella allowed Arnold to post a $1 million bond as he awaits trial in Tampa. Prosecutors wanted Arnold to wear an ankle monitor but Sabella rejected that, because Arnold had football camps to visit.

It all started in early February, before the Seahawks beat New England to become world champs. Arnold’s Lions didn’t make the playoffs. He scheduled a long weekend of fun with friends and rented a property in Largo, Fla. Residents in the building complained about the noise and the marijuana smoke.

Sometime during the weekend, Arnold’s sister called him and asked why he was in Miami. He said he wasn’t in Miami. She said, well, you may not be but your phone is. Arnold took stock of his belongings and discovered a bag with $100,000 cash was missing, as were the phone, a Bible, Rolexes, shoes, luxury pocketbooks and an $80,000 diamond pendant. The cash, as Arnold told the cops later, was for blackjack and roulette at a nearby casino. “It’s the offseason,” he explained.

Arnold assumed that Yan Lopez, a driver that he’d hired, and young barber Danny Tenesaca were the thieves. He had heard Lopez make reference to a job he had in Miami, for a rapper. Everybody else in the party was a friend of his, although some of them brought people who definitely weren’t.

Arnold is being charged for what happened next. His girlfriend at the time and one of her friends lured Lopez and Tenesaca into the apartment. Christion Williams and Lyndell Hudson, two college players and friends of Arnold, came out of a bedroom closet with guns. They held Lopez and Tenesaca and occasionally beat and pistol-whipped them. Arnold was in a car outside and never entered the apartment. He is being accused of masterminding this revenge operation, to the point that he advised the girls what to say.

Police determined later that Lopez and Tenesaca had nothing to do with the robberies. Hudson, Williams and two other friends of Arnold’s are being held without bond. The two women, Arianna Del Valle and Jasmine Randazzo, pleaded guilty and are facing four years in jail. Arnold’s next court date is Oct. 5.

“No one has the right to take the law into their own hands,” said Suzy Lopez, the State’s Attorney. “A dispute over missing property does not justify violence, kidnapping or retaliation.”

Meanwhile, James Pearce is on the practice field in Atlanta, although he has been suspended without pay for the first eight games. Shortly after Arnold’s incident, Pearce was arrested on two charges of aggravated battery for ramming the car of WNBA player Rickea Jackson with his own car in Miami. He also was charged with evading a police officer, then assaulting him. Pearce is in a 12-month trial diversion program, and if he avoids further problems and stays away from Jackson, the charges will be dropped.

Pearce was a first-round pick who had a stellar rookie year as a pass rusher. But during his draft process, he didn’t speculate on whether character is built or revealed. He’d already had his problems at Tennessee and was considered a risky pick. The Falcons took that risk.

Arnold was considered beyond reproach, primarily because of the Sabans. In fact, Arnold is one of the main drivers of Saban’s post-retirement makeover, in which the glowering martinet of the Alabama sideline is now the gruff landlord with the heart of gold. It has kept Saban’s portfolio strong, and his blessing probably contributed to Arnold being drafted 24th in the first round by Detroit.

Arnold was the 2nd-rated defensive back in the nation in Tallahassee. He wasn’t on a great team, and said that’s why he wanted to go to Alabama, to catch up on the winning. He also said John Paul II had a “give the ball to Terrion” offense, and he was looking forward to playing alongside parallel talent. He signed with Saban and played early, was demoted, and then came on again.

Saban has opened the door to his life with “Miss Terry,” who was his high school sweetheart in West Virginia and has been his wife for nearly 55 years. As Saban recalls it, the two went back to their hometown a few years ago. Saban pointed out a fellow who once dated Terry and was running a tire store. “If you’d married him you’d still be here,” Saban said. “No, if I’d married him he would have won seven national championships,” she replied.

But Miss Terry is a character in her own right. Because LSU fans were miffed that Nick left to go to the NFL, she sprinkles holy water on the Tiger Stadium turf whenever Alabama plays there. She befriended a lot of players but she had a bond with Arnold, texting him during game weeks. “I thought Coach was telling her what to say,” Arnold said,”but then I realized that he doesn’t say nice things like that.”

Arnold was particularly moved when he learned that Miss Terry corresponded with Henry Ruggs, who has served three years of a 10-year sentence in Nevada for felony DUI and vehicular manslaughter in a wreck in which his car was clocked at 158 mph. Ruggs was a noted Alabama receiver.

“She gave me this book,” Arnold said, “and I noticed there were some pages missing, and she told me she’d sent those pages to Henry. I said, dang, even though he’s in prison, she’s still that solid person. She’s my dog.”

“He used to come over to our house and play rummy,” Nick Saban said of Arnold. “He started that whole thing with LANK (the slogan Let All Naysayers Know). He’s my guy.”

What to make of all this? One can be disillusioned, but the essence of Arnold was no illusion. That was real. So was his misspent Florida weekend. It was too deliberate and reckless to be written off as a lapse. It came from some portion of Arnold that had either been withheld or altered, by the money and the opportunity. He wouldn’t be the first case.

From O.J. Simpson to Mike Tyson to Lance Armstrong to Bill Cosby, we’ve seen the fragility of the pedestal that we, as fans and observers, build. We don’t know any of these people, not really. They aren’t sure they know themselves. It’s pure folly to judge people for the worst day of their life, or extol them for the best. As for character, it’s really a synonym for decision-making. Nobody gets them all right. For Terrion Arnold, the issue is whether he’ll be allowed to make another.

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Tommy John was already having a bad day. National League manager Yogi Berra had left him off the All-Star team, even though he was 13-3 with a 2.50 ERA, and Andy Messersmith and Don Sutton, his Dodger teammates, were going. John never hid anything under a bushel. “I guess I didn’t kiss the right behind,” John said. “Yogi Berra picks All-Stars like he manages. Pitifully.”

But he also had a game to pitch, against Montreal. He was leading 4-0 in the third inning when he threw an 0-and-1 pitch to Hal Breeden. It took a strange, high path to the plate, and on the mound John was mystified, and also in pain. “I felt like I’d left my left arm somewhere else,” he said. “It just flew away, independent of the rest of me.”

John tried another pitch, but his left arm had not returned from orbit, and the ball sailed as the first one had. He walked off the mound at Dodger Stadium. It was July 17, 1974.

There was no real concern at first, although John went on the 21-day disabled list. It was just a matter of diagnostics. John’s wife Sally was pregnant with their daughter Tamara. As he waited for the elbow to calm down, he promised he’d pitch again before Sept. 10, the due date. As it turned out, Tamara was walking before her father pitched another game.

What happened in the interim was the most consequential medical development in the history of pitching, one that salvaged or enabled several thousand of careers. Dr. Frank Jobe performed it in September, and now more people know John from the surgery than from his pitching career, which was formidable. He pitched for 14 years after the operation, won 20 games in three different seasons and threw 101 complete games. He died of bladder cancer Sunday, at 83. Four days earlier, Cincinnati’s Hunter Greene had become the 41st major league player, and 40th pitcher, to have the surgery in 2026 alone.

More than half of the arms that undergo Tommy John surgeries belong to high school, college, minor league and amateur pitchers. Over 2,600 major leaguers have had it. Ex-Dodger pitcher Hong-chih Kou had it four times. The Braves’ Jonny Venters had three Tommy Johns. Shohei Ohtani is pitching after two TJs. John Smoltz was a successful starting pitcher with the Braves, did the Tommy John, came back as a premier closer, and got into the Hall of Fame because of it. Cade Horton had it when he was pitching for Oklahoma, became a top-of-rotation pitcher for the Cubs, and had it again this year.

Nothing is guaranteed, but a clear majority of pitchers regain their previous velocity. Justin Verlander won the Cy Young Award when he was 39, post-TJ. Chris Sale, Tarik Skubal, Sandy Alcantara and Jacob deGrom overcame the surgery to win their Cy Youngs. Bryce Harper got it when he was an outfielder and was back in business in five months, at least eight fewer months than the average rehab time for pitchers.

None of this was known when Jobe opened up John’s arm and realized he was entering the land of the unprecedented. The surgery involves taking a tendon from another place in the body and tying it into the shattered joint. It had never been done to an elbow. John was in no position to grant permission at the time, so Jobe went into John’s right wrist to find the tendon to transplant. That’s why John was a bit perplexed when he woke up to see bandages on the right hand.

“Can I get listed as a righthander, too?” he asked later.

Jobe, who died in 2014, had the stoic bedside manner. Inwardly, he doubted John had even a one percent chance to pitch again. John tackled the process head-on, increasing his running program to 10 miles a day, optimistically shooting to return near the end of the 1975 season, even advising the Dodgers to run a contest for fans to guess his return date. But 1975 came and went with no real progress. The elbow seemed workable, but John kept having numbness in his fingers. For a franchise which lost Sandy Koufax too soon, that was haunting.

At spring training in 1976, John hit 88 mph when throwing to teammate Jimmy Wynn. “You’re all the way back,” Wynn said.

The big night was April 16, in Atlanta, and John got the first two outs on ground balls, and 10 of 15 outs overall. That meant something, because the sinker was always his best friend. He got through five innings and lost, 3-1. He was in the rotation the rest of the season and went 10-10 with a 3.09 ERA.

John went on to win 288 games overall with a 3.34 ERA and a 1.283 WHIP, which of course no one had heard of back then. No pitcher in baseball’s post-1900 age has won more games and failed to enter the Hall of Fame except for Roger Clemens. At least we know why Clemens isn’t in, as lame as those reasons might be. One skeptic wrote that John never led his league in anything significant. Mike Mussina is in Cooperstown after leading the A.L. in wins once and in innings-pitched once, and never winning 20 games in a season, and he had a 3.68 ERA. Besides, wasn’t it important that John led the league and, indeed, the whole of baseball in the preservation and elongation of pitchers’ careers? How many billions of dollars have pitchers made, once they returned to the mound with new elbows? Before TJ surgery, such injuries sent most pitchers back to the farm or the local hardware store.

But it wasn’t just the baseball writers who whiffed this one, after 15 years of eligibility. The Veterans Committee, which uplifted Jeff Kent into the Hall this year, has had no time for John either. The process is consumed by numbers these days, with WAR and OPS (for hitters) as the main vehicles. There is no room to consider a player’s impact on the history of the game, the things that he paid forward, the tickets that fans bought to see him, the memories he spread.

That said, you can debate whether John was courageous or just desperate. He risked losing any left-arm function, but he knew baseball would be impossible without it. It’s Jobe who gets squeezed out here, because even though general managers, owners, and ballplayers are considered, scouts and coaches and doctors are not. The Tommy John surgery was only a fraction of Jobe’s handiwork throughout sports.

The proper and most innovative solution would have a shared plaque, with John and Jobe as an entry, but there are procedures to follow here, you know, or at least there were until Carlos Beltran’s induction. In any event, John had no trouble leading his own campaign.

It was a bumpy life, all told. John somehow pitched for powerful Yankee, Dodger and Angel teams and never won a World Series. The nation gave him its heart in 1981, when his two-year-old son Travis fell out the window of a New Jersey beach house, fractured his skull and was in a coma for almost two weeks. Travis recovered in time to throw out the first pitch of an October playoff game, and Tommy and Sally were featured on every channel. The two would divorce later, and their 28-year-old Taylor, who suffered from depression, died at Tamara’s suburban Chicago home after an overdose of prescription drugs. Taylor had performed on Broadway in Les Miserables when he was a child, and his version of the Star-Spangled Banner was often played at ballparks.

And John fought a stuttering problem that persuaded high school officials in Terre Haute, Ind. to cancel his speech at graduation, even though he was a valedictorian.

Certainly John deserves a spot in the orthopedist’s Hall. Because of the surgery, young pitchers see no downside in throwing as hard as they often as they can. That leads to more busted elbows and more anesthesia, for an operation that’s almost become as routine as an appendectomy. The speedboats, mansions and Range Rovers that John has provided the men and women of medicine are nearly immeasurable.

But John’s true legacy will be species recovery, Because of he and Jobe, new herds of 38-year-old pitchers roam the grass like buffalo.

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Olivia Miles is the one with the black-framed glasses. Everyone in the WNBA should get a pair. Preferably with heavy tint on the sides of the frames, to block out the periphery, to hide the talking points and the race cards and the general distemper that has drowned out what should be the WNBA’s overture. The basketball itself, once you don your tunnel-vision goggles, is just fine. Particularly when Miles is handling it.

The rookie point guard for the Minnesota Lynx was a lifeguard on Saturday, hanging around until it was time to drag her teammates to safety. The Las Vegas Aces had cut Minnesota’s lead to 74-73 in the fourth quarter. Miles promptly found Napheesha Collier for a 3-pointer. Then she did it again. When the Aces relied on their championship pedigree to cut the lead to five, Miles drove for a layup. Then she did it again.

Miles wound up with 23 points, eight assists and four rebounds, and the Lynx won on the road, 92-87, and improved their WNBA-best record to 29-7. As a rookie Miles is seventh in the league in assists and eighth in scoring, and she’s shooting 49.6 percent from the floor, 40.2 percent from the 3-point line, and 87.3 percent from the foul line, periously close to the 50-40-90 holy grail for shooters. She appears destined for Rookie of the Year, and even though her numbers fall short of Caitlin Clark’s and A’ja Wilson’s, she’s getting MVP noise as well.

The Lynx feel deprived because they haven’t won a championship in nine seasons. Between 2011 and 2017 they won four. Cheryl Reeve coached all four of those teams, and she has won 364 games, most in league history. Those were the days of Maya Moore, Seimone Augustus, Sylvia Fowles and point guard Lindsay Whalen, now a Lynx assistant coach. While Clark often came up from Iowa to appreciate Moore, Miles was Whalen’s biggest fan. “You’re going to get really tired of me,” she told Whalen the day she was drafted. “I’m going to have a lot of questions.”

Reeve is also Minnesota’s general manager. The Lynx had the No. 2 pick in the 2026 draft. Dallas had the first pick and chose Connecticut’s Azzi Fudd, who is the partner of Wings’ star Paige Bueckers. Fudd was also an entirely logical first pick. But when reporters wondered how the relationship would affect the Wings’ daily life, team officials blocked that line of questioning. The WNBA loves to silence anything short of “What does this win say about your character?,” but in this case the internet was already in full riot. Anyway, when Dallas picked Fudd, Minnesota could pick Miles. “She’s not just a point guard, she’s a connector of people,” Reeve said at the time. Now she calls Miles a “generational talent.”

It’s not outlandish to call Miles the truest point guard in either men’s or women’s basketball, only because the best point guards, like Clark and Jalen Brunson, would just as soon shoot. If she has a comparison, it’s probably John Stockton, without the malice. Miles’ arrival in Minnesota meant Courtney Williams could return to shooting guard, and that Natasha Howard could get the ball in useful spots inside, and thus everything improved. There’s a lot of simplicity and very little Showtime in Miles’ game. She moves the ball ahead on the fastbreak, and she’s content to find Collier and Kayla McBride, who scored 43 against Dallas last Sunday with 10 three-pointers. Passing is her jab, and shooting is her uppercut, something she’s not at all reluctant to use if most other options are covered. On June 4, she hit eight of 11 threes against Golden State.

Her unofficial nickname is “The Spectacle,” a play on her glasses and her entertainment value. But Miles has prospered by avoiding the spectacle, or whatever you call the acid rain of opinion that has plagued the league since Clark showed up last year. That plague has also bought a life-changing Collective Bargaining Agreement and record TV ratings, thanks mostly to Clark, who leads the WNBA in assists on behalf of Indiana, and got to 1,500 points and 500 assists quicker than anyone in league annals.

But Clark’s roughhouse treatment from a few rivals, including those who clearly didn’t like her in college, has spun into narratives that follow the political fault line. People who never watched a second of WNBA games and wouldn’t know Sheryl Swoopes from Sheryl Crow now attack the league’s existence, and grandstanding NBA washouts like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White threaten to declare themselves women and join up.

Then Indiana’s Sophie Cunningham, a Fever substitute whose own triple-doubles consist of clicks, videos and fouls, opined that transsexuals shouldn’t invade women’s sports. She also said it didn’t mean she was anti-trans. Fair enough. But those who applauded the progressive statements of Doc Rivers, LeBron James and Steve Kerr over the years went after Cunningham with shut-up-and-dribble fury.

If any of this nonsense persuades a curious sports fan to discover the WNBA, then it’s probably worth it in some cumulative way. The league keeps expanding and the talent keeps filling the space. Atlanta’s Rhyne Howard is the WNBA leader in the disparate categories of 3-pointers made and steals. Indiana’s Kelsey Mitchell hits 43.4 percent of her 3-pointers. Wilson, going for her fifth MVP, leads in scoring (25.9), goes to the foul line 7.7 times per game and hits 85.4 percent of her tries. And the rookie class of Miles, Fudd, Flau’jae Johnson (Seattle) and Kiki Rice (Toronto) is just another ascending wave, with more to follow.

Remember when Houston won the first four WNBA titles and folded eight years later, or when Detroit won the 2006 title and was forced into self-exile to Tulsa three years later? The WNBA was down to 12 teams. By 2030 it will have 18, including a replacement in Detroit.

Miles grew up in Summit, N.J., and played soccer as well as basketball. She was far more shot-hungry in soccer than basketball, but said soccer gave her the field vision that she uses today. She said she would have gone to Princeton if coach Courtney Banghart had not left for North Carolina, but went to Notre Dame instead, where she and Hannah Hidalgo formed a marauding backcourt. Miles yearned to run her own team, so after she recovered from an ACL injury and earned two Notre Dame degrees, she irked some Irish fans by transferring to TCU, which had knocked Notre Dame out of the NCAA regionals. Miles became Big 12 Player of the Year in 2026, and the Horned Frogs reached the regional final.

Now Miles has won every Rookie of the Month award, and Wilson, who by no means is giving up her torch, addressed her directly at an All-Star Game press conference. “For real, you’re a star,” Wilson told Miles. “Not just because of your game, but the way you carry yourself off the court. I love how unapologetic you are. The more you play, you’re going to find more ways to get to your spots and crush it.”

Miles seemed stunned by the testimonial and merely touched her heart. Since then, somehow, she has widened the Spectacle, within the frame.

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He stands as the perfectly assembled product of all these Cuban decades, from Martin Dihigo to Minnie Minoso to Luis Tiant to Omar Linares to Braudilio Vinent to Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez to Aroldis Chapman. Now we wonder if Yordan Alvarez, in the midst of the greatest major league season that either a Cuban or a Houston Astro ever had, is actually at the end of the line.

There has only been one Cuban to win a Most Valuable Player award after a full major league season. That was Zoilo Versalles, Minnesota’s shortstop in 1965. If Houston, the surprise leader in the American League West, makes the playoffs, Alvarez might well be a unanimous selection. True, some kneejerk voters might point out that Alvarez doesn’t lead the A.L. in WAR, since he’s a tick behind Detroit’s Kevin McGonigle (?), but he leads the major leagues in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage (by 68 percentage points), OPS (108 points), total bases and intentional walks, and he leads his league in runs, hits, runs batted in and home runs (tied with Junior Caminero). Moreover, he has an .862 OPS in two-strike situations with a .282 average. He is a candidate to win both the conventional Triple Crown, which has happened once since 1967, and the “slash” version, and he only turned 29 in June.

Alvarez has 84 walks and 91 strikeouts, and he is a career .300 hitter with a .976 OPS, second to Aaron Judge among active players. He already has 205 career home runs, was the Rookie of the Year in 2019, and stroked a home run off Philadelphia’s Jose Alvarado that basically won the 2022 World Series. An ankle sprain and a broken finger limited Alvarez to 48 games last year, and in a way he was forgotten as 2026 dawned, even though he’s still 6-foot-4, 235.

His schooling was impeccable. His father Agustin always warned him about chasing bad pitches, and in Cuba’s 15-and-under league he struck out seven times in 142 plate appearances. In his second season for Las Tunas in Cuba’s top league, Alvarez hit .351 in 125 appearances and hit only one home run, but also struck out just 10 times. The grounders would become rockets eventually, and Alvarez began filling out after he defected at age 17, and lived in a safe house in Haiti with future Houston teammate Yuli Gurriel. Astros scout Charlie Gonzalez pounded the table to sign him after Alvarez worked out in Florida, but Houston had spent its international bonus money. So had the Dodgers, but they shelled out $2 million, paid the $2 million penalty, and signed him.

Alvarez with the Dodgers? The eyes glaze over that one. But this is the same organization that let Roberto Clemente and Vladimir Guerrero slip through its fingers, and when the Dodgers sought Houston reliever Josh Fields, Astros’ general manager Jeff Luhnow mentioned Alvarez. Except that general manager Andrew Friedman thought Luhnow was referencing Yadier Alvarez, who had signed for $16 million. No way that was happening, so Luhnow asked his scouts which player he should request next. “The guy I’ve been telling you about,” Gonzalez told him, and thus Yordan, the other Alvarez, came to Houston.

In fairness, Alvarez didn’t have a defensive position then, and the National League didn’t yet have the designated hitter. Still, Fields-for-Alvarez might dislodge Larry Andersen-for-Jeff Bagwell as Houston’s most glorious trade.

Cubans were once a novelty in baseball in MLB, with all their escape stories. Kendrys Morales tried to get out eight times, was hauled back into port eight times, and finally succeeded in the ninth. He became a slugger for the Angels. Rene Arocha disappeared during a flight layover in Miami, and Rey Ordonez bolted when the Cuban national team was at the World University Games in Buffalo. El Duque was stranded in the Bahamas for three days when his boat broke down, and Yasiel Puig tried to defect 13 times, and was at one point held captive by smugglers until he got through.

Eventually the Obama administration and the Cuban regime agreed to let Cuban players come to MLB without such dramatics. But that deal didn’t kick in until 2018, when Donald Trump was President, and he canceled it the next year. In 2021, nine Cubans defected during a tournament in Mexico but, by then, Cuban players were leaving home as young teenagers and finding residency in other Caribbean nations.

As Cuba’s poverty deepens, its beloved national team suffers. This spring, Cuba was eliminated in the first round of the World Baseball Classic for the first time. Last fall, Yordan Reyes left Cuba for the Dominican Republic after he impressed scouts with his power at the World Cup in Taiwan. Reyes is 5-foot-11. He’s also 12 years old.

Scouts can only dream of what the Cuban national team could have done if unshackled. Linares, Orestes Kindelan and Victor “El Loco” Mesa (whose son Victor Jr. plays for Tampa Bay) looked like All-Stars every time Cuba showed up at the Olympics, where it won gold three times. But the talent pool was no secret. Some Cubans who left before Castro locked the door found greatness in America, including Tiant, A.L. Cy Young Award winner Mike Cuellar, and Hall of Famer Tony Perez.

The Havana Sugar Kings were proud members of the Triple-A International League, and players circled those trips, with a eye toward various postgame entertainments.

But anyone who visited Cuba heard the stories of Dihigo, the Shohei Ohtani of his day.

Dihigo is in the Mexican and Cuban Halls of Fame and also in Cooperstown. In 1938 he pitched a no-hitter in the Mexican League, went 18-2 with an 0.96 ERA and led the league in strikeouts. Dihigo spent the league championship game locked up with the opposing pitcher, Satchel Paige. He won it, 2-1, with a home run.

Buck Leonard called Dihigo “the best player who ever lived, black or white.” Johnny Mize, who played for a team Dihigo managed in the Dominican, said the same thing, and Dihigo was 38 then. “I thought I was having a good year and they were walking him to pitch to me,” Mize said.

Dihigo threw no-hitters for teams in three different countries. Counting his days in Mexico, Cuba, various winter leagues and the American Negro Leagues, he is given credit for winning 288 games, and he completed 120 games in Cuba alone. He also hit .317 in Mexico and over .300 in nine Cuban League seasons. But it wasn’t just the numbers, which Dihigo built by playing year-round. Al Campanis, the former Dodger general manager, scouted Clemente, played with Jackie Robinson and of course was all too familiar with Willie Mays. He often said he never saw a player like Dihigo.

And there were times when Dihigo let a kid carry his gloves to the ballpark. Sometimes that kid was Minoso, who would lead the American League in hits in 1960, when he was 36.

Considering the uncertainty of what’s to come, fans should know and savor the Cubans they see each night, guys like Hall of Fame-bound closer Chapman in Boston, Yandy Diaz in Tampa Bay, Randy Arozarena in Seattle, Andy Pages of the Dodgers, Yasiel Iglesias in Atlanta, Adrian Morejon of San Diego, etc. They all look up to Yordan Alvarez, as does everyone else, but the melancholy dread is that, one day, an island will come down to one man.

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Dusty Baker was managing Washington in 2016. It was October, so he was in uniform. All five franchises that he managed found their way into at least one postseason. On this occasion someone was asking him about pitching, which he knew from his days of trying to hit it. “It’s really not that complicated,” he said. “Throw the fastballs up and throw the breaking balls down.” Clay fell from the eyes of those who were listening, and wax disappeared from their ears. It wasn’t the first or last time that Baker let us know that life is simpler than we think.

There is no more beloved figure in the game, even though Baker has finally left it, and his goodbye gift is “Crossroads,” the autobiography that he wrote with Steve Kettman. People were drawn to Baker by his aggressive humanity. There were no strangers in his world, just people he hadn’t met yet, and no one worth wasting his disdain. Instead of devoting his life to baseball, he took what he needed from the game and those who played it, and he applied its day-to-day lessons to everything else, like fishing and hunting and wine development and music appreciation and traveling. He was reading newspapers and books long after they lost their allure. This particular volume is just like its author, uncompromising and thoughtful and simple. He learned to keep things clean at home and in the Marine reserves, and his life remains decluttered.

Baker, now 77, played 19 years in the majors and, with the Dodgers, was the MVP of the 1977 N.L. Championship Series win over Philadelphia. He came up with Atlanta and is best known for his presence in the on-deck circle when Hank Aaron stroked home run No. 715 in 1974. But his managing career, in which he had a chance to counsel and motivate 25 men at a time, was his calling card. Baker won 54 percent of his games over 26 years, and he got to three World Series, finally winning with Houston in 2022, but also bringing the Astros back from an 0-3 deficit to a Game 7 against Tampa Bay in 2021 before losing an ALCS. Some of those job changes were troubling, but Baker’s worth was always measured by the suddenness of the phone calls from teams seeking help. From 1993 through 2023, he was out of work for only five years.

The losses hurt. After the Giants were run down and caught by the Braves in the 1993 N.L. West race, Baker kept going back to Candlestick Park for a week, making up stuff to do, hoping that, somehow, a 163rd game would present itself. In the book Baker soberly points out the bullpen decisions that kept backfiring over the years. He kept remembering 2002, when he removed Russ Ortiz with a 5-0 lead in Game 6 in Anaheim, and his three reliable relievers came crashing down, and the Giants went home empty. He made decisions based on heart and trust, not spread sheets, and his luck wasn’t all that good until he got to Houston. In Game 4 of that Rays series, Baker rememberd Ortiz, and he left Zack Greinke in a bases-loaded situation, and Greinke got the strikeout and Houston won. The constant push-pull with the civilians in the front office made 2023, the post-title year, nearly intolerable. But Baker already knew it was time, just as he knew his run with the Giants was over at the 10-year mark.

Besides, Baker knew why he was in Houston. The Astros were reviled for their electronic sign-stealing and trashcan-banging ways of 2017, when they beat the Dodgers in the Series. When the hammer came down they lost their manager and general manager, and Carlos Beltran lost his incipient chance to manage the Mets. The Astros needed a powerwash, and Baker had been cleaning something all his life. He told the club they would win a World Series with him, and in his third year they did.

But the games aren’t really the gist of “Crossroads.” The most powerful figure is Johnnie B. Baker Sr., Dusty’s taciturn dad, who always seemed to know what his eldest son was up to. One day Dusty pilfered a candy bar. Dad asked him to smile, which exposed the candy on his teeth. Out came the belt. The real lessons came in the odd jobs that Johnnie B. did and the know-how he passed along, along with his shoes, which Dusty had to polish every day.

Some of Johnnie’s parenting wouldn’t pass the sensitivity test today. He cut Dusty from his Little League teams more than once, usually for deportment. Later, when Dusty signed a contract with the Braves and didn’t tell him, Johnnie B. sued him, under the auspices of the California Child Actor’s Bill. Dusty refused to speak to his father for a while, but when he turned 21 he discovered that Johnnie B. had invested Dusty’s money in solid stocks, and he suddenly had money while some of his counterparts had blown theirs.

The other powerful figure was Aaron, whom Baker and Ralph Garr followed like lemmings. For everything Aaron did, he has remained an opaque figure to most of the public, but Baker was enthralled by his wisdom and judgment. When a work stoppage came along, Aaron told Baker to stay in shape, but Baker didn’t, and had a rough year as a result. He was sent down to Richmond and radiated such misery that an elementary-school girl wrote him a note that said, “You’re my favorite player, and if you’re not the same Dusty Baker, then send the other one back.” Teachers come in all ages.

Aaron was a savant who positioned the outfielders by watching where a hitter’s hands were, and often knew what pitch was coming before the pitcher got the sign. Before 715, Aaron told Baker, “I’m going to get this over with right now.” And when Aaron left for the Brewers, the Braves slowly fell apart. Baker was in New Mexico, recovering from what he thought was an alien encounter, when a hotel-room TV told him he’d been traded to the Dodgers.

Baker eventually got in tune with Dodger ways, and learned to appreciate Tom Lasorda’s family approach, but it didn’t start well. He hurt his knee playing basketball in the winter, which he knew was an unforced error, and then told the Dodgers the injury happened when he was playing with his dog. He had a futile season and was booed vigorously. Once his knee healed, Baker was a major factor in three World Series appearances in five years, and the championship in 1981.

Turbulence followed. Baker was dogged by rumors of drug use, which the Dodgers seemed to believe when they released him after the 1983 season. His first marriage was fraying. He railed against the drug testers, one of whom invaded a bathroom stall to watch Baker execute. His investments, managed by his brother Vic, began fluctuating, and when the Bakers fell victim to more stringent limits on tax shelters, Vic was consumed by guilt and suffered psychosis, which led to homelessness. Dusty fought an unmerciful IRS, which had not informed the Bakers of the tax-shelter change, and he finally reached a settlement he could live with, especially with a fat contract from the Cubs on the way.

But Baker was always able to compartmentalize his rage, although it threatened to overflow when he visited Ghana and saw a replica of the slave ships and realized the horrors of a month at sea. “I had moved beyond anger,” he writes. “I felt more of a sense of a deep and collective spiritual sorrow.”

He became a batting coach and then a manager, and he remarried and had son Darren, who, as a batboy in the 2002 World Series, was rescued from possible home-plate mayhem by J.T. Snow. Darren became a prospect as he played at Cal,, and eventually went 7-for-14 for the Nationals, but was released, signed with the White Sox and was released again in July. He’s 27 now. Without baseball, Darren and Dusty wouldn’t have been spring training roommates when the son was with Washington and his dad was managing Houston. Memories, unlike contracts, don’t expire.

During the Astros’ World Series run, Baker gathered leftover food from the clubhouse and took it to homeless shelters. There were innumerable encounters with strangers, particularly young ones who might have seemed misdirected, who get a couple of tickets from Dusty and become regular correspondents. One night Baker had a few drinks and started driving, and his heart sank when he saw blue lights behind him. The officer was ready to write the DUI ticket when he saw the name on the license. Baker, as a Dodger, had given him a baseball once upon a time. No harm, no foul, no blood-alcohol count.

Baker grew up in Riverside, Ca. and knew the Bonds family well. It would have been nice to hear Dusty make the Hall of Fame case for Barry, who broke Aaron’s record with Dusty as his manager, or to address those steroid days in general. Baker managed Sammy Sosa, too. But he makes it clear that he’s not telling us everything, and he takes pains to absolve those who stood in his way. Cincinnati fired him after two years and two division championships, but Baker blames nobody. He also points out that Alex Gonzalez’s error was actually the most damaging play in the Steve Bartman game of 2003, the Game 6 of the NLCS that the Cubs could have won to clinch, but didn’t. But Baker dutifully says Gonzalez makes that play 99 times out of 100.

“All this is baseball,” Baker writes. “People are always looking for explanations. Sometimes there aren’t any.”

Baker will be eligible for the Hall of Fame when the Veterans’ Committee meets in December. Most believe Baker’s World Series win will open his door. He was the second-oldest manager to win one, but then he often points out that lead singers and saxophone players and blues guitarists keep playing into their dotage, keep using the knowledge they accumulate from all the crossroads they meet.

Dusty’s dad told him that when he did come to an intersection, he should go the right way, meaning the virtuous one. Former basketball coach Al McGuire also used to say that you should go right, except he was referring to right turns, the ones without hassle or calculation. In truth they were saying the same thing, and Dusty is, too. Fortunately he has devoted a few months, and 405 simple pages, to the uncomfortably frontal task of looking back.

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In the last game Don Nelson ever saw, a 7-footer made the offensive decisions, from 25 feet away. An undersized, undervalued guard took the basketball wherever he wanted before he put it through the hoop, and Madison Square Garden and a whole city rode with him. In another time Karl-Anthony Towns would have been trading paint with people in the lane, and Jalen Brunson would have gotten maybe 15 minutes off the bench. Instead, they helped make the New York Knicks champions. Long before they handled their first nerf ball, Nelson was preparing a place for them.

If you like the helter and the skelter of today’s NBA, Nelson deserves your thanks. If you hate the blinding disorder of it all, Nelson is the man to blame. He wouldn’t have cared either way, because no NBA coach was less afraid to fly out of formation, to find loopholes in basketball’s holy writ. As a coach he won 1,337 games, at a percentage of .557, and ranks second to former protege Gregg Popovich. As an influencer, he altered the game more than anybody else who never coached an NBA champion or finalist, and he helped the Celtics win five championships when he played. “Nellie used what God gave him better than any player I’ve ever seen,” John Havlicek said.

Nelson suffered a stroke in July and was in hospice care when he died on Sunday, at age 86.

He was the people’s choice almost everywhere he coached, whether it was Milwaukee, Dallas or Golden State, a public figure who often overshadowed his team just by acting naturally. Back then it was important for NBA coaches to outdress each other on the bench, with Pat Riley and Chuck Daly as the thread kings. Nelson was a beefy fellow with hair that just woke up, and when he did wear a tie he usually had a picture of a fish on it, and, off the court, he was rarely seen without a beer or three.

He grew up on a farm in Illinois that his family lost. Pretense was as foreign to him as defense. In Oakland he often met his players at Smitty’s Cocktails, featuring beer, Scotch and shufffleboard. Sometimes he’d leave practice halfway through and let his assistants take over. It wasn’t a bad idea when he had assistants like Popovich, John Killilea, Rick Carlisle, George Karl, Avery Johnson and Gerry St. Jean.

Nelson wasn’t there to clutter the mind or stuff a playbook. He said he put the onus on guards because they’re harder to find than big men. And he was always seeking ways to get his best scorers against your bad defenders. The league was trained to pigeonhole players into the five slots. If you were a 4, you couldn’t be a 5. Nelson looked at those molds as obstacles, unnecessary borders. At their best, his teams had five guys who could dribble, pass and shoot, regardless of size. To a staid, role-bound league it seemed like the discovery of fire.

In his first Golden State tour, he had Chris Mullin, Tim Hardaway and Mitch Richmond to light up Oakland’s arena, and in his second he had Jason Richardson, Baron Davis, Monta Ellis and Stephen Jackson. In 1989 he allowed Manute Bol to launch 90 three-pointers. Bol was 7-foot-7. In Milwaukee he had Marques Johnson and Sidney Moncrief, and he invented the position of “point forward” and let Paul Pressey run with it, allowing strong guard Ricky Pierce to punish people inside. He also stationed centers Paul Mokeski and Randy Breuer at 3-point range because the no-zone rules forced opponents to follow them, thus opening up the court. Eventually the NBA installed new defensive rules, and turned to Nelson to write them.

None of Nelson’s personnel decisions rivaled the draft of 1998, when he was in Dallas. He wound up with the No. 6 draft pick, passed up Paul Pierce and took the bulbous Robert Traylor because Milwaukee wanted him. In return Milwaukee sent picks No. 9 and 19 to Dallas. Nellie took German teenager Dirk Nowitzki with the first, took Pat Garrity of Notre Dame with the second, then swapped Garrity and some spare parts to Phoenix for backup guard Steve Nash.

The reaction was swift and critical. No one knew anything about Nowitzki except that he was 7 feet and skinny. In the midst of a White House scandal, a Dallas columnist airily dismissed the new Maverick as “Lewinsky.” Nash was also something of an unknown, but Nelson and his son Donnie were enthralled with him. Nowitzki and Nash totaled three MVPs and are both in the Hall of Fame, and Nowitzki, with his famous one-legged jumper, became the model for the “stretch four,” the tall shooter who defied matchups. Nash built his value in Dallas and signed with Phoenix, and Nelson was furious with owner Mark Cuban for letting that happen.

Nelson’s magnum opus was the first round of the 2007 playoffs. His Warriors were the eighth seed, with 25 fewer wins than the 67-15 Mavericks. No team had ever braved a gap like that and won a series, but Avery Johnson, coaching Dallas, was preoccupied with Nelson’s matchup game. He benched Erick Dampier, who had started at center all year, and played Devean George, surrendering his size advantages without a shot. Nelson told the Warriors how to pressure Nowitzki at the point of attack, and otherwise released the hounds. Davis, Jackson and Matt Barnes all shot 40 percent or better from three, and Nowitzki struggled to shoot 39.3 percent overall. Golden State won the series in six, and their loyalists still have those gold “We Believe” T-shirts somewhere.

There is some reason to believe that Nelson cared at least as much about being original as winning. He took the Knicks job after Daly turned it down. He had Patrick Ewing, the big man he had coveted, but Nelson preferred to run the offense through Anthony Mason instead, and he was fired after 59 games. To be fair, New York chewed up and swallowed most coaches back then. As for competitiveness, Nelson is the unofficial alltime leader in ejections.

When the scoreboards hit zero, Nelson had no trouble greeting the real world. He campaigned for farmers who had hit hard times, organizing Nellie’s Farm Fund in Wisconsin, and driving a tractor that pulled a piggy bank, nicknamed “Barkley.” He persuaded Mullin, who was his general manager at Golden State, to address his alcohol problems. He settled in Maui, picking up properties and farmland along the way, planting marijuana and hemp, looking at sunsets and whales with his wife Joy. When fires besieged Lahaina, he opened his condos and apartments to victims.

Eventually Nellie decided he didn’t want to die so far from shore, and he and Joy moved back to suburban Dallas. He won the Chuck Daly Coaching Achievement Award last year and wore a pair of Luka Doncic sneakers to the press conference, in protest of Dallas’ trading Doncic to L.A.

When the celebrations of Nelson’s life are over, we’ll see another season, the 18th for Stephen Curry. In 2009 Curry was a spindly shooter with bad ankles, and the Warriors, who had myriad needs, took him in the first round. Nelson and assistant Larry Riley had a lot to do with that, and Nelson coached the rookie, let him run the team at times, and built the foundation for the most remarkable shooting career in league history. On Sunday, Curry expressed thanks for all that. He also said, “Nellyball is a real thing,” although the younger ones among us just call it basketball.

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When the 49ers drafted Roger Craig in 1983, they listed him as a “fullback.” You know, one of those squatty, neckless grunts who played football head-first. Craig became the opposite, became a receiver that the linebackers couldn’t cover and a runner that the safeties couldn’t tackle. Of course, the safeties couldn’t cover him, either, and the linebackers who tried to tackle him got a taste of Craig’s high knees, a style he learned from hurdles coach Ira Dunsworth, back in Davenport, Iowa.

“The high knees break tackles,” Craig said. “They’re like a weapon. They might go to somebody’s chin or head. Guys back off.”

It took Craig only three seasons to find a new frontier. In 1985 he had 1,050 rushing yards and 1,106 passing yards for San Francisco, and led the NFL with 92 catches. There had been no thousand-thousand guys before that and there have been only two since: Marshall Faulk and Christian McCaffrey. Three years later Craig would rush for 1,502 yards and catch 76 passes, with a total of 108 first downs.

He retired at 33, with three Super Bowl rings. On Saturday he entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was in Canton, but he did not accompany Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Adam Vinatieri and Luke Kuechly at a press conference. Saturday’s induction audience saw Craig, smiling gratefully as he wore the gold jacket, but only heard him speak in a pre-recorded video, and near the end of his speech it learned why. Craig announced that he has been diagnosed with vascular dementia.

He had noticed changes, but said he “dismissed” them as “normal aging.” His family asked him to get some opinions. “Two things can be true,” he said. “Football gave me opportunities beyond anything I could imagine. It helped shape the man I became. At the same time, we know more today about brain health than when I played, and I hope sharing my story encourages people to pay attention to their health and seek help.”

It’s typical, and shameful, that Craig’s announcement barely caused a ripple in the wide, wide world of sports. Much more attention went to the latest WNBA nonsense. The media cared about NFL carnage when Will Smith made a film about it. Like a film crew that scurries out of town after the hurricane leaves, they’ve made a decision by their absence.

But problems thrive when the lights go off. Boston University has a center that charts player deaths due to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Of the 376 brains it has examined, it has found CTE in 345 of them, including that of Marshawn Kneeland, the 24-year-old Dallas defensive end who committed suicide after a police chase last November.

Craig said doctors have told him that concussions are the likely culprit. And the NFL has tried to put guardrails on a runaway game by enforcing targeting penalties, adjusting the kickoff rules, and empowering a press box official to order players off the field if they seem unstable. As he said, Craig played long before the NFL quit denying something was wrong. If an 11-year career did enough to affect his brain, think of the mounting toll that’s ahead. Instead, the audience at Canton and in the NFL community as a whole shrugged off Craig’s news. One imagines that some people in the league office were seething. How dare Craig try to hijack Brees’ solo moment.

Researchers are still trying to find a way to identify CTE before the patient dies. They have zeroed in on the tau protein, the one that destroys brain cells. A variation of that protein, called CCL11, can be detected through a PET scan of a living player. If doctors can come up with a biomarker that identifies those proteins, and test players before and after a football season, they can recommend that players be held out of competition. But that’s a long way off, with several legal and medical hurdles ahead.

Few athletes have done more to ensure their post-retirement health than Craig has. He ran over 30 marathons and even founded the San Jose Rock and Roll marathon in 2006. He kept himself at least 10 pounds lighter than when he played. And he had a prominent role in a software firm run by Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive. When the 49ers campaigned for a new stadium, Craig was their point man.

But Craig always had a hydroelectric energy level. He wrestled in high school, ran track, did everything he could to match the feats of his older brother Curtis, who was a running back at Nebraska. In his final football game at Davenport Central, he ran 41 times for 353 yards and scored every point in a 29-28 loss. At Nebraska he willingly became a blocking back for Mike Rozier, in an option offense that hardly ever asked Craig to catch a football. When he got to San Francisco he spotted a treacherous hill near Redwood City and began running it, and he persuaded Jerry Rice to do the same.

San Francisco coach Bill Walsh had already gotten Wendell Tyler to handle the running game in 1983, and he drafted Craig, with the 49th pick, to back him up. Assistant coach Paul Hackett worked out Craig, and threw him 100 footballs. Craig caught all but two. Hackett suggested to Walsh that Craig was the ideal man to christen their laboratory. At the end of that rookie season, Craig was targeted 62 times and caught 48 passes, including four for touchdowns. The key was to give Craig “space,” away from the debris at the scrimmage line. He drew his own orbits there.

Football’s popularity continues to undock from the rest of sports. A new season makes us reconsider its paradox. “The devil always makes me think twice,” Chris Stapleton sang, and the suspense and the sheer athletic genius of the game is always at war with the butcher’s bill.

If you’re a young player in Alabama or Arkansas, and your family needs a route to escape poverty, and you have a chance to play college football for free and then maybe pro football for seven fat seasons…and at the end of that time you have bought everyone a house and allowed cousins, nephews and your own children to glimpse the good life….and you know that at the end of that road, and maybe sooner than you think, lies a debilitating and deadly illness….would you do it?

Most players would say yes. Roger Craig gave no indication on Saturday that he wouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with the question. There is something wrong when the family doesn’t get to answer it too.

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What a time for socialism to be alive. Not only are its politicians thriving, the billionaires of sports have signed on, too.

Short of talking in Swedish and insisting on six months parental leave, baseball’s owners are pushing socialism in spikes. That’s all “competitive balance” is, you know. It’s a push to make the game a paler shade of beige, to make sure all teams are as close to .500 as humanly possible.

The NFL has followed the John Maynard Keynes model for years, sharing revenue, observing a draft in which the worst pick first, and shaping a schedule that punishes a team for winning the previous year.

Now baseball is threatening to impose a salary cap (and salary floor) on the game and has convinced the mediaocracy that it will risk the 2027 season to see it through. It’s all the name of making the game “fair.” The richest teams have hijacked the outcomes and cornered the market on the best players, and the owners just can’t let the moguls take over. They’re the only ones who deserve moats and castles, you know.

Competitive balance is their catchphrase. When the Yankees and Dodgers were playing in the World Series almost annually, in the 50s, and when the Yankees of 1936-43 were appearing in seven World Series in an eight-year span and winning six of them and winning over 100 games five times, did the game sputter and die without competitive balance? The war cry, supposedly, was “Break up the Yankees,” but when they did quit winning, people didn’t really celebrate. According to Simon and Garfunkel, a nation turned its lonely eyes to Joe DiMaggio, not Jim Bottomley. Greatness is what the fans want. When greatness comes to town, you circle the date and you skip choir practice.

Pro basketball was never more popular than when the Bulls were winning six Finals and losing none, and no pro football team had more personality and charisma than the Steelers, when they won four Super Bowls in six years. Having a different champ every season is great for each market. The NBA has had eight champs in the past eight seasons. That’s 27 percent of the league. But it doesn’t do much for the folklore, particularly when the Bucks and Nuggets rise and fade so quickly.

But if a salary cap really smoothed out the competition and recognized brainpower as much as fortune, that would be a worthy goal. The evidence indicates that it does not.

The NFL has a hard salary cap, although it is approaching the GDP of Taiwan. Its teams have to perform triage every off-season. Kenneth Walker was the Super Bowl MVP for the Seahawks, and now he plays for Kansas City, because Seattle simply had too many other mouths to feed.

So, over the past 15 seasons, nine different franchises have won Super Bowls. Kansas City and New England have won three apiece.

Ten franchises have lost Super Bowls, with the Patriots and San Francisco at three apiece.

Nine have lost NFC Championship Games, and nine others have lost AFC championship games. But only six of the 32 teams have failed to reach the Final Four in that span.

The NHL also has a hard salary cap. In its past 15 seasons (excluding 2020 and 2021, when its playoffs were affected by Covid-19), ten of its teams have won Stanley Cups, including three by Chicago and two apiece by Florida, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. Eleven franchises have lost in the Final: Tampa Bay, Boston, Vegas and Edmonton twice each. Six teams have lost in the Eastern Conference finals, and ten have lost in the West final.

Seven of its 32 teams have fallen short of the Cup semifinals.

We’re not going to deal with the NBA, because its cap has more fine print than an aspirin bottle.

And now baseball, where spending is unlimited, although there is a luxury tax.

Eight different franchises have won the World Series in the past 15 seasons (excluding 2020). San Francisco leads with three and the Dodgers, Boston and Houston have two apiece.

Twelve teams have been World Series losers, with Houston, Texas and the Dodgers leading with two. That’s one more than hockey, two more than football.

Eight franchises have lost in the American League Championship Series and seven has lost in the NLCS.

And eight franchises have failed to reach the LCS level: the Angels, the Athletics, Minnesota, the White Sox, Miami, Pittsburgh. Cincinnati and Colorado. That’s eight of 30. Twenty-two MLB teams have at least gotten to within a series of a World Series in that time. That seems pretty competitively balanced, especially when you consider that 25 NHL teams are in that group, and 26 NFL teams.

So to review:

NFL: Nine champions, ten Super Bowl losers, nine NFC championship losers, nine AFC championship losers.

NHL: Ten champions, 11 Stanley Cup losers, six Eastern Conference championship losers, ten Western Conference championship losers.

MLB: Eight champions, 12 World Series losers, eight ALCS losers, seven NLCS losers.

In other words, a baseball salary cap isn’t likely to spread the winning much more widely than today’s system does. Even if salaries are capped, it will all come down to the things that can’t be quantified or regulated. Player evaluation, instruction, desire, long-term vision, and a formidable load of health and luck.

You can’t lose a baseball season over that. Not unless you’re more interested in proving a theory than advancing a game.

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Somewhere on the Venn Diagram you can find (A) “LeBron James ruins basketball because he just wants to play with winners” and (B) “The Dodgers ruin baseball because they win.” Shoulder-to-shoulder, probably.

The Pavlov bells were ringing desperately Saturday night when the Dodgers traded three minor league players for Tarik Skubal, the Detroit lefthander who has won the past two American League Cy Young Awards and, represented by Scott Boras, can become a free agent at season’s end.

Season’s end? No, the end of baseball as we know it. Various pundits across America proclaimed that the trade automatically means the 2027 season will never be played, thanks to the Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations in which the owners want to institute a salary cap. The logic is a little strange, considering that the Dodgers haven’t actually signed Skubal, and we’re supposed to conclude that baseball peace would be at hand if the Tampa Bay Rays, for instance, had made the same deal.

The same howls were heard when the Dodgers signed Kyle Tucker for a clinically insane $60 million a year, and now Tucker is hitting .235 with a .700 OPS, which is below the N.L. average. Yet the Dodgers remain in charge of the National League West, mostly thanks to the contributions of Andy Pages (whom they signed for $300,000) and Justin Wrobleski (their 11th round pick in 2021).. Wrobleski is 11-2 with a 2.88 ERA and is the best control pitcher in the league. Pages, struggling lately, still has 71 RBIs.

The Dodgers must have felt guilty about destroying baseball because they spent the weekend getting swept at home by the Red Sox. But then they’ve destroyed the game with every trade and acquisition they’ve made. MLB is reportedly asking for advice from Iran. How many obliterations can it survive?

The most bizarre aspect of the anger is the Dodgers did not have the right of first refusal when it came to Skubal. Anybody could have traded for him. Since most of the other contenders had more pitching problems than do the Dodgers, one assumes somebody would have offered more than pitcher River Ryan, outfielder Zyhir Hope and pitcher Brady Smith. Not that anybody knows how good those youngsters are, although Ryan is 27 with a Tommy John-ed elbow. But nobody topped the Dodgers’ bid. Instead the Braves went for Tyler Mahle, and the Cubs went for Kevin Gausman, and the Rays went for Freddy Peralta. Since the trade deadline isn’t until 6 pm Monday (ET), you can expect more developments. If the Dodgers work out a deal for San Diego closer extraordinaire Mason Miller, please draw the shades and shelter in place.

“How could these other teams allow this to happen?” sputtered Wayne Randazzo, the Angels’ play-by-play man. Forgive him. In his position, you’d change the subject too.

Skubal’s WHIP this season is 0.910. This would be the fourth consecutive season it is below 1.000. We probably assume, wrongly, that everyone knows what WHIP is. It’s Walks And Hits Per Innings Pitched and is, therefore, a gauge of how many baserunners a pitcher deals with. Anything under 1.300 is presentable, anything under 1.200 is quite good, and to be under 1,000 is overwhelming, especially for a starter. Beyond that, Skubal has walked 92 batters since the end of the 2022 season.

He is a fastball-changeup pitcher with a sinker. He has lost 42 games in 153 starts. And he’s lefthanded, in a landscape where the lefthanded hitter is increasingly dominant. He doesn’t turn 30 until November.

One doesn’t know how much Shohei Ohtani’s recent knee and bicep pains affected this decision. But the Dodgers think Blake Snell is one rehab start away from returning, and Tyler Glasnow is beginning that process after he threw batting practice in Dodger Stadium, and they already have Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and for that matter Wrobleski and the improving Roki Sasaki. A bullpen that comprises the newly healthy Edwin Diaz, Tanner Scott, Evan Phillips, Alex Vesia and Jack Dreyer should be fine, and if emergencies hit, plenty of starters can bite the bayonet.

Gone are the days when the Dodgers had to rush Clayton Kershaw back into playoff series with three days’ rest. While the rest of baseball puts the burden on their relievers, Los Angeles is going back to the 60s and leaning on its starters, all $100 million of them, if you add up the 2026 paychecks of Skubal, Snell, Glasnow and Yamamoto.

This money seems outrageous to most civilians and even on baseball’s Monopoly board. But at least it’s well-spent. The Phillies are paying $99.5 million to Zack Wheeler, Cristopher Sanchez, Jesus Luzardo and Aaron Nola. They are 44-18 when Wheeler, Sanchez and Luzardo start. They are 9-13 when Nola starts, and their No. 5 starter is a coin flip, although rookie Andrew Painter looked sharp on Friday. The Dodgers wanted Skubal. The Phillies absolutely needed him. If they didn’t want to give up promising minor league players to get Skubal, as they thrash around in a bid for a wild-card, that’s bad. If they didn’t have such players in their system to give, that’s worse.

And, no, this has nothing to do with the salary cap which, theoretically, would promote “competitive balance” in baseball. A salary floor, in which the Pirates, Marlins, Rockies, etc. would have a payroll within shouting distance of the elites? Yes, that would help. But the Brewers and Rays regularly prove that a nimble and economical organization, with some foresight and guts, can play head-to-head with anybody.

The Red Sox have right-sized themselves into the 12th spot on the payroll chart but have won 28 of their last 33. They’re doing this with a $31 million starter (Sonny Gray), an $18 million closer (Aroldis Chapman), an $18 million first baseman (Willson Contreras) and a whole lot of sub-millionaires. If you saw shortstop Andruw Monasterio diving and throwing like a peak Ozzie Smith all weekend, you might not believe, or care, that he’s a $780K player. Regular shortstop Trevor Story and staff ace Garrett Crochet make $50 million between them, and they won’t be back anytime soon.

Baseball’s lust for a salary cap will require commissioner Rob Manfred to borrow some spinal fluid from hockey commissioner Gary Bettman, who never budged as the 2003-04 season slipped away and got the cap he wanted. A year-long baseball lockout is still hard to imagine, despite all the storm warnings.

And what if it happens? Baseball wiped out its playoffs in 1994 and the only casualty was the city of Montreal, which was girding for a World Srries and wound up liquidating its team and driving away its fans. Washington got the Expos 11 years later and won the championship as the Nationals in 2019. Throughout baseball, fans had long since returned to the seats they had foresworn. It took Cal Ripken’s 1995 quest, the Yankees’ return to the trophy room in 1996, and the McGwire-Sosa home run lovefest of 1998 to lure them. But a post-lockout game would offer the same compelling stories this time.

The fact that baseball is too dumb to die is no reason to dumb yourself down to understand it. Just ask yourself and your neurotic fan next door, to consider the Dodgers and their $317 million Opening Day payroll and their 69-43 record. And then consider the Mets and their $354 million Opening Day payroll and their 47-66 record. Which team is the clear and present danger?

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Graduation is such an emotional time. When Tarik Skubal pitched Detroit to a 7-0 lead over Baltimore on Thursday, he waved to the Comerica Park fans and they saluted him right back. The other Tigers were so overcome with grief that they allowed the Orioles to come back for a 10-9 win, but that just reinforced the theme. Detroit, which got to the 15th inning of the clinching game of the Division Series last year, has again become a place to serve your apprenticeship.

Skubal will almost certainly be dealt before Monday night’s trade deadline. He won’t necessarily go to the oligarchy, although the Cubs badly need him and the Dodgers, Yankees, Braves and Rangers could use him, since he’s won the past two American League Cy Youngs. But the Brewers, Rays, Astros and Diamondbacks could rent him, because Skubal, a Scott Boras client, isn’t signing a long-term deal until the last conceivable moment next spring. And for all we know, next season could be 2028.

The surprise is that Casey Mize might be walking down that aisle as well. Skubal is pitching for $32 million this year, thanks to arbitration, but Mize, the first overall pick in 2018, is getting $6.15 million in his final year before freedom. The Tigers have invested a lot in Mize, stuck with him through injury and wheel-spinning, and Mize has been outstanding this season, with an 0.992 WHIP and only five home runs permitted in 16 starts. But the Tigers scratched Mize from his scheduled start on Friday, in Sacramento, which probably means his next start will be a debut somewhere else.

This is always the shell game. If you’re trading Skubal and/or Mize, you’re not doing it from a position of strength, so don’t bother asking for someone’s minor league wonder child. But if you’re trading for Skubal and/or Mize, you’re gambling that (A) each pitcher will provide the magic carpet to the postseason and (B) he’ll be enchanted enough by your club and city that he’ll set down roots for the rest of his career. Your nightmare is that he will leave instead, and the players you dealt will prove that you were right in your evaluation, tragically wrong in your judgment. Case in point: San Diego trading James Wood and CJ Abrams to Washington for Juan Soto, who stuck around for a turbulent year and a half and then signed with the Yankees. Wood leads the National League in OPS and Abrams, a shortstop, leads the league in RBI.

In 2008 CC Sabathia was coming to the end of his deal in Cleveland. Milwaukee needed a boost to make the playoffs. The Brewers traded Zach Johnson, Rob Bryson and Matt Laporta to Cleveland to get Sabathia, who was saluted in Milwaukee like the man who invented the pop top, and rewarded all that love by going 11-2. The Brewers did make the playoffs but lost in the first round. Laporta hit 31 home runs in four years at Cleveland; Jackson was 2-3 on the mound in two years. Then Sabathia, who had said he might want to stay in the N.L. so he could hit, picked the Yankees, where he helped win a World Series the next year and proceeded to the Hall of Fame.

Obviously nobody ever made a bad trade for Randy Johnson, but Houston’s celebration in 1998 might as well have been timed by the pitch clock. Seattle traded Johnson to the Astros for infielder Carlos Guillen and pitchers Freddy Garcia and John Halama. Johnson went 10-1 for the Astros with a 1.28 ERA; with the Mariners, he was 9-10, 4.33. Houston steamed into the playoffs, where Johnson ran into the one pitcher who was hotter than he was. San Diego’s Kevin Brown beat him, 2-1, and then Johnson lost another tough one in the deciding Game 4. Johnson’s Astros career ended, and he signed with Arizona, won a World Series, won four consecutive Cy Youngs and strolled into the Hall. Meanwhile, Seattle won 116 regular season games three years later.

But pitchers like Sabathia and Johnson no longer roam the earth. Giving a pitcher a near-decade’s worth of torrential money is not something your financial advisor recommends.

The 200-inning pitcher has gone the way of the .330 hitter and the $3 hot dog. In looking over the past eight full seasons (excluding 2020) of MLB pitching, let’s say 185 innings is a reasonable goal. For those who make 32 starts, that’s 5.8 innings per. Bob Gibson was just breaking a sweat at that point, but the 185-inning mark has become the pitching equivalent of 26.2 miles for today’s generation. There were 25 pitchers to hit 185 innings in 2017. There were 13 last season.

The assumption, if you’re going to bestow a nine-figure contract on a starting pitcher, is that 185 innings should be the absolute minimum.

No pitcher has more than five 185-inning seasons since 2017. Jose Berrios, now with Toronto, and Philadelphia’s Aaron Nola are the only ones with five. San Francisco’s Logan Webb has hit 185 in the past four seasons, and Seattle’s Logan Gilbert did it in 2022-24.

Most teams, of course, are using “openers” in the first inning, or “piggybacking” two starters to cover the nine innings. Skubal’s workaday model is now an aberration. But when the Dodgers got to October last year, they rode Yoshinobu Yamamoto to their third World Series title in six years and cared not one bit that he’d given them only 125 regular-season innings. Yamamoto signed a 12-year, $325 million deal in 2014 and still is owed $248 million of that. The interest gets compounded in October.

It’s just amusing to see today’s baseball executives, bred in the Ivy and schooled on probability, betting Bugatti money that pitchers can stay upright for six months and then unleash their brilliance in the postseason. Deadlines do strange things to judgment but, with each hour that passes until Monday night, the ace next door is always greener.

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The old days weren’t always good, particularly in the NFL, particularly in the most oppressive weeks of the year, when gargantuan men packed up and moved into freshman-sized dorm rooms.

Training camp isn’t spring training. No leisurely throwing sessions, no dipping the big toe into the season. Training camp is Code Red from the first whistle, with a weary veteran trying to deal with a zealous rookie. It’s coaches who confuse themselves with drill sergeants. And it’s not a place for heroes, with the exception of Rams’ coach Sean McVay, who became the best friend of every NFL player when he said his essential men wouldn’t play preseason games.

There are three glorified exhibitions now. There used to be six. Actually that used to bring a little romance, because many of those games were played in the Tulsas and Raleighs and Portlands, and Americana could see real live NFL players. In 1972, a crowd in Tampa (several years before the Buccaneers) saw more of the sport than it wanted. Bubba Smith of the Baltimore Colts was the most feared pass rusher in the game, with 43 sacks in his first five years, but in this game he was chasing a Pittsburgh Steeler, and he ran into an unyielding, metal first down marker, and his knee was impossibly twisted and rendered useless. Smith missed the 1972 season. He came back for three more full seasons, and 9 ½ more sacks. When he died, doctors found CTE on his brain.

In 1978, Oakland safety Jack Tatum sought out New England receiver Darryl Stingley during an exhibition game. Tatum’s shoulder pad crumpled Stingley’s head and compressed his spinal cord. The hit left Stingley in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, which ended when Stingley was 55. Yes, it theoretically can happen at any time. But it definitely shouldn’t happen in a dress rehearsal.

The NFL has tried to make training camp more of a deployment than a classroom. Rounds of mini-camps and Organized Team Activities, in the spring, provide most of the X-and-O education. But there will be intrigue nevertheless, along with the human stories that always bubble up through the drudgery. Here are some of the rookies who have the chance to elbow their way onto an NFL roster, which explains why their lonely voices support the preseason:

Seth McGowan, Indianapolis

The Colts took McGowan in the seventh round, even though he had only two major-league college seasons. They also took him despite the fact that his 25th birthday loom in October. McGowan says he’s “lived through a couple of lifetimes” to get to this point. He ran for 824 yards and 12 touchdowns for Kentucky last year. scored two of those TDs against Florida, and he got a Super Bowl invitation. His first prime-time season was 2020, when he was a freshman at Oklahoma.

In between? He looks back willingly but not fondly. At Oklahoma he was charged with larceny, battery with a dangerous weapon and assault when he and two teammates attempted to steal marijuana from another student. All three were kicked off the team. McGowan did three months in jail, then searched for another chances. At Texas College, he was only a de facto assistant coach. He played one year at Butler Community College in Kansas, and did well enough to get a shot at New Mexico State, where he gained 723 yards. He not only behaved but impressed coaches with his engagement.

McGowan went to the NFL combine and ran a 4.49 40, but also had a 42-and-a-half inch vertical jump, second-best for a running back since 2007. “I’m a second-chance guy,” said Colts’ general manager Chris Ballard. “How long should we keep punishing him?”

With the usual running back attrition, McGowan now bids for playing time behind Jonathan Taylor. The practice squad? He’s seen worse. “I’ve seen God do the impossible with me,” he said.

Charles Demmings, Minnesota

The Vikings took Demmings in the fifth round from Stephen F. Austin, after a sizzling combine in which the cornerback ran a 4.41 40 and put up a 42-inch vertical. He also got attention when he did not transfer from SFA, even though he would have fit nicely into any Big 12 secondary. “I sweep the shed,” he explained. “Which means I want to leave a place better than I found it.”

Demmings deflected 35 passes in 42 collegiate games, and had five breakups along with four interceptions last season. He had none of those numbers on his mind when he was in high school at Mesquite, Tex. Demmings didn’t even play football until he was a senior because he and his dad were running Twin Lawns Mowing, and having fun doing it, with a profit. He talks of a client named Miss Pam, who had a yard three-quarters the size of a football field. “Had 102 lines,” he said.

But when Demmings finally hit the practice field, he didn’t leave it. “You can either be a fountain or a drain,” he said. “I choose to be a fountain.”

Jaishawn Barham, Dallas

The Cowboys took Barham in the third round, right after they took safety Caleb Downs and edge rusher Malachi Lawrence. Barham spent two years at Maryland, where he was a freshman All-American, and two more at Michigan, but he didn’t really lure the eyeballs until last year, when he became a rusher and had four sacks. Barham, who goes 6-foot-3 and 240, had a 4.6 40 at the combine and impressed teams with his interviews, especially since he declined to speak to the media throughout his college days.

Barham head-butted an Ohio State linebacker and drew a penalty that set up the Buckeyes on the Michigan two, although the Buckeyes only kicked a field goal. He also had a pick-six in the Polynesian Bowl. Dallas coaches have said Barham could be an inside linebacker in the image of Zack Baun, the former Eagle, but new defensive coordinator Christian Parker is open to anything. And what of the anonymous coach who complained that he “couldn’t get two words” out of Barham? “I take this seriously,” Barham said. “It’s nothing to play around with.”

Domani Jackson, Green Bay

The Packers took Jackson in the sixth round, which would have seemed incomprehensible when Jackson was a California state sprint champion (10.25 in the 100) and one of the leading cornerback recruits in the nation. USC won the initial battle, but Jackson missed his senior year at Mater Dei High with a knee injury. That, and coaching changes, held Jackson back, and he transferred to Alabama. But he lost his starting job during the 2025 season.

While the scouts lost interest, Jackson re-entered the lineup and played well against Okahoma, Georgia and Indiana. He was still the 23rd corner taken and the second for Green Bay, behind first-round pick Brandon Cisse, but Jackson’s 4.41 40 and his 6-foot, 194-pound frame convinced the Packers to spend a bargain pick.

Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, a former Packer, also played at ‘Bama and works in the football office there. He has become closer to Jackson. “He did a good job looking at himself in the mirror and, instead of blaming a bunch of shit, he took accountabiity,” Clinton-Dix said. “He pinpointed everything and that’s what’s called ‘adulting’ to me.”

Emmett Johnson, Kansas City

The Chiefs took Johnson in the fifth round, just after they signed Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker as a free agent. They might become the 1-2 running punch that the Chiefs have lacked recently. Johnson, from Minneapolis, had only one Power Four conference offer, and he made Nebraska grateful by running for 1,451 yards and 12 touchdowns. But he had to wait until his senior year to get featured.

Johnson broke 68 tackles as a senior, lost only one fumble and dropped only one pass. For his efforts, he was first-team All Big Ten. His parents are immigrants from Liberia and, after they fled from the war, they met in Minneapolis.

He ran 4.5 at the combine and he’s still being judged on his size (5-foot-10, 200). Motivation won’t be his problem. “They talk about chips on your shoulder,” Johnson said. “I’ve got a whole can of Pringles up there.”

Pat Coogan, Tennessee

The Titans took Coogan in the sixth round. Short arms (32 ½ inches) don’t help you in the draft. Yet nobody will be surprised if Coogan becomes the Titans’ center before long. Coogan was one of Indiana’s underground leaders in its drive to the national championship last year, to the point where he was named MVP in the Rose Bowl, the first time an offensive lineman had won that award since 1944.

Coogan has played 32 games in the past two years and has won 30. He was Notre Dame’s center in 2024 when the Irish lost the championship game of the College Football Playoff, then transferred to Indiana. At 6-foot-5 and 313, Coogan has given up two sacks in 1,228 snaps.

But he was most famous for his blazing pre-game speeches. “We’re going out there for God, country and m—-f—-ng Notre Dame,” he yelled before a playoff game. His grandmother heard about the language, but Coogan said she didn’t mind. “She’s Irish Catholic,” he said.

Jack Strand, Atlanta

The Falcons signed Strand after he was undrafted. It might be a shrewd move for both. Strand threw 126 touchdowns in his career at Minnesota State-Moorhead, and he is getting most of the reps in Falcons’ camp, primarily because he was the only healthy quarterback until Atlanta signed Cooper Rush on Wednesday. Tua Tagliavoa is out with a recurrence of a back injury, although he’s had plenty of other ailments that could recur at any time, and Michael Penix is overcoming an ACL tear. The Falcons waived Trevor Siemian.

Fomer NFL MVP Matt Ryan is the new club president, but new coach Kevin Stefanski joked that Ryan wasn’t available. Strand is. He had 42 TDs and 14 interceptions last year, and ran for five more scores, and that same arm pitched two perfect games at Bloomer (Wis.) High. He also has a degree in engineering physics, with an eye toward a career in aerospace. Preseason games will reveal if Strand can handle the gravity of the situation.

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“Back in school again

Maxwell plays the fool again

Teacher gets annoyed

Wishing to avoid an unpleasant scene

She tells Max to stay when the class has gone away

So he waits behind

Writing 50 times, ‘I must not be so-o-oh-o.”

Whenever the Dodger Stadium sound system takes a break from its brain-busting treachery, Dieter Ruehle comes to the rescue. Ruehle is the organist who tries to play something connected with the Dodgers themselves, as Nancy Bea Hefley did when she heralded Orel Hershiser with “Master of the House.”

For years Ruehle has played “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” whenever Max Muncy has appeared. Like the protagonist in the Beatles’ song from “Abbey Road,” Muncy has a way of hiding in plain sight. He’s a career .232 hitter, a 5-foot-10 fellow who turns 36 on August 25. He usually can be found on the second half of the Dodgers’ lineup card. He is no danger of winning Gold Gloves, although he’s worked diligently to get respectable at first and third base. And in a lineup of human conglomerates, Muncy is making $10 million this year and next.

But when the Dodgers need a late-inning push, it’s notable how often the game has come down to Muncy and his hammer. That’s when his strike-zone radar kicks in. Pitchers will tempt him with fastballs, a fingernail off the plate, and Muncy will either take them or foul them off, confident that something juicy will present itself. When it does, Muncy will take a compact, forceful home run swing. It has produced more longballs than anyone in L.A. Dodger history except Eric Karros.

Muncy hit his 229th as a Dodger last Wednesday in Philadephia, off Aaron Nola. That broke a tie with Ron Cey. Karros has 270. Muncy has more homers for the Dodgers than Mike Piazza, Frank Howard, Davey Lopez, Pedro Guerrero,Matt Kemp, Raul Mondesi , Adrian Beltre or Steve Garvey. And No. 229 broke a 3-3 tie in the sixth inning of a Dodger win.

But the two previous home runs meant more. The night before, Muncy beat Zack Wheeler, the richest pitcher in the N.L., with a 2-run shot when the Dodgers were down -1 in the fourth. Four nights before that in Yankee Stadium, Muncy took Gerrit Cole deep in the seventh inning, another 2-run homer that created a 2-1 lead. He also homered off Wheeler on May 29 at home.

Muncy surfaced in 2018, unbeknownst to all but the most fanatic minor league followers. He hit 35 home runs for the Dodgers that year, leading the team, in just 481 plate appearances. His .582 slugging percentage led the Dodgers, too. He is the only player still wearing blue from those days, and he’s the 34th player in alltime franchise history, encompassing Brooklyn, to play 1,000 games in that uniform. Muncy is 13 home runs away from catching Roy Campanella, No. 4 on the Dodger list.

He has two 36-homer seasons and two 35-homer seasons. He has 20 this season, and his .253 average is his best since that rookie season, but that’s not as important to the Dodgers as his eerily reliable OPS, which is .830 for his career and .851 this season. He started hesitantly in 2025 but never dreamed his 20-12 vision could be the problem. Then he took an eye exam, which revealed astigmatism in his left eye. Muncy began wearing glasses and the focus returned.

Through all this Muncy has helped the Dodgers visit four World Series and win three, and their 67-39 record (as of Monday) is the best in MLB. But he’ll always wince when he thinks of 2021. He and his club were never better. Muncy had a career-high .895 OPS and the Dodgers won 106 games. But on the last day of the regular season, first baseman Muncy collided with Milwaukee baserunner Jace Peterson and tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. He did not play a postseason game, and the Dodgers eventually lost to Atlanta in a 6-game N.L. Championship Series, with Albert Pujols playing first base against lefties and Cody Bellinger against righties, with infielder Gavin Lux trying to play centerfield.

But Muncy also repudiates the Dodgers’ reputation for winning by printing currency He’s not the only one, of course. Justin Turner was a key figure in the first part of this Dodgers’ run, and he was playing in a Cal State Fullerton alumni game when coach Tim Wallach recruited him. Andy Pages has been the Dodgers’ best offensive player this year, and he was a $300,000 international sign in 2018. Justin Wrobleski has stood guard over the battered starting rotation, and he was an 11th-round draft in 2021. The seasons are full of stories like this, with foot soldiers who learned winning in the Dodger organization.

Muncy might be the most unlikely. He was a well-known hitter at Baylor and the Athletics drafted him in the fifth round. He was almost perfect for the Moneyball ethic, because he walked and he homered for a living. But Muncy didn’t play well when the A’s gave him a chance. Later he said he was too worried about getting sent down. Oakland released him, but executives Fahran Zaidi and Eric Kubota didn’t forget him.

Zaidi became Andrew Friedman’s assistant with the Dodgers and recommended they sign Muncy, who wasn’t sure he wanted to continue. But that first Dodgers’ season was spent entirely at Oklahoma City. Muncy came up the next spring when Logan Forsythe went on the disabled list, and he hasn’t left yet.

In a truly bizarre development, he then became one of two Max Muncys in MLB. The second one — Maxwell Price Muncy, as opposed to the Dodgers’ Maxwell Steven — was picked in the first round of the 2021 draft, from Camarillo (CA) High. Beyond that, both Muncys celebrate their birthday on Aug. 25. The two met in the Pacific Coast League, when MP Muncy was playing for Las Vegas, and MS Muncy was rehabbing with Oklahoma City. They both laughed about that, and Oakland’s Muncy talked about reserving tickets to the Phoenix PGA Tour event, and seeing the disappointed looks at Will Call when he, not the famous Dodger, picked them up.

It took some people a while not to call the Dodger slugger Max Mercy, after the cynical sportswriter that Robert Duvall played in “The Natural,” and told Robert Redford, “They come and they go, Hobbs, they come and they go.”

But Muncy isn’t going anywhere. He has already produced some of the keynote homers in L.A. franchise history. He took Nathan Eovaldi deep in the 18th inning of World Series Game 3 in 2018, giving the Dodgers the only win in that series. He homered at the bleakest moment of Game 7 in Toronto last year, cutting the Blue Jays lead to one run and setting things up for Miguel Rojas and Will Smith.

In 2026 Muncy launched a homer into McCovey Cove off San Francisco’s Madison Bumgarner, who didn’t like Muncy’s home run trot. “If you don’t want to watch me run, you can go get it out of the ocean,” Muncy yelled, which launched a few blue T-shirts at the Dodger Stadium shop.

Rose and Valerie, screaming in the gallery

Maxwell must go free

The judge did not agree and he told them so-o-oh-o

But as the words were leaving his lips

A noise came from behind

Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down on his head

Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer made sure he was dead.

Reportedly, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was despised by all the Beatles except Paul McCartney, who wrote it, and it made Rolling Stone’s list of 50 terrible songs on great albums.

But when the only thing that can shield a Dodger fan’s eardrums from total dissipation is the sight of Muncy doing what he was put here to do, it’s a chorus worth the hallelujah. Better yet, it’s not Sweet Caroline.