Category: Sports News

There is an old saying that water finds its level.

The 2026 Rockies are careening toward a fourth consecutive season with triple-digit losses. They are a bad team, and with eight games remaining, there is little left to be decided.

But this season has not always felt like watching a terrible team.

There have been stretches when the Rockies looked like a fairly normal, competitive baseball team. There was even a point when the offense was the best in baseball. There were stretches when the bullpen gave them a legitimate way to protect a lead, and others when the whole thing fell apart.

The standings are not lying. They just flatten out a season that has been anything but flat.

So, with one final week left, maybe this is a good time to reconcile the record with the experience of watching the Rockies get here.

The standings flatten everything

To set some parameters, a competitive game here is defined as any Rockies win, regardless of margin, or any loss by three runs or fewer.

Through September 17, 108 of the Rockies’ 153 games fit that definition — 70.6% of the season.

There have also been long stretches when Colorado stayed in games almost every night. From June 9 through July 10, 27 of 30 games were competitive — 90% — and the Rockies went 15-15. Expand the window from June 9 through August 18 and 48 of 60 games were competitive, during which Colorado went 26-34.

A team can stay close regularly and still lose a lot of baseball games.

Colorado has done exactly that before.

*Through September 17.

The first two columns measure the full season. The best sustained stretch column shows the strongest extended run from each year.

The 2023 Rockies are a good example of how much a final record can hide. They lost 103 games and still played .500 baseball over one 40-game stretch.

So competitive stretches are not unique to the 2026 Rockies. What stands out is how dramatically this team has changed while doing it.

Six versions of the same team

The shifts become easier to see when the season is broken into six stretches.

For context, wRC+ is a park-adjusted measure of offensive production, with 100 representing league average and higher being better. ERA- is also park-adjusted, but works in the opposite direction: 100 is league average and lower is better.

Put those stretches next to each other, and the Rockies barely look like the same team twice.

They opened the season 14-17 with an offense that was well below average, but the rotation posted a 95 ERA- while the bullpen was excellent at 79. The offense did not have to carry the team because the pitching kept games close enough for Colorado to find a run somewhere.

April 1 in Toronto was a pretty good example. Kyle Freeland allowed one run over five innings, the bullpen followed with five scoreless innings, and the Rockies survived 17 strikeouts long enough for Troy Johnston to tie the game in the eighth.

Tyler Freeman gave Colorado the lead with an RBI single in the 10th before Jimmy Herget finished off the 2-1 win.

That was one version of the Rockies: keep the game close, get enough from the pitching and wait for the offense to find something.

Then the bottom fell out.

From April 30 through May 27, Colorado went 6-20. The offense cratered to a 62 wRC+, while the starting rotation posted a 156 ERA-. The bullpen was below average, too.

The May 19 loss to Texas showed how quickly that version of the Rockies could get buried. Colorado’s opener did not escape the first inning, and the Rangers were ahead 5-0 after two and 7-0 after four.

Joc Pederson was in the middle of it, finishing with four hits as Texas kept piling on.

The Rangers eventually won 10-0. The Rockies finished with three hits.

From May 29 through July 3, the picture flipped almost completely. Colorado went 16-16 and posted a 126 wRC+ — the best park-adjusted offensive mark in baseball over that stretch.

That number stands out beyond this season, too. The Rockies did not produce a full calendar month with a wRC+ that high anywhere in the previous decade. The best mark in the 2016-2025 monthly data was 116 in May 2019.

The pitching never really joined the offense. The starters posted a 125 ERA-, while the bullpen was even worse at 134.

June 26 in Minnesota compressed that entire stretch into one night.

Colorado trailed 7-0 entering the eighth. The Rockies scored three runs there, then five more in the ninth. Jake McCarthy homered to pull Colorado within one, Kyle Karros doubled, and Hunter Goodman followed with a two-run homer that suddenly put the Rockies ahead 8-7.

Minnesota tied the game in the bottom of the ninth and won it in the 10th.

For a while, the offense was good enough to overcome almost anything.

Almost.

Then it disappeared.

From July 4 through July 29, the Rockies’ wRC+ collapsed from 126 to 72. The bullpen actually improved to a 92 ERA-, but the starters remained poor at 138.

Colorado had gone from asking one of baseball’s best offenses to carry bad pitching to asking one of its least productive offenses to survive it.

A couple of weeks later, the balance shifted again. From July 31 through August 16, the Rockies went 8-7. The offense was almost exactly league average at a 96 wRC+. The rotation remained below average at 124, but the bullpen posted a 78 ERA-.

For 15 games, that was enough.

The constants

Not every part of this team has moved up and down with the same volatility. Defense has been one fairly consistent weakness. The Rockies rank 28th in fielding percentage at .982 and 26th in Outs Above Average at minus-25. Without clean date-range defensive splits, it is harder to map the defense onto each rise and fall, but the larger picture is clear: Colorado has been a poor defensive team throughout the season.

The starting rotation has been the bigger problem. For most of the year, it has ranged somewhere between poor and very poor.

Colorado could survive a 124 or 125 ERA- from its starters when something else was working. The offense carried that burden during the 16-16 stretch from May 29 through July 3, and the bullpen helped do it during the 8-7 stretch from July 31 through August 16.

The two major collapses tell a different story. From April 30 through May 27, the starters posted a 156 ERA- and the Rockies went 6-20. From August 17 through September 17, the rotation posted a 152 ERA- and Colorado went 6-23.

That most recent stretch is particularly telling because the other units have not collapsed to the same degree. The offense posted a 90 wRC+, which is poor but nowhere near the 62 or 72 from the earlier offensive downturns. The bullpen posted a 109 ERA-, also below average but hardly catastrophic.

And lately, the games have looked like it. From September 9 through September 13, Colorado lost five straight by scores of 6-1, 10-3, 6-2, 11-7 and 8-1. After briefly interrupting that run, the Rockies were blown out again in consecutive 9-3 and 9-2 losses.

Starting pitching has been a weight on this team all season. The difference has often been how heavy that weight became — and whether anything else was strong enough to carry it.

Water finds its level

Maybe that is the simplest way to describe the 2026 Rockies. They have spent six months moving between different versions of themselves.

At times, the bullpen carried them. At times, the offense did. There were stretches when they stayed close often enough to give themselves a chance to steal games, and others when everything broke at once. Through all of it, the defense has generally remained below average and the rotation has mostly remained a problem.

Maybe water really does find its level.

The Rockies are eight games from the end of another ugly season, and no amount of slicing the schedule into smaller pieces changes the record.

But it does help explain why getting here has felt so strange. The final record will make 2026 look more straightforward than it has actually been.

There are eight games left in the 2026 season, and whichever version of the Rockies shows up, I’ll be watching.

On The Farm

Triple-A:Albuquerque Isotopes 3, Salt Lake City Bees 0 (6 innings/rain)

The Albuquerque Isotopes (72-76) picked up a rain-shortened 3-0 win over the Salt Lake Bees (66-80), with the game called after two outs in the top of the sixth.

Albuquerque did not exactly overwhelm Salt Lake offensively, finishing with five hits, but the Isotopes made enough of their chances count. Drew Avans walked to open the third and Tyler Freeman followed with a single before Charlie Condon reached on an error in left field that allowed both runners to score. Chad Stevens then opened the fourth with his second hit of the night and scored when Nic Kent ripped his 21st double of the season to make it 3-0.

Parker Mushinski worked two scoreless innings despite allowing two hits and a walk, Jarrod Cande followed with two scoreless frames of his own, and Keegan Thompson recorded the final five outs before the rain arrived. Cande earned the win, while Thompson was credited with his first save.

The Bees went 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position and stranded nine, while Albuquerque went 0-for-6 with RISP and left five aboard. The Isotopes pitching staff allowed six hits and five walks but struck out five and kept the Bees off the scoreboard.

White Sox lose grip on AL Central lead after Tigers score 9 unanswered | MLB.com

MLB.com’s Scott Merkin looks at a White Sox team trying to hold its place in a tightening playoff race. Chicago’s 11-8 loss to Detroit dropped the White Sox a game behind Cleveland in the AL Central, though they still hold a Wild Card spot with the final week of the season approaching. The margin for error is getting smaller, and the White Sox will close out the regular season with three games against the Rockies.

Ryan McMahon just gave Yankees all the necessary evidence for a future DFA | yankeesgoyard.com

Yanks Go Yard’s Pat Ragazzo looks at Ryan McMahon’s continued offensive struggles in New York and argues that his Yankees tenure may be nearing its end. McMahon has an 80 wRC+ over 162 games since the trade and is hitting .210/.275/.346 this season despite continuing to provide value defensively.

Rockies Manager Warren Schaeffer Explains Frustrating Tanner Gordon Trend | SI.com

Scott Roche of Sports Illustrated looks at Tanner Gordon’s rough September and a trend Warren Schaeffer wants to see him clean up. Gordon has generally done a good job getting ahead of hitters, but finishing them off with two strikes has been another story. That problem showed up again Thursday, when he allowed seven runs in three innings against San Diego, and it has helped push his September ERA to 12.34 over three starts.

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Good morning Birdland,

The Orioles had a golden opportunity on Friday night to gain ground in the AL wild card race. The fading White Sox lost again, which meant an O’s win would have gotten them within two games of that final playoff spot. Instead, they lost 6-5 in extra innings to the Brewers.

It’s the latest loss in what has obviously been a frustrating season for the Orioles. The team has simply lost too many games like it did on Friday. The talent is there. They are capable, on a day-to-day basis anyway, of competing with the best team’s in the sport. But far too often they get tight in the biggest moments, and their execution falls apart.

That was most evident in the seventh inning, when Samuel Basallo failed to lay down a bunt that would have put two runners in scoring position with one out. Basallo probably hasn’t bunted much in his life, and maybe never against a lefty with DL Hall’s repertoire. So it should have surprised no one when he ended up striking out. Might as well have swung away, or perhaps it would have made sense to pitch hit for Basallo given his struggles since coming off of the IL.

There was good news in the loss. Gunnar Henderson and Coby Mayo combined to go 6-for-9 with two runs scored. All three of Mayo’s hits were doubles, and his season OPS is up to .771. Pete Alonso hit another home run, a clutch round-tripper that tied the game at 3-3. As the math of a postseason berth this year starts to look worse, the Orioles will need to turn their focus towards 2027. The trio of Henderson, Mayo, and Alonso could very well be the heart of the lineup moving forward, so giving them any sort of momentum into the offseason would be a silver lining.

There are now eight games left on the schedule, and the Orioles are still three games out of the playoffs. Baseball Reference puts their chances of making the playoffs at 2.9%.

The Orioles and Brewers square off in game two of their series at 4:05. It’s a matchup between Trevor Rogers (10-10, 4.22 ERA) and lefty Robert Gasser (4-5, 4.30 ERA). Other games to keep an eye on: Tigers at White Sox (2:10 p.m.), Athletics at Guardians (6:10 p.m.), Blue Jays at Rangers (7:05 p.m.), and Braves at Astros (7:10 p.m.)

Links

Sig Mejdal changing roles in Orioles front office, will no longer oversee analytics | The Baltimore Banner
Anyone hoping that Mike Elias’ time at the helm of the Orioles is coming to an end this winter, may be disappointed. The recent news of Matt Blood leaving the organization and now Mejdal changing roles seems like an effort from the front office to show that they are willing to adapt without needing to clean house. Will ownership be on board? That remains to be seen.

Because You Asked – Doomsday | Roch Kubatko
Kubatko mentions here that “Elias is expected to stay.” That’s another pretty clear indication of where things are headed this winter. That should also mean 2027 is make-or-break for him, but who knows.

Basallo saw extra O’s gear lying around, and D.R. kids were top of mind | Orioles.com
It is very sweet of Basallo think of kids back in his hometown. If someone can enjoy these giveaways instead of them sitting in a closet somewhere, it makes sense to make that happen. It’s also very funny to think of kids down in the Dominican Republic owning beach towels with a big “Ocean City, Maryland” advertisement across the bottom of it.

Orioles injury update on Bautista, Helsley, Holliday, Bradish, Alexander, Baz; O’s-Brewers lineups | Baltimore Baseball
It sounds like Félix Bautista might get into a big league game before the season’s over. The same might not be true for Ryan Helsley, who hasn’t pitched in a rehab game in a week. Shane Baz is good to go for his next start, and Blaze Alexander is probably getting re-activated before the season is over. Kyle Bradish might need sports hernia surgery, and Jackson Holliday is meeting with a doctor about his wrist inflammation this weekend. That sums it up!

Orioles birthdays

Is it your birthday? Happy birthday!

• DL Hall turns 28 today. The lefty was one of the Orioles top prospects from the day he was drafted in 2017 until the day he was traded to the Brewers prior to the 2024 season. He worked two innings and earned to the win over his old club in last night’s series opener.
• Danny Valencia is 42 years old. He had two brief stints in Baltimore, first in 2013 and then again in 2018. Valencia was known for his ability to hit left-handed pitching (.864 career OPS vs. LHP), which he flaunted with the Orioles.
• Nick Johnson turns 48. The first baseman wrapped up his decade in MLB with a 38-game cameo on the 2012 Orioles
• Randy Myers is 64 years old. The southpaw was a crucial member of the Orioles bullpen from 1996-97, collecting a 2.51 ERA over 123 total games.
• The late Bob Turley (b. 1930, d. 2013) was born on this day. He came with the organization when it moved from St. Louis as the staff ace. In his lone season in Baltimore (1954), Turley had a 3.46 ERA and led the league in both strikeouts and walks. He was traded to the Yankees after the season.

This day in O’s history

1963 – The Orioles and Angels play a game in front of just 476 fans at Chavez Ravine, the smallest recorded attendance at the stadium excluding the 2020 season.

2017 – The Orioles fall 1-0 to the Red Sox. The only run of the game scores in the 11th inning when Brad Brach uncorks a wild pitch with the bases loaded, allowing Jackson Bradley Jr. to score from third base.

The Detroit Tigers scored a huge comeback victory on Friday night, scoring five in the eighth inning to tie their four-game weekend series with the Chicago White Sox, 11-8. It was a bullpen day for the good guys — which surrendered just two earned runs — while home runs by Hao-Yu Lee and Riley Greene powered the late-inning offense to triumph.

Getting the start for the Olde English D in Game 3 is right-hander Jackson Jobe, who is coming off his best outing of the 2026 campaign. Last time out against the Colorado Rockies at Comerica Park, the 24-year-old cracked the six-inning mark and recorded his first quality start with 6 1/3 frames of one-run ball on three hits — including a solo homer — and a walk while striking out eight and hitting a batter for his second win of the season in an 8-1 final.

Jobe saw the ChiSox earlier this summer in his second game back from the injured list and turned in his worst performance of the season, coughing up six runs on nine hits (two home runs) and a walk while striking out four and hitting a pair of batters.

For the White Sox, fellow righty Sean Burke will toe the rubber on Saturday night looking to improve upon his last start, in which he lasted just 1 1/3 innings after surrendering seven runs at home to the Pittsburgh Pirates on eight hits and two walks while striking out a pair along with a wild pitch. The 26-year-old did bounce back in relief in his most recent appearance, holding the Guardians to an unearned run over five frames on four hits and two walks while striking out four in Cleveland to earn his ninth win.

Burke has faced the Tigers twice this year with mixed results, tossing 5 1/3 innings of one-run ball on three hits and two walks while striking out six in Chicago for a no-decision in a 2-1 win. The second matchup came in Detroit, where he allowed four runs on five hits (one home run) and three walks while striking out two over 4 1/3 innings in another team win that he failed to figure in the decision, 7-5.

Take a look at how these two hurlers match up in the third game of the weekend series.

Detroit Tigers (73-81) vs. Chicago White Sox (78-76)

Time (ET): 7:10 p.m.
Place: Rate Field, Chicago, Illinois
SB Nation Site:South Side Sox
Media: Detroit SportsNet, MLB.TV, Tigers Radio Network

Game 155: RHP Jackson Jobe (2-2, 3.89 ERA) vs. RHP Sean Burke (9-7, 3.47 ERA)

JOBE

BURKE

PHOENIX — Just in case anyone thought the New York Yankees would simply fade away into the night, their season drifting out to sea with the news that Aaron Judge may be done for the season, the Bronx Bombers delivered a subtle message Friday night that reverberated around the baseball world.

The Yankees, with Gerrit Cole looking more like the 2023 Cy Young winner than the pitcher who looked like he was throwing batting practice earlier this month, smacked around the Arizona Diamondbacks 9-2 Friday, and acted afterwards as if it was simply business as usual.

There was Cole, who had given up seven homers in his last two starts pitching his best game in a month, yielding four hits and two runs in six innings.

There was DH Ben Rice, looking like a top-5 MVP candidate by hitting his 39th home run of the season − just as Yankees manager Aaron Boone predicted in spring training − to go along with 94 RBI.

There was rookie shortstop George Lombard, hitting a homer and playing flawless defense.

And there were the Yankees, talking as if they plan to be playing deep into October, whether Judge is in uniform or on their bench as a cheerleader. Judge is going on the injured list with a strained calf and the Yankees have no idea whether he’ll return.

“I mean, it’s a tough blow for us to take,’’ Rice said. “Obviously, we were missing him for a long time there (three months), so this one is especially hard to swallow, just being back for a brief period and already gone.

“But we got no choice but to just keep playing hard, keeping doing our thing.’’

Well, that starts on the mound, and with Cole dominating Friday, with Cy Young favorite Cam Schlittler scheduled Saturday, and Max Fried and Carlos Rodon pitching well, there may not be a more formidable starting rotation in the postseason.

The Dodgers are all in, going for a three-peat.

And they might not have an extra ace up their sleeve anymore, but when the postseason begins, they’ll still hope to play their quad of aces — four of a kind that will beat almost every other hand.

But do the Dodgers have four aces? Or three? Or just a pair, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tarik Skubal?

Could the left groin tightness that chased Blake Snell from his last start after an inning linger into the postseason? Snell isn’t the sturdiest of starters, having missed most of the season because of shoulder fatigue and loose bodies in his left elbow. But the Dodgers suggest he’s going to be OK; Snell is slated for one last regular-season start.

And what about Tyler Glasnow?

Read more:Dodgers surge late to beat Giants as they work to get healthy for playoffs

Can the Dodgers trust the 6-foot-8 right-hander who missed three months because of back spasms?

Should they put their belief in the 11th-year pitcher who likely would be the odd man out in the postseason if Shohei Ohtani still were available to deal on the mound?

They’re going to have to trust Glasnow. And he’s going to have to trust himself.

“He’s a guy that you can’t put too much thought into him, or it starts getting in his own head,” said catcher Dalton Rushing, who is injured but enjoyed watching Glasnow find his footing in Friday’s 8-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants.

“It was a lot of fun to watch tonight,” Rushing said. “Looked like himself.”

After three suboptimal innings, Glasnow settled down in a trust-building exercise of an outing against the Giants and their triple A-caliber lineup.

He wasn’t the most efficient, the most pristine, the sharpest — but he was fit to throw 98 pitches and six innings.

To fight through after laboring with 59 pitches in the first three innings, to earn his second win since April and to help the Dodgers maintain their four-game buffer over the Atlanta Braves as they play to secure a first-round bye with eight games left.

There was no champagne hangover for Glasnow on Friday — he flew directly back to L.A. from Miami, skipping Thursday’s clubhouse party in Cincinnati, where the Dodgers celebrated clinching the National League West Division for the 13th time in 14 years — but how about a toast to good health?

Cheers to giving up just two runs, one each in the second and third innings. To walking only two batters and striking out 10. To giving up only three hard hits and producing 15 whiffs.

To feeling and pitching better.

“After that third inning, I just stopped trying to be quick,” Glasnow said. “Just go out and be athletic, and I think it started to feel a little bit more timed up.”

Glasnow came into Friday’s game — one of his final two regular-season starts — having given up eight runs on 11 hits and seven walks in his previous two starts, looking less than comfortable in both. Out of rhythm, out of sync.

“This is an important start, and he knows it,” manager Dave Roberts said before the game. “It’s certainly not do or die, but ... just to kind of get back feeling good.”

Afterward, Roberts wasn’t thrilled with how Glasnow started, but liked how he finished.

“You could see him fighting himself a little bit,” Roberts said. “The fastball command wasn’t great early. Got a lot of strikeouts. Curveball wasn’t sharp. But I thought he did a good job of making pitches when he needed to. The slider got better, fastball command got better as the game went on. Good to see him get through six innings.”

It’ll be better yet for the Dodgers’ odds if Glasnow can carry Friday’s progress into his next start — and then into the playoffs, where he proved himself as a Dodger last season after an elbow sprain sidelined him for the 2024 postseason.

Read more:Plaschke: No more bubbly. NL West champion Dodgers appear headed for early fall

In the Dodgers’ 2025 World Series run, Glasnow made six appearances, three of them starts. He had a 1.69 ERA and averaged 10.5 strikeouts per nine innings. The stuff of aces.

“Today was a step in the right direction,” said Glasnow, the formerHart High School star, before leaving the clubhouse in flip-flops. “I’d rather kind of feel it, work through some stuff, and have a good one right before playoffs.

“I think I’m in a good spot right now.”

Sign up for more Dodgers news with Dodgers Dugout. Delivered at the start of each series.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders:W, 8-5 vs. Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp — mathematically still alive, per the Scranton Times-Tribune, but not by much; they would need to win their last two games while Indianapolis and Rochester both drop their final two (before tiebreakers factor in)

DH Jarred Kelenic 1-5, 2 K, 1 SB
RF Jasson Domínguez 0-5, 2 K
C J.C. Escarra 1-5, 1 R, 2 K
2B Marco Luciano 3-3, 2 2B, 1 RBI, 2 R, 1 BB
1B Yanquiel Fernández 1-3, 1 HR, 2 RBI, 2 R, 1 BB, 1 K
3B Tyler Hardman 1-4, 1 HR, 3 RBI, 1 R, 2 K — three-run homer in the fifth put them up for good
CF Duke Ellis 2-4, 1 R, 2 SB — one shy of 60 stolen bags
LF Kenedy Corona 1-4, 1 R, 3 K, 1 SB
SS Connor McGinnis 1-2, 1 2B, 1 RBI, 2 BB, 1 SB — first hit in Triple-A

Xavier Rivas 3 IP, 5 R, 3 ER, 4 H, 3 BB, 3 K, pickoff error — Triple-A has been a rough go for Rivas, with a 10.73 ERA
Adam Kloffenstein 6 IP, 0 R, 2 H, 1 BB, 5 K (win) — yeoman’s work taking a piggy-back start and giving six strong

Double-A Somerset Patriots: Season over

High-A Hudson Valley Renegades: Season over

Low-A Tampa Tarpons: Season over

Florida Complex League Yankees: Season over

Dominican Summer League Yankees: Season over

Dominican Summer League Bombers: Season over

In 2002, Dan Evans’ first season as the Dodgers’ general manager, the team won 93 games. This sounds preposterous today, but the Dodgers had not won more games since 1988, the Kirk Gibson year.

In 2003, the Dodgers won 85 games, with a minor league system on the rise and a front office Evans had staffed with Logan White, the scouting guru who drafted Clayton Kershaw, and future general managers Kim Ng and A.J. Preller.

For Evans, that was the end in Los Angeles. Frank McCourt bought the team before the 2004 season and brought in his own people, as a new owner often does. The new general manager was Paul DePodesta, immortalized in “Moneyball” and promptly tagged by Times columnist T.J. Simers as “Google Boy.”

Evans figured he would get a second chance as a general manager. After 22 years, he is getting that chance, but with a twist: The team might never exist.

Read more:Dodgers clinch 13th NL West division title in 14 years: 'Something I know we can build on'

In the same year Evans left the Dodgers, the Expos left Montreal, traveling south to emerge as the Washington Nationals. If the guy trying to revive the Expos as an expansion team succeeds, Evans is his choice for president of baseball operations.

“I love the idea of trying to put together something from the beginning,” said Evans, 66. “I just think it would be a really wonderful place to call my final spot in baseball, to make a difference and bring a team back and set up a franchise for the next 20 years.”

After major league owners and players reach a new collective bargaining agreement, probably sometime next year, baseball is expected to invite bids for two expansion teams.

In Montreal, the civic leaders most likely to lead bid groups distanced themselves from baseball after the 2022 collapse of a shameful effort by the Tampa Bay Rays to secure a new Florida ballpark by pitching a team-share concept between Montreal and St. Petersburg, Fla. When the leverage play failed, major league owners ditched the two-city notion.

Into the breach stepped Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, a Montreal technology entrepreneur and founder of Watch Mojo, a pop culture brand with 26 million subscribers on YouTube. His net worth — he posted it on social media — is $250 million.

That’s nowhere close to what one would need to buy an expansion team, but it’s enough to start a conversation. And the sentiment in Montreal is much the same as it is in Los Angeles: Public funds should not be used to build professional sports venues.

Read more:Plaschke: No more bubbly. NL West champion Dodgers appear headed for early fall

“If we go out there and say we need a billion from taxpayers, it’s not going to go anywhere,” Karbasfrooshan said.

The average value of an MLB team today: $4 billion, according to CNBC. The projected fee for the coming NBA expansion team in Las Vegas: $7 billion to $10 billion. As baseball owners prepare for a lockout, in a push for the salary cap that would drive franchise values higher, insiders anticipate the MLB expansion fee could settle around or even above the $4 billion range.

Then, say, another $2.5 billion for a ballpark with a retractable roof, and billions more for the surrounding development: not just the usual restaurants and shops but also, according to a vision Karbasfooshan posted online, an immersive technology pavilion, an entrepreneurship academy, even a “live beer-making process tied to Montreal’s brewing heritage.”

So Karbasfrooshan has started the conversations, with old money and new money in Montreal, with corporations there and elsewhere, with private equity funds from all over — and with sports industry veterans who can tell him what he doesn’t know. He might end up with a small stake in the team, or none at all.

“I’m not coming at this like some kind of social dilettante billionaire who thinks he’s God’s gift,” he said. “I’m just a guy.

“I’m a nobody in many ways, but I’m a guy who built a world-class company and executes and fundraises and all that.”

Karbasfrooshan is optimistic he has generated enough interest to pull all that capital together, but he spoke this week with a sports investment banker in the hope of “turning that interest into commitments.” He has a former NFL executive interested in becoming president of business operations and has spoken with a former MLB executive about running stadium operations.

Read more:Dodgers co-owners Mark Walter, Todd Boehly sell Chelsea shares

He has Evans too, although the person proposed to run baseball operations is pretty low on the list of priorities for MLB.

“They wouldn’t care if the capital wasn’t there,” Karbasfrooshan said. “But, if all factors are equal — if Salt Lake has capital and we have capital; if Raleigh has a stadium and we have a stadium — you can then show you have these people committed. In a way, it’s doing a bit of their due diligence.

“They’re going to maybe take you a little more seriously than if you’re just a guy making noise.”

For now, MLB is keeping an eye on him. Without billions in funding and a stadium site, the rest is flowery prose, but there is no sense in dismissing any potential bidder a year or two before the bidding opens.

Montreal boasts the largest market of any of the projected expansion contenders, with a rich history of baseball even beyond the Expos. After Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier, he dispatched Robinson to the Dodgers’ triple-A team in Montreal.

The oft-cited lack of fan support for the Expos is largely a myth. It was the same playbook the Athletics ran in Oakland: trade away your best players and tell fans the ballpark is terrible, and then shrug and say the fans aren’t showing up. Montreal is a great sports town, with room to embrace a good ballclub.

Maybe Montreal does not get a team, or maybe Karbasfrooshan lands a billionaire who has someone else in mind to run baseball operations. Even if Evans does not get an opportunity to construct Version 2.0 of the Expos, life has been good since McCourt sent him packing.

For the next five years, Evans scouted for the Seattle Mariners.

“It kind of control-alt-deleted me and put me in a really good place,” he said.

Since then, lots of really good places: player agent; mentor in a sports management training program; Toronto Blue Jays front office; president of the board of directors of the Society for American Baseball Research; chief operating officer of the company that turned the Field of Dreams site from a movie set to a year-round tourist attraction.

“When your day is evaluated by thousands of people coming through on a daily basis, from all over the world, and they just want to enjoy it and play catch, it really improves your quality of life,” he said.

“It’s not winning and losing anymore, which was a bit of a shock to the system. But I actually won every day.”

That’s what the Dodgers do these days, just about every day of every year. They just tied the major league record for consecutive postseason appearances with 14.

In every one of those years, save for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, they have won at least 90 games. They have come a long way from the days of McCourt, who took the team into bankruptcy.

“It’s remarkable,” Evans said. “For a lot of people, they don’t remember that Dodger franchise, because they see today’s. You and I know what it looked like, and it was embarrassing. What he did was ransack the team.”

Read more:Blake Snell exits Dodgers' loss early because of injury

Harsh, but the league said the same. In a bankruptcy court filing, MLB accused McCourt of “looting” $189 million in team revenue. (McCourt denied the allegations and said the league had approved the organizational restructuring that facilitated that accounting.)

Evans chuckles at the suggestion that today’s Dodgers are bad for the sport.

“Now, for a lot of people, the franchise is the scourge of baseball,” he said. “And, folks, if you only had a little memory.”

In Montreal, Major League Baseball is only a memory. Nos amours, the good people of Montreal called their team. Our loves.

Sign up for more Dodgers news with Dodgers Dugout. Delivered at the start of each series.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Hm, Jonathan Bowlan has an issue with his groin, but not so bad that he needs an IL stint. But not so good that he can throw right now.

God bless the Phillies and their approach to injuries. Never change, guys.

On to the links.

Phillies news:

• The bullpen lost another arm this weekend. Maybe Don Mattingly ain’t all that grand as a manager?
• Luzardo lost for the season? Time for those bats that are getting paid a lot to start making up for it ($).

MLB news:

• Aaron Judge is headed back to the injured list with a calf strain. His playoffs are in peril now it would seem.
• Cade Cavalli has emerged as one of Washington’s cornerstones of the roster, so the team has decided to reward him for that.
• “Don’t make the first or third out at third base” is something we have all grown up knowing. Does it hold up to mathematical scrutiny though?

Before we dive into the chaos and unpredictability of the weather, let’s start with what we know about the schedule. After 24 of MLB’s 30 teams have an off day on Monday, the Red Sox, Yankees, and Phillies are all scheduled to play at home, everyday, from Tuesday, September 22nd through the final day of the regular season on Sunday, September 27th. Here are the details:

• The Red Sox will host the Cleveland Guardians and Chicago Cubs (three games each).
• The Yankees will host the Rays for four games (double header on Tuesday), and the Orioles for three games.
• The Phillies will host the Brewers for three games, and then the Rays for three games.

Do you see the potential problem here? All of these games will either definitely have to be played, or there’s a pretty solid chance they’ll have to be played. And once the sun rises on Tuesday, there are no off-days to make them up without spilling into the Monday before the Wild Card series, which is supposed to start September 29th.

Looking at the standings, the Rays find themselves four games up on the Yankees, and will hold the tiebreaker on them as long as they don’t get swept in New York. Or to put it another way, they can’t clinch the tiebreaker over the Yankees unless they win a game in New York next week. Well, what if not enough games are played for them to grab a win by Thursday night? They might have to come back to New York on Monday the 28th to wrap up the division.

Meanwhile, in Boston, the Red Sox should find themselves locked into the second Wild Card spot by the time any potential chaos ensues, but it’s a very different story for their opponents. The Guardians are one game up on the White Sox for the AL Central division and just two games up on the first team that could knock them completely out of the playoffs, and the Cubs find themselves in a three-way, 85-69 tie with the Phillies and Padres for all three Wild Card spots in the NL. So yeah, those games are probably going to have to be played.

And speaking of the Phillies, both of their opponents also might need every last game counted as the Brewers are just two games up on the Dodgers for the No. 1 seed in the NL, and the aforementioned Rays could end up close enough to the Yankees with any stumble that they also get swept up in the storm.

So with all of those details on the table, let’s take a look at what last night’s GFS model is showing in a loop that runs from Tuesday morning through Friday night:

Rob Manfred probably just had a stroke watching that play out. Maybe something from the European family of models has better news? Here’s that loop from last night’s run, only this time we run it from Tuesday morning all the way through Sunday night.

Notice how it’s completely different but just as problematic? Well, that kind of sums up what we’re facing here. There’s a very strong probability of rainouts next week (I can say that with confidence), but the details of where and when those will occur remain murky.

How does a dynamic like that happen? Because in this situation we’re not really tracking a low pressure storm center. Instead, we’re tracking a gigantic high pressure over southeast Canada that’s going to block up everything and lock our rainy pattern in place. Let’s take a much broader view of a run from these two models again, but in this loop, just keep your eyes on Canada from Quebec to the Maritimes

Same loop, only this time with the other model:

See the problem here? At this point, we can confidently say we’re going to have an enormous blocking pattern in place next week. That colossal high is going to play the role of a brick wall any way you slice it. But the exact size, strength, spread, speed, position, intensity and orientation of that high are all up for grabs, and until those details are ironed out, the models will keep spitting out wildly different results regarding which games get rained out.

In general though, a blocking high and a developing low will work together to create a persistent onshore flow over the northeast, I-95 corridor for several days next week, and there’s very few ways that doesn’t end up translating into a large, slow moving storm by the time we’re trying to wrap up the regular season.

Does that mean rain in just Boston and the Red Sox and Cubs have to play into Monday the 28th to determine the Cubs’ Wild Card position? Maybe. Does that mean a retrograding low where both Tampa and Yankees lose their games and can’t get the division decided? It’s possible.

All I know for sure right now is two things:

1) The Red Sox can add even more chaos to this equation if they beat the Rays again today and drag them a little closer to New York in the standings.

2) I’ll be keeping you updated here at Over The Monster as the situation evolves in the coming days.