Jeffrey Loria, a self-promoting international art dealer, was intensely disliked in Montreal when he owned the Expos. He used to complain to me about the cartoonish portrayals of him in the city’s newspapers that he said were anti-Semitic. They probably were.

There was, however, nothing anti-Semitic about the intense dislike for him when he sold the Marlins and left Miami in 2017 with the entire sale proceeds of $1.2 billion, claiming he had made no profits and therefore owed the city and the county nothing under terms of their contracts for the construction of the team’s new park.

I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know whether Loria owed any money for the stadium, but I don’t need a law degree to know a bad dude when I see one, and Loria was a bad dude. Baseball only gained when …

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Is there a more anonymous team in the majors? Is there a more unlikely team to be leading its division? Why can’t other teams do what this team has done?

This team is the Tampa Bay Rays, and the Yankees and the Red Sox should be embarrassed playing in the same division with them.

The Rays entered Saturday’s schedule leading the Yankees in the American League East by half a game. The Rays were 6 games ahead of the Red Sox, last year’s World Series champions.

These following figures are mind boggling. According to the Associated Press’ Ron Blum, who in my opinion is the most reliable calculator of Major League Baseball payrolls, the Red Sox began the season with the largest payroll, $221.6 and the Yankees were third at $207.2 million. Where were the Rays? They had …

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Bryce Harper and Manny Machado dominated the baseball talk this past winter. As the class of the free-agent class, they clearly were the primary topics of conversation. Spring training began, and they were still hot topics, maybe even hotter, because they remained unsigned.

Finally, on Feb. 21, Machado’s agent, Dan Lozano, reached agreement with the San Diego Padres on a 10-year $300 million contract.

It came as no surprise that Harper would sign after Machado.

Harper’s agent is Scott Boras, and there was no way Boras was going to let Harper sign first and risk having Machado get a more lucrative contract. There were two reasons …

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