Hello, ho, ho! Here's an important message from Network Rail for anyone who's travelling by train this Christmas and New Year.

We'll be working over the festive period to make improvements to the railway. Most of the network remains open, but some train services will be affected from Sunday the 25th of December until Monday the 2nd of January.

So, to keep your festive plans on track, please check before you travel at nationalrail.co.uk slash Christmas.

Here you go. Here you go.

Cone Tax is the nothing personal word of the day. Today is Tuesday, September 20th, 2022.

It's pretty cool to have a tax named after you in Major League Baseball, a spending tax.

The luxury tax thresholds were argued about when the players and the owners were trying to do a collective bargaining agreement.

And the owners wanted to make sure the luxury tax thresholds were as low as possible. The players wanted to make sure the luxury tax thresholds were as high as possible, because the assumption was that the higher they are, the more payroll that more teams will have and the more money, more players will get to share.

And then there was a special level put in at $290 million a payroll that really is unthinkable to me at least $290 million called the Cone Threshold, which was wanted by owners to try to control the spending of the new owner on the block.

Stephen Cone. He bought the Metz, Metz fans were all excited having flown banners over the stadium for years. Sell will pawn sell the reason we haven't won a World Series since 1986.

The entirety of Coke as life is that the will ponds didn't spend enough. Well, maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. They certainly spent more than we ever spent.

They certainly had some World Series appearances, but haven't won it. I get it. Out goes will pawn incomes Cone and the spending begins right after he says, hey, I'm going to win a World Series in the next three to five years.

We're only in year two. The Metz last night while you were watching, sleeping or not paying attention. All you Metz fans out there are in the playoffs. Yippee.

The New York Metz have made the playoffs. It doesn't mean they've won the division. They're still fighting with the Atlanta Braves for the division. Can you imagine 200 win teams in the same division? That almost never happens.

Except last year when the Dodgers and the Giants did it, but normally it never happens.

So yesterday is a day that owners and team presidents do not look forward to. It's a day when the luxury tax bill comes due and your payrolls get put in a list and printed.

The thing with payrolls is that it's so weird. Imagine the company that you're in and the job that you have. Imagine if you opened the newspaper or went online to the USA today or any plethora of websites.

And there were all the salaries of every employee you and every other employee and then they added it up. And so you could see if you're working it, let's say, I don't know CVS, you could see what everybody's making. And then you could pair it to what everybody's making at Walgreens or Dwayne Reader, shop writer, pick any drugstore you want.

And you imagine that concept sort of always made me queasy that our payrolls and the player salaries were out there. So the list comes out of the teams who are above the luxury tax thresholds.

And we've got ourselves a bit of an interesting situation post CBA. There are wait for it. Six teams over the threshold. There haven't been that many in six years.

You've got the meds, the Dodgers. Can you name them? The Yankees big markets so far. They're doing great. The Phillies fire their manager. They could make the playoffs. They could not not bad.

The Padres, we know they're over the luxury tax threshold because they're so jealous of the Dodgers. They have to spend like drunken sailors trying to make their low revenue team a mid to high revenue team. Good luck with that.

...