IT’S A MADD MADD WORLD...

If you were wondering if there had ever been a full uninterrupted season before this one when the Yankees were off both on Memorial Day and July 4, according to the Elias Bureau you have to go all the way back to 1915 and 1909 — and even those two years were sort of a fluke in that both times, the two holidays fell on a Sunday when most of the teams back then did not play Sunday baseball. So there’s that…

When Freddie Freeman returned to Atlanta last weekend for the first time since his unceremonious departure as a free agent back in March, he let it all hang out. Tears and emotions flowed after Braves fans saluted him with a sustained standing ovation as Braves manager Brian Snitker presented him with his World Series ring. But Freeman’s new Dodger teammates were somewhat taken aback when he heaped praise on his former Braves teammates and the Atlanta management, making it very clear he wished he was still there. And then a few days later Freeman fired his agent Casey Close. What happened here was a clear case of a failure to communicate. Throughout their negotiations last winter, the Braves held firm on a five-year offer for their 32-year-old franchise first baseman while Close kept pushing for 6-7 years. When it was clear to them, Close and Freeman weren’t going to settle for a five-year deal, (ultimately bumping it from $135M to $140M), the Braves pivoted and traded for the A’s Matt Olson and Freeman subsequently

signed a six-year/$162 million deal with the Dodgers. The miscommunication was that Close was acting as an agent trying to get the most money for his client and Freeman let him do that while neglecting to tell him: “I don’t care how much money you get me as long as, at the end of the day, I’m still a Brave.”…

There were shockwaves throughout baseball last week when Wes Johnson, the much-acclaimed Twins pitching coach, announced he was leaving the team to take the position of pitching coach at LSU, leaving a first-place team in the middle of the season for a college job. Had to be money, right? And, if so, how embarrassing was it for baseball to have college teams paying more for coaches than they are? In its initial story, The Athletic reported that LSU would be paying Johnson $750,000 a year as opposed to his $400,000 with the Twins. It looked like one of the all-time greed grabs, Johnson bolting on his team in the middle of the season to nearly double his salary. But as it turned out, this wasn’t quite the case and so determined was Johnson in his insistence that this was a move based on family considerations he released the terms of his LSU deal which call for a base salary of $380,000 along with a vehicle allowance of $800 a month and a relocation incentive of $25,000. When Johnson was hired by the Twins from the U. of Arkansas in 2019 he was the first college pitching coach in nearly four decades to jump directly to the major leagues.