hardball

MLB is a guinea pig, a crash test dummy. The league is trying to learn in real time how to play a regular season in a pandemic, which falls into the category of trying to learn to swim while surrounded by great white sharks. Maybe you will succeed, but good luck. Additional members of the …

The playoff system, in the best of years, causes debate and frustration. Should a team play 162 games and really have its season come down to one three-hour, sudden-death game? Are 10 teams too many for a postseason? Too few? There is no perfect setup, so imagine how imperfect it was going to be this …

Alex Rodriguez was the wrong messenger. In a conference call Thursday, Rodriguez recommended players accept a revenue-sharing plan before attempting a clarifying tweet Friday that he “never mentioned the word salary cap.” A-Rod often has trouble with words, including that salary cap is not a “word,” but two of them. He also has difficulty with …

Had it all gone as planned, Gerrit Cole would be through his season-opening start, his Yankee Stadium debut and, this weekend, the righty would have been involved for the first time in The Rivalry. Oh yeah, he also would already have banked about $9 million of his pitching-record contract. Instead, Cole plays catch occasionally with …

The Mets were the accidental contenders of 2019. When they tried, they failed. When they surrendered, they succeeded. Brodie Van Wagenen provided the words. In January 2019, before even his first spring training as GM, he assessed the Mets as the NL East favorites and challenged the rest of the division to “come get us.” …

Former MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews has spoken out publicly for the first time since retiring amid sexual-harassment allegations nearly two months ago — and admits he was “inappropriate” and even found his accuser’s story “very credible.” “I didn’t argue about it, I didn’t deny it,” Matthews told Vanity Fair magazine of journalist Laura Bassett’s claim …

Think of the major league players in a clubhouse like the cool kids in high school. The world revolves around them. Their approval, friendship and respect are collateral in that universe. I have seen owners gravitate toward star clusters in clubhouses, GMs dumb down their language, curse and spit to try to be one of …

“Can I kick you in the shins?” Strange questions have come my way during this pandemic, so I decided to play along. I told the veteran player agent who asked, “No, you may not kick me in the shins.” “Great,” he said. “Now, here is the choice, I am either going to kick you in …

Some members of MLB management pushed to kill a draft in 2020. They wanted to allocate bonuses that would have been distributed to amateur players instead to current players and team employees to better weather the financial plight caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Ultimately, the Players Association and enough members of management thought eliminating an …

Jacob deGrom would have thrown one of the first pitches of the 2020 season, shortly after 1 p.m. Thursday. Perhaps 20 minutes later and 205 miles to the south of Citi Field, Gerrit Cole would have unleashed the first pitch of the rest of his life. So much is being lost to the coronavirus pandemic. …