Trade Winds

by

The 2026 Major League Baseball trade deadline has come to pass. There was a flurry of activity Monday afternoon that provided some surprising moves, none of which were exceedingly shocking.

The big news of the trade deadline actually broke late Saturday evening when it was announced that the Los Angeles Dodgers have come to terms on a trade with the Detroit Tigers to acquire ace lefty Tarik Skubal.

Skubal is the back-to-back reigning American League Cy Young winner, and the first reigning winner to be traded in-season since Justin Verlander in 2023 — only the sixth ever. He led all of baseball in WAR and strikeouts in 2024 and went a combined 31-10 with 469 punchouts across 2024 and 2025. There was talk he may not be traded at all this year after he had loose bodies removed from his elbow in May and was back on a mound 38 days later. The Dodgers are now the first team in league history to have a reigning two-time MVP and a reigning two-time Cy Young winner on the roster together in the same season.

Unlike most baseball fans, I was happy to hear the news. The most important reason for that is my hope was that he would not end up on the New York Yankees. The Yankees had a rather quiet deadline, but they did acquire Luis Garcia Jr. from the Nats, he leads the NL in slugging percentage. GM Brian Cashman seems to like his team’s chances should they get Judge, Stanton and Bellinger back healthy before the end of the season. 

Failing to acquire Skubal hasn’t cost the Yankees much in the way of championship odds with only a slight drop from +550 Sunday afternoon to +600 Tuesday afternoon.

I screencapped two sets of odds to track the movement on FanDuel, giving a wide enough birth from the deadline itself to still get a reasonable picture of the changes it brought: 

Sunday at 5 PM: 


Tuesday at Noon: 


The question that I have for the Yanks is— what would their odds currently be had they acquired Skubal?

What would the third most favored team, the Milwaukee Brewers (+950 odds) odds be if they’d acquired Skubal?

A key reason to ask, is that the Dodgers didn’t give up a whole helluva lot to get the superstar pitcher — outfielder Zyhir Hope, the No. 5 prospect in their system and No. 25 in all of baseball, right-hander River Ryan at No. 7 in the system and No. 68 overall, and right-hander Brady Smith at No. 17, per MLB Pipeline. Los Angeles managed to hold onto their top four prospects and still get a nuclear arm added to their arsenal. 

The Dodgers sit at an unprecedented +155 to win the World Series in early August. That speaks to the incredible team they have constructed, and also the weaknesses of the rest of the field.

A three-peat would give them the first one since 1998-2000, when the Yankees pulled it off, it would also elevate the cries of the Salary Cap hungry owners and the majority of MLB fans who support such a measure.

Seeing a cap and floor model in the vein of the NFL would give fans a sense that any team could win it all. Just don’t tell that to Cleveland Browns fans, hell, don’t even mention it to Bills fans. Teams that scout, draft, recruit, sign, develop and take care of their players will still have an enormous advantage, and those in low-tax, high-revenue, nice-to-live locations will have built in advantages that will become more stark in a hard capped league. 

Point being, don’t expect a salary cap to fix all your franchises woes overnight, but I do understand the appeal and would love to see what America’s pastime looked like with a more level playing field.

Other noteworthy items from the deadline:

The Boston Red Sox basically dumped one of the members of their golden age of prospects they’ve been championing for the last several years. The oft-injured Marcelo Mayer never found his groove in the big leagues, and made more headlines for his attitude and alleged off-the-diamond issues. Word is the organization felt he was detrimental to the prospect they just locked up for nine-figures last summer in Roman Anthony. Mayer was said to be a regular fixture of the New England late night scene (according to 98.5 The Sports Hub of Boston), which fed into questions about his motivations and maturity. He was shipped to the San Francisco Giants for lefty reliever Erik Miller and minor-league outfielder Carlos Gutierrez.

The Red Sox also paid a pretty heavy price to nab Adley Rutschman from the Baltimore Orioles. The switch hitting catcher is currently injured, but could provide a valuable dynamic to the Red Sox lineup heading into the final stretch of the season, and the postseason should they land a spot. I quipped that the Red Sox are now going after players who are “pre-injured”, as another key acquisition before the deadline was Curtis Mead, the former Nationals second-baseman who has some serious pop in his bat right now and could provide much needed defensive stability to the Red Sox middle infield, was injured in his first game with the Sox. A pitch struck and broke his wrist. He now heads to the infirmary with ace Garrett Crochet, who hasn’t pitched since April 25 and still hasn’t picked up a baseball after shoulder inflammation turned into a lat strain, Roman Anthony, out since May 5 with a torn ligament in his hand and no timetable, shortstop Trevor Story, on the 60-day list since sports hernia surgery in late May and only now aiming at a rehab assignment. Rutschman officially begins his Boston tenure on the 10-day list with left wrist inflammation. Which when you compare it to the medical report I just got done delivering, is actually pretty healthy! 

Boston moved from +3500 odds on July 13, to +1800 on Sunday afternoon, climbing as high as +1500 after the acquisition of Rutschman before settling to their current line at +1600. Still a dark horse by those odds, but third behind division rivals Tampa and New York in American League team odds to win it all.

The Atlanta Braves were quiet at the deadline, their odds have dropped slightly as a result. But Chris Sale did win July’s NL Pitcher of the month, and the Bravos still have big October aspirations.

My recent article, The Dead Tradeline, discussed how the expanded Wild Card slots (and the longstanding inability to trade future draft picks) makes for less excitement at the trade deadline. Far more teams being “buyers” now than sellers limits the amount of top end players who are available to be moved, and not trading future picks limits the amount of resources teams have to acquire them. I discussed how the Red Sox could greatly benefit by being deadline sellers, but their improbable win streak, and Breslow’s desire to save his General Manager job, had made that highly unlikely. The Red Hot Sox haven’t slowed down yet, having just completed a sweep of the Dodgers this past weekend, placing them at a mind-blowing 28-5 since June 24. 

The last few weeks have felt like a holding pattern as we waited for the deadline to come and lock in the rosters. Now that we’ve seen its fruits come to bear, the headline that remains: the rich get richer in LA, the Yankees don’t make major waves, and the odds of a serious labor stoppage that puts the 2027 season at risk have grown ever higher. 

So enjoy this postseason run, it may be the last one we get for a while.

Sex Ed

by

I’m reminded of the age old question: who is going to teach our kids when there are no more young people willing to martyr themselves for the sake of the profession?

The answer is: The Sex Robots.

A WESTERN NEW YORK school district has halted its plans to place a humanoid robot in a classroom after a New York Focus report on the plan sparked fierce debate over the use of artificial intelligence in schools and backlash from local parents. Salamanca City Central School District announced in a Facebook post Friday afternoon that its pilot project with tech company Realbotix has been put on hold as school officials “work through enhanced student data privacy agreements” with the state education agency and engage with community members… In April 2024 (Realbotix), it acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which creates hyperrealistic sex dolls.

— New York Focus

This story lept out at me before the uproar even had time to begin. One of those comically incompetent decisions that only gets made by the most highly-educated individuals.

Upon seeing the aesthetic of the device, I became more concerned for the robot’s safety than that of the high school students.

Football Nationalism

by

European football’s governing body, UEFA, has made clear their response to FIFA’s stated plans to sell private stakes in the World Cup.

“UEFA and its 55 member associations stand as one. We unanimously and unequivocally reject FIFA’s proposal to transfer ownership interests in the World Cup and other FIFA competitions to private investors. The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product. It is one of football’s greatest sporting legacies. It has been built over generations by players, national teams and supporters across every continent. No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale.” —UEFA

This evokes memories of the European uprising in response to twelve of the biggest clubs coordinating for their own breakaway league in 2021. The dirty dozen involved were Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan, and Inter Milan.

“Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan, AC Milan and Juventus all dropped out of the Super League on Wednesday, leaving the new competition essentially extinct before it even started.” —CBC

The interesting thing is that the new league wouldn’t have ended the domestic European leagues the clubs are all aligned with, it would have changed the “Champions League” format by giving these top clubs permanent placements and a larger share of the money from it. The Champions League is their season-long playoff system that is most easily comparable to the College Football Playoff. The plan they had discussed was far less of a fundamental change to their structure than what College Football has and is currently in the process of undergoing.

Which has me thinking, if only Europe was as conservative about its borders and Americans were as resolute about our College Football, what a vastly different world it would be.

Machine Yearning

by

Stories like these are becoming more frequent, and beginning to poke holes in the infallibility of AI.

Forrester’s survey of leaders found 55 percent of employers regret making tech-driven staff cuts — leading its analysts to predict that half of AI-attributed layoffs will be “quietly reversed.”
 — Inc.

While AI may be inevitable in displacing large swaths of the labor market, whether it can reach that scale before this current AI market-bubble pops is another question entirely.

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, Ford’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering.
 — Quartz 

The good news is this means more human jobs, the bad news is they probably won’t go to Americans anyways.

Blood in the Water

by

The San Jose Sharks have locked up their franchise superstar, but the cost signals dangerous waters ahead.

Five years, $94 million, $18.8 million a year — and Celebrini turned down the $20.8 million max. Grier thanked him publicly for “the flexibility they have provided to the team in how we allocate future dollars.” —NHL 

That $18.8 million average annual value, while it may not compare to other top earners in the rest of the major sports leagues in America, makes Celebrini the highest paid player in hockey.

He deserves to be. He has taken the league by storm. Last season he posted 45 goals and 115 points in 82 games, finished fourth in Hart Trophy voting, and was named IIHF Male Player of the Year. His 115 points were the third-most ever by a teenager, behind only Gretzky’s 137 and Crosby’s 120.

And he technically just took a discount, albeit a small one. The maximum any player can earn is 20% of the cap, which comes out to $20.8 million next season. Grier says ownership was willing to pay it. Celebrini said no. While he could have signed for as many as eight years, the young cornerstone strategically signed for five. This makes him eligible for a new contract, and what would likely be a significantly higher average-annual-value, before his age 25 season. 

To put Celebrini’s new deal into perspective: it doesn’t start until 2027-28, when the cap will be $113.5 million. That $18.8 million will eat 16.6% of it. When Sidney Crosby signed his 12-year, $104.4 million extension in July 2012 — a deal that kicked in for 2013-14 against a $64.3 million cap — his $8.7 million cap hit represented 13.5%.

The danger San Jose now faces is they have an emerging young core who are entering contract extension territory, and the Sharks can’t do for them what they have done for Celebrini.

The NHL has a hard cap. It sits at $104 million for 2026-27, up $8.5 million, and is locked in at $113.5 million for 2027-28 — the last year the league and the players have confirmed. Rookies begin their careers on entry-level contracts, cost-controlled deals that run three years for anyone signed between 18 and 21. After that is where things get extremely volatile.

Celebrini’s deal is a consequence of a standoff between the Ducks and the Flyers earlier this summer. Leo Carlsson is a talented young center for Anaheim who came off his entry-level deal on July 1 and became a restricted free agent — which is what made him eligible to sign an offer sheet. Philadelphia took advantage on July 3, tendering Carlsson a five-year, $90 million deal at $18 million a year. Carlsson signed it. Had Anaheim not matched, Carlsson goes to Philadelphia and four Flyers first-round picks go to Anaheim.

The Ducks matched, and throttled their salary cap flexibility in the process. They now sit under $10 million in space with Cutter Gauthier — a 41-goal scorer — still unsigned.

The biggest winner of the deal wasn’t Leo Carlsson. It was Macklin Celebrini. Being a vastly superior talent to Carlsson, and seeing what Carlsson had just been signed for, the leverage flipped in the Sharks forward’s favor. Celebrini wasn’t offer-sheet eligible this summer — he still has a year of entry-level left and wouldn’t have hit restricted free agency until July 2027 — but that was exactly the problem. Grier said it out loud: the goal was not letting Celebrini reach next offseason unsigned. Because next offseason, someone tenders him $20.8 million and forces San Jose to match.

The Sharks bit the bullet and secured him for the next half-decade at just under $19 million instead.

The Sharks have had incredible draft lottery success the last few years, and now their other recent first-round picks will be looking to cash in as well. Will Smith, fourth overall in 2023, enters this season on the final year of his entry-level deal — which makes him extension-eligible right now, and offer-sheet eligible in July 2027. Michael Misa, second overall in 2025, has two years left; he becomes extension-eligible in July 2027 and offer-sheet eligible in 2028.

This summer, the Sharks drafted Ivar Stenberg second overall. Stenberg is a Swedish winger out of Frölunda who put up 11 goals and 33 points in 43 games in the SHL — as an 18-year-old, against grown men. He’s three short years from the same cliff San Jose just pulled Celebrini off of.

San Jose has also already committed north of $24 million a year in long-term money to Mason Marchment, Darnell Nurse and Jacob Trouba. The cap goes up, but perhaps not fast enough.

The Sharks’ window to win their first Stanley Cup has shifted from the next decade to hurry up before this thing implodes.

California isn’t doing the boys in teal any favors either. The state boasts the top marginal income tax rate, 13.3% — the highest in the country. As a California resident he owes California on his entire income, home and road, with credits for what he pays elsewhere. A Florida/Texas/Nevada-based player pays zero state-tax on roughly half his season by simply playing at home.

The last team to win a Stanley Cup out of a genuinely high-tax American state was the 2014 Los Angeles Kings. The last Canadian winner was Montreal in 1993 — thirty-three years ago. Since 2020: Tampa, Tampa, Colorado, Vegas, Florida, Florida, Carolina. Five of those seven play in states with no income tax at all. The other two, Colorado and North Carolina, are flat-tax states under 4.5%.

I’d love to see the Sharks get over the hump and finally win a Cup after years of close calls and then nearly a decade of losing that has led them to this draft lottery abundance.

But I’m also reminded what a great position the Hurricanes are in, with nearly all of their core locked up for the next five years and beyond at a fraction of what San Jose is going to have to dish out.

The NHL is a microcosm of the economic transition taking place on the continent writ large. High-tax areas lose, low-tax areas win.

That’s one reason the Stanley Cup is sitting in Raleigh today.

Cue the hysterical attempts to moralize that reality.

Our Long National Nightmare is Over

by

Another glassy-eyed deconstructionist has bitten the dust.

“Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino is stepping down nearly a year after the company’s failed rebrand, logo redesign, and restaurant modernization efforts sparked widespread customer backlash.” —AP

This concludes what I consider a successful boycott of the Americana eatery.

It was not enough for me that they walked back the logo redesign. I wanted the restaurants returned to their classic look instead of the modernist cleansings they’d undergone. Masino’s renovations had left them as generic, soulless diners, and I wanted her gone from the company. Time will tell if her replacement suffers from the same ideological incompetence she exhibited.

For today, I’m declaring victory, and the next time I’m in the vicinity of a Cracker Barrel, I will be stopping by to enjoy a Country Fried Breakfast with double hash brown casserole as the sides, eggs over medium, and cream gravy on the chicken fried steak. 

I encourage everyone to pay them a visit. Their next quarterly earnings report showing an increase in sales after her departure will be sweeter than a Double Chocolate Fudge Coca-Cola Cake. 

A nation is its people and their culture. And damn it, this is ours.

The Sapphire Buckeyes

by

Thee Ohio State University just became the newest and largest Power 4 conference team to incorporate a jersey sponsor patch. 

“Ohio State Athletics today announced a landmark partnership with JPMorganChase… designat[ing] Chase as the official bank sponsor of Ohio State Athletics and the new jersey patch partner across Ohio State’s 36 men’s and women’s varsity programs.” —Ohio State

I have put together a mock-up of what their jersey’s may look like twenty years from now. 


This brings to mind my Rhetoric class in college. When we learned about fallacies, the professor was sure to emphasize the “Slippery Slope” fallacy, yet the private equitization of college athletics continues to argue for the converse:

The Slippery Slope is not a fallacy, it’s an inevitability. 

Update: Notre Dame has just gotten into the mix. They have inked a six-year, $18-$20m a year deal with SoFi. While I may not love jersey sponsorship patches, I’m very pleased that Notre Dame’s is more valuable than OSU’s.

Peacocking

by

Last week I posted an article here on the site covering the current state of affairs in the streaming wars, and where things may be headed. You can check that out here.

One of the issues I covered was the enormous amount of money NBC/Comcast had recently signed on to secure even more sports rights to their lineup, the biggest recent additions being the long-awaited return of the NBA as well as Sunday Night Baseball from MLB along with the wild card round of baseball’s postseason.

I mentioned how the math didn’t really add up, as I stated Peacock has almost always been a loss-leader to put it very mildly, it’s been hemorrhaging money for most of its existence, only just posting its first profitable quarter in last week’s earnings report. Comcast spun off its cable channels into the new company Versant, and they have since announced plans to spin off the network and streaming into its own company as well, a separation expected to be completed by mid-2027. Leaving Comcast as a broadband and telecom provider, basically washing their hands of the streaming and television money pit.

A story broke this morning that Peacock Premium (with ads), will be included with a YouTube Premium subscription. To those unfamiliar with YouTube Premium, it is the paid version of YouTube (it has nothing to do with YouTube TV which is their version of cable TV) that doesn’t include ads. As someone whose most used streaming app for well over a decade (probably two decades) has been YouTube, I am a long time subscriber of YouTube Premium. I used to use a different email every one to three months to get free trials of it, this went on for about four or five years. Then they began enforcing that more strictly, so I used a still active college email address to lock in the student discount rate, it’s been in the range of around six to eight dollars a month the last few years for me. But it gives me access to everything on YouTube commercial free. I use YouTube to follow podcasts, a broad spectrum of channels that cover my many different interests, and it includes movies that can be watched ad free as well. You can also use it for music, which I do here and there for its large catalog of concerts. To me it’s the best deal in streaming, it has saved me God-only-knows how many hours in commerical interruptions.

This move is interesting to me for a few reasons, the first of which being how I just don’t find Peacock of any particular interest as far as streaming services are concerned. I just don’t like the platform, I don’t like the content, it’s home to a poorly designed user-interface, there are far too many commercials, and it’s really never felt like a good value proposition outside of their past insane Black Friday deals. The sports rights they do hold are too fragmented, if you’re an NFL or MLB fan, you only get one game a week. It made sense for Peacock to be sold off to a larger streaming brand that could get those sporting events in front of their larger subscriber base and extract value out of them to encourage subscriber retention, as I think what it has to offer is better at that than it is to drive new subscriptions. Peacock and Paramount Plus were both the weak links in terms of content and capital, then Paramount got Ellison money while Comcast is dumping assets as quickly as it can. Their paths could not be more divergent now.

To give you an idea of how much I dislike Peacock, when it was announced they had secured the rights to the MLB Wild Card round games, I decided I would simply not watch them. Later reports would clarify that the games will be simulcast on NBC and NBC Sports Network, allowing people the chance to watch them without necessitating a Peacock subscription, but to feel that strongly about a streaming service to abstain from an entire round of the postseason of your favorite sport is telling. Subscription fatigue is real, and Peacock is the low man on the totem pole for a reason. 

Now sure, it’s not completely without its value. If you didn’t have cable and couldn’t pick up the networks with an antenna where you are, Peacock was a great way to watch the Super Bowl and the Olympics this past winter. But those are one and done scenarios, people were not as likely to carry Peacock year-round like they were the other apps.

Another reason this sparked my interest is it exhibits the continuing pattern of streaming consolidation. We have a major deal tied up in the courts in Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which cleared the DOJ in May and the European Commission last week, only to be hit with a suit from twelve state attorneys general and a temporary restraining order that has pushed the outside closing date as far as June 2027. Mergers and acquisitions are in the air. Could this move by YouTube signal the potential future outright acquisition of NBC/Peacock?

People state the concern is antitrust laws, if they had any intention of enforcing the antitrust laws, Google would already be ten different companies right now. They may be willing to see if they can add an over-the-air TV network and a significant streaming catalog of classic television and live sports rights.  

Another interesting caveat is that YouTube Premium subscribers’ main benefit is not having to sit through commercials, but the addition of the Peacock Premium content is said to be its ads-included tier. So if you’d like to watch The Office or the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air woke remake (God help you) early next year on your YouTube Premium account, you’re going to have to sit through ads. (Live sports include ads regardless of plan, but everyone already knows and accepts this as the reality we have always lived with.)

Google is currently facing a lawsuit, filed July 14th in the Northern District of California, that asserts its claim that YouTube Premium is ad-free is a falsehood, as video creators often include their own paid promotional spots within the videos. There is a genuine bit of irony that they have added literal ad-supported content in the midst of this lawsuit, which shows they probably view it as more of a speeding ticket than a serious infraction.

A concern will be, does this increase the cost of a YouTube Premium subscription? YouTube says the standard Premium price won’t move when Peacock arrives. The upside is significant though, having access to live MLB, NFL, NBA, Premier League, Big Ten and Notre Dame football games is a massive coup for YouTube’s paid service, and may signal they are willing to expand the scope of what the service actually is. Google has the money and means to take it as far as their heart desires.

The best thing about this change for sports leagues is it gets their product in front of more Millennial and Gen Z viewers, as their business models currently stand, their revenues would go off a cliff without Baby Boomers. 

This moves us a step closer to the old-school network model, which in a world of increasing frustration over fragmented sports rights, could actually be a good thing. It’s become such a populist issue that Trump’s FCC has made inroads about it.

Let Peacock be an industry lesson. The subcription model only works when people are actually willing to pay.