We are just a couple of days away from the World Series starting. There are some great games ahead of us, and baseball has delivered some really enjoyable games this postseason. With the series beginning in a few days, it is worth taking a look at some of the futures markets and who we should wager on for MVP and the overall series.
Champion
It is really hard to bet against the Brewers. I'll be honest, I'm not a Brewers fan. Most of it is because I am a Cubs fan, and I have found the Brewers to be a bit insufferable without winning anything, so if they do win, it might just get worse. Personal issues aside, the Brewers are the best team in baseball, have been the best team in baseball, and have looked absolutely elite in the postseason. Can they be stopped?
The Tampa Bay Rays will look to do just that. It doesn't look good for them, though. They had the second-lowest OPS against 98 mph or faster pitches in baseball this season. They have struck out 66 times in the postseason, but that's actually five fewer in one less game than the Brewers. Still, the Rays will need to figure out a way to make contact against an elite pitching staff. Outside of Jacob Misiorowski, the Brewers bullpen can fire pitches in there.
I think the Brewers probably do win the World Series. At -165, the price is a bit higher than worth it at the moment, and the value is on the Rays. Tampa does have a very good team. Brewers winning 4-2 is probably my favorite look at +360.
The edge in the starting rotation probably does go to the Rays. Drew Rasmussen is a finesse pitcher, but he has been elite. Freddy Peralta used to pitch for Milwaukee, so I'm interested to see how he performs. Nick Martinez has been strong for them as well. They have a good bullpen, too. The Rays have a shot to win this game, but if they do, it will probably be because Rasmussen wins two games and likely is involved in a third at +2000.
For the Brewers, there are a number of guys who could've been selected for the NLCS MVP, but it went to Jake Bauers. It really wouldn't surprise me to see him get it in the World Series as well. William Contreras at +650 is my favorite look. He has had numerous big hits, and if he can call great games for the club, he could get a bit of an edge. Contreras had a good series the one time the teams played this season. The Brewers have so many good players it is hard to pick just one guy who will get the credit.
I think betting on Contreras to get the most hits in the series at +850 is also a look. Most of it is the same logic as the MVP. I don't like anyone on the Rays to get this because the speed of the pitching might be hard for them to catch up to.
After roughly two weeks of radio silence, New York Yankees brass delivered their official postmortem on Wednesday, and owner Hal Steinbrenner made it very clear who he blames for the team tying its longest championship drought since winning its first World Series in 1923.
Steinbrenner spoke alongside general manager Brian Cashman during a joint Zoom news conference from the team's spring training ballpark in Tampa, Florida, and manager Aaron Boone followed with a video news conference from Yankee Stadium.
With Boone and Cashman seemingly public enemies No. 1A and 1B among the Yankees fan base , making them available for the conferences all but confirmed Steinbrenner's loyalty to both of them, and he confirmed that fact.
"The bottom line is the players didn’t live up to their end of the bargain in the playoffs," Steinbrenner said.
Steinbrenner said that he felt the 2026 Yankees were a "world championship caliber team," yet for the second year in a row, they were eliminated by a division rival in the American League Division Series on their own home field.
Steinbrenner said Boone, who will return for his 10th season, "managed a good season" which included numerous injuries to several star players. However, the postseason proved practically impossible for the offense.
"I believe we absolutely had a team that was winning a championship. I was disappointed, quite frankly, with the offense throughout the course of the year as a whole," Steinbrenner said. "That is certainly one part of the organization that I will be looking at from top to bottom ... but this is twice now when the offense just hasn't lived up to their end of the bargain and got the deal done."
Cashman himself later broke the news that he had agreed to an extension - his current contract expires later this year, and he became the team's GM in 1998. When Cashman took over from Bob Watson in 1998, it was the 15th change at GM since George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in January 1973. Cashman has been the only GM under Hal Steinbrenner, who succeeded his father as controlling owner in November 2008.
"Well, look, Cash is great every season," Steinbrenner said. "I think the roster he put together, the team that we rolled out of spring training with, was as good as any in baseball, in my opinion. We had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way, but the team was fantastic, and it was a world championship-caliber team."
Boone finished his ninth season as manager and has one season left on a two-year contract extension agreed to in February 2025. The 53-year-old former third baseman has led New York to a 790-565 regular-season record and three first-place finishes in the AL East but a 27-30 postseason mark.
"At the end of the day, we haven’t won a championship with me at the helm," he said. "Ultimately that’s what has to happen to satisfy certainly myself — that's why I'm doing this — but to answer those questions ultimately."
Major League Baseball is viewed as one of the more traditional sports, along with golf, where an expected standard developed over 150 years of history. But things change over time, and in recent years, there's been a concerted effort to allow players to show more personality, be more demonstrative, and celebrate their success.
Some pitchers now demonstrably react after striking out opposing hitters, to varying degrees. Mets reliever Jefry Yan being the most prominent example. Many hitters are now more willing to wear their emotions on their sleeve, in moments big and small.
How you feel about this can relate to your age, the generation you grew up watching, or willingness to change with the times. But there are celebrations, and then there are celebrations. Monday night, in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series between the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians, we had the latter.
Needing a win to get to the World Series, the Rays were up 3-1 in the bottom of the seventh inning, facing Cleveland's best reliever, Cade Smith. Caminero came up with a runner at first and nobody out, crushing a line drive to left that hit the foul pole for a two-run homer.
A huge moment for the 23-year-old second-year player that put his team one step closer to a championship. And Caminero enjoyed it. Really, really enjoyed it.
At nearly 39 seconds, it was the second-slowest home run trot in the Statcast tracking era, per MLB.com's Sarah Lang. 39 seconds! To run the bases. And it's not just Caminero.
In game two of the NLCS between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers, catcher William Contreras hit a game-tying home run in the bottom of the fifth and, again, admired it and took an extraordinary amount of time to get around the bases.
Reactions to Caminero's example were, well, mixed, to say the least.
ESPN's Jeff Passan posted the video on X, "This is how you celebrate a home run in a game that could send you to the World Series. Junior Caminero is ready."
Other fans called it a "disgrace," comparing it to how Derek Jeter would celebrate a big homer. One fan wrote, "Junior Caminero is a disgrace to the game of baseball. Imagine someone on the Yankees acting like this in a big playoff game. Imagine playing in the same division as Derek Jeter and acting this classless. There’s an argument that the Rays should bench Caminero. This isn’t how you act."
Another had a similar sentiment, calling it a "slap in the face" to baseball.
"An absolute disgrace to baseball and everything this great game stands for! I first saw this video when Fry Daddy posted it, and I still can’t believe what I witnessed. Congratulations to both teams—one has a chance to win its first World Series, and that’s awesome. But what he did was an embarrassment, a complete disgrace, and a slap in the face to the game I love."
No other sport has the number of "unwritten" rules that baseball has traditionally had in place. Don't show up the other team being one of them. But the celebrations this postseason raise the question, should those "rules" exist in the first place?
There are two valid sides to it; one says that baseball is about tradition and big celebrations are against the tradition of celebrating like you've been there before. The other is that players showing their personalities and emotions is important to modernize the game and bring in fans who enjoy seeing how much the moment means. Even Shohei Ohtani, who is rarely demonstrative, had a big celebration after hitting a home run in game four of the NLCS.
Cade Smith, the closer who gave up the homer to Caminero, was asked his thoughts about the celebration after the game and had a magnanimous answer, saying, "It's not my style but I guess if I don’t like it, I shouldn’t give up home runs."
Videos of Caminero's home-run, uh, walking trot, exploded on social media, and isn't that what MLB wants? Fans who don't normally see baseball to get the passion and energy and excitement that the postseason brings? On the other hand, though, is that the best example of it?
Though, again, if you're going to celebrate anything, a huge home run to give your team a stronger chance to reach the World Series is probably the time to do it. Caminero and Contreras will have a chance to celebrate in the actual World Series when it starts on Friday. Just imagine if one of them hits a walk-off homer.
The World Series hasn’t started yet, but one player is already a champion.
Relief pitcher Jake Woodford played for both the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays this season, guaranteeing that he becomes a champion.
The Rays traded the 29-year-old to Milwaukee just before the season began in March. Woodford was in the Brewers’ bullpen to start the season, appearing in 16 games. He had a 1-0 record with a 6.94 ERA and one save in 23 1/3 innings pitched.
On June 5, Woodford was designated for assignment and subsequently released a few days later. On July 4, he signed a contract with the Chicago Cubs.
Woodford appeared in just one game for the Cubs, allowing three runs in two innings. The Cubs designated Woodford for assignment on July 11, and he was released on July 16. However, the Cubs signed him to a minor league contract on July 18. On July 29, the Cubs selected his contract, returning him to the major league roster.
Woodford threw one scoreless inning on Aug. 3 but was once again designated for assignment by the Cubs on Aug. 4 and released on Aug. 10.
The Rays then brought him back, signing him to a minor league contract on Aug. 11. After more than a month in the minor leagues, the Rays selected his contract and added him to their major league roster on Sept. 24.
Woodford pitched against the New York Yankees, giving up three earned runs in 1 1/3 innings. He was designated for assignment on Sept. 25 and released again on Sept. 29.
Woodford’s roller-coaster ride took him through three different teams over the course of the 2026 season, but one of those teams is guaranteed to win the World Series.
However, Woodford is not guaranteed to receive a ring. There is no official rule that requires teams to give rings to every player, as ring distribution is at the discretion of team ownership and management.
The World Series begins on Friday at 8 p.m. ET, with the Brewers hosting the Rays.
When you do something on the baseball field that’s only been done twice in nearly 114 years by two Hall of Famers, you know it’s extraordinary.
Tampa Bay Rays star and ALCS MVP Freddy Peralta has been lights out down the stretch. In his last 10 starts dating back to the regular season, he has pitched more than 50 innings, allowed one run or fewer in each start, and his team has won all 10 games, according to Opta STATS.
The only two other pitchers to have such streaks were St. Louis Cardinals legend Bob Gibson in 1968 and Walter Johnson in 1913 with the Washington Nationals. However, Johnson’s Nationals are not today’s Nationals. The franchise later became known as the Washington Senators before moving to Minnesota and becoming the Twins in 1961.
When the Rays acquired Peralta from the New York Mets at the trade deadline, he had a 4.99 ERA in 22 starts. While they expected him to improve, no one could have expected this.
"This is crazy," Peralta said. "I’m very happy to be here and grateful to be here because when I was in July, I had no idea where I was going to be. I think that this was the right place."
Since joining the Rays, the 30-year-old went 5-2 in 10 regular-season starts with a 3.25 ERA and was named the American League’s Pitcher of the Month for September. In the postseason, he has been especially dominant. In four appearances (three starts), Peralta has a sparkling 1.08 ERA in 16 2/3 innings pitched.
Nicknamed "Fastball Freddy" for his heater, Peralta credited Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder, along with bullpen coach Jorge Moncada and bullpen catcher Charlie Valerio, for his turnaround.
"They helped me a lot," Peralta said. "I can’t thank them enough because the way that they helped me is amazing, something I’m never going to forget in life. I’m very grateful to have people like that here, people that I never saw before and now they are part of my family."
While Peralta is on a roll, the World Series is going to be a little odd for him: He will face the Milwaukee Brewers, with whom he spent the first eight seasons of his career.
"Milwaukee is a team and a city that gave me the opportunity to make my dream, and also Milwaukee is going to be always in my heart," Peralta said. "But this is a time to compete ... and excited to go."
The right-hander is set to hit free agency this offseason and could earn a big payday. First, however, he is looking to take down his old team and help the Rays win their first World Series title.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be careful when you're behind the wheel this week.
College football is great! Surely you want even more of it, right? We'll get into the problems with a 24-team College Football Playoff (CFP), then talk about the NBA's new betting restrictions, and close with thoughts about President Donald Trump's new government golf course plans. And just in case you don't make it to the end, here's a shortcut to our survey on who you're rooting for in the World Series.
But first, many congratulations to "Gary's 1st Entry" on outlasting everyone else in our NFL Survivor group. There's no prize other than this shoutout, so be sure to print out today's newsletter, highlight this paragraph, and frame it in gold. Perhaps Gary can keep going and challenge Primetime Paulie Rothrock's 13-game winning streak from last season.
Locker Room Links
Both teams in the WNBA Finals left the court for the National Anthem—unclear if this was a protest or just part of the pregame routine. WNBA policy doesn't require teams to be on the court for the anthem, but does require a "dignified posture" if they are.
In the thick of a playoff race, three Zambian women's soccer players are separated from their National Women's Soccer League teams because they played in Uganda, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a three-week restriction on reentry due to Ebola. (There are zero active Ebola cases in Uganda and Zambia.)
This is the kind of excessively nerdy fantasy football content I live for. (Yahoo remains the best fantasy sports system. ESPN's is trash, relying on name recognition to get by.)
I figured out how ESPN calculates fantasy football win percentage, it's bad!
ESPN made a stats 101 error when calculating their win percentage which leads to horribly miscalibrated numbers. ( thread) pic.twitter.com/bDypgjelKj
Saturday was one of the best days of college football ever—or perhaps it could have been, if we thought any of the five top-10 teams who took a loss were now certainly out of playoff contention. Instead, Georgia, Notre Dame, Indiana, Alabama, and Texas are all still very much alive in the championship hunt.
Today was one of the craziest days in college football history:
- First time ever five teams ranked in the top 7 lose in a single week - First time the No. 1-ranked team loses to an unranked team in consecutive weeks since 1990 - First time Texas, Alabama, and Georgia all lose… pic.twitter.com/psVRoM5s5b
With two losses, Alabama and Texas are at least on the edge of the playoff bubble with perhaps no more room for error. But that's only true under this year's CFP format. Next year, the playoff is almost officially set to balloon to 24 teams, making the chaos of a day like Saturday matter even less.
Fans will always celebrate a huge upset or major rivalry win, of course—Tennessee fans don't need playoff stakes as an excuse to get drunk when they beat Alabama. But the joy of a rivalry win in the past was always bigger because of the off-field stakes, too—the first loss for your rival meant they probably wouldn't be national champions, the second meant they'd be out of the Rose Bowl, a third meant you could be proud your team sent them packing for the Alamo Bowl. Winning is great; ruining your rival's season is even better.
With 24 teams in the playoff, the joy is a bit diminished because it will take four or possibly five losses to knock a powerhouse program out of the CFP (Iowa, at 8–4, was ranked 23rd by the committee before last year's playoffs). It'll be a bit like a rivalry win in college basketball—we win, you suck, congrats on getting a slightly worse NCAA Tournament seed.
In the business of sports, more inventory for TV is king, and the powers that be think more teams playing more playoff games will make more money. At Free Agent, we don't begrudge institutions for trying to make more money—we all do the same every day. But it's not clear abandoning conference championship games will be the answer, especially when the Big Ten and SEC championships apparently outdraw many playoff games.
ESPN and the power conferences know fans aren't happy about it—just look at allthechatteronline, and how the crowd at BYU reacted when College GameDay discussed expansion on Saturday (especially when BYU would probably benefit from expansion!). They're betting enough people will watch to make the expansion profitable anyway. The last hope is that fans get loud enough to bully them into abandoning expansion—which only occasionally works, sometimes on things small (putting the trophy logo on the court for the NBA Finals) and large (soccer's European Super League). If any powerhouse considers going independent, that might shock leaders into a rethink too.
Almost every sport I know is adding more: more teams, bigger playoffs, more for TV. As fans, we still eat it up, of course—much to the excitement of the TV executives who are selling commercial time to the people trying to reach us, the viewing public. (The only counterexample is the MLB proposal to cut eight games from the regular season—I'd love to see each sport I follow cut its season by about 25 percent to make regular season games matter more, so I'm interested to see how this goes.)
Perhaps I'm biased because my favorite team, Michigan State, is a dumpster fire—they could expand the playoff to 64 teams and the Spartans still wouldn't deserve a bid. I personally don't have a whole lot at stake in the playoff format now or anytime soon. But as a neutral, the chaos of Saturday might have been viewed with my full attention in the past—instead, this year I just had it on in the background while I played video games.
Sports Are Regulating Bets Without Politicians, Part 3
After last year's major betting scandal, the NBA asked sportsbooks late last week to stop offering certain types of potentially problematic bets. The sportsbooks, which the NBA says handle roughly 99 percent of the U.S. betting market, agreed. No politician or regulation was necessary to solve the problem.
No longer can bettors bet on unders for a bit player who likely won't get more than 12 minutes of playtime. Bettors also can't wager on the opening tip or on players to miss specific shots. Parlays that string together under bets on the same player's statistics are also out (this one seems a bit harsh—if you just want to bet on a certain major player to have an off night, you can bet on stats separately, but not in a big multiplier parlay). Bets on players who have two-way contracts between the NBA and G League were already banned.
This all comes on the heels of similar developments last year in the NFL and MLB. While some people want to ban prop bets altogether, the NFL asked sportsbooks to eliminate bets in four different categories. Sportsbooks largely agreed or weren't offering those bets anyway. MLB, in light of some pitching-related scandals, asked for a $200 limit on pitch-specific bets and to keep them out of parlays—sportsbooks agreed to that too.
As I wrote last year, "Ideally, this is how the regulation of the sports betting industry should go….These approaches are catching the nuances of what works for both the leagues and for sportsbooks without the heavy-handed approaches of politicians who would use an axe to ban all prop bets instead of a scalpel to limit problematic bets."
It's important to note leagues are able to do this because they have commercial partnerships with the sportsbooks. Otherwise, the leagues would have no direct leverage over a sportsbook offering a bet the league doesn't like. Keep that in mind the next time you see people bemoaning a league partnership with a sportsbook or a prediction market.
Trump's Golf Course Plans Have People Teed Off
President Donald Trump has new plans for the National Park Service golf course at East Potomac—again. Last time new plans were announced, the site plan still had its historic miniature golf course, a par-3 course, and the existing road still ringing the property for bicycling, running, etc. Much of the public didn't like that plan anyway—now, none of that remains in the latest plans, just 18 holes of golf and a driving range.
What's really going on here seems quite clear to me: Like so many other things going on in the second Trump administration, this is a scheme to enrich the Trump family. The plan?
Step 2: Use taxpayer dollars to pay for renovation of the course into, allegedly, a championship-level course capable of hosting major golf tournaments (no matter that the area has next to zero parking, is a mile from the nearest Metro station, and only accessible by narrow roads not meant to handle tens of thousands of spectators).
Step 3: Have the federal government sign a sweetheart deal with, who else, the golf division of the Trump Organization to operate the course on extremely favorable and profitable terms.
If you're wondering why the Trump administration is doing something, corruption is usually a good guess.
The arguments for the course don't make much sense. There are plenty of adequate, competitively priced golf courses in the broader Washington, D.C., area. Several of them are already capable of hosting professional golf tournaments. Between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, there were three tournaments at three different courses in the last couple years. The 2030 PGA Championship and 2037 Ryder Cup will happen just over the D.C. line in Bethesda, Maryland.
East Potomac is not the nicest course around, no thanks to the legal limbo it's been in for the past year. But if the National Park Service is going to, for some reason, be in the business of running a golf course, it should be a course that emphasizes and teaches its history instead of the pipe dream of a corrupt madman.
Who Ya Got? 2026 World Series Edition
For the first time in 46 years, we've got a World Series contested by two teams that have never won it before. Brewers against Rays is also a rare instance of the top seeds from each league outlasting the randomness of the MLB playoffs to make the World Series. And before you trot out the tired line that "TV executives must be seething about the small market teams" remember that they care much more about getting a playoff series that goes seven games with close results in each game (What did I say above? Inventory rules all!).
The Tampa Bay Rays will take on the Milwaukee Brewers, as they defeated the Cleveland Guardians, 7-3, in Game 6 of the ALCS to win the American League pennant.
The Brewers, who shockingly swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, have been watching this ALCS patiently to see who their opponent will be.
Tampa Bay won Game 5 on the road, which is always a pivotal tilt when the series is tied at two games apiece, and they didn’t squander their first trip back home at Tropicana Field.
With a sold-out "Trop," the Rays used their momentum to get the job done.
Richie Palacios got the Rays on the board first in the bottom of the second inning after a clutch, two-out double to make it 2-0 early.
Then, with the game at 3-1 in favor of Tampa Bay, it was their superstar, Junior Caminero, hitting what felt like the series-sealing home run that sent the Trop into rapture.
Caminero turned on an inside pitch and was willing the ball to stay fair, as it smacked off the foul pole and the celebration ensued. Caminero stopped before hitting first base, screaming in elation with the crowd and his nearby teammates in the dugout as he understood making it a 5-1 game in the bottom of the seventh inning was a back-breaker for the Guardians.
Caminero took his time rounding the bases before touching home plate, and the Rays fans in the stadium matched his energy the entire time.
Cleveland, though, wouldn’t go down without a fight. They found some juice in the ensuing frame, scoring twice to make it a 5-3 game. But as they’ve done all season, the Rays responded when they needed it.
Yandy Diaz hit his own home run, and there was no doubt about the 416-footer he sent over the left field wall to give his squad a four-run lead.
As the top of the ninth began, Bryan Baker, the Rays’ lockdown closer, took the mound to finish the job in Game 6. He got Steven Kwan and Jose Ramirez to both ground out to first base before Chase DeLauter popped out foul to punch Tampa Bay’s ticket into the Fall Classic.
This marks the first time the Rays have been to the World Series since the 2020 COVID-19-shortened season, while the Brewers are in for the first time in 44 years.
Either way, one of these franchises will be winning its first-ever World Series as neither have been able to place one in their trophy case in history.
The 2026 World Series starts later this week, and with it, potentially the last Major League Baseball games we'll see for quite some time.
On Dec. 1, the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league's owners and the MLB Players Association expires. Barring some extremely unforeseen circumstances, the owners will immediately proceed to a lockout. Players will be barred from contact with team personnel, unable to use team facilities, along with many other noticeable changes designed to pretend as though the stars who sustain the sport don't exist.
Nobody knows how long negotiations to determine the next Collective Bargaining Agreement will take to resolve. Nobody knows how long the lockout will continue, or if spring training or the 2027 regular season will start on time. If the league will miss games and potentially jeopardize the sustained growth baseball has enjoyed. For example, the 2026 NLCS between the Dodgers and Brewers was the highest rated LCS from either league since 2015, despite lasting just four games.
Attendance has increased. National ratings have increased. And the owners are reportedly committed to blowing it all up in order to fight for a salary cap. Except one of their newest members just accidentally blew up their entire case and rationalization for it.
The salary cap fight stems from anger and outrage over the Los Angeles Dodgers' offseason spending. After winning the 2024 and 2025 World Series, the Dodgers added Kyle Tucker on a $240 million, 4-year deal. Then signed closer Edwin Diaz to a 3-year, $69 million contract. Opposing fans were furious, some suggested canceling the season because a third straight title was a foregone conclusion, and prominent writers egged them on with misleading comments.
Fast forward to late October and it's almost impossible to age worse than these predictions of baseball doom. Kyle Tucker was a below average hitter in Los Angeles, one of the worst values of any player in the sport. Edwin Diaz had an ERA near nine in the regular season, battled several injuries, and turned in one of the worst reliever seasons in baseball. The Dodgers won the division series, then got swept by the small market Brewers. The American League will send either the Cleveland Guardians, with the lowest payroll in the league, or the endlessly cheap Tampa Bay Rays to the World Series.
But that's not even the worst part for the league office. Fans are quick to dismiss these (quite common) results as "outliers." Even though the Rays are one win from their second World Series appearance in the past seven seasons, more than the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Giants, Cubs, or Angels. Even though a Guardians appearance would be their second appearance since 2016, again, more than any of those organizations. And even though the Brewers have the best record in baseball for two straight seasons.
They might be able to (inaccurately) dismiss the results. But they can't dismiss a small market owner proudly bragging about how much money he and his team are making.
That's exactly what Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein last week. Local outlet Baltimore Baseball reported that Rubenstein, speaking at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., told a group of other sports team owners that he bought the organization in part because of how much money they were making.
"A lot of my friends were buying teams, and I realized they're making money. They're making more money than I'm making in private equity," Rubenstein explained, per Baltimore Baseball. "I thought I should look at it as a financial thing, but ultimately I bought the Orioles for a philanthropic purpose. I grew up in Baltimore, as people know. I didn't think I'd done enough for Baltimore, so I bought the team to help revive the team a bit and ultimately revive Baltimore because Baltimore had some challenges."
He did claim that "owners care more about winning than making money (but they're) not against making money." Hilarious.
Rubenstein's laudable "charity" aside, the admission that baseball teams are making more money than private equity is about as damning as it gets for the league's salary cap arguments. Baseball is a highly profitable industry, small market teams are bringing in enormous sums of money, and many owners are choosing to pocket it instead of reinvesting in their rosters. Because they're not "against making money."
One X user showed how prolific small market owners are at pocketing money. While the highest payrolls have increased substantially over the last decade, the lowest payrolls have remained nearly flat. Yet the league is making substantially more money than it was in the 2010s, and cumulative inflation since 2015 has been over 42%.
Not to mention that MLB's form of socialism, revenue sharing, means the Dodgers' success benefits teams like the Pirates, Orioles, and Marlins, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year...each. Some estimates put the Pirates' revenue sharing payout at anywhere from $60-100 million. Just for existing. Before any income they get from tickets, television, advertising, parking, concessions, merchandise, or non-baseball events.
It's ironic though, that the season in which the league angrily posted that too many fans have no hope of their team winning a World Series has been a complete dismantling of that argument. In every conceivable way.
One of the Brewers, Rays, or Guardians are going to win the World Series, demonstrating that fans can indeed have "hope" if their front offices are competent. The Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Giants, Angels, Cubs, Astros, Rangers and Red Sox combined to win five postseason games. And one of the league's small market owners accidentally admitted that baseball is more profitable than one of the most famously lucrative industries on planet earth.
Rubenstein is, of course, fully entitled to make as much money as he can or wants to with the Orioles. He's also already proven to be one of the better small market owners when it comes to investing money, signing Pete Alonso and Kyle Bradish this past offseason, extending Samuel Basallo, and locking up Shane Baz. But it's ludicrous to act as though there isn't an enormous amount of money coming into MLB. And that plenty of it flows to the "poorer" teams.
Will this matter to the owners' fanbase calling for players to take less money so Rubenstein can make more money? Of course not, they're happily set to continue demanding a salary cap to be more like the NFL, the sport with the worst competitive balance in the country and the most predictable outcomes. Why would they let a little thing like reality interfere with that?
Con una épica remontada de en Dodger Stadium, Milwaukee eliminó en cuatro juegos al bicampeón de la MLB y selló su boleto al Clásico de Otoño por primera vez desde 1982.
Con un estelar Gavin Williams y un cuadrangular de Petey Halpin, Cleveland doblegó 3-2 a Tampa Bay para tomar ventaja de 2-1 en la Serie de Campeonato de la Liga Americana.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! It's a great week to do something nice for the furryfriends in your life.
Let's get into some nitty-gritty about baseball's salary cap fight. We'll dive in with two sections on that, then move on to some new thoughts about an old video game.
People are complaining about day games in MLB's division and league championship series. I'm old enough to remember when my elders would wax poetic about World Series day games. But it's interesting to see MLB use day games on weekdays to minimize overlap while the NBA and NHL are fine with multiple playoff games at the same time.
A Chinese player for Mississippi Valley State was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). His student visa had expired and he was on his way to visit his visa sponsor when he was detained. His lawyer said ICE forced him to sign a form for voluntary departure.
MLB's Salary Cap Fight Isn't About Balance, It's About Costs
In 2025, baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, were rooting for the small market, small payroll Milwaukee Brewers to beat the goliath Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series (NLCS). The Brewers got swept. Now it's 2026, and guess what? Baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, are rooting for the small market, small payroll Brewers to beat the goliath Dodgers in the NLCS. (At least the Brewers aren't getting swept this time!)
But what if none of that matters at all to the salary cap fight?
A small market World Series victory for the Brewers (19th in MLB payroll), the Tampa Bay Rays (28th), or, yuck, the Cleveland Guardians (30th) helps boost the theoretical argument that MLB doesn't need a salary cap for small market teams to succeed. But labor negotiations are not decided by debate club rules—you don't win with a better policy argument. It's all about the power dynamics and leverage of what is essentially a business negotiation between employees and employers. The policy argument might matter to public opinion, but it makes hardly any difference to leverage.
Competitive balance may not matter to the owners at all (in fact, some studies have found that salary caps don't create more balance, but revenue sharing does). The owners are almost certainly focused on keeping down their labor costs. A salary cap would likely give an immediate boost to team values—when Formula 1 teams recently agreed to a broad cap on their expenses, valuations shot up.
The lockout fight will come down to who can endure the pain the longest, and how much the "losing" side is willing to stomach what the "winning" side is offering. The billionaire owners have plenty of wealth and income from their other assets, but also don't want a lockout to crater the value of one of their biggest assets. The players have had years to save and plan for a lockout, and some can still try to lean on endorsements, merchandise, and other nonpayroll income to help them along. The owners will try to say they're showing good faith by combining their salary cap with a salary floor that would force some teams to spend more on players—but that won't appeal much to the union's player leadership, which is largely made up of high-level players who want a big payday coming out of the lockout (I see you, future free agents Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes).
The only way public opinion might matter is if government officials decide to get involved. President Donald Trump has already made noise about taking action, and backs the owners' push for a salary cap, but it's unclear how much he can lean on negotiations. The National Labor Relations Board may end up involved—all four members were appointed by Trump (one is a Democrat who used to work for the players union). Members of Congress could threaten to take away MLB's antitrust exemption, but probably wouldn't have the votes to do it.
It goes without saying all this is incredibly frustrating for fans (as well as players who want to earn a living and teams that want to plan for the future). The lockout is going to hit baseball like a car crash that everyone saw coming from miles away. The basic bargaining positions have not changed in years, but the two sides have made basically no progress.
At least Minor League Baseball won't get locked out, and should get a major viewership boost if MLB ends up losing games.
With All the Salary Cap Scandals, Are They Even Worth It?
What's funny to me is that the MLB salary cap debate is happening in the wake of two of the biggest spending cap scandals in sports history: the Los Angeles Clippers salary cap circumvention scandal and, in soccer, the Manchester City financial scandal. You'd think the difficulty of enforcing these rules would cause some people to think twice about a salary cap, and how cheaters can ruin the integrity of the game for fans.
If MLB owners do manage to convince the players to agree to a cap, the cap's rules will make a big difference in how successful it is.
The NBA had a scandal over fake endorsement deals, the Premier League had a scandal over fake sponsorships, and hockey fans got mad every year about players coming off the long-term injured reserve list just in time for the playoffs, changing their cap hit, until the league finally closed the loophole. In multiple sports, fans from high-income-tax states complain that their salary cap limits are the same as teams in low- or no-tax states, making the latter more appealing to free agents.
Meanwhile, in the NFL—actually, it's somehow been largely scandal-free on the salary cap front for over a decade, except for a couple minorscandals.
I'm not exactly sure how the NFL manages this—maybe it's the hard cap with few exceptions, maybe it's the size of their rosters, maybe it's because many of the tactics teams use to game the cap are legal (for example, converting a "signing bonus" into base salary paid out over five years). Or maybe there is a ton of salary cap circumvention with sham side deals and the NFL just fails to catch it.
Regardless, I'm morally not a fan of teams colluding to avoid paying players their competitive market wage. We're talking about millionaires, so you might not have much sympathy. But if you had the talent and put in the hard work to earn a million fans, you wouldn't want owners to collectively diminish your wage either.
4 Years Later, Gran Turismo 7 Still Slaps
Just when I thought I was out, Gran Turismo 7 has pulled me back in. First released in 2022 (see my brief review from the time here), the game is now my go-to activity when I have free time.
A few times a week, my 2-year-old son will ask to see race cars on TV, and sometimes I will fire up Gran Turismo 7 or the latest Formula 1 game for him to watch me play (he sort of pays attention, but what he really wants is to break small pieces off my Formula 1 Lego sets, forcing me to pause each lap and reassemble them). A few weeks ago, I noticed Gran Turismo 7 has weekly challenges of five races. While working through them, I noticed that—despite having beaten most of the game's most difficult challenges on its hardest difficulty—I'd won less than 40 percent of its races.
That just couldn't stand, and now I'm trying to work through them all. AI has added a new component for me—I've used it to help with car selection, pit strategy, and tweaking of settings.
All this is to say that I'm impressed a 4-year-old video game can still make me obsessed. Kudos to the Gran Turismo 7 team for releasing several updates throughout the year with new tracks, cars, and more.
Replay of the Week
I watched this live and on replay so many times, and still can't figure out what they thought was going on. Was it a designed run play, and with what purpose? Did the players forget they didn't have any timeouts? Were the Commanders coaches running the clock low because they thought they'd have to kick it back to the Giants? I thought maybe they were trying to line it up for the kicker, but that would have involved a quick kneel followed by a spike.
The whole overtime was bonkers, and the Commanders are cowards anyway.
Jayden Daniels thought the clock would stop at 5 seconds out of respect for him pic.twitter.com/CQ16tDxL5o
The mountains of Grand Teton could become the backdrop for a Major League Baseball game. The proposal is only on the table for now, but it has already drawn opposition from local officials and environmental groups because bringing baseball there would require building — even if only temporarily — a field inside one of the most important national parks in the United States.
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