Which franchises will be truly committed to winning the National League Central next season?
The Milwaukee Brewers own the division for now, despite their revenue limitations and budgetary constraints. Their front office has a well-earned reputation for resourcefulness, so don’t expect the Brew Crew to back down.
Tipsheet keeps waiting for the Chicago Cubs to regain divisional dominance, given the franchise’s huge revenue base and the independent wealth of their owners. The Small Bears paid top dollar to steal manager Craig Counsell from the Brewers . . . only to flop miserably this season.
That left Counsell pointing out the talent gap between his new team and his old team. Will the Ricketts family buck up to rectify that in the offseason?
The Cardinals are one of the most improved teams in the sport this season. After finishing last in the division a year ago, they climbed all the way up into baseball’s mush middle. But as the late Joe Strauss would say, that is no reason to throw a balloon party.
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Will the DeWitts invest more in their product this season? Will they step back and commit to a full-on youth movement? Or will muddle along with something in-between?
There will be no hope for the Pittsburgh Pirates as long as Bob Nutting owns the team, because he will absolutely, positively cut corners at every opportunity. Dumping Rowdy Tellez in the final week of the season to avoid paying a $200,000 bonus is just another example.
The brings us to the Cincinnati Reds, a team loaded with promising young talent. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were supposed to take a big step this year and they didn’t, which is why manager David Bell got the short haircut.
Building a contender in the Great American Bandbox is difficult, given the toll that cozy stadium takes on pitching. And just how committed to winning is the ownership?
Writing for Baseball Prospectus, Matthew Trueblood and this take on the Reds:
Despite a spotty record of financial support from ownership and the smallness of the market and the fact that this team has won just three division titles since the dawn of the Wild Card era and their not having reached the playoffs in a full season since 2013, this should be the most attractive managerial seat available this winter. The Reds are not currently good, but almost everything they need to become good is already lying around. A healthy Matt McLain and a well-managed reclamation of Noelvi Marte could, in the blind of an eye, turn this team from a dud to a legitimate contender in what is still a wide-open division, if the team remains as engaged as they were last winter and can keep their top arms on the mound a little bit more often.
That makes it sound easy; it won’t be. (Elly) De La Cruz had a great season, but his league leadership in strikeouts and errors is a reminder in triplicate that his skill set is volatile. Next season might be tougher for him, even though hopefully, it will be more fruitful for players like McLain, Marte, and Christian Encarnacion-Strand. At any given moment, they seem to have one outfielder playing really well, one who has flashed good things but is slumping, and one who could be really good if they would get healthy. That always sounds encouraging, but it’s really a recipe for eternal frustration and coming up short. The new skipper, be it Skip Schumaker, David Ross, or some hot young coach getting their first shot, will have to navigate all that and create some consistency and stability. Those things were too often absent under Bell, but not solely because of Bell’s own shortcomings.
Nor is it easy to get the Castellinis to spend generously in two straight offseasons.
That will be the job of the front office, rather than the new manager, but it’s still a crucial and difficult job. Last winter, the team sagely signed Nick Martinez, foolishly flung money at Jeimer Candelario, and got pretty much the mixed results they deserved from Emilio Pagan, Brent Suter, and Frankie Montas. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were able, at least, to mill Montas into another interesting outfielder for their perpetually interesting mix, in ex-Brewer Joey Wiemer, but Wiemer’s complicated swing and suboptimal approach yielded ghastly results during what the team hoped would be a reset and reorientation at Triple A. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ won’t get much value from that group next season, unless Martinez makes the improbable decision to opt in for $12 million rather than taking his solid performance back to the open market. They have to spend more this winter and push a payroll that sat around $90 million this year back toward the $125 million range. There’s a very good chance they won’t actually do it.
FAREWELL TO OAKLAND
Here is what folks are talking about the A’s farewell to Oakland:
Daniel Brown, The Athletic: “The A’s plan to move to Las Vegas in time for the 2028 season. Until then, the team is set to share Sutter Health Park with the Sacramento River Cats, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. The 46,889 fans who came hoping for one last memory in Oakland wound up risking nostalgia overload. Henderson and Stewart, two Oakland natives who rank among the A’s greatest players, combined to throw out the first pitch. Barry Zito, who won a Cy Young Award in 2002, sang the National Anthem. For more than an hour before the game, the video scoreboard aired the broadcast of the 1972 World Series, the first of three consecutive titles for the Swingin’ A’s of that era. This wasn’t that — these modern A’s lost at least 90 games for three straight seasons — but the final note of this prolonged swan song will nevertheless rank among the most memorable days in Coliseum history. Cars lined up outside the gates before 7 a.m. for the 12:35 p.m. local start. Fans cheered the action as if the pennant were on the line, especially so when center fielder J.J. Bleday raced to his right to make a spectacular diving catch on a ball hit by Carson Kelly.â€
Bob Nightengale, USA Today: “At precisely 3:06 p.m. Pacific time, baseball was officially pronounced dead in Oakland. This franchise delivered four World Series championships, six pennants and 17 division titles to the Bay Area, so it was only appropriate to leave Oakland as a winner. Once the final out was recorded in the Oakland A’s 3-2 victory over the Texas Rangers, the sellout crowd of 46,889 — the largest in five years — stood in their seats wildly cheering, chanting, ‘Let’s Go Oakland!’ The players congratulated one another, and then gathered at the pitcher’s mound. They stood together and listened to manager Mark Kotsay, who played for this organization 20 years ago, emotionally thank the crowd for loving his team . . . The sellout crowd, the Athletics' first since the 2019 wild-card game, arrived to the Coliseum wanting to be together one final time, to show their love and admiration. They came wearing jerseys of their favorite players, everyone from Reggie Jackson to Rickey Henderson to Stewart to Jose Canseco to Coco Crisp to Steven Vogt, watching replays of their 1972 World Series championship shown on the stadium scoreboards.â€
Jeff Eisenberg, Yahoo! ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ: “A fiercely loyal, often underappreciated sports town had its heart ripped from its chest three times in the past five years at the hands of team owners who sought greener pastures. It began in 2019, when the Golden State Warriors gambled their soul abandoning raucous, no-frills 'Roaracle' to head across the Bay to a $1 billion, state-of-the-art arena stocked with luxury suites. A year later, the Raiders traded the crumbling, antiquated Oakland Coliseum for a glitzier new venue on the edge of the Las Vegas Strip, pledging to try to recreate the fanaticism of the Black Hole in a destination city. But to many longtime fans, the A’s turning their back on Oakland stings most. (A's owner John) Fisher cemented himself as Oakland’s most despised man even before last year’s announcement that he planned to move the A’s to Las Vegas. He alienated fans by slashing payroll, sabotaging the team’s competitive prospects and allowing the already crumbling Coliseum to fall further into disrepair, all while raising ticket prices and charging more for hot dogs than any other major-league team.â€
Ray Ratto, The Defector: “John Fisher, you see, didn't end baseball in Oakland as much as he cratered the viability of the franchise itself, wherever it ends up. It has no more of a future in West Sacramento or Las Vegas than it did in Oakland. His power-carelessness has made this franchise, which has been a free-riding barnacle on the hull of MLB for as long as he’s owned it, into something more abstract. It is the St. Louis Browns without Baltimore as a viable escape hatch, the Washington Generals without the Harlem Globetrotters to prop them up—it's that bereft, that hopeless, and that much of a challenge to the imagination. Indeed, Fisher's insults to West Sac have already begun, with Fisher—or one of his invertebrate spokesmen, now that original front man Dave Kaval has exhausted our ability to endure either his face or voice—announcing that any postseason games the A's somehow incur in the next three-to-one-thousand years will be played in Las Vegas. It takes a serious man with an ironclad will to open his relationship with his next town with such a deftly wielded middle finger. The Fisher touch is that he still hasn't noticed that his team’s future home is giving him the same treatment. There remains no evidence that Las Vegas is keen to either have or hold the team either. Fisher’s A’s are not moving to Vegas or Sacramento so much as they are into The Forbidden Zone. It doesn’t matter. Fisher is both a caricature and an inordinately obstinate man, and he has become the most detestable and least sympathetic sports figure in the nation just by being himself—first with the decision to leave Oakland and then in the ways that he has manifested that choice. He bought the team 19 years ago in the same way and for the same reason he once bought artwork, which is solely for his own amusement. This is evident in the way he ran the team, which was cheaply and with a religious devotion to roster churn aimed at keeping expenses down. It isn't that Fisher wasn't a baseball fan per se—his family bought a piece of the Giants three decades back as mostly silent partners and fully relinquished it only when he became the money behind the A's—but he clearly lost interest four years ago. That was right about the time that Fisher made up his mind that Oakland was no longer worth his attention. He wrecked the painting he bought because he didn't like the frame.â€
MEGAPHONE
“I have been afforded so many memories that I don’t know that there’s anything physical that I need from this place to make me whole. I don’t know if any grain of dirt satiates what the heart wants. I have friends now, right? Guys named Dave Stewart. Guys named Rickey Henderson. Guys named Dennis Eckersley. Like, I got to hang out with guys like Vida Blue. … And I am forever grateful that this place allowed that to happen. I don’t know what physical form you put that in.â€
Former A’s pitcher Dallas Braden, to The Athletic, on saying goodbye to the Oakland Coliseum.