Joe Santoro
Sports Fodder:
The Colorado Rockies, 10-50 this season, are on a path to become the worst major league baseball team since the Cleveland Spiders went 20-134 in 1899. And nobody really seems to care.
Nobody, after all, cared all that much that the Chicago White Sox went 41-121 just last season, breaking the expansion 1962 New York Mets' record for the most losses (120) in a season since 1901. The White Sox, it seems, showed the Rockies that it is perfectly acceptable to win one or two games a week for six months in a row and there won't be any real price to pay, save for a few smart aleck comments on ESPN.
You think the players care? The players, many of whom should be in the minor leagues or driving a UPS truck, get to accrue major league service time they truly don't deserve. They will earn at least the major league minimum of roughly $4,000 a day for each day they are on the roster. Think UPS pays that?
The owners absolutely don't care. All they care about is that every MLB franchise, even ones that lose 120-plus games, is worth at least $ 1 billion. They get that billion whether the team wins one game or 162.
There are no real losers here, folks. Yes, of course, fans are the losers but, in case you haven't heard, nobody really cares about the fans. Fans are robots, addicted to pleasure-seeking and entertainment. They just need a place to stuff their faces with $9 hot dogs and beers, $15 sundaes, buy $45 hats, sit in $40 seats and shell out $50 for parking. They'll watch any random nine guys try to play baseball as long as they are wearing their favorite team's colors.
The Rockies, by the way, are still averaging more than 27,000 fans a game this season.
So why pay a pitcher a million dollars a start when you can pay a dozen or 15 guys less than $25 million or so, total, to split the season's 162 games? Hey, you'll still likely win one-fourth of your games whether you want to or not. That's the beauty of professional sports.
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The Rockies this season have a very real chance of making the 2024 White Sox look like the 2024 Dodgers.
The Rockies are on pace for just 27 wins this year. There are 24 teams right now that already have 27 or more wins with roughly 100 games remaining in the season. Every team but the Rockies and White Sox (18-42 heading into Tuesday's games) could have 27-plus wins by the end of next week.
The conventional thinking in baseball used to be that every team would win roughly 50 games and lose 50 games in a given season. It's what you do in the other 62 games that would determine your overall success or failure.
Well, the White Sox destroyed all that a year ago. The White Sox, who still haven't won a total of 60 games since the start of the 2024 season (they've gone 59-163), have redefined the depths a major league team can experience in a season. They not only didn't win 50 games last season, they also were horrible in those other 62 games.
The White Sox started the 2024 season by losing 30 of their first 44 games by May 15. And then they really started to struggle. The White Sox, after that promising 14-30 start on May 15, proceeded to lose 79 of their next 96 games through Sept. 3. They made losing an art form, losing 18 of 19 games from May 16 through June 6, 21 in a row from July 10 to Aug. 5 and 16 of 17 from Aug. 17 through Sept.3.
And, save for a few nasty comments and jokes by the national media, hardly anyone outside the south side of Chicago noticed for more than it took for them to make those nasty comments or jokes. And then they quickly went back to telling you how amazing Shohei Ohtani was doing for the Dodgers.
Nobody outside Denver can name more than three current Rockies. Hunter Goodman, Jordan Beck, Brenton Doyle, Michael Toglia and Ezequial Tovar are their best position players. Former A's prospect Nick Martini, now 35, has gotten over 100 at bats for the Rockies.
This is simply a bad major league team living up to expectations. The same could be said about the 2024 White Sox with Nicky Lopez, Paul DeJong, Dominic Fletcher, Tommy Pham, Martin Maldonado, Danny Medick and Corey Julks.
You don't lose 120-plus games by accident. It happens on purpose.
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Baseball, more than ever before, is all about the dollars.
There are nine teams in MLB with a payroll of over $200 million this year while six are under $100 million. The Rockies are at $125 million but you can bet that will shrink next year, much like the White Sox went from roughly $175 million in 2024 to about $70 million this year.
Teams that lose in record numbers don't try to put a better product on the field. They just go out and cut expenses. There are a lot of ways to make money in baseball. Never forget that winning games and championships is the most difficult way.
The reason why we are seeing teams like the White Sox and Rockies lose in record numbers is because the price of doing business is now out of control. Is it a coincidence that this losing epidemic started the same time Shohei Ohtani signed a $700 million deal after the 2023 season? Teams that want to win the World Series are now forced to sign players to contracts worth $500 million or more.
Major league baseball needs a salary cap now more than ever. A cap works in the NFL and NBA. The small market Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder are in the NBA Finals. The Kansas City Chiefs have just as much chance to win the Super Bowl as the New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams.
MLB, though, is run by the players and their agents. It's why the sport is likely facing a lengthy work stoppage when the current collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2026 season. Don't be surprised if at least half the 2027 season is wiped out by a strike.
The players will never agree to a salary cap, especially not now with players earning $30 million a year or more. Ohtani makes $70 million a year, roughly what the White Sox, Athletics, Miami Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates and Tampa Bay Rays will pay their entire rosters.
A dozen teams average 30,000 or more fans each game. Six (Rays, A's, White Sox, Marlins, Pirates and Minnesota Twins) are averaging under 20,000. Another four (Cincinnati Reds, Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Indians and Kansas City Royals) average under 25,000. That means that the Dodgers, who average just under 51,000 fans a game, sell more tickets in one game than 10 teams sell in two games combined.
Players, though, don't care that half the teams in baseball can't compete financially. They don't care that a salary cap would make the sport healthier and more competitive from top to bottom. They only care that the minimum salary of $760,000 per player will only go up, salary cap or no salary cap.
Without a cap we will likely see major league baseball teams regularly losing 120 games a year from here on out.
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If you are looking for a fun time this Fourth of July weekend, you might want to head for Denver. That's where the Rockies and White Sox will team up for three games July 4-6 in what could be more laughs than a Savannah Bananas game.
The Rockies and White Sox will likely combine for less than 90 wins this year, even though three of those wins will come this July 4 weekend. Hey, somebody has to win those three games.
The White Sox are on pace to win 48 games after winning 41 last year, while the Rockies are headed to 27 wins. That would add up to 75 wins between the two worst teams in MLB. The record for fewest wins combined by the two worst teams since the schedule was expanded to 162 games in 1962 (not including the strike seasons of 1981 and 1994 and the Covid year of 2020) is 99 by the 1962 New York Mets (40 wins) and Chicago Cubs (59).
The 2019 Baltimore Orioles (64) and Detroit Tigers (47) combined for 101 wins. Last year's White Sox (41) and Rockies (61) managed just 102 combined wins, so this epic losing by the worst teams in MLB is now a trend.
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If you listen to most NBA oddsmakers, it would be difficult to see this NBA Finals, which begins on Thursday in Oklahoma City, going beyond five games.
The Thunder, after all, won 68 games in the regular season while Indiana won just 50. OKC swept Memphis to open the playoffs and then beat Denver in seven games and Minnesota in five. Both Denver and Minnesota might be favored to beat the Pacers if they were in these Finals.
Indiana only had to beat a banged-up Milwaukee Bucks team and an overrated Cleveland Cavaliers team in five games and a one-dimensional New York Knicks group in six games to get to the Finals.
OKC also swept its two games with Indiana this year, 132-111 at home and 120-114 on the road. So, it’s easy to understand why the Thunder, a much deeper and overall more talented team than Indiana, is the obvious favorite in the Finals.
Given all that, don't underestimate the Pacers, a gritty team that went 4-1 in overtime games in the regular season and 2-0 in the playoffs this year. But it all comes down to the Pacers stealing one of the first two games at OKC. The Thunder is just 4-3 on the road in these playoffs while Indiana is 6-2 at home.