The Twelve MLB Playoff Teams for 2025

It was down to the wire yesterday as it took the final game for the playoff slots to be finalized. The three nearby teams are all in--Guardians, Reds, and Tigers. The Guardians had a record comeback by coming from 16 and a half games down to nose out the Tigers for the AL Central title. They went 20-5 in September.

Here are the 12 who made the playoffs, ranked by the size of the metropolitan area they play in: Yankees (1), Dodgers (2), Cubs (3), Phillies (5), Blue Jays (7), Red Sox (11), Tigers (12), Mariners (15), Padres (17), Reds (23), Guardians (24), Brewers (26).

And here are the 12 teams ranked by total payroll: Dodgers (2), Yankees (3), Phillies (4), Blue Jays (5), Padres (9), Cubs (10), Red Sox (12), Mariners (16), Tigers (17), Reds (22), Brewers (23), Guardians (25).

It aoparent from these lists that the most impressive teams in 2025 are the Brewers, Guardians, and Reds, all three of whom made the postseason despite being in the bottom ten in both market size and payroll. The biggest loser, by far, is the Mets, who missed out on the playoffs depsite having the biggest payroll at $323M.

"Final Victory", by Stanley Weintraub

This book is a lively account of the 1944 presidential race between FDR, running for a fourth term, and New York Governor Thomas Dewey. What struck me in reading this book are all the similarities between 1944 and the recent 2024 election. Here are some of these parallels.

1. Health issues. By 1944, FDR's health had deteriorated badly. Everybody who saw him for the first time in awhile remarked about how bad he looked. Yet, FDR was determined to run for a fourth term, on the dubious proposition that he couldn't desert his country in a tinme of war.

After meeting with FDR for the first time in three years, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. said, "If I hadn't been warned by the stories of his illness, I would have been shocked beyond words. He stayed behind his desk, and his face was as gray as his hair...I was convinced he was far from a well man. He is thin; he has an unhealthy color. His hands shake violently when he tries to take a drink of water. His words were slurred, and he had memory slips about names and numbers."

Similarly, Joe Biden decided to run in 2024, even though he was clearly too old for the job. Biden's deterioration wasn't as obvious as FDR's was, as it was mental decline rather than physical decline. But it was the same obstinancy that FDR exhibited in his 1944 run.

The damage to the country was much worse in Biden's case, as his last-minute withdrawal from the race did not give his VP, Kamala Harris, enough time to build up momentum for her campaign, and we got stuck with the atrocious Donald Trump, who is doing his best to destroy the country. We got lucky with FDR, as his VP, Harry Truman, turned out to be one of our better presidents, following FDR's death less than three months into his fourth term.

2. Voter suppression. A big issue in 1944 was how the GIs in uniform were going to be able to vote. There were 11.3 million GLs, an estimated nine million of them of voting age. Republicans were doing their best to limit the ability of these service members to vote, on the (accurate) theory that most would vote for their Commander in Chief. Attempts to impose a uniform federal absentee ballot were killed by the coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. So it was left up to each state to provide the mechanism for voting in that state's election, and at that time some states still had poll taxes, literary tests, and other means for denying blacks the ability to cast a ballot. In the end all 48 states provided for some sort of armed forces voting, and an estimated half of the service members eligible to vote actually did cast a ballot.

In recent years, up to and including 2024, the GOP has done its best to restrict votimg rights, just as it did in 1944. Battles over state voting procedures flooded the courts after the 2020 election, and likely would have occurred in 2024 had Trump again lost.

3. Soft on Communism. This became the main theme of Dewey's campaign as the election neared. In Boston he told the crowd that "In America a Communist is a man who supoprts a fourth term so that our form of government may more easily be changed", and he said that FDR had "only softly disavowed Communism". Many of these rants from Dewey and hs suporters were tinged with anti-Semitism.

Since 1944 the GOP "softness" allegations have morphed from "soft on Communism" to "soft on crime", or soft on terrorism". We hear many allegations today that the Democrats are not tough enough on crime, usually by way of arguing for longer sentences, no cash bail, etc. In the George W. Bush era we heard that the CIA must use torture to fight terrorism. In 2024 the affable and bumbling Biden was an easy target for all sorts of "softness" allegations.

4. Relatability. Thomas Dewey was a cold, aloof man, who did not like interacting with other people. FDR was just the opposite; he loved people. and was loaded with charm and charisma. The pithy quote from Oliver Wendell Holomes comes to mind; after meeting FDR, he famously described him as "third-rate intellect, first-rate temperament".

Dewey's aloofness might have caused his 1944 defeat to FDR, and it definitely did cause his 1948 loss to Harry Truman. Truman, a natural people person, made 356 whistle stops covering over 30,000 miles during the 1948 campaign, to only 50 for the lethargic Dewey, whose speches were so scripted and cautious that they energized nobody. On a scale of one to ten for relatability, Dewey was a zero.

There are very few elections since 1948 in which the less relatable candidate won. I can think of only three--1968, 1972, and 1976. It seems that after the back-to-back disasters of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, the electorate finally said "enough".

The burning question today is why the electorate continues to view Donald Trump as more relatable than the leading Democrats. My answer, simply put, is this: he speaks their language. The test I like to use is to imagine two steelworkers stopping off for a beer or two on their way home after a hard day's work. What sort of language would they use? They certainly would not say "unhoused" instead of "homeless", "food insecure" rather than "hungry", "undocumented person": rather than "illegal alien", or "existential threat" rather than just "threat". And they sure as hell wouldn't want their daughters to be run over on the sports field by biological males; and yet, when a Democratic Congressman expressed this sentiment, he was castigated by his fellow Democrats, with some even calling for him to resign from Congress! This illustrates how out of touch today's Democratic party has become.

The Trump campaign slogan which most resonated with the American people in 2024 simply said "She's for them, he's for us". This is why Trump won the working class vote 56%-42% (and 66%-32% for the white working class vote). Democratic policies are hugely more beneficial to the working class than the GOP's are, but it is the GOP which speaks their language, while the Democrats remain tone-deaf, using highfalutin language which does not resonate with voters.

Jimmy Kimmel Returns to Late Night TV

Jimmy Kimmel returned two nights ago to his ABC late night show after a one-week suspension for comments made after the Charlie Kirk assassination. The ratings were through the roof, as you might expect.

Amazingly, I woke up just in time to hear his monologue. When I had wakened up enough to turn the channel to an ABC station, Kimmel was just being introduced! I thought he struck all the right notes in his comments.

One of the questions now is whether the viewers of the 23% of the local stations still not carrying his show will demand that Sinclair and the other local station owners will relent. I think there is a good chance that the same sort of pushback we have seen on the national level may also work on the local level.

I'm still perplexed at why Kimmel's comments were considered to be so objectionable. His point seems to me to be twofold: one, that people were jumping to conclusions prematurely about the motivations of the Charlie Kirk shooter; and two, Trump's tone-deaf response to a question about how he was handling the death of his (supposed) friend.

I've always liked Kimmel, dating back to his days as Ben Stein's sidekick on "Win Ben Stein's Money", and then later, on "The Man Show". He always seemed to be genuine, personable, and witty. By all accounts he is a good guy, and treats his emoployees well.

Trump's Favorite Lies

President Trump visited the U.K. this past week, and in a joint press conference with PM Keir Starmer he regurgitated a litany of the lies he has been spouting in recent years. It is impossible to know whether he is intentionally lying or is just hopelessly delusional. In the end, I suppose it doesn't really matter which it is. Here is a rundown of these lies.

1. He repeated his usual lie that he won the 2020 election. Of course, he lost fair and square.

2. He said we have already solved inflation, when inflation is actually rising. It was up to 2.9 percent in August, up from 2.7 percent in July. It’s the highest since January. He said, as he has repeatedly, that he inherited the worst inflation in U.S. history. He didn’t. He inherited 3 percent inflation, just above what it is now, and way lower than in the late 1970s. It was about a 41-year high in June 2022 under President Biden, but it then plummeted toward the end of the Biden administration.

3. He repeated his favorite imaginary figure on U.S. aid to Ukraine, saying that we’re into that war for $350 billion. That figure is not even close to correct. A think tank that closely tracks the issue puts U.S. aid at less than half of the president’s figure.

4. He said again that China is paying a whole bunch of tariffs to the U.S. It is actually U.S. importers who pay those tariffs, often passing on the cost to U.S. consumers.

5. He also repeated some of his favorite old January 6 nonsense. He said it’s now clear that Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, rejected his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops on that day. In fact, there’s still no evidence that actually happened. He said, again, the January 6 House Select Committee deleted all its evidence, deleted all the records. In fact, in addition to a public report, it preserved a huge volume of evidence.

6. On immigration, he said he thinks 25 million migrants entered under President Biden. Even his 21 million figure from months ago wasn’t even close to true, more than double the truth, even if you don’t count the people who were quickly expelled from the country.

7. He repeated his claim that prisons in the Congo and Venezuela were emptied to release prisoners as migrants into the U.S. Neither he nor his campaign could ever provide any corroboration for that claim.

8. He again said that he had a role in resolving a conflict between the countries of Azerbaijan and Albania. Of course, he means Armenia, not Albania.

The Sad Case of Kevin Strickland

Kevin Strickland spent 43 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, making him one of the longest wrongfully imprisoned people in U.S. history. Strickland’s story is one of the most heartbreaking examples of wrongful imprisonment in American history. In 1979, at the age of 18, he was convicted of a triple murder in Kansas City, Missouri, despite maintaining his innocence.

His conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of one witness, who later recanted and admitted she had been pressured by police into identifying him. There was no physical evidence tying Strickland to the crime, yet he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.

For decades, Strickland fought to prove his innocence. Advocacy groups, journalists, and even prosecutors later acknowledged that his conviction was a mistake. Still, appeals and petitions for his release were denied again and again, a stark reminder of how difficult it can be to overturn a wrongful conviction once it enters the system. Finally, in 2021, a judge formally exonerated Strickland, declaring that he had been wrongly imprisoned for 43 years.

Missouri law at the time did not offer him compensation, meaning he was released with little financial support despite spending more than four decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit. His case has since become a rallying cry for reform in wrongful conviction laws and compensation statutes across the United States.

Here are a few of my reactions to this travesty of justice:

1. The legal system needs to acknowledge that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. No conviction should ever be allowed when it is based solely on eyewitness testimony. Any case relying solely or mainly on eyewitness testimony should contain a jury instruction in which the judge advises the jury that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable and should be evaluated with strict scrutiny. Especially problematic is an eyewitness identification of a stranger. This type of "evidence" has virtually no credibility, and the jury instruction should so indicate.

2. The case illustrates how important it is to not discriminate against black people serving on juries. in Strickland's first trial, the sole black juror voted against conviction, after which the prosecutor vowed that this wouldn't happen again. True to his word, the prosecutor eliminated every black prospective juror with peremptory challenges in the second trial, and Strickland waas convicted. It was a few years later that the Supreme Court, in the case of Batson v. Kentucky (1986), ruled that a prosecutor's use of a peremptory challenge in a criminal case-—the dismissal of jurors without stating a valid cause for doing so-—may NOT be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. Unforunately for defendant Strickland, this ruling was not applied retroactively.

3. The case illustrates what a blatantly racist society exists in the state of Missouri. We northerners like to disparage the so-called "deep South" for its racism, but I've found that border states like Missouri are often the worst offenders. For example, Indiana in the 1920s had the highest Ku Klux Klan membership of any U.S. state. At its peak, the Indiana Klan boasted around 240,000 members, which represented nearly 30% of the native-born white male population in the state.

4. The denial of compensation by racist Missouri is an outrage. States need to ensure that some compensation is provided for those defendants who are imprisoned as a result of a wrongful conviction.

The Sad Case of "Phillies Karen"

The Smerconish poll today asks, "Agree/Disagree: Leave Phillies Karen alone." I am disheartened to see that 61% are voting for "agree".

Public misbehavior needs to be called out publicly. We seem to be drifting into a society in which misbehavior is becoming more and more overlooked with a dismissive shrug.

This woman got in the face of the guy and put her hands on him. If a man did that, the condemnation would be universal. But because it's a woman, 61% are now saying to move on!

If Phillies Karen would aopologize and give the ball back, then I would say it's time to move on. But absent that, let's hold her feet to the fire.

Some Thoughts on "The American Dream"

A recent Smerconish daily poll posed this question: "Do you think the American Dream-—that if you work hard, you'll get ahead-—still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?" The result was 50% for once but no longer", 44% for "still holds true", and 6% for "never held true".

What I find objectionable is not the results, which are unremarkable, but the way the question is phrased. The term "get ahead" implies financial success, in particular, doing better financially than your parents. The implication here is that the "American Dream" consists of financial success.

I take issue with this forumulation. After all, noone ever lay on his or her death bed and said, "My only regret is not spending more time on my business". The very thought is ludicrous. No, success in life consists of many things, but financial success would be way down on the list.

The Real Use for "Identity Politics"

I never had any concept of what "identity politics" was all about, or how evil it was, until a bunch of hate-filled women accused me of being a misogynist during the 2016 campaign because I dared to criticize Hillary Clinton's campaigning style. If I criticized her, so their reasoning went, then I must be a misogynist.

Since then I have noticed many examples of this concept which has so polluted our politics. The right-wing MAGA folks are bellowing about how the recent school shooter in Minnesota was trans, as if that means trans people are evil. Another example of this identity politics nonsense.

Two books I've read recently prompt me to consider whether there might be a legitimate use for identity poitics. The distinction I wish to make is urban vs. rural. This might be an example of a useful distinction, as rural and urban folks do tend to see the world differently.

The first book which clued me in to this is "The History of the SS", by G. S. Graber. While most of the book is a straightforward, factual account of the SS, near the end the author reflects on the meaning of this ugly piece of 20th century history. He says that the history of the SS is "an inseparable part of that yearning seen on all sides today to return to a preindustrial age".

The author elaborates: "The vast changes that the Industrial Revolution caused, including the establishment of a gigantic urban proletatriat, made it impossible for the conserative, land-oriented men who formed the ideological nucleus of the SS to come to terms with the twentieth century. The city became for them the emblem of all that was unsound and morally abhorrent. And in the city, they believed, it was the Jews who contolled life. Here is the meeting place between the conservative reaction against modern life which typified the SS, and their anti-Semitism."

The second book is "Miracle at Philadelphia", an account of the Constitional Convention of 1787. Here again I will skip to the end, where the author describes the approval process. Each of the 13 colonies had conventions to consider whether to ratify the proposed constitution. The debate was largely between the urban representatives and the rural representatives. The rural folks (called anti-Federalists) couldn't support the idea of a federal government with power superior to that of the states. In the end, the constitution was duly ratified, but look at the closeness of the vote in the three key states: Massachusetts, 187-168; Virginia, 89-79, and New York, 30-27. We don't realize that the constitution which has worked so well until recently came close to never getting off the ground, because of the rural-urban schism.

I checked the voting patterns of the twenty most rural states in the last three presidential elections. They all (except for three New England states, and Georgia in 2020) went for Trump in all three elections.

I suggest that instead of harping on gender, race, ethnic group, sexual persuasion, or what generation we were born in, we should pay attention to the differences between rural and urban folks.

"Suspense" (dir: Frank Tuttle, 1946)

This is pure film noir. No big stars in it, a mediocre script, and a cheesy plot. Certainly not art, but a mildly entertaining diversion for 101 minutes. A classic love triangle, with some horror aspects thrown in during the last half.