The Mets are close to closing on five of those $20 million ownership stakes

By Craig CalcaterraJan 11, 2012, 9:00 AM EDT
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The New York Daily News reports that the New York Mets are close to sealing the deal on five of the $20 million shares they’ve been trying to sell. The owners have been approved by Major League Baseball and the deals could close by the end of the month.  The Daily News:

With that, the team would raise enough capital to repay $25 million owned to MLB, a $40 million bridge loan to Bank of America and other club debts and operating expenses that have emerged in the wake of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal.

There is a reported overall total of $350 million in debt — and the team has reportedly lost money in recent years — so that doesn’t handle everything. But it’s better than nothing.

Now, I’d just like to get a gander at the sort of person who gives the Mets $20 million for perks that are basically not much better than being a season ticket holder.

Alex Bregman shows how easy it is to manufacture “controversy” in baseball

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By Craig CalcaterraOct 16, 2018, 7:26 AM EDT
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In most sports it takes legitimate trash talk to create off-day “controversy.” In baseball, it takes the weakest sauce. We saw how weak that sauce was yesterday.

Alex Bregman and the Houston Astros are going to face off against Nate Eovaldi and the Boston Red Sox in Game 3 of the ALCS tonight. It’s worth noting that earlier this season, they hit back-to-back-to-back home runs off of Eovaldi when he was pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Yesterday, in an act which was likely somewhat inspired by self-motivation, somewhat inspired by getting in Eovaldi’s head and somewhat inspired by a simple interest in having fun, Bregman took the video of those back-to-back-to-back homers off of Eovaldi and posted it to his Instagram:

Of course, since this is baseball, where even farting off-key can be construed as “showing up” the opposition or somehow disrespecting the game, it became a thing. Or at least people tried to make it become a thing.

Indeed, it took them a bit to find someone who would help them make it a thing, because Eovaldi himself didn’t care about it a bit, nor did Astros manager A.J. Hinch or Red Sox manager Alex Cora. Eventually, however, they hit pay dirt. Here’s Sox infielder Steve Pearce talking to WEEI.com:

“Wow. I don’t know why he would do that. We do our talking on the field. If he wants to run his mouth now we’ll see who is talking at the end of the series.”

My guess is that almost no one on the planet, Steve Pearce included, would care about this in a vacuum or if they allowed themselves to think through it for more than a second. Baseball culture, though — and let’s be clear about it, baseball media culture — has conditioned most of its players and participants to think that stuff like this is supposed to be controversial, so it actually takes effort not to start dancing to this kind of tune on auto-pilot.

Kudos to Hinch, Cora and Eolvaldi for exerting that effort and not dancing to it. To the press that automatically sought out comment on this and Pearce who dutifully gave it: hey, I get it. It’s hard to resist one’s conditioning. Maybe you’ll be able to resist it next time.