Jeff Passin, my friend, when we had you on earlier this month to talk baseball, the hope was that all this off-field nonsense, it cleared out and we'd able to get into some action on the diamond, but anyone paying attention over the past week knows that that is not an option.

What is going on, sir, with the baseball world?

Well, we've got a gambling scandal, Clinton, and generally speaking, those aren't good things.

But they are particularly bad when we're talking about

Shoahotani, the biggest player in the sport,

one of the biggest stars globally in all of sports.

A baseball bombshell involving one of the game's biggest stars the Dodgers

show hey otani his longtime friend and interpreter fired by the Dodgers after

allegations of massive theft to pay gambling debts.

And yet, as our colleague Tisha Thompson

is breaking this enormous scandal

that's just in its nascent stages,

there was another story playing out, a story that was full of palace intrigue

and power struggles and the culmination really of a couple of years of frustration at the Major League Baseball Players Association which for a long time now, you know, its decades of existence has built this reputation as if not the strongest union in the United States, then certainly among the strongest and yet against the backdrop of

show hey otani monopolizing headlines across the sports world is this story that frankly was absolutely fascinating and

involved so many characters and so many different elements that really shed a lot of light on the problems at the

MLBPA and frankly whether they are going to be able to be fixed in time to salvage the

2027 baseball season. I know that's looking far ahead but when you're talking about unions and when you're talking about leagues and talking

about the relationships between them, there may be none that is more fraught and fractured

than in Major League Baseball right now.

Uniforms, gambling, and Game of Thrones style talk.

I only watched like eight episodes of that,

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