As the most recent disgrace of an MLB postseason has come to a merciful end, we have to acknowledge the reality that professional baseball in America is a lost cause. After spending nine years in MLB press boxes from Seattle to Tampa Bay, we’ve seen behind the curtain—and it’s not pretty. Yet there’s too much money and profit involved for anyone directly affiliated to do the right thing. We got out, and we won’t be silent.

To start, math doesn’t lie: it is sometimes wrong, but it doesn’t lie. A team that goes 40-41 on the road during the regular season has literally no chance of going 11-0 on the road in the postseason—including winning 8 times against teams that were sabermetrically superior based on a 162-game data set. This is how gullible MLB thinks the public is when it comes to just accepting “miracles” as legitimate results: P.T. Barnum time!

Not to mention the fishy assignments of the umpires for the Fall Classic itself: according to Umpire Scorecards, most of the crew picked for the Series had no business being anywhere near a diamond in October. Instead of picking a top crew, MLB populated the championship matchup with schmucks:

  • Game 1: D.J. Reyburn (75/92 ranking)
  • Game 2: Quinn Wolcott (1/92)
  • Game 3: Alfonso Márquez (77/92)
  • Game 4: David Rackley (68/92)
  • Game 5: Brian Knight (33/92)
  • Game 6: Vic Carapazza (60/92)
  • Game 7: Crew Chief Bill Miller (53/92)

The only game the losing team in the Series won was the single game umpired by the best umpire from the regular season—Wolcott. The other four games were umped by guys averaging a 63rd rank out of 92 umps in 2023! It’s pretty easy to see just how this affects the outcomes of a game … and a series, according to plan. The losing team was already the financial underdog, but nothing can be left to chance, as we all know is key.

Then we look at the winning manager and players: the skipper has a confirmed career record of empowering and enabling PED users, dating back to the 1990s, and several players on this team suddenly had “rebound” seasons that helped the team win—including the voted Series MVP, who obviously won’t win our trophy when the time comes for us to re-assess this postseason as the sports historians we are won’t lie.

Finally, the money: in a large TV market, a team on its second new stadium in the last three decades, despite having never won the World Series. When you haven’t even made the postseason since 2016, it’s a sure sign of desperation to spend $251M—and you don’t do so unless you know it’s going to pay off. It’s one thing to come close in the prior seasons and then spend, but you don’t blow money out of the blue … unless? Yeah.

What’s worst about this is the MLB complicity in it all. There’s no care for teams that can’t make money hand over fist; there’s no equity or fair play in this sport without a salary cap. Cheaters prosper without punishment in this sport on a regular basis: in the last 20 seasons, half the World Series have been won by cheating teams now, each from large TV markets and without a league title in forever (or ever, in fact).

When the time comes for us to examine the awards for this postseason, about a year from today, it will be an interesting time for our moral souls, that’s for sure. We offer no predictions but disgust for MLB now and then—but we will treat it as any good historian/journalist should: based on the facts. And those suggest very strongly that MLB is just as corrupt and rigged as the NBA has been for the last 30 years: point of fact.