Low and inside
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 117
ANDY ROONEY 2.0
I Don't Trust Major League Baseball to Tell Me About Major League Baseball
EVERY MORNING, I get an email from Major League Baseball. I don't want it. I could probably unsubscribe but, as with the airline promotional emails that come in around the same time of day, I'm sort of afraid that if I unsubscribe or demote the email to some lesser inbox, someday I'll end up missing something that I did want to get.
The Major League Baseball email presents itself as a roundup of baseball news. It even sometimes uses curiosity-gap subject lines, like a news outlet trying to entice readers into clicking by withholding the specific news from the headline: "No rookie starter had done this in 60 years"..."Execs reveal player most likely to be traded"..."One of MLB's rarest feats happened last night."
The headlines and stories about the leading events or trends in Major League Baseball, however, are written by people who are employed by Major League Baseball. Once upon a time, the name for such things was "press releases." The alias for the sender that shows up in the inbox is "MLB Morning Lineup," but if or when the email is opened, the actual address in the "From" field is "info@marketing.mlbemail.com."
Long ago, I used to find out what was going on in baseball by reading the roundup of AP game stories in the morning paper, plus the hometown game coverage and the news of any trades or spectacular feats or new trends that rated their own stories. Then newspapers kept shrinking and that coverage got squeezed out more and more, and for a while they just assumed everyone was watching Baseball Tonight on ESPN. And then ESPN stopped doing Baseball Tonight, and ESPN.com got less and less interested in the part of sports where they tell you what happened in the games, and everybody sort of assumed the information was out there but hardly anybody took responsibility for it. Craig Calcaterra does do a good newsletter, but a whole sports league going through a one-man band seems like a mismatch of scale.
Meanwhile, baseball was eliminating the middleman. I assume the reason I get the MLB Morning Lineup email is that I watch Baltimore Orioles baseball games through a subscription to MLB.TV. If I didn't want to do that, I could instead subscribe to the streaming service run directly by the Orioles. The Orioles broadcasts are done by the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, which is owned by the Baltimore Orioles, whose previous ownership, readers may remember, suspended an announcer for speaking too frankly about the team's past failures while praising its success.
The influence doesn't have to be that blatant. Major League Baseball is a sport where the New York Mets, with a payroll of $333 million, and the Philadelphia Phillies, with a payroll of $285 million, play in the same division as the Miami Marlins, with a payroll kept down at $70 million. The Athletics and their visiting opponents are playing major-league games in a minor-league ballpark shared with the Sacramento River Cats, spending a multi-year layover there as their owners try to finish moving them from Oakland to Las Vegas. The commissioner reinstated Pete Rose from his eternal gambling ban in a blatant surrender to Donald Trump. No matter how interesting these stories may be, they are simply not subjects that show up in the coverage of Major League Baseball that Major League Baseball delivers each morning.
Meanwhile, the MLB Morning Lineup does produce the same sort of prognosticatory, evaluative, who's-up/who's-down coverage that sports discussion thrives on. But when a Major League Baseball–run outlet publishes headlines like "Who are All-MLB contenders as we enter June?" or "7 players who could win their 1st MVP in '25" or "Who's leading the first Cy Young poll of '25?" it's weighing in on what's ultimately the question of which players will or won't collect bonus money from Major League Baseball. For pre-arbitration players, the difference between making the All-MLB first team and making the second team last year was $500,000. The difference between winning the Cy Young award and being runner-up was $750,000.
Even worse is the speculation about where players should go in free agency or in trades. "Who are the best remaining free agents?" is not a public discussion for the people who hire free agents to be subsidizing. Stories like "Top trade candidates and where they best fit" or "Each team's most important trade chip" or "A trade might be just what these players need" are pure meat-market treatments of the players—paid for, here, by the people who will be buying and selling the meat.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, June 29, 2025
★★★ A casual little peloton rolled by outside the window, with riders dressed in everything from logoed spandex on down. The sun was still hot but the air had dried out; the clouds were feathers and buckshot on clean bright blue. Motorcycles boomed up Columbus and the bike lane was full of commercial and recreational cyclists alike. With the dry breeze, midday was no barrier to getting out and about. The walk back home, though, with the air gone still and the afternoon heat still gathering, started to get sweaty.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
HERE IS THE Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Encyclopedia of Cookery; 1001 Recipes, Menus & Rules for Modern, Scientific and Economic Cookery (Vol. 4), by Eugene Christian and Molly Griswold Christian, published by the Corrective Eating Society in 1920, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CUCUMBER SANDWICHES
Crisp a few slices of cucumber, then dry and dip in Hygeia dressing and place between whole wheat crackers spread with peanut butter.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
