Free Friday: A Can't-Miss Sale?
For the 2025 season (at least as of right now*) the Atlanta Braves’ highest-paid player will likely be: Chris Sale. Now, it’s true, the Red Sox are paying a big ol’ chunk of that, but it just goes to show you the way MLB pays its players is screwy.
I say, “as of right now” because Max Fried will be a free agent at the end of this season, and if Atlanta wants him back, I suspect he’d become their highest-paid player in 2025.
On Thursday, the Braves reworked Sale’s deal and signed him to a two-year, $38 million contract. So right now, when that extension kicks in, he’ll be TIED as Atlanta’s highest-paid player for the 2025 season. Here are those highest-paid players in 2025:
Chris Sale, $22 million
Matt Olson, $22 million
Austin Riley, $22 million
Ronald Acuña Jr., $17 million
Raisel Iglesias, $17 million
Sean Murphy, $15 million
Reynaldo López, $11 million
Joe Jiménez, $9 million
Michael Harris II, $8 million
Pierce Johnson, $7 million
Ozzie Albies, $7 million
I bring this all up for two reasons—one, because I never want to pass up the opportunity to talk about how criminally underpaid Ronald Acuña Jr. and, especially, Ozzie Albies are.
But, two: Chris Sale will be 36 years old in 2025. He hasn’t been an elite pitcher or even an especially good one since 2018, which, in today’s world, is roughly 400 years ago. The Braves getting Sale—even with the Red Sox paying $17 million of the $38 million he will be paid over the next two seasons—feels like a very un-Atlanta move.
It could work out, for sure. Sale still strikes out a lot of people, and if he can keep the ball in the ballpark, he might be really effective.
But it still seems like the sort of move a team makes when they’re desperate to find answers to a new question.
See, the top teams, I think, are all coming around to the same idea: The regular season doesn’t mean bupkis. I’ve got to believe that the vast majority of Atlanta folks—I’m talking fans, players, media and so on—look at the Braves’ 88-win season in 2021 as the ultimate triumph. Sure, they had the worst record of any National League playoff team. But they won the World Series.
And I’m sure those same folks look at their 100-win seasons in 2022 and 2023 as bombs. The Braves convincingly lost their lone playoff series each year to a Phillies team that they stomped over the regular season. The 2023 Braves, over six months, had one of the greatest offenses in the history of baseball. But they averaged one run per game in their three losses to the Phillies. And that defines the whole season.
The Dodgers are facing the same questions. It’s all about October now. We baseball fans will watch the regular season because we love baseball, but it means little more than the NBA regular season of the NHL regular season. And the MLB season is A LOT longer than the NBA and NHL regular seasons.
I can’t predict the future—but would it surprise me if teams started using their aces once a week, 22 starts a year, in order to protect them for October? Of course not. Would it surprise me if teams started resting their star players 25 or 35 or more games a year to keep them fresh for October? Of course not. Would it surprise me if teams played for 92 wins instead of 100 or 105 or 110, because 92 wins is enough to get you in the playoffs and that’s all that matters anymore?
Of course not.
This is where the game has been going for a while now, sure, but it’s there now. I, personally, am not a huge fan of it—I’ve long been more of a regular-season guy than a playoff guy—but as I’ve written before, I just love baseball, so I’ll go wherever the game takes me. And the game is taking you and me into a new era, I think, one where soon enough 16 teams will make the playoffs, and the regular season will be mostly for entertainment purposes, and there won’t be very many important games played between April and September.
In other words: I suspect that the Braves believe that if Chris Sale gives them two good starts in October and those help the team go on to the World Series, he will be worth every penny.
Happy Friday! Our Friday posts are free so everyone can enjoy them. Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support.
PosCast Draft Winner!
OK, we have our winner for the PosCast Holiday Draft! And congratulations this year go to …
LINDA HOLMES!
So awesome. The topic of the Holiday Draft this year was gifts, and—spoiler alert—Linda’s gift theme this year was gifts that you want but would never buy for yourself.
This included:
Pick 1: Balenciaga Super Destroyed Baggy Pants in Light Blue (price: $2,450).
Pick 2: Retro Fab 10 Veuve Clicquot Mini Refrigerator, Special Edition (price, $3,995.95)
Pick 3: Judith Leiber Couture Pancakes Crystale Minaudiere Bag (Price: $6,495)
If you didn’t get any of these practical gifts this year, well, there’s always next year.
Final results:
Linda Holmes, 25.9%
Alexis Gay, 20.6%
Nick Offerman, 20.1%
Ryan George, 13.7%
Brandon McCarthy, 4.5%
Hey, if you feel like it, I’d love if you’d share this post with your friends!
RIP, Dr. Frank Ryan
OK, so here’s all that Frank Ryan, who died this week, did in 1964 and 1965: In ’64, he quarterbacked* the Cleveland Browns to a 10-win season (he led the NFL in touchdown passes) and then threw three touchdown passes to Gary Collins as the Browns shocked the heavily favored Baltimore Colts 27-0. It’s the last Browns championship.
*My father, who rarely has anything to say about grammar, has long hated using the word “quarterback” as a verb. It’s kind of an odd thing, really, but I can remember him saying on multiple occasions, “Quarterback is something you are, it’s not something you do.” I should probably respect that.
The next year, 1965, he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Rice. He doctoral thesis was “Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc,” which, by odd coincidence, is the same thesis I wanted to write to get my Ph.D. and then I found he wrote it first.
“Can you explain your thesis in layman’s terms?” a reporter asked him in 2013.
“I can’t, no,” he said.
As a quarterback, Ryan had a strong arm and startling touch on the bomb. Even now, he ranks 11th all-time in yards per completion, tied with Joe Namath and just behind the mad bomber, Daryle Lamonica. And he was a brilliant play-caller in a day when quarterbacks, not coordinators, determined how the game was played.
“I went on the field not with a radio in my heart that gives instructions,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I went on the field with concepts. Occasionally, I ‘d get a sense of something special and break the thesis of the moment and throw that long pass for a touchdown.”
Yes, even on the field, he was always the mathematician.
After his playing career, he taught math at Case Western and at Yale. He was also athletic director at Yale, and he had a fascinating approach there. He wanted to play every sport so that he would understand what it was like for the players. This included ice hockey, where the born-and-raised Texan learned how to ice skate so he could know what it feels like to be a goaltender and face blurring pucks.
“I should know a little about playing goal to get an appreciation of the problems that face them,” he said.
He was also, for a time in the 1970s, director of the House of Representatives Information Systems. It was quite the life for Dr. Frank. He was 87.
Joey on Brandon
OK, you’ll want to behave yourself in the comments because… yeah, Joey Votto is a reader here at JoeBlogs. Yesterday, I pulled an old Brandon Phillips quote from 10 years ago about Joey being a quiet and somewhat bland guy (“Plain Jane Joey”). I wondered what Joey would have to say about Brandon. It turns out (unsurprisingly, I think) that Joey adores Brandon and considers him one of his favorite-ever teammates.
Here’s Joey in full on Hall of Fame candidate Brandon Phillips:
“So Brandon was a quiet, to himself teammate in the clubhouse and on the bus and on the plane. But as far as having inside jokes and getting along with teammates and being dependable on the field, working, being prepared, playing through injury… he was among the best I’ve ever played with.
“Brandon was dependable, he played well, he always wanted to get better, always worked, he was an excellent teammate on the field, and I loved him. I know lots of teammates loved him. I have nothing but good things to say about him. Defensively he was excellent. He was creative. You go through an old highlight reel of his, he has things that are Pete Maravich-esque, Jason Williams-esque, they are things that break a lot of fundamental rules and they’re effective.
“On a daily basis, he used to practice every one of his more higher-skilled double play turns or on-the-move throws to first. He perfected them.
“He was an excellent diver. I use that term because I’m not a strong diver so I pay mind to who’s a good diver and who’s a good slider and who’s good at collisions and contact and so on. Brandon was an excellent diver and slider, which added to his range. He had a really nice, strong, accurate arm, so he could go back and play anything in the hole, anything up the line, any turn that was going to be close he could finish the play and finish it accurately.
“I played with him for like 10 years, and he threw almost no bad throws. You know, a couple hops that were on-the-run throws, maybe, but if there was a standard play you were getting the ball right in the chest with a nice accurate throw.
“Offensively, he had stellar years. And he wasn’t a big man, you know, so ‘stellar’ feels like an appropriate word to use. You know, when you go 30-30, there’s 30 home runs in there. And he hit over .300 a few times, drove in lots of runs; it was something he prided himself on.
“Brandon was just an excellent player. I loved playing with him, he was one of the most memorable players I played with.”
JoeBlogs Week in Review
Wednesday: Kicking Off Our Big Baseball Hall of Fame Breakdown.
Thursday: Hall of Fame Breakdown: Second Base.
I absolutely hate the path baseball is taking. You cannot have both a six-month-long, played-almost-every-day regular season, and a large playoff. They are incompatible. I'd prefer if they went to the pre-1969 model, but I'd be perfectly happy with 1969-1993.
My wife is also a PhD in math. I am a CPA with a fair amount of grad work in statistics, so not a slouch with numbers. But I also could not make heads or tails of her dissertation's title or abstract, let alone the actual paper itself. I know it is abstract algebra and provides a tiny bit of the math that was used in public key cryptography 25 years ago when internet commerce was just getting started. Thank you for the memorial. It was a lovely tribute of a person I would never have known about otherwise.