Don't Come Crying

Baseball franchises are divided between the haves and have-nots, real and pretend. You can put the Yankees; Mets; Red Sox; and Dodgers in the former and most everybody else in the latter. How to explain mlb.com, then? Go on the website, and it’s Juan Soto, all day every day, just like it was Shohei Ohtani last offseason. If not Soto, then the next top-rated free agent. Scott Boras and his fellow agents must love how the daily barrage of stories creates a fan frenzy to sign their clients, yesterday if not sooner. Fast-forward to the end of the next collective bargaining agreement, and you can bet ownership will be crying poor, even though its publicity machine—and mlb.com is nothing if not a publicity machine—treats free-agent signings like an auctioneer working a gullible crowd with money to burn. So, if Soto gets his $700 million-plus contract, don’t come crying to me, and be careful about passing the cost onto your fan base. The peasants are grumpy these days.