IT’S A MADD MADD WORLD...
That was a really bad job on the Brewers’ part, alienating (possibly permanently) their best pitcher Corbin Burnes over what amounted to an arbitration pittance in the big scheme of things. The 2021 AL Cy Young winner who led the league in strikeouts last year had filed $10.75 million to the Brewers’ $10.01M and apparently they made little effort to compromise, instead choosing to “take him to court.” They won. But according to an embittered Burnes, the Brewers did a great job of devaluing him. “From our end, they just never really made an attempt to try and avoid a hearing,” he said at Brewers camp last week. “In the end, it was very eye-opening. You learn your true value to an organization.” To that, Brewers GM Matt Arnold had this rather weak response: “We want to be solution-based. We always want to get to a place where the player is comfortable.” It should have never come to a hearing, not over $750,000 for one of the best pitchers in the game and the Brewers know that
— and will have no one to blame but themselves when Burnes hits the road out of Milwaukee as a free agent after 2025 . ...
The Nationals’ pitchers and catchers arrived at camp Wednesday once again without Stephen Strasburg, their oft-injured righty ace who this time is said to be recovering from a stress fracture in his second and third ribs that is related to his thoracic outlet syndrome surgery last year. No word when or if Strasburg will join the team. All that is known is the Nationals are holding the bag on what has become one of the worst contracts of all time. After leading the Nationals to the world championship in 2019, Strasburg opted out of his contract and signed a new seven-year, $245M deal and has been hurt ever since. He missed the whole 2020 season with carpal tunnel surgery and most of the last two seasons with thoracic outlet surgery. So far, since signing the extension, he’s given the Nationals a total of five starts for their $245 million . ... Oh, by the way, in case you missed it. Jacob deGrom is already hurt-on-arrival in Rangers camp.