Mets owner Steve Cohen’s quest to build something undisclosed atop the parking lots around Citi Field—psst it’s a casino—held its coming-out party on Saturday, as roughly 450 Queens residents and assorted Mets fans trooped through the stadium’s Piazza 31 Club to … Continue reading
As Major League Baseball’s scheduled March 31 opening day looms nearer without a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the nation’s sports media are pointing fingers squarely at both sides: the players’ union as well as team owners, who have been … Continue reading
MLB’s year-long assault on its minor-league affiliates, first launched last fall, ended this month with unconditional surrender, as the nation’s farm teams fully capitulated to a plan that will see 43 franchises either get bumped to independent leagues, demoted to amateur leagues, or … Continue reading
Last week, baseball’s winter meetings in San Diego—normally a hotbed of trade activity—were also abuzz with talk of an even higher-stakes deal: Major League Baseball’s proposal, first revealed in October, to eliminate 42 minor league affiliates once the current operating … Continue reading
Major League Baseball saw attendance decline for the fifth straight year, falling to a mere 28,198 fans per game, the lowest mark since 2003. It’s a trend that has already prompted much public hand-wringing from baseball barons and the sportswriters … Continue reading
Nobody goes to baseball games anymore. That’s the common alarmist wisdom that has become one of the overarching themes of the 2019 season, which had barely gotten underway before USA Today was declaring that MLB’s attendance slide of recent years … Continue reading
Any self-respecting student of insane Machiavellian gambits should be familiar with the Madman Theory, Richard Nixon’s self-invented strategy for winning the war in Vietnam. The theory, as recounted by Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman after he got out of … Continue reading
The Mets swept the so-hapless-even-their-owner-is-mad-at-whoever-made-them-this-hapless Marlins this weekend to crawl back within a game of a .500 record, but first they unveiled a Friday surprise: an email announcing that starting next Monday, fans will no longer be allowed to bring … Continue reading
It’s not like everyone hadn’t been thinking it, but it took Tommy Pham to mention the elephant in the room. The outfielder, who one year earlier had celebrated his 6-WAR season in his first year as a starter at age … Continue reading
The baseball panic is rising. With every additional day that Bryce Harper and Manny Machado go unsigned—and Dallas Keuchel and Mike Moustakas and A.J. Pollock and Craig Kimbrel—the drumbeat strengthens: Something is wrong here. After all, as has been pointed … Continue reading