L.A. Dodgers win the World Series: Thus Begins the Curse of the Jabronis

Jabroni Jeffrey Maier* (Austin Capobianco) 
grew up to be a jerk and brought his
Jabroni jerk-ass friend (John Peter) 
to the 2024 World Series too*
Unsurprisingly the families of these two asses
blamed Mookie Betts for calling out their
inappropriate, hazardous, and borderline
criminal antics.

The Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Evil Empire State Yankees in 5 games to win the 2024 World Series Championship.  Hopefully, after the two jerk-ass jabroni Yankees fans conducted themselves like all Yankees fans everywhere in Game 4 we can see the Yankees be afflicted with the Curse of the Jabronis.

I suppose this was the best outcome of a bad situation.  I hate both franchises because they represent everything wrong with the modern game.  Money is Everything.  

And don't let anyone tell you differently.  Both the Dodgers and Yankees sign away baseball's best players to massive contracts, thus undercutting the whole concept of the sporting ensuring other teams don't really have a chance to win.

No small market team or teams which draft, develop, mold, and build a stable of great players slowly has a chance to win anymore.  Those players get purloined by the big market teams which then amass a stable of other teams players and thus continue to win the Titles.

Baseball doesn't want to address this of course, because it's way better if the Yankees and Dodgers are in the Playoffs and way better to have the big fan base teams drawing viewership to various platforms so that MLB can continue to extract Billions (Yes that's Billions) from TV, streaming, and other media platforms.

ESPN, Fox and TNT are paying a combined $12 billion over seven years, ending in 2028. Apple has a separate seven-year deal, running through 2029 and worth a total of $595 million. Roku’s newly inaugurated Sunday afternoon games are worth $10 million per season to MLB.

Fox has the World Series rights until the end of this deal, and has seen 3 of the lowest viewership numbers in Baseball history since the Covid 2020 season.  So, having Shohei Ohtani in LA and thus making having the Japanese audience highly interested is unsurprising.

King of the Jabronis
Better than Willie McCovey

But, as the Dodgers celebrate their championship, the first without the presence of legendary broadcaster Vin Scully, let us remember the last time the Dodgers won the Series in 2020, treasonous King of the Weirdos and peerless Jabroni Trump was defeated in the Presidential Election.  

While, history doesn't repeat it does rhyme and Two-Time Loser Trump works in 2024.

*- Jeffrey Maier interfered in Game 1 of the 1996 ALCS, and his actions won the game for the Yankees, who went on to defeat the Baltimore Orioles and then the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. 

Yankees - Dodgers World Series: Can we finally put to rest the bullshit Moneyball theory of baseball?

 Among all of the major sports, Baseball has resisted the idea that Superstars are not only a sufficient condition but, also a necessary condition to win a Championship.  We've been assured throughout our childhoods that how you play the game is the most important aspect and that a scrappy team of fighters can overcome the obstacles and win.  This is so much nonsense.

Moneyball caught everyone's attention, mainly when the Brad Pitt led film came out in 2010 but, also with the book in 2002.  And all the Sports Nerds who asserted that professional scouts, and baseball managers and general managers didn't know the game at a deep fundamental level were ignoring the Holy Algorithm first established by Bill James, and then expanded refined, reinvented by PECOTA, Sabermetrics, Wins Over Replacement, or On-Base+Slugging Plus or any of the cutesy, new fangled statistics and statical measurements which many people claim are the true measure of the player and of the game.

Well, it's all crap.  And it's always been crap.  You need Superstars to win in Baseball, and superstars cost money.  Look at these rosters for Dodgers and Yankees.  Aaron Judge and Juan Soto?  Shohei Otani and Freddie Freeman?  These teams aren't comprised of plucky, grit and gristle, hustle players but, with players who cost more by themselves than many other teams rosters.

This list of the Team salaries for 2024, shows the top 6 highest payrolls made the Playoffs and #2 and #5 made the World Series.  You can go back to 2011 and find this pattern every time, the highest payrolls make the Playoffs and one of them wins.  But, you might point out other teams with lower payrolls also made the playoffs; and yes some teams get there and get bounced and then their best players are cannibalized by the Dodgers or Yankees. 

What's the last team you can think of built not bought to make and win the World Series;  the Kansas City Royals of 2014 and 2015?  That team hit with players on the rookie deals who panned out and since then when those players left (for Big Contracts) the Royals haven't sniffed the Playoffs until this year with a new crop of players on rookie contracts playing well.

And that Moneyball team in 2010 movie didn't win because of David Justice or Scott Hatteberg even though those players performed well enough, or because of Billy Beane's savvy mathematical wizardry.  They had Miguel Tejada (131 RBI), Barry Zito (23wins), Jermaine Dye, and a young Eric Chavez.  None of whom were even mentioned once in the movie.

But, nobody wants to admit that money is more important in this game than the vaunted Sabermetrics and even more important than old head baseball man Ken Hawk Harrelson's "TWTW" The Will to Win...  because then everyone would understand that as long as there are rich teams and poor teams, the rich are going to dominant the Playoffs and World Series and undercut the Hollywood fantasy of a Bad News Bears scruffy team of misfits catching lightning in a bottle and banding together to win it all, and all the LIES and PROPAGANDA sold to the GenX and Millennial kids about the True Champions winning.

This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community. 
Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America,
and in America, you're on your own. 
America's not a country.
It's just a business. 
Now fucking pay me.

So enjoy this Dodgers/Yankees World Series with big name players but, don't fool yourself into believing anyone can build a team and win because it's like everything in America, as Brad Pitt (playing Billy Beane) said about America in Killing them Softly the Official/Unofficial sequel to Moneyball...

The Cubs and the Ricketts Family Curse

Rickettsia -  small disease causing bacteria transmitted by ticks.

As the World Series draw near the Astros will make their 2nd appearance in 3 years, it's time for Chicago baseball fans to resurrect the time-honored eternal lament Wait till Next Year. And to recognize for all the talk about "every season is sacred" the Chicago Cubs are more than willing to coast and cash-in on the dying embers of the 2016 Championship for the Cubs fans must face the truth the "vaunted" World Series Window hath closed.

It's also time to note that while WSCR 670 The Score calls this the greatest era in Modern Cubs History, in reality the Cubs have not made the Playoffs for the last two seasons. The Theo Epstein-Jed Hoyer brain trust is chock full of Hubris, believing the hype that they are the smartest guys in baseball, they've overvalued their own players, made terrible decisions in Free Agent signings, and now need a new manager because they ran the last one out of town.

Now, this is nothing against any player on the Cubs, I wish them nothing but good luck in getting as much money from the Team and sport they can before the harsh Ricketts family ownership and wonder boy Epstein jettison them.

But, in reality I have not been a Cubs fan since the odious Ricketts family descended upon Chicago like a plague of locusts and got control of the Cubs in October 2009. Joe Ricketts is the TD Ameritrade Patriarch who made his fortune the old-fashioned way; by siphoning off money from people, like the blood-sucking tick borne disease which is their namesake

In 2007, Sam Zell another ruthless and worthless "investor" acquired the Tribune Company using the financial trickery of a "leveraged buyout" dumping Billions of dollars of debt onto the Tribune Corporation and then selling off the valuable assets; i.e. the Chicago Cubs. The Ricketts Family took note and implemented "Project North Side"; a complicated scheme of chicanery and inventive bookkeeping using the purposefully shady, complicated, and byzantine banking rules to buy the Cubs without actually having the assets or cash-in-hand.

With the Cubs purchase Joe Ricketts, an unabashed racist, felt no compunction in running 6 straight losing seasons with cut-rate players maximizing profits and now after 1 World Series Title, setting up as many revenue streams as possible to drain the Cubs Fanbase of dollars. Next season the Cubs will remove their games from TV onto their "Marquee Network", a pay-per-view channel.

Like, most of the Corporate Vulture Class, Joe Ricketts got rich spending other peoples' money. Then congratulated himself on his "work ethic" and set about using the Awesome power of the Government  to crush the Working Class. After winning the World Series, Ricketts worked to get Trump elected, ever since the Cubs have lost.