Dirty Cheaters

I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters. Most of them are about The Pentavirate—a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, who run everything, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as The Meadows.

But some of them are legit, like Joe Sheehan’s baseball newsletter. Here’s a tiny slice of his latest issue, which is a tour de force:

Over the last decade, MLB has restructured its finances to make it possible for teams to just show up and still make money. They have, in fact, created incentives for tanking. The owners have clawed back so much cash that the percentage of revenues going to players is near free-agency-era lows. Teams have dipped into the public trough for [billions] in tax dollars to fund projects that grow the industry’s bankroll and saddle the citizenry with the debt.

While they were doing that, your local newspaper columnist was talking about dirty cheaters.

Really, you have to subscribe so you can read the whole thing. Because it’s not like you’ll ever hear this kind of thing on Baseball Tonight.