There is the regular season, and there is the post-season. Baseball also has an off-season, in which teams make trades and sign free agents. There is, in addition, another season, and we are apparently in it now. Introducing the Silly Season.

Unlike the regular season and the post-season, there are no rules governing the Silly Season. Anyone can play, and many do. Eligibility requires only that you have a silly idea and a place to display it so people can see how silly it is. Ideas can take different forms.

For this Silly Season’s debut, I offer Exhibits A, B and C. I came across A and B on the Internet. Exhibit C came to me in the form of an e-mail from a reader.

Exhibit A

Sports web sites are always looking to post articles in which they proclaim the “10 best” this or the “10 biggest” that. MLB.com and ESPN.com are especially good with those meaningless measurements. Here is a recent assortment of what I am talking about:

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Enough time has passed that my memory could be faulty, but I seem to recall that a year or so ago New York Yankees executives were saying – boasting may be too strong – they planned to get under Major League Baseball’s luxury tax threshold so they could avoid paying millions of dollars in tax and get themselves to the lowest tax rate for next season.

Just as they fell short of reaching the playoffs, the Yankees fell short of achieving their economic goal. The tax threshold was $189 million, and the Yankees’ payroll for luxury tax purposes was $244 million. As a result, they incurred a $27.4 million tax.

Undaunted, the Yankees are now looking to 2019 when they feel confident they will be able to get under the tax threshold, which will be …

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Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, talks a better game than he plays. As a talker, he hits .750; as a player, he bats .091.

We’re not talking baseball here; we’re talking baseball diversity.

We’ve talked baseball diversity often in this column, more often than some readers might like. But every time I think about putting the subject on hold, especially Manfred’s questionable comments and diversity efforts, he or his surrogates make an outrageous or meaningless statement.

More often than not, reporters and headline writers are his unwitting surrogates because they take his comments seriously and mislead their readers, never questioning his actions or lack thereof. No one asks him to explain …

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