The draft, the cheating scandal and baseball's dark future

Tough weekend to be a Yank fan. 

For starters, we only had three draft picks. Yep, three. For some reason, that surprised me: The annual big event arrives, after all the mock selections and speculation, and the Yankees - who haven't won a can of beans since 2009 - only drafted three times. Three.

What gives? Boston - found guilty of cheating, surely the worst crime of all - forfeited a second round pick. But the Redsocks still drafted four players. Same with Houston, Houston. the epicenter of evil in American sports: The Astros lost two picks due to the scandal, yet they still drafted four times. 

We got three. And it was not happenstance. In fact, my friends, it quite neatly sums up the ethical priorities of MLB's leadership: 

To be caught cheating - even if leads to a world championship - is hardly the worst thing you can do. Nope. The real crime - the biggest felony of all - is paying a free agent what he is worth on the open market. 

Yep. Forget the scandal. By far, the Yankees committed the worst transgression of 2019: They signed Gerrit Cole for a record salary, costing their ownership brothers more money in the future. That meant rewarding the Astros with a Yankee pick, and in the end, we drafted only three times. Three.

They say that, in the heat of a crisis, you learn about a person. Since the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, I suppose it also means that institutions can be judged. 

If so, baseball's current log-jam - its inability to come up with a pandemic plan -  is providing a talent showcase for greed, pettiness, incompetence and nepotism, particularly among the owners. While the world burns, with angry people in the streets, with hunger everywhere, we are watching billionaires grub for money. 

In recent weeks, I have begun to ponder what not long ago was unimaginable: Life without baseball.  

Don't get me wrong: I really miss the games. Also, I appreciate the incredible challenge of playing while maintaining the safety of players and staff. But everywhere you look, the sport has become a spreadsheet. And the issues will not be solved in the next few months. Folks, this is going to an extinction-level event - especially for the minor leagues, which used to offer the cleanest parts of the game.

Lately, I've been wondering about baseball after COVID, maybe three years from now. I'm thinking about minor league teams stocked by local players, rather than MLB prospects who are passing through. I yearn for baseball to return to its roots, and by that, I do not mean playing one wretchedly over-hyped game in an Iowa cornfield to signify a Hollywood fantasy. 

The impossible is about to happen. MLB is going to flub this. And it will never recapture the fans, the spirit, and - most importantly, to its princely owners - the profits of the past. They are about to screw themselves. I say, go for it!