The Naïveté of John Roberts
PLUS: The Los Angeles Angels are staring down a problem the size of Babe Ruth
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” So wrote Chief Justice John Roberts back in 2007 in the majority opinion for the PICS Case, which made it unconstitutional for school districts to use race as a factor in assigning students to local schools. Simple enough, right? And pure of heart. Roberts wants Americans to stop sorting and judging others based on the color of their skin. If you see race—POOF!—don’t.
What Roberts wrote was certainly long overdue, coming as it did more than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education. Although, come to think of it, that’s really odd, because Brown was supposed to have taken care of racial discrimination in public schools back in the days of black-and-white television. I’m pretty sure stopping discrimination was the intent of the 14th Amendment as well, which was added to the Constitution in 1868. Yet there we were, in 2007, dealing with this issue yet again. What gives?
Here’s the rub: Roberts wasn’t actually ordering a school district to desegregate. Instead, he was making it illegal for school districts to use race as a factor when assigning students to local schools to counter de facto segregation. The school district in question—Seattle—was trying to promote diversity by making sure the student population of its individual schools matched as much as possible the racial composition of the Seattle school district’s student body. Because Seattle didn’t want a school system that was racially segregated due to residential patterns and white flight, it took race into account as a tiebreaker when students were applying to high schools. (Seattle allowed its students to apply to any high school in the district.) Roberts nullified this attempt to diversify Seattle’s schools by citing, of all things, the principle of anti-discrimination. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race;” in other words, stop taking a kid’s race—black or white—into account when trying to make sure the schools don’t end up racially segregated. So plainspoken, so righteous, so clear-eyed. It also turned out to be one of the reasons American schools are actually more segregated today than they were in the late 1960s, since Roberts’ reasoning doesn’t account for the ways Americans choose to segregate themselves and how the legacy of racial discrimination continues to shape life outcomes in contemporary America.
“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Roberts wrote that in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, a convoluted redistricting case from 2006. Roberts expresses a legitimate concern in his decision, and well-intentioned Americans certainly don’t want to “divvy up” the country by race. But the quote is most notable for revealing Roberts’ disposition towards matters of race. His use of the word “sordid” (suggesting something dirty and distasteful) rather than a more straightforward word like “problematic,” the use of the word “business” to position himself (normally a pro-business guy) against something self-serving, the subsequent use of the phrase “divvying us up” (which draws you, me, him, and every other American into an exercise as base as tiddlywinks), the pretentious way the sentence is constructed: It all suggests this crude talk of race is beneath him, too unpleasant for Roberts to consider, something Martin Luther King, Jr. in an act of national salvation tossed once and for all into the dustbin of history when he dreamt of the day his four children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Yet for all the progress we’ve made as a nation in realizing King’s dream, we still have a long ways to go, meaning we must wrestle with the issue of race no matter how complicated and uncomfortable that may be. Roberts’ sentiment sounds noble, but it also betrays the naïveté at the heart of the Chief Justice’s jurisprudence. The quote won’t age well.
Roberts’ naïveté re-emerged during the final days of the Court’s recently concluded 2022-23 term. We can begin with the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which found Roberts siding with the Court’s other five conservatives in the majority. I wrote about this case before, so a quick summary will do. 303 Creative LLC concerns a wedding website designer in Colorado who does not want to design wedding websites for same-sex couples on account of her religion. Colorado law makes it illegal for businesses open to the public to discriminate against LGBTQ people. The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, sided with the website designer, arguing the First Amendment does not allow the government to compel an individual to say something that individual does not want to say.
Some commentators have argued this is a fairly narrow ruling, since it focuses on freedom of speech rather than freedom of religion and applies only to businesses involved in creating commissioned expressive content. Consequently, Gorsuch assures us (and presumably Roberts as well) this decision won’t allow hotels to begin turning away Black customers or Jewish customers on account of the hotel owner’s religious beliefs, since the provision of lodging is strictly a commercial activity and not speech. And while the ruling may allow a portraitist for hire who creates original, expressive works of art to turn away a Black or Jewish patron (or any patron, for that matter) it would not allow a house painter for hire to do the same.
Yet narrow as this ruling may appear, I worry it’s opened a door the conservatives on the Court are prepared to kick wide open. The issue here is that the Court’s conservatives are overly deferential to religion. They treat it as a belief system that not only deserves as much protection as any other secular belief system but also as a belief system that deserves greater public accommodation than other secular belief systems. Their intention seems to be to destroy the wall of separation between church and state and then excuse religious institutions from rules the state has put in place to regulate the behavior of secular institutions, thus favoring not any one religion over another but religious entities or religious concerns generally. A worry of mine is that the Court will soon affirm that parents can use publicly-funded school vouchers at both secular and religious schools but that the state cannot intervene in the operations of religious schools despite the flow of public money to those schools. That would effectively make religion neither a distinct nor equal but preferred institution in the United States.
Some might argue I’m overly worked up over this because 303 Creative LLC is a freedom of speech case rather than a freedom of religion case, to which I respond, “The freedom to say what exactly?” This website designer didn’t invoke a secular reason when she refused to work for a couple on account of their sexual orientation. Had she done that—“Sorry, I don’t serve gay people because I don’t like them”—she would have been in clear violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. This isn’t simply a case about speech, but about religious speech, and that’s critical because speech laced with religion is the only way this website designer could muster enough constitutional might to counter the state’s anti-discrimination statute and deny service to a same-sex couple.
I can imagine scenarios in which that would be legally permissible. Someone who operates a business that caters specifically to a religious clientele (i.e., a Christian bookstore) rather than the general public would likely qualify. But businesses open to the general public and serving a general function don’t, and it seems to me that’s what’s going on with 303 Creative LLC. The business owner isn’t being asked to bless or endorse a wedding any more than creating a website for an opposite-sex couple blesses or endorses their wedding. Religion is the excuse used by a business that isn’t really any different from other businesses in the public marketplace to circumvent a public law.
303 Creative LLC comes close to creating a religious exemption from public law, and it is naïve to believe this is as far as the religious right intends to take this ruling. The next step is obvious: For the owner of a business to say the very operation of their business is a personal form of expression, because, after all
and why wouldn’t the creation and operation of a business flow from some sense of vocation, belief, or mission? The Court has already hinted at that in the Hobby Lobby case. It’s hardly a stretch to imagine a businessman who, inspired by his faith, opens a safe and wholesome chain of hotels to serve wayward travelers…except those he objects to on account of his faith, be they Black or Jewish or LGBTQ. I don’t put it beyond this Court to conclude we must tolerate otherwise unconstitutional acts of intolerance in the name of tolerance.
One final note on 303 Creative LLC: Some have argued we wouldn’t be in this position if the LGBTQ community hadn’t become moralizing bullies determined to force a hesitant nation to accept their way of life. The irony is that the gay couple that “bullied” the owner of Creative LLC into creating a same-sex wedding website doesn’t actually exist, which means this dispute doesn’t exist, which means this lawsuit shouldn’t exist. Yet for some reason, the Court accepted and heard this case and handed down its ruling during the last week of its term, a time reserved for the release of its most momentous decisions. I’m not naïve enough to believe this imaginary case isn’t therefore serving some greater legal purpose. I would hope the Chief Justice of the United States wouldn’t be so naïve either, but, well, note to security at the Supreme Court: If one of these shows up outside your building
be careful: John Roberts may let it in.
The other major case decided at the end of June—this one authored by Roberts himself—was Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard. This is the case that held race-based affirmative action policies used in college admissions processes violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Liberals and Democrats are claiming SFFA is further proof of just how out of step the Supreme Court is with the American public, but that’s not quite right. A snap poll conducted by ABC News found 52% of the American people supported the decision (including 58% of independents and 26% of Democrats) while only 32% disapproved of it. Unlike the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade last year, a majority of the American people backs the Court ending affirmative action.
Majorities, however, aren’t always right, and they aren’t right on this one. One of the reasons some people oppose affirmative action is the result of a basic misunderstanding about the program. They think affirmative action promotes less-qualified minority applicants over more-qualified white applicants, which undermines merit-based systems. But affirmative action only kicks in if all initial qualifications (i.e., high school grades, SAT scores, etc.) are equal. At that point, a college like Harvard takes the race of the applicant (along with such factors as financial aid eligibility, recruited athlete status, and legacy status [familial relationship to an alumnus]) into account. In other words, many Americans think affirmative action means Black students only have to play three quarters to get rewarded while white students have to play a full four-quarter game to win, but it’s more properly understood as one aspect of a tie-breaker held after all students have played a complete game.
Affirmative action in college admissions seeks to address a number of issues. First, it is predicated on the assumption that race is a significant factor shaping life outcomes in the United States. Someone who is white is more likely to have advantages in life because of their race than someone who is Black, while someone who is Black is more likely to face obstacles in life because of their race than someone who is white. Secondly, it attempts to counter any potential racial bias against Blacks in the admissions process itself. Finally, it aims to intentionally increase the diversity of the student body and the college’s graduates, which can enrich life at the university and serve the greater good by helping to create a diverse well-educated society. This last point is an underappreciated benefit of affirmative action, as it helps, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to “secure a more functional [multiracial democracy.]”
Still, many Americans (according to the ABC News poll, 60% of whites, 58% of Asians, 40% of Hispanics, and 25% of Blacks) do not like using race as a factor at all—even as a tie-breaker after everything else is even—in college admissions. For them, favoring Black Americans is just as bad as any system that at one time favored Whites over people of other races. These Americans would much rather use a process that is “colorblind,” a word Chief Justice Roberts uses in his opinion to describe the way he believes the American legal system ought to work.
That word “colorblind” is drawn into Roberts’ opinion from Justice John Harlan’s lone dissent in the notorious 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which found “separate but equal” racial segregation constitutional. There Harlan wrote in words that would condemn his peers and Jim Crow
[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Justice Clarence Thomas also leans on Harlan’s words in his concurrence in SFFA. But as inspiring as those words may be, they’re from a dissent, for Christ’s sake, which proves how novel that argument was not just in the 1890s but in subsequent decades when Plessy was the law of the land. (I shouldn’t need to mention how prevalent racism was in America prior to the 1890s.) Even if we concede the Constitution is or at least ought to be or simply aspires to be “colorblind,” the fact remains Americans (Supreme Court justices included) did not view their country that way throughout much of its history (and resisted mightily when the federal government finally declared Harlan’s view should prevail.)
That’s a history that is foolish to ignore since, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explains in her dissent in SFFA, the legacy of a racially discriminatory society is still etched into our country. It is there in the way land and wealth are distributed amongst the people, in the way school district lines are drawn and educational funds are distributed, in the way neighborhoods are laid out and developed, in law enforcement and health care discrepancies, and in the assumptions that often shade personal interactions. All of these factors can significantly shape the course of lives, and it is likely their negative effects will shape the lives of Black Americans far more than the lives of white Americans. To not account for and not attempt to counter these differences—to be “blind” to the way “color” has structured American life—is to continue to grant yesterday’s racism purchase in today’s society. One cannot just leap from a racist society to a colorblind society without putting the work in, without some sort of intentional effort to see it, counter it, and undo its legacy. (It should also be noted it is a luxury, as many whites profess, not to see color, as many people of color find their attention drawn to color on a regular basis as the result of unsettling and often upsetting interactions with others.)
Even when we strip race from the equation we may find uncomfortable race-based results. When California abolished the use of affirmative action for admission to its state universities in the late 1990s, enrollment of Black and Latino students plummeted. The pursuit of a colorblind admissions process that treated every applicant equally only ended up reinforcing the patterns of racial inequality present in California. SFFA takes that problem a step further. While the Supreme Court ruled colleges can no longer explicitly use race as a factor in the admissions process, it left the legacy criterion untouched, which is problematic since most of Harvard’s alumni are white. The intent of the legacy criterion may not be racial but it will certainly have a racial effect.
A colorblind society composed of colorblind Americans is certainly a noble aspiration, but it is far from realized in practice. Yes, American life today may feature less overt racism and less racial violence than it did a century ago, and Black Americans certainly have more opportunities today than they did fifty years ago, but someone looking at America today has to realize we are not only still trying to realize King’s “colorblind” dream but in danger of backsliding. The number of hate crimes in the United States has surged over the past two years, with Blacks most often the targets of such crimes. The United States elected its first Black president in 2008, but responded eight years later by electing one of the nation’s most overtly racist presidents in its history. Trump’s victory in turn legitimized the presence of white supremacist rhetoric in our national politics, which can be read as a “whitelash” against Obama and a Black Lives Matter movement outraged over police violence directed toward Blacks. Just a few days ago, Oklahoma’s “colorblind” Superintendent of Public Instruction urged an audience not to view the 1921 Tulsa Massacre through the lens of race but as individual-on-individual violence even though the perpetrators of the massacre were white and its thousands of victims Black. A Black woman in California this past week was grabbed and slammed to the ground by the neck, pepper-sprayed, and then arrested by a white police officer for doing nothing more than filming that police officer arrest her husband for allegedly shoplifting a cake.
Chief Justice Roberts would likely be troubled by these acts. In fact, during the past term, Roberts was part of a majority that found some states had illegally used race to gerrymander congressional districts in a way that disadvantaged Black voters. But it takes a tremendous amount of naïveté for a man as politically powerful as Roberts is to insist on deciding momentous national questions by adopting an idealistic, colorblind worldview, particularly when it is not difficult at all to see how the effects of racism still structure American society and as overt racism creeps back into mainstream American life. Roberts runs the risk of allowing his purity to dilute the principles he cherishes and defends. Roberts would be wiser to adapt his constitutional jurisprudence to the practical realities of the nation he serves.
John Roberts may not be a dyed-in-the-wool originalist but the approach appeals to him, so let me remind him of a sentiment expressed by James Madison in Federalist 51: Men are not angels. One cannot assume that by banishing all considerations of race from our public affairs that the residue of racism will drift away and men will no longer discriminate on the basis of race. One shouldn’t assume that a plea for religious tolerance won’t actually empower the intolerant. One can’t assume his peers are incorruptible and don’t need a code of ethics. (Yeah, when it comes to naïveté, there’s that too.) I’ll give Roberts the benefit of the doubt. I believe his intentions are pure. But that’s not enough to defend the principles our Constitution enshrines.
Signals and Noise
“Everybody wants a Blizzard. What the hell is a Blizzard?”—Don Trump, upon setting foot in a Dairy Queen in Iowa.
Trump claims the government is using the legal system to persecute him. Here, according to ABC News, are the twenty-seven political foes Trump himself has said ought to be indicted or jailed:
Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin
Former FBI attorney James Baker
President Joe Biden
Former national security adviser John Bolton
Former CIA Director John Brennan
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
Former President Bill Clinton
2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton’s lawyer
Former FBI Director James Comey
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch
Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe
Former special counsel Robert Mueller
Former President Barack Obama
Justice Department official Bruce Ohr
Bruce Ohr’s wife
Former FBI attorney Lisa Page
Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Steele Dossier author Christopher Steele
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok
Prosecutor Andrew Weissman
Leigh Ann Caldwell, Josh Dawsey, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez of the Washington Post report Trump pressured Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Marc Caputo of The Messenger writes Trump will likely clinch the GOP nomination with a win in Iowa, where he has surged in the polls following his recent indictments.
Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast argues Chris Christie is the only GOP presidential candidate who understands what it means to run against Trump.
Hey, Ron DeSantis is only behind Trump by one point in Wisconsin!
“I’m somebody that, I don’t really buy into ‘the rich need to pay their fair share [of taxes].’”—Mike Pence, during a campaign stop in Iowa.
The Economist profiles the right-wing Moms For Liberty group and the aggressive efforts by Republican presidential candidates to win their support.
Josh Kraushaar of Axios looks at the Democratic playbook in Pennsylvania.
By David Brooks of the New York Times: “Why Biden Isn’t Getting the Credit He Deserves” (“But the main problem is national psychology. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives is nearly four times as high as their satisfaction with the state of the nation. That’s likely because during the Trump era we have suffered a collective moral injury, a collective loss of confidence, a loss of faith in ourselves as a nation….You can’t argue people out of that psychological and moral state with statistics and fact sheets. Biden is going to have to serve as a national guide, not just an administrator. He has to get outside the protective walls that have been built around him and make himself the center of the nation’s attention, not Trump. He’ll have to come up with a 21st-century national story that gives people a sense of coherence and belonging — that we are marching in a clear direction toward some concrete set of goals.”)
Sue Halpern of The New Yorker asks “What is No Labels Trying to Do?” Her answer: “The fundamental fallacy at the heart of the No Labels effort is that there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties—that both favor extremists. Everything we know from recent history demonstrates that this is not true. This feigned evenhandedness disguises what seems to be an inevitable effect of No Labels’ ‘insurance policy’: a paving of the way for a candidate who will not challenge the current constellation of wealth and power.” Meanwhile, Lee Drutman and Beau Tremitiere write in The Bulwark about “fusion voting” and why the 2024 race could use a third party but not a third candidate.
Russell Berman of The Atlantic looks at whether proportional representation could fix American democracy.
Thomas Edsall of the New York Times notes a key demographic trend shaping the 2024 election: “One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million. Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million. These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump. President Biden won white people with college degrees in 2020, 51 to 48 percent, but Trump won by a landslide, 67 to 32 percent, among white people without degrees, according to network exit polls.”
Moderate House Republicans worried about their re-election chances are pushing back against rebellious MAGA Republicans upset over McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal.
The right-wing House Freedom Caucus voted to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene from its ranks but it’s not clear if that actually happened. UPDATE: Greene is now apparently ghosting Freedom Caucus members to avoid being expelled, if that’s actually what happened.
A Trump-appointed judge has issued an injunction prohibiting certain government agencies from meeting and communicating with social media companies about “protected speech.” The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri who claim the government went too far in encouraging social media companies to clamp down on posts concerning vaccine hesitancy and the validity of elections.
Get ready for the new-but-old conspiracy theory: Voting machine manipulation.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers used the line-item veto to extend annual spending increases for public schools for the next four centuries. Here’s the text he struck to accomplish that: “For the limit for
the2023-24 school year and the 2024-25school year, add $325 to the result under par. (b).” (It may be hard to see, but the hyphen between “2024-25” is struck to create the year “2425”.) Sounds like a stratagem, but not sure how far $325 will get you in the 25th century.The Democratic-led state government of Maine has partially decriminalized sex work. The new law will eliminate penalties for those who sell sex but leave in place penalties for those who purchase it.
Republican Larry Householder, the former Speaker of the Ohio House, was sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison for orchestrating a $60 million bribery scheme.
Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams has carried around a weathered photo of a police officer friend who died in the line of duty in 1987. But the New York Times reports members of Adams’ staff created and weathered the picture for him after he claimed to have it in his pocket.
Daily undocumented migrant crossings are down 50% since March, but officials don’t expect that decline to last.
Between the evening of June 30 and the morning of July 5, twenty people were killed and 126 people wounded during 22 mass shootings in the United States.
State revenues are projected to decline 0.7% this year, a reversal from previous years when COVID relief funds bolstered state finances. The decline is also a product of a shaky economic outlook and widespread tax cuts.
Citing a solid jobs market and stable household incomes, economists at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase have lowered the odds that the United States will soon enter a recession.
An inflation index tracked by the Federal Reserve showed inflation at its lowest level since April 2021.
The world’s 500 richest people added $852 billion to their accumulated wealth through the first half of 2023. That’s an average of $14 million per day each over the past six months.
Michael Sasso and Alexandre Tanzi of Bloomberg look at how the core of the American economy is shifting to the southeast.
By Michael Brenes of Foreign Affairs: “How America Broke Its War Machine” (“Shortages in production, inadequate labor pools, and interruptions in supply chains have hamstrung the United States’ ability to deliver weapons to Ukraine and enhance the country’s defense capabilities more broadly. These problems have much to do with the history of the U.S. defense industry since World War II. Creeping privatization during the Cold War, along with diminished federal investment and oversight of defense contracting since the 1960s, helped bring about the inefficiency, waste, and lack of prioritization that are complicating U.S. assistance to Ukraine today.”)
President Biden has approved supplying Ukraine with cluster bombs, a weapon banned by most countries in the world but that Russia has been using.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian explain in Time how Vladimir Putin has cannibalized the Russian economy to fund his war in Ukraine.
The U.K. defense chief stated Russia has lost half its combat capability and is currently incapable of launching an offensive in Ukraine.
Russian media has indicated Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin—recently exiled to Belarus—is in St. Petersburg.
The German far-right is surging in popularity, which is definitely not the sort of news you want to hear.
By Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal: “Taiwain’s Impossible Choice: Be Ukraine or Hong Kong”
European nations have invested billions in hydrogen fuel production, but the United States’ recently enacted clean energy subsidies are luring production facilities and green energy jobs across the Atlantic.
The world registered its hottest day on record on July 3rd. The average global temperature was 62.6 Fahrenheit. Even the Argentine Islands of Antarctica (currently in winter) set a new July high at 47.6 Fahrenheit. (UPDATE: July 4th was actually hotter.)
Garbage Time: The Los Angeles Angels are Staring Down a Problem the Size of Babe Ruth
(Garbage Time theme song here)
The MLB All-Star break is upon us, so it’s a good time to check in on the big leagues. And I must say: If you haven’t been checking out baseball this season, you’ve been missing out.
For the first time ever, MLB has introduced a clock to the game, giving batters a limited amount of time to get set in the batter’s box between pitches and pitchers a limited amount of time to deliver the ball to the plate. As a result, games that have been a slog to watch in recent years are now brisk, clocking in on average at about two-and-a-half hours (which is how long games tended to last forty years ago.) On more than one occasion, I’ve put a game on and found myself in the fifth inning after just an hour of viewing. It’s easy to get sucked into a game when that happens.
Maybe some fans visiting the park lament shorter stays. Vendors likely feel the same way. And faster games mean good announcers have less time to shine, although it also makes bad announcing more bearable. Those are small quibbles, though. The game’s quicker pace has not only resulted in more engaging games but seems to have electrified play as well. When pitchers have their stuff working, they mow down line-ups; when they don’t, they have nowhere to hide and get banged around by offenses. In that moment, teams need to rely more on their defenses to get them out of innings.
A few other rule changes have also made baseball more exciting this year. Banning the shift has opened up holes in the infield, so much so that I hope MLB can impose a rule that somehow keeps middle infielders even further away from second base pre-pitch so we can be treated to more Ozzie Smith-style web gems. Players are stealing more, too, with the average team attempting just under one stolen base attempt per game, which is up by about 40% from last season. (Some teams, like the Padres, Pirates, Rays, and Reds run at nearly double last year’s rates.) Some may attribute that change to bigger bases, but I suspect limiting the number of times a pitcher can try to pick-off a runner per at-bat coupled with the ever expiring pitch clock has mattered more. In games I’ve watched, a failed pick-off attempt is practically a green light for baserunners.
There are a ton of great storylines to follow this year. The Atlanta Braves, at 59-28, are a juggernaut starring Ronald Acuna, Jr., the runaway favorite to win the NL MVP Award this year. Acuna suffered a leg injury in July 2021 that cost him the rest of that season and kept him from contributing to Atlanta’s World Series championship run that year. It took him a while to regain his form in 2022, but now, at age 25, he is at the peak of his powers. This past week he became the first player ever to hit 20 home runs, collect 50 RBI, and steal 40 bases before the All-Star break. He’s hitting .333 as well, which is good enough for second in the NL.
The Braves are absconding with the NL East, but not only are the Philadelphia Phillies, last year’s World Series runners-up, surging (currently 48-40 but 25-9 since the start of June) but the surprising Miami Marlins are challenging for the second-best record in the National League. While last year’s Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara has disappointed, second baseman Luis Arráez has kept baseball fans checking in on the Fish daily as he flirts with a .400 batting average. Despite a 9 game hitting streak that’s part of a 20-for-21 game run, his average has recently dipped to .388. Still, Arráez is locked in, and he tallied three 5-5 games at the plate in June. The only other players who have ever achieved that feat in a calendar month are Hall of Famers George Sisler, Ty Cobb, and Dave Winfield.
Rookie Corbin Carroll (18 HR/48 RBI/.292 BA) has more than lived up to expectations for the NL West leading Arizona Diamondbacks, becoming the first rookie ever to hit 15 home runs and steal 25 bases before the All-Star game. But the most exciting debut belongs to the Cincinnati Reds’ brash Elly De La Cruz. After being called up to the majors, De La Cruz crushed his first home run 458 feet, robbed five bases, recorded a sub-11-second triple, and threw a ball from the left side of the infield to first at 96 mph. And that was just during his first week. In his twelfth game, he hit for the cycle the hard way by saving the triple for last. After Nationals manager Dave Martinez asked umpires to inspect De La Cruz’s bat, the 6’5” phenom clobbered a 455 foot home run and then taunted the Nats’ bench by pointing at his bat. (As I write this, De La Cruz just stole second, third, and now home, all in a span of two pitches, humiliating divisional rival Milwaukee in the process.)
At the time of De La Cruz’s call-up, the Reds were 27-33; since then Cincinnati has gone 22-6 and now sits atop the NL Central.
If Miami, Cincinnati, and Arizona have surprised in the National League, the Mets, Padres, and Cardinals have stunk it up. The Mets own MLB’s highest payroll and, even after a recent six-game win streak, a sub-.500 record. Whatever was clicking for Buck Showalter’s team last year isn’t this season, and ownership has threatened a fire sale if they don’t turn it around. (If you want to watch a team lose a game in bad fashion, check this soulcrusher out.) The Padres are far too talented to sport a 41-47 record and seem to lack the ability to capitalize on any momentum. Fitting, then, that San Diego and New York are duking it out this weekend before the break. As for the 37-52 St. Louis Cardinals—the most sanctimonious franchise in all of professional sports—well, let me just say this epic collapse couldn’t have happened to a more off-putting organization. I’m posting this here so any Cardinals fan who stumbles onto this page knows they’re damned, too.
If there’s any justice in this universe, this is hopefully the beginning of a century’s worth of misery and agony for the Redbirds and their fans.
Over in the American League, the best divisional race in baseball is taking place in the East, where every team is over .500. The Rays (whose shortstop, Wander Franco, has the third-highest WAR of the season but for some bizarre reason only got named to the All-Star team as an injury replacement, and for an outfielder nonetheless) started the season with a 13-game win streak and a 47-19 record before going 10-16 over their last 26 games to come back to the pack a bit. They’ve still got the best record in the AL, but the youth movement in Baltimore currently has the Orioles knocking on their door. The Blue Jays and Yankees (who, unfortunately, are without slugger Aaron Judge for an uncertain amount of time after the outfielder ran into a wall at Dodger Stadium and knocked it down) are jostling for third in the division. Depending on how well the second-place Houston Astros fare in the AL West (where they currently trail the Texas Rangers by three games) all three wild card teams could come from the AL East. As for Boston: Hey, no one really expected them to be four games above .500 at this point in the season, so let’s call that a win.
In other news, here’s a proposal for Rob Manfred: Trade Luis Robert, Jr. away from the White Sox and relegate every team in the AL Central to the International League. As of Saturday afternoon, no team in the division has a winning record. (UPDATE: Cleveland has just won a game to push their record to 45-44.) How dismal is this division? I was writing this article—this very paragraph, in fact—while watching Saturday’s Toronto-Detroit game and didn’t realize the Tigers had a combined no-hitter going until they were two outs into the ninth inning. (UPDATE: Detroit completed the no-hitter.)
Which brings me finally to the AL West, home of the truly atrocious (but really no worse than the Kansas City Royals) Philadelphia Kansas City Oakland Las Vegas no, still Oakland Athletics. But the team we need to talk about is the Los Angeles Angels.
A brief history: The Angels won the World Series in 2002 and won the AL West five out of the following seven seasons. Their star player for most of that time was Vladimir Guerrero, Sr., a feared slugger who signed with the team in 2004, won the AL MVP Award that year, and collected a Silver Slugger trophy every year between 2004 and 2007. Guerrero left the Angels in 2010, but in 2012, the team signed veteran first baseman Albert Pujols—widely regarded as the best player of his generation—and brought up from the minors a young outfielder named Mike Trout. According to Baseball-Reference.com, Pujols’ player profile most closely resembles that of Henry Aaron, but his time in Anaheim was rather underwhelming as he never recaptured the form that garnered him three MVPs in St. Louis.
But if Pujols didn’t look like an all-time player during his time with the Halos, Mike Trout certainly did, winning rookie of the year in 2012; the AL MVP Award in 2014, 2016, and 2019; and putting up numbers between 2015 and 2020 that, depending on the year, essentially made him an analogue of either Frank Robinson or Mickey Mantle. It should go without saying that Trout is the best player of his generation. Yet despite having the modern-day equivalents of Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle together in their lineup, the Angels have only played three playoff games with Mike Trout on their roster.
And then, in 2018, the Angels added the modern-day equivalent of Babe Ruth to their team.
There is really no doubt that Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player of all time. That’s because not only could Ruth hit (and in the process make his name synonymous with the sport itself) but before he was known for hitting home runs, he was widely regarded as one of the best pitchers of his generation. Players no long specialize in both hitting and pitching as Ruth did; those that have tried have not managed to do both well at the same time.
That is, until Japanese phenom Shohei Ohtani signed with the Angels in 2018. Ohtani won the AL Rookie of the Year Award that year, won the AL MVP Award in 2021, and was only denied the award last year after Aaron Judge put up Ruthian numbers himself by hitting 62 home runs in a single season. Ohtani is probably not destined to go down in history as an all-time great pitcher, but he is good enough to not only make the All-Star team as a pitcher but be in the running to start the game. As for his hitting, well, we’re a little more than halfway through the season and he’s sitting on 31 32 home runs. You do the math.
Jeff Passan of ESPN recently wrote an article reviewing Ohtani’s monstrous month of June. In that month, Ohtani hit .394 and led MLB in on-base percentage (.492), slugging percentage (.952), OPS (1.444), home runs (15), RBI (29), extra-base hits (25), and total bases (99). Additionally, over 30+ innings on the mound, Ohtani struck out 37 batters, compiled a 3.26 ERA, and held opponents to a .288/.302/.368 slash line. Passan compared Ohtani’s offensive production that month to other players’ monthly production and found Ohtani’s June ranks among the top 20-25 months any player in MLB history has ever had. Once the more pedestrian pitching numbers are added, though, Ohtani separates himself from the pack. The only other month comparable is—you guessed it—Babe Ruth’s June 1919, when Ruth was both hitting and pitching for the Red Sox, and Ruth still comes up short. As Passan concluded
In June, Shohei Ohtani concocted one of the greatest monthlong offensive showings in baseball history. Not the best, certainly among the top 25, probably in the top 20. Combine it with his pitching, though, and…against the greatest array of talent ever assembled in the game, with the world watching, he had the greatest month of baseball anyone has ever seen.
Yet despite the presence of Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth in their lineup (Pujols has since retired) the Angels have never managed to make it to the playoffs and may not this year either, as they currently own a 45-45 45-46 record. Their prospects for turning this season around are diminishing by the minute. This past week, Trout was hit by a pitch and fractured a bone in his wrist, putting him on the IL for an indefinite period of time. (Trout has lost much playing time to injuries over the past three years.) Trout is also getting older and, according to Baseball-Reference.com, is beginning to look a little more like Brooklyn great Duke Snider than Mickey Mantle. Ohtani needed to leave his most recent start due to a blister on a finger (which has robbed us of the chance to once again see him start as both DH and pitcher in the All-Star Game.) And even if the Angels get their act together, they’ll either need to pass three teams and overcome a 7.5 game deficit to win their division or pass three other teams and displace either the Yankees or Blue Jays (currently 4 games ahead of them in the standings) to crack the wild card. That’s not an impossible task, but it involves a lot of moving parts and requires a stunningly mediocre team with a history of mediocrity to play better than they appear capable of at the moment.
Even if the Angels squeeze into the playoffs, one has to wonder if they’re set up to make a deep run into October. Angels management may conclude they don’t have the luxury of waiting to find out: The problem is Ohtani will become a free agent at the end of this season, and there are certainly teams that covet the talents of Babe 2.0 and will pay top dollar to acquire him before the August 1 trade deadline. Complicating matters is that Los Angeles handed Trout a 12-year, $426.5 million contract in 2019 and may not be able to afford two superstar contracts that will total close to if not over $1 billion. (The Angels may also be wondering if it’s wise to pay two all-time great players big bucks to take the field in their thirties; Trout will turn 32 in August, while Ohtani just turned 29 last Wednesday.) Ohtani may also be questioning the competitive savvy of the Angels organization given their struggles over the past twenty years. For someone who has so dramatically set himself apart from virtually every player who has ever played the game, a World Series ring still eludes him.
If the Angels are going to let Ohtani walk or think he’ll sign with another team in free agency, they should trade him as soon as possible for a haul of talent. That would certainly demoralize their fanbase, and team executives have to be uneasy about trading the 21st century’s version of Babe Ruth. (Ask the Red Sox how that turned out for them.) Yet if Ohtani isn’t part of the Angel’s future, the Angels need to flip him for it. Complicating matters is that Ohtani may only be a 2-3 month rental for a team with pressing World Series aspirations. His trade value plummets every day he languishes in Anaheim.
I suspect you’ll see Ohtani next season in Chavez Ravine playing for the L.A. team with a reputation for both buying and developing talent. Seeing Ohtani in Dodger blue will smart for Angels fans, especially after the Dodgers win a World Series with him in their lineup. But setting that prophecy aside, the main drama in Major League Baseball over the next few weeks will center on Shohei Ohtani and how the Los Angeles Angels manage a problem of Ruthian proportions.