The Table Setter, Jan. 18, 2024: Prime Real Estate

That degree of simplicity was always a lie. All over our lives, when we grow up and take a close, informed look at the world, we see that the version of it with which we first fell in love was a comforting fabrication. That feeling of having to find a more serious, more sober, more complete, but also sadder way to love something gets familiar. Anyone who's survived deep enough into a relationship to lose the glow of raw infatuation knows it. It pounces on you when you re-watch a favorite childhood movie with your own kids.

Sports fandom encourages you to delay that embrace of adulthood. Sports aren't exactly just games, but we can sell ourselves on that longer than we can hold onto the cartoon version of the first Thanksgiving or blithely assume that Justin Timberlake sat down one day and spontaneously scribbled out "Tearin' Up My Heart." Eventually, though, it all becomes inescapable. Here, three decades into the Internet Age, the ugly, complex reality presses itself at your windows (and your tabs, and each of your apps) much sooner and more insistently. I quote the should-be legendary musical episode of Scrubs: 

Quote

It's best to know the truth,
Of that there is no doubt,
But you'll have to face the future
When the truth comes out.

That show was good. I don't care what my wife says. She's a hypocrite, anyway. She loves Cougar Town, which (don't get me wrong) is great, but it just steals all of Scrubs's jokes. I'm not begrudging them that, the same people who made one made the other, it's not borderline plagiarism like Family Guy stealing from The Simpsons. And we named one of our sons Sorkin, so I'm in no position to criticize anyone for recycling content from one series to another. I'm just saying, there's a lot of the same jokes, from some of the same actors, and by the way, Scrubs did it first.

I swear, I started out planning to talk baseball. Let's face the hard truth of the ugly business sides of our beloved game, and the future they so much shape.

Prime Time?
You know, Deion Sanders was also a great baseball player. He's underrated. I wouldn't mind seeing Coach Prime become Manager Prime, as long as he was Managing some other team. That would be entertaining.

Alas, the Prime we're talking about today is Amazon's streaming platform. Tons and tons of things are still unknown, but Wednesday brought the news that Amazon is investing over $100 million in Diamond Sports Group, the parent company to Bally Sports, and that they're likely to support and/or host broadcasts for several teams in 2024 and beyond. Fearless leader John Bonnes wrote an astute breakdown of what little we know yesterday, but the most important and fascinating question--whether this will lead to an unexpected increase in the Twins' earning potential for broadcast rights this year and a concomitant loosening of the financial reins that have held back the front office this winter--remains not only unanswered, but unanswerable, at last for a few more days. We're under four weeks until spring training opens, too, so a few days is no small thing.

Blue Jays Deepen Pitching Staff
On that last part, about the tight timelines here and the need to gain some clarity quickly, a point in support: the Blue Jays signed Cuban righthander Yariel Rodriguez Wednesday. It's a four-year deal worth $32 million, for a hurler who seems to profile best as a reliever but worked as a starter in last year's World Baseball Classic. Toronto's starting rotation is already pretty solid, but maybe there's a swingman role open for Rodriguez. Given all the noise he made going into this process about wanting to start, it seems unlikely that he'd have signed with the Jays if they hadn't intimated that they're open to giving him an audition. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that any team would sign a guy for four years and $32 million if they envisioned him as a starter in any serious measure.

This feels akin to the Reynaldo López and Jordan Hicks contracts from earlier this winter, and evokes the piece Cody Schoenmann wrote yesterday about those guys vis-a-vis Jhoan Durán. Relievers dreaming of becoming starters again is often as futile as us grownups wishing we could go back to seeing the world in simple lines and primary colors, but if I can reminisce and lament, they can perseverate and try.

Out of the South, Into the South Loop
During the Winter Meetings, Jerry Reinsdorf rather obviously (but not altogether clumsily) made sure reporters witnessed him meeting with the mayor of Nashville, Tenn. He wanted everyone to think he was actively (if not yet inflexibly) looking to move the White Sox to the most obvious available market, as a leverage play against the municipal and state governments with whom he would have to work in order to get a new ballpark built in the Chicago area.

All along, I regarded that as a transparent ploy. Reinsdorf is no man of deep principle, but he's a Chicago guy. He was born in Brooklyn, but he moved to Chicago nearly 70 years ago. He got his law degree at Northwestern. His wife is buried in Chicago. He still owns the Chicago Bulls. Anyone who knows how Illinois politics works also knew, though, that the ploy was likely to work. It looks like it has.

JUST IN: The White Sox are in "serious talks" about the possibility of building a new ballpark on the South Loop parcel known as “the 78.” https://t.co/lfKDeMKAzO

— Chicago Sun-Times (@Suntimes) January 18, 2024

We have no details, yet, on whether or to what extent public funding will help build this park, or even whether it will actually be built. This is a big step for the Sox, though. The location they're talking about would put them squarely in what we'd call downtown, virtually in the shadow of the Sears Tower. It feels like Reinsdorf won his staring contest with the partners he needed, and did it pretty quickly.

What do you expect to come of the uncertain TV situation? What do you make of Rodriguez? Is there a Blue Jays-Twins trade fit coming into focus? Let's talk ball, and pray for the warmer temperatures my weather app says are coming early next week. (Mild winters: another thing that once seemed simple...) Happy Thursday.