The Penny Fades into History

After 230 years in circulation, the copperhead run has come to an end. And consumers should prepare for the price on everything to go up four cents over time.

That's the big news announced yesterday when the US Treasury minted its last one-cent coin forever. 

In a penny-pinching move, the U.S. Mint has produced its last one-cent coin. The final penny was minted in Philadelphia Wednesday, 232 years after the first penny rolled off the production line. The government decided to stop making new pennies because each one costs nearly 4 cents to produce. The move is expected to save about $56 million a year.

If you have a jar of pennies on your dresser, or a few stuck in your couch cushions, don't worry. They're still perfectly legal for making payments. But of the more than $1 billion worth of pennies in circulation, most never circulate. And it was costing the government a lot of money to keep making more of them.

As a proud son of the Land of Lincoln, the great state of Illinois, I am rather saddened by the end of the penny. There was a time when Illinois' political leaders would never have let this happen. In fact, the movement to get rid of the penny has been around for decades, but back in the day, the Illinois reps would effectively squelch any move by any rep from any state to eliminate the Lincoln penny. And with a strong electoral presence, legendary political leaders in the House and Senate, and the power of Chicago politics, no serious penny-pinching plan ever got off the ground or out of committee.

The word from the Illinois contingent was clear:  Mess with the penny and your state will never pass a single bit of meaningful legislation or receive any favors from the federal level again. 

Perhaps that story is a bit apocryphal ... but for anyone growing up in the Land of Lincoln, I don't doubt it. In fact, many years ago, the College Board actually put a synthesis DBQ argument question on the AP English Language and Composition national test about whether to eliminate the penny. My students that year were quite proud to have additional knowledge on the issue, giving them enough evidence for perhaps an additional paragraph to their essay. Argue for or against keeping the penny? Nonsense. It didn't matter because it was never gonna happen.

But, now ... it's over. 

Of course, while penny critics note that a penny costs almost five cents to produce and eliminating it will save the taxpayers $56 million, the nickel actually costs much more at nearly fourteen cents. So, perhaps the feds should eliminate the nickel and round up to the dime. Or why not just round everything up to the next dollar and eliminate all change?

Greatest High School Movies

I saw an online post that asked, "What is the greatest high school movie, and why is it Clueless."

As I pondered the post and question, I had to concede that the Amy Heckerling 90's film re-imagining of Jane Austen's Emma is a pretty qualified nominee for the moniker. It's an incredibly entertaining film that actually holds up pretty well after thirty years. 

When I think about teen films and high school movies, I go back to the early 1980s, and honestly the first two I can recall are Amy Heckerling's original teen classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High, based on the non-fiction high school expose by a young music writer named Cameron Crowe, and a less memorable but sweetly entertaining film The Last American Virgin. 

Entertainment Weekly recently posted its list of the greatest high school/teen movies. Some of my favorites are classics like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ten Things I Hate About You, and Can't Buy Me Love. But here's an interesting question: How do we feel about Grease?

Colfax Carousal Punk Fest -- Denver

It's been a while, but this is my most recent piece for Westword:

It’s no secret to anyone traveling around Denver that the Bus Rapid Transit project has put a significant strain on the numerous small businesses, restaurants, and music venues lining the historic and traditionally lively Colfax Avenue corridor. As the area struggles to stay vibrant and financially solvent, two local punk musicians who grew up in the scene want to give something back. Tom Dodd and Ryan Heller, of Denver band Tuff Bluff, have organized the inaugural Colfax Carousel Punk Fest, which will debut on Saturday, November 15.

“There are so many cool bands in Denver,” Dodd says, “and we just thought it’d be cool to have a show to see all these bands at one time.”

Dodd and Heller have felt like some local music fests don’t always showcase Denver talent as well as they’d like. So, with the news that the Underground Music Showcase was in its final year, they had a huddle. “Ryan said, ‘Let’s just do it. We can get all these Denver bands, put them on one bill, showcase local music, and help out these venues,'” Dodd says. “So, it’s just a win-win.”

“Colfax has such a rich history,” Heller adds, “but the area is hurting, and we just want to help out.”

Read the rest of the story at Westword.

Thoreauvian Walking

Henry Thoreau was an inveterate walker, often spending three or four hours in the afternoon sauntering around Concord and Walden Woods. In fact, other than writing prodigiously -- his journal surpasses two million words -- walking could be considered one of his primary occupations. Thoreau was a "saunterer," and one of his most well-known essays is simply titled "Walking."

For someone who struggled with and died early from tuberculosis, Thoreau's sauntering is an impressive ... "feet." And, in the contemporary age we know that walking is one of the most important habits we can establish for both physical and mental health. A recent study has re-established the role that a daily walk of fifteen minutes or more can play in staving off the risks of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Walking for at least 10 or 15 minutes at a time might do more for your health and longevity than spreading your steps out into shorter walks throughout the day, a large-scale new study suggests.

The study, published in October, looked at the effects of how people gather their steps each day, as well as how many steps they take and the associations that these patterns of daily activity might have with risks for heart disease and premature death.

The data showed that middle-aged and older people in the study who grouped some of their steps into walks lasting for 15 continuous minutes or more were about half as likely to develop heart disease within the near term as those men and women who rarely walked for that long at one time. The people taking longer walks were also less likely to die during the years-long study from any cause.

Thoreau walked as a way of life. And he even had a quaint explanation for the origin of the term saunter. We should consider the wisdom of his words:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.

Fighting the American Revolution Again with Ken Burns

Several years ago on this blog and in my column for The Villager, I told the story of “29 and 0!”. As I was just starting my high school teacher career, a colleague and I heard a voice booming through the doorway into the teacher lounge. It was Tom, a veteran history and government teacher who was also the head baseball coach and a bit of a legend around town for his gruff but engaging presence, as well as his state championships.

When my colleague and friend Jane asked, “Uh, what, Tom? What are you yelling about? What’s 29 and O?” Tom, the high school’s lovable curmudgeon, glanced sideways at us with a suspicious scowl that melted into a mischievous grin. “I’ve been teaching American history for twenty-nine years,” he growled. “I’ve taught the Revolutionary War twenty-nine times.” He paused for effect. “America has never lost! We’re 29 and 0!”

It's in that spirit of teaching history as a living, breathing thing that I am anticipating the long-awaited release of legendary documentarian filmmaker Ken Burns The American Revolution, which premieres on PBS next weekend, November 16. For many historians, history fans, and average Americans feeling a bit anxious about the state of the union, the release couldn't come at a better time. Jennifer Shuessler of the New York Times recently spent time with Burns, exploring the question: "Can Ken Burns Win the American Revolution?"

“The American Revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia,” he said. But his six-part, 12-hour documentary about the subject, which debuts on PBS on Nov. 16, will aim to strip that away — and hopefully bring some healing to our own fractured moment.

“We say, ‘Oh we’re so divided,’ as if we’re Chicken Little and this is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “But the Revolution was a pretty divided time. The Civil War was a pretty divided time. Almost all of American history is division.”

Maybe storytelling, he said, can “help short-circuit the binaries we have today.”

The remarks were pure Burns — the kind of sunny all-American optimism that thrills his admirers, and draws eye-rolls among skeptics. But “The American Revolution,” which Burns directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, is arriving at a moment when even attempting to bring a unifying story to a broad American middle feels like a radical act.

Speed Dating with a Book

I don't believe that everyone will be a reader if they simply find the right book. That view puts me at odds with many of my fellow English teachers and librarians. Not every person will love to read books or choose to spend their time lost in a novel. However, I do believe in the value of putting a book in someone's hands that might pique their interest. That's especially true for kids.

And for teachers and school librarians, an excellent way to do that is an activity known as "Speed Dating with a Book." When I was an English teacher at a school with one of the best high school libraries I've ever known, I was introduced to the idea from one of our research librarians, and on numerous occasions I began taking my classes, especially freshmen, to the library once or twice a year. By the way, a great day to try this is on Dr. Seuss's birthday, also known as Read Across America Day.

This week I hosted several classes in my beautiful high school library for a few rounds of book speed dating. Basically, students are give three rounds of 10-15 minutes to simply try out a book. I began by setting up six tables with a selection of different genres: sports books, history and historical fiction, YA lit and coming-of-age, great stories, memoir, and action/mystery/thriller. I explained the idea and then "book talked" a couple titles from each table. I also pointed out several displays in the library, including "Great Beach Reads," "Faculty/Staff Recommendations," and "Classic Thrillers."

I would then set a timer and encourage the students to do the classic "book store dance" -- peruse book covers and titles, skim the back cover or flyleaf, and then find a comfy spot to give the book a chance. After about twelve minutes, I'd encourage them to pick a new book, perhaps explore a new genre. And then we'd do a third round. After about forty minutes, I'd offer them the opportunity to check out a book or just go back to class. Yesterday I was "matchmaker" for more than a dozen students who took a book home for the weekend, and hopefully more.

What a great way to spend a day in a high school library.

Here are some titles that went home with a new friend this weekend:

Where the Crawdads Sing

Moneyball and The Blindside

Perks of Being a Wallflower

Carter Finally Gets It

A Child Called It

Book Lovers

Elway -- Punk Band Back with a Message

It's fall in Rocky Mountain region, and Elway is back in play.

No, I'm not talking about the Colorado legend and Hall of Fame quarterback, but I am talking about Denver. More specifically the smokin' hot Denver music scene and the return of the indie-punk band of the same name. Elway, a well-known punk group originally out of the hip music town of Fort Collins, just dropped its first album in years, and this release has a biting, sharp and fresh new angle with a tone for the sound of the times -- a blistering hot LP of political protest. And the band will kick it off with an album release party tonight in Denver at the renowned rock club The Squire Lounge on Colfax Avenue.

Justin Criado, a prolific music chronicler of the Colorado Sound and the local scene, caught up with lead singer Tim Browne to talk about it in this new profile for Westword Magazine, Denver's alt-weekly: Denver Band Elway Goes Deep on New Album

At long last, after eighteen years, Elway put out a politically charged protest record.

But the latest from the Fort Collins-born indie-punk crew — Nobody’s Going To Heaven, released on October 10 via Chicago label Red Scare Industries — isn’t as obviously in-your-face as you’d assume from a genre known for telling Nazi punks to fuck off. It’s a more nuanced approach, with political undertones that highlight the chaos and carnage surrounding the Western world, while still offering an optimistic outlook overall.

Original vocalist-guitarist Tim Browne didn’t necessarily set out to make a record fueled by such fire and fury that went into Nobody’s Going To Heaven initially, and considers it “an indignant dispatch from within the walls of the crumbling empire.” It occurred naturally, he shares; he had no choice but to reflect on what he believes will ultimately lead to a “post-American world.”

“We’ve not really been historically a very political band,” Browne says. “There are some songs about politics, but generally, I’ve tried to avoid it just because I feel like it’s really easy to slide into tropes and platitudes. I’ve always been hesitant about writing about politics and tread lightly when I do.

I am excited for this new album, especially because I wrote a profile on the band about this time last year when the group was in town to record the tracks and played a rare Denver show, their only time appearing in their home state in 2024. At the time, I was a casual fan of the band, but had not yet explored their sound in depth. 

Elway Will Play a Rare Denver Show at the Squire Lounge This Week | Denver Westword

While it has no connection to John Elway, the punk-rock band Elway was once sued by the local football hero, who wanted to block the use of his name. But it’s never advisable to tell a bunch of punks they can’t do something, and the band has been doing what it wants for nearly two decades now.

The boys are back in town this month to record a new album and play a show at the Squire Lounge on Friday, August 16, and Elway fans should take note: This concert will not only showcase new music, but it could be the band’s only local performance in 2024, according to lead singer and songwriter Tim Browne. “We figured everyone is going to be out here, doing rehearsals and pre-recordings through the fall, so let’s do a show,” he explains.

Originally based in Fort Collins, the bandmembers are now spread around the country, with Browne in Denver, guitarist Brian Van Proyen in Johnstown, bassist Joe Henderer in Chicago and drummer Bill Orender in Philadelphia. The group also no longer does nearly 200 shows a year, as it did in its early days.

Elway has been hinting about new music on its Instagram page, and the new LP will be its first album since 2022’s Best of All Possible Worlds, which New Noise magazine called “a musical journey…of melodic punk songs that add elements of rock and roll, pop-punk, [and] skate punk.” Still with the label Red Scare Industries, Browne says the band is “happily marooned.” For the imprint’s twentieth-anniversary compilation album, 20 Years of Dreaming and Scheming, Elway recorded an old song from Red Scare band Sundowner. “We covered the 2006 song ‘Traffic Haze,'” Browne says, an acoustic punk song that “is really beautiful and gorgeous, and we turned it into a Propagandhi-style thrash banger. It’s the first song with blast beats on any Red Scare release.”

While Elway has a classic late 90s post-punk sound and a catalog of songs about the vicissitudes of life and growing up, the group had never been so unapologetically political. But it seems that Browne and the guys have decided they have something significant to say about what's going on in the world, and they are not holding back. And despite the title of the Album "Nobody Going to Heaven," there is definitely a hopeful tone in the criticism. In that way, the album reminds me a bit of my guy Henry Thoreau and my characterization of Thoreauvian Punk.

Check out this release from the new LP:

Wondering what to eat? Ask Marion Nestle

I first ran across Marion Nestle in a documentary film. Supersize Me, the Academy-Award winning film from the late Morgan Spurlock, featured a bizarre experiment and simultaneously delicious and torturous experience eating nothing but McDonalds for thirty days. And like any good documentary, it was filled with commentary and testimony from a variety of players, including nutrition expert Marion Nestle. A longtime professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at NYU, Nestle is the sort of calm, pragmatic and infinitely knowledgeable voice that gives deep credibility to any discussion. 

So, what does a person like that eat on a daily basis. The Washington Post recently profiled Nestle and explained: What 89-year-old nutrition expert Marion Nestle eats in a day - The Washington Post

For more than three decades, Marion Nestle has been telling people what to eat.

Nestle, now an emerita professor at NYU, says her time in government opened her eyes to the multi-billion-dollar food industry’s enormous influence over Congress. By the early 2000s, she became a critic of the food industry and an advocate for major food reforms, which she made the case for in best-selling books.

In 2002, Nestle published “Food Politics,” an exposé that argued that the food industry is at the root of many of the country’s nutritional problems. The industry rakes in ever-growing profits by churning out highly processed foods laden with additives, Nestle wrote, and then aggressively markets those foods to children and adults while lobbying against regulations and trying to co-opt nutrition experts.

Over the years, Nestle’s blunt nutrition advice, sharp criticism of food companies and frequent media appearances made her one of the most recognizable names in nutrition. In 2006, she published one of her most popular books, “What to Eat,” which showed consumers how to navigate supermarkets and improve their health by deciphering food labels.

And, in a related piece, The New York Times recently published a feature on 

How to Eat for a Long and Healthy Life. If you've followed this blog for a while, you know that I have been a critic of fast food and a proponent of healthier, more natural eating for ages. Some people note the advice of food writer and social activist Michael Pollan who say, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." And there is much wisdom in that simple sentiment. Too many people are eating things that aren't really "food," at least in a natural, organic sense. My first instinct at the store is to flip a product package over and read the ingredient list. And too often these are filled with mystifying materials unnecessary in food production. Like Red Dye No. 40.

More than any one food, it’s your overall diet that matters, Dr. Hu said. He has studied several different eating patterns — including the Mediterranean diet, plant-based diets and diets based on federal guidelines for healthy eating — and has found that all of them are associated with reduced risks of earlier death.

These diets prioritize a variety of unprocessed or minimally processed foods, including plenty of vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, Dr. Hu said. Beyond that, he added, there’s a lot of flexibility in how to eat for healthy aging. “One size does not fit all,” he added.

Thoreau, Leisure, and the One-Day Work Week

 Many people are coming around to the idea of a four-day workweek. But if you ask Henry Thoreau, one day should be sufficient. It's not quite the Four-Hour Work Week claimed by ideas guru and motivational writer Timothy Ferris, but it is a challenge to the daily grind that left so many Americans, in the words of ol' Henry, living "lives of quiet desperation."

Thoreau challenged the idea that man's life must be consumed by work and the pursuit of wages that would allow him to purchase what Adam Smith called "the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life." Whereas Smith and his theories about the new capitalism of the early 19th century used the exchange of labor for that trio as a measurement of a person's "wealth," Thoreau countered that a "man is wealthy in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." Or, in other words, there are two ways to be wealthy: acquire more or require less. 

The way Thoreau phrased it according to his experiment of living life at Walden Pond for two years was:

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

And in the reference I made to the one day of work, he sardonically -- and in some people's estimation blasphemously -- asserted about the Sabbath:

The order of things should be reversed; the seventh day should be the day of toil...and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widerspread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.

The idea of work, and what we are giving up in the constant pursuit of a paycheck was the subject of a piece of commentary in the Washington Post "We should be living in the golden age of hobbies. What happened?"

It’s a first date. The drink in your hand is mostly ice. You’ve talked about your jobs, your days, your dogs. The conversation lulls, and you can feel the question coming. “So,” the person across the table asks, “what do you do for fun?” The answer should be easy. We are supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies. Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labor. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted 15-hour workweeks by 2030. This would leave people the opportunity to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself.”

But the golden age that Keynes predicted has not come to pass. Though productivity has grown dramatically since Keynes’s time, the most recent American Time Use Survey found that full-time employees still work eight hours a day, the same workday that the National Labor Union demanded in 1866. Workers enjoy just under four hours of leisure time, and the bulk of that brief window is spent watching TV. The odds are stacked against hobbies. “Work has been supercharged with meaning and purpose and identity, a charge that it never had, at least for the majority of people,” Hunnicutt said. The seamlessness of streaming and the narcotic effects of scrolling make every other activity feel effortful. To pay the bills, huge swaths of Americans take on “side hustles” during hours that earlier generations might have spent building model trains or singing in a choir.

Thoreauvian Punk & the American Work Ethic

“This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! …It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.” -- Henry Thoreau

These thoughts from Henry Thoreau's essay Life Without Principle might seem to suggest Thoreau was a bit of a layabout, a "Do-little" as he was sometimes referred to around his hometown of Concord. And that mis-reading of his words and his tone is a part of the misconception that Thoreau -- "the hermit in the woods" -- was opposed to work. In fact, Thoreau was quite the opposite and was almost incessantly active doing one job or another for most of his short life. 

The caveat is Thoreau's questioning of why people work, how much they should work, what they exchange or give up because of work, and how to balance the all important distinction between "making a living" and "making a life." And that conflict has been central to Americans' love-hate relationship with work for most of the country's history. It's of course an interesting conundrum, especially for a nation ground in the Puritan work ethic, (or Protestant for that matter), and it's the heart of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, America's Long Love/Hate Relationship with Work."

To understand how Americans feel about work, consider two often-cited, but seemingly contradictory, philosophies. First, there’s the American dream—the belief that hard work can bring prosperity. And second, there’s the chart-topping country song “Take This Job and Shove It.” They are two sides of the same coin: The hope that work will move us above our station, and our disappointment when it doesn’t happen as promised.

Ever since the founding of the country, Americans have defined themselves by their work, and by the wealth and status it can bring. Benjamin Franklin argued that hard work was essential for success. In the late 1800s, there were the Horatio Alger stories, extolling the idea that the new country was the land of opportunity, where people could go from poverty to wealth because of what they did for a living.

That has never been more true than in modern America. In recent decades, work has taken on even more importance—promising not just money, benefits and a sense of identity, but also community, purpose and belonging. Millennials were told to follow their passion in commencement speeches by Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs and Jim Carrey; anything less would be considered a disappointment. A larger share of Americans, responding to the World Values Survey in 2017, said work was important in their life than those who said religion—79.7% vs. 60.7%.

Little wonder, then, that in a recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, about 70% said they believe the American dream doesn’t hold true, the highest in nearly 15 years of surveys.

Bloggers You Might Like

I started this blog back in 2008, and at that time the web log, or blog, was a relatively new thing to many people. This blog has never really centered on a theme or developed a regular publishing schedule to build an audience. It's just been a place for me to practice writing commentary and sharing my thoughts on whatever is on my mind. At one point, early in the game, I had this idea that the blog would become a thing, a business, a brand ... all that stuff. Alas, that has never really come to pass, as I have never really committed the time and energy to it. 

Over the years, however, I have come across a few professional blogs that I regularly come back to or check in with. And the range is broad and rather quirky, but as far as blogs go, these writers generate a steady stream of interesting information and commentary in the vein of the newspaper or magazine feature.

Austin Kleon is a "writer who draws" or perhaps "an artist who writes." He became a well-known and best-selling writer years ago with his breakthrough work Steal Like an Artist. His website is much more than just a blog -- it's a fabulous resource for creative inspiration. His first book originated out of a speaking engagement, and it's kind of a cool story:

In 2011, I was a 27-year-old copywriter. My first book, Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by blacking out newspaper articles with a marker, had been published the year before. Like many a poet before me, I kept my day job. W.H. Auden once said, “It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” This wasn’t a sad fact for me: I was very happy to talk to anyone who would listen, and I was even happier if they threw a little scratch my way.

I had recently accepted an invitation to give a talk at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. The college asked if I had a title for the talk. I told them it was called “How To Steal Like An Artist.” On one of our morning walks, I asked my wife Meghan what I should say. She said the best talk she ever heard was when an author named Mary Doria Russell visited her high school and simply listed 10 things she wished she’d known when she was a student.

“That’s perfect,” I said, “I’ll steal that.”

Another unique online writer with a great story is Maria Popova whose site "The Marginalian" is a treasure trove of links and commentary on the great artists, writers, artworks, and literary pieces across the ages. 

Baseball Needs a Lockout & Salary Cap

Well, that was an incredibly thrilling World Series, a true manifestation of the best side of America's national pastime. It was also an glaring example of what is wrong with baseball -- massive economic disparity in league. The Number 2 payroll that has a $700 million player contract (Ohtani) beat the Number 5 payroll. 

The era and idea of Moneyball -- the Michael Lewis book and movie that explored the rise of sabermetrics in sports and the hope that small market teams like the Oakland A's could use logistics to compete with big money behemoths like the Yankees -- is over, as if it were ever really valid. Major League Baseball has needed a salary cap, profit sharing, and economic parity since at least the 1994-95 lockout. And it needs it now more than ever.

Who knows what will happen during off season negotiations: 

OF ALL THE things to cause outrage, to intensify the bleating that baseball is broken and the Los Angeles Dodgers are the culprit, the signing that generated the most consternation was that of a relief pitcher.

Not Shohei Ohtani's $700 million contract in 2023. Not the $325 million guaranteed to Yoshinobu Yamamoto a few weeks later. Not the $182 million that added two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell last offseason. Not even the drastically under-market deal signed by Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki that winter.

There was something about the four-year, $72 million contract given to left-hander Tanner Scott in January that infuriated fan bases in every market outside of Los Angeles -- even the only one that dwarfs it.

But this much is clear: the small market teams and owners should outright refuse to ever enter into play with organizations that have Amazonian power over small indie bookstores. It's just silly, unsustainable, and not good for "love of the game."