Unlike the College Football Playoff Committee with respect to the selection of the College Football Playoff field and rankings, I am willing to declare both that I am biased and the precise nature of my bias. In that regard, I am biased, and my bias is that I am opposed to the College Football Playoff Committee itself. To be sure, that bias is not one recently or hastily adopted but, instead, long-held and deep-seated. My public writings dating back to 2013confirm thefortitude ofmy bias.
With that noble acknowledgement decreed, I present ALDLAND’s final 2025 College Football Playoff rankings for purposes of playoff seeding:
Indiana
Georgia
Ohio State
Texas Tech
Vanderbilt
Texas A&M
Ole Miss
Oregon
Oklahoma
Miami
Notre Dame
Texas
The reasoning behind these rankings ought to be fairly obvious, but I will add a note regarding the Group of Five’s total exclusion: I acknowledge that the prior exclusion of arguably worthy representatives of the Group of Five from the formal contesting of the national championship under previous regimes was a significant driver of the change to the expanded-playoff format, that did not and does not now mean that there is at least one such worthy representative every year, and there is no such worthy representative this year.
Beginning last week, flags across the United States flew at half mast following the announcement of the passing of former Grateful Dead vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux. In the 1960s, the Alabama native began her professional singing career in the nearby Muscle Shoals scene, where she backed Percy Sledge on “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and continuing up to Memphis to back Elvis on “Suspicious Minds.” During this period, she also provided vocal support for other recording artists, including Duane Allman, Boz Scaggs, Cher, and Neil Diamond.
The following year, 1970, Donna sought a change of scene in San Francisco. By the end of that year she had met and married her husband, keyboardist Keith Godchaux, and experienced her first Grateful Dead concert, likely an October 4 or 5 date at Winterland. Describing the show a a “spiritual” experience, she soon introduced herself to Jerry Garcia and informed him that her husband would be the band’s new piano player. Keith joined the band in 1971, and Donna did the same shortly thereafter. With founding member Pigpen’s vocals and organ work in decline (and all the way gone by 1972),* the Godchaux’s tenure with the band, which extended until 1979, marks what many consider the Grateful Dead’s best era.
We had the good fortune of catching Donna on stage in a surprise appearance with her former bandmates Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart during Dead & Company’s headlining appearance at Bonnaroo in 2016. (So far as I know, it marked her only appearance with that group.) For a first live experience of Grateful Dead music from a band of original members, it was hard to imagine topping this.
A musical life of this breadth merits multiple selections. Here are my four selections for this week’s jam:
* For a fun taste of this interesting transition period– between 1971-72, Keith and then Donna joined the band, while Mickey Hart (temporarily) and Pigpen (permanently) departed– check out December 10, 1971. That night in St. Louis found the Dead in a rare six-man lineup amidst the crossing lines of those four members.
Let’s be more direct: Ohtani just had the greatest individual game in postseason history. On the mound, he threw six scoreless innings, allowing two hits and three walks while striking out 10. He got pulled after giving up two straight baserunners to start the seventh, which kind of mucked up his line, which is ironic, because that’s what the Dodgers offense has been doing to other starting pitchers over the past two weeks.
At the plate: 3-for-3 with a walk. All of those hits were solo home runs: 116.5 mph off the bat and 446 feet in the first, 116.9 mph and 469 feet in the fourth, 113.6 mph and 427 feet to center in the seventh. That second one, man, what a tank.
This is the perfect distillation of the value proposition for Ohtani. Given that this win, 5-1 over the Brewers in NLCS Game 4, clinched the pennant for the Dodgers, either one of those performances would’ve been memorable-bordering-on-legendary for Dodger fans. Put together? Well, after that fourth-inning home run, I started asking that question from a couple paragraphs back: Was this the best game in playoff history? … Read More
To be sure, I would not blame anybody for downgrading Detroit after Tarik Skubal surrendered a grand slam during a five-run seventh inning that ignominiously crowned a Tigers loss last night to a vagrant team playing in a minor-league park. Far from the August heater the team generated to fuel their run to the 2024 postseason, however, these Tigers have struggled in the second half with the likes of the Twins, Pirates, and A’s in a manner belying a true talent level perhaps somewhere below their overall winning percentage. And Javy Baez doing that bad thing again feels like a microcosm of team-wide regression trends in action:
But BP’s PECOTA conceded none of that reasonable skepticism. It said this final outcome was a guaranteed certainty; no hedge, error margin, or other reservation of any kind. Presumably, it knew that Skubal could have a bad night, Baez could turn back into a pumpkin, and Jack Flaherty could continue to melt down, but it said it was not concerned. Having crossed that triple-digit threshold of certitude, it probably did not love what it saw in Sacramento last night, but one envisioned PECOTA taking that on the chin with an unwavering forward stare into a known and unavoidable future.
In short, once you go to 100%, you simply cannot go back. Again a concession from me: I will grant force majeure: If the season suddenly and prematurely ended due to a public-health catastrophe, war, or series of natural or Manfred-made disasters, then PECOTA probably gets a pass. Short of that, though? If 100% means Fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice, baseball robot? My promise to the ALDLAND readers is that I will not be fooled again.
You serious, Clark? Yes. As basically first reported by ALDLAND.com months ago, the Detroit Tigers have clinched a spot in the 2025 MLB playoffs. Look for yourself:
Yesterday, D’Juan Epps, apparently a fundraiser for Vanderbilt’s official student-athlete name, image, and likeness organization and an “associate director” within the university athletic department, filed a lawsuit seeking the recovery of unpaid fundraising commissions.
Epps’ suit, filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia, names Student Athlete NIL LLC (“SANIL”) as the sole defendant and describes work performed in connection with Anchor Impact. According to a university website, Anchor Impact is “the official collective for Vanderbilt Athletics.” SANIL is a Delaware company registered to do business in Georgia, apparently a nationwide vendor assisting schools with the administration of their official NIL programs. SANIL’s principal office in Georgia appears to be a residence in Marietta associated with Susan Gout, a sports marketing professional. Records identify Gout, a Penn State alum, as SANIL’s registered agent.
An undated interview describes Epps as Anchor Impact’s “general manager,” and it quotes his description of Anchor Impact’s “join[ing] forces with [SANIL] in an initiative that will significantly impact the lives of Vanderbilt’s student-athletes. The world of college athletics is evolving, and this partnership will empower these young men and women to navigate the complexities of name, image and likeness opportunities while fostering their personal and professional growth.” Two years ago, Epps went on camera to discuss how Anchor Impact helped student-athletes partner with community nonprofit causes.
In his lawsuit, Epps alleges he raised about $3.5 million for Anchor Impact; that a contract between him and SANIL entitled him to uncapped commissions on that amount; and that SANIL did not pay him his full commission. He further alleges that, while he is a resident of Murfreesboro, business transactions relevant to his case occurred in Georgia. Records indicate that SANIL has not yet been served with or appeared in the lawsuit.
Vanderbilt athletic recruiting was in the legal news last year, when breakout star transfer quarterback Diego Pavia scored a preliminary court victory allowing him another year of eligibility with the Commodores in 2025. While the NCAA seemingly acquiesced to the ruling, voluntarily extending its effect to other, similarly situated student-athletes, it later appealed, seeking reversal. That appeal remains pending.
The potential consequences of the dispute between Epps and SANIL would seem to be narrower than those of Pavia’s case, but we still will keep an eye on it.
If you thought 2025 was the year ALDLAND let Rob Manfred off the hook, you thought wrong. See above and at MLB.tv for access to what’s becoming a tradition unlike any other: MLB.TV briefly goes on sale in early May for an assertedly steep discount that more often than not hooks your correspondent but also compels him to stir up an old screed about the league’s poor media conduct. Before you click over there to grab the deal, recall this commentary on the same offering from 2022:
Readers of this website know that this author is among the last people on Earth who would go out of his way to promote an MLBAM business decision, but here you are, reading a post by me notifying you that MLB.tv is on sale today for a loosely speaking fair-ish price.
Of course, this occasion mostly serves as a reminder of MLB’s callous media-distribution practices. Six years ago, the league settled an antitrust lawsuit attacking things like its telecast blackout policy and centralized MLB.tv product by agreeing to make pricing and offering concessions to fans. Specifically, the seasonal price of the full MLB.tv package at that time would drop from $129.99 to $109.99, and the league would create a new, single-team package at a seasonal price of $84.99. These prices were to remain fixed for five years (i.e., through the 2020 season), subject to annual increases only up to the higher of three percent or the rate of inflation.
Now, that settlement agreement has expired, and MLB is seizing the opportunity to undo its effects. Most obviously, across-the-board pricing is up, doubly insulting as the league simultaneously excludes games from the full MLB.tv package for the benefit of its new partnerships with NBC and Apple.
Perhaps even more underhanded, however, is the soft killing of the single-team MLB.tv package. When first offered, the single-team option was priced at seventy-seven-percent of the full package price, then a twenty-five-dollar difference. MLB now has aggressively closed that gap. At today’s sale pricing, for example, the cost of the single-team option has jumped to eighty-six-percent of the full package price, just a ten-dollar difference. Stated otherwise, someone considering a single-team package can receive a thirty-fold increase in programming for just ten additional dollars. “Even you dummies know that’s a good deal,” fans hear Rob Manfred saying in their heads, even as they wonder why it doesn’t quite feel like a deal. The move to neutralize the single-team package feels like a purely spiteful move designed to achieve the functional undoing of one of the settlement agreement’s most visible achievements without any meaningful cost savings to MLB.
As I have been writing here for years, the message should be a simple one: “Rather than changing the game he wants people to watch . . . Manfred ought to change the way people can watch the game, obviously by making it easier for them to do so.” For how much longer can Manfred continue to squeeze baseball’s fans– including, as a recent example, Padres fans required to purchase yet another streaming service to watch this morning’s Peacock-exclusive game against the Atlanta Braves beginning at 8:35 am San Diego time– remains to be seen.
As the traditional regional sports network model of television crumbles, Manfred has not hesitated to recapture territory once ceded to independent providers and the outside revenue streams they created. The result, for now, is that MLB.tv now includes in-market offerings for ten teams: the Athletics, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Guardians, Giants, Mets, Padres, Phillies, Rockies, and Twins. I naturally hesitate to call this a sign of progress, since the intent does not appear to be in the direction of eliminating blackouts, for example. But maybe it’s a start, and at least people in Sacramento have another way to follow their newfound MLB team.
Entering Opening Day, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA announced the Tigers’ playoff odds at below twenty-percent. FanGraphs’ ZiPS, while less hateful, still came in worse than a coin flip at under forty-four-percent. Then Detroit started playing the games. And then they started winning the games. In fact, they won nineteen games before May 1 for the first time in their 124-year history, and, the next day, they became the first AL team to reach twenty wins on the season.
Some bitter Cleveland fans pointed out that Detroit has notched all of those wins while playing a lot of teams with sub-.500 records. That may be true. I don’t know. I do know that, according to ESPN, the Tigers overall have faced the tenth-toughest opponent schedule to date, while the rest of the AL Central has been coasting on cupcakes:
Regardless, postseason eligibility depends on standings, and standings depend only on wins, and wins are wins, and the Tigers now have twenty wins in a month’s worth of games that even PECOTA and ZiPS can’t ignore. As a result, those playoff odds have skyrocketed. BP is up from 19.9% to 61.1%, and FanGraphs is up from 43.6% to 81.1%!
There inevitably will be fluctuations, but banked wins cannot be unwon, and if relative breakouts from the on-the-ropes gang of Javy Baez, Spencer Torkelson, and Casey Mize can last, so too can this team. At least for right now, this is the fun baseball place.
The Savannah Bananas broke their all-time attendance record on Saturday night when a sold-out crowd of 81,000 people attended their game in Clemson’s football stadium.
The game itself was unlike anything these people had ever seen. Broadcast nationally on ESPN2, the temporary 190-foot short porch in left field led to nearly a dozen home runs. There were mid-game dances and a halftime performance. Outfielders caught flyballs while doing backflips, and fans even helped record outs by catching foul balls.
The Bananas have become baseball’s most polarizing team. Purists will tell you that it’s a silly idea, despite over a million fans showing up to their games last year.
Others say that the Bananas are re-running the same playbook that made the Harlem Globetrotters so popular in the 20th century. But all of these people are wrong. The Bananas are something entirely different. … Read More
Detroit Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson could come crashing down to Earth at any moment. For most people, the only surprising part of that statement would be the suggestion that the former top draft pick’s metaphorical elevation recently has been anywhere other than firmly entrenched beneath Comerica Park’s newly turf-covered keyhole path. But Torkelson has had himself a year in a week, or just about anyway. He clubbed eleven hits in nine games, including two home runs and four doubles, the latest of which walked off a ninth-inning comeback win against the White Sox on Sunday afternoon:
In 2024, Torkelson’s performance across ninety-two games for the Tigers was just above replacement value, contributing 0.1 fWAR. He’s already has bested that and more in a tenth of the time, pacing all Detroit batters (alongside Riley Greene) in 2025 with 0.6 fWAR.
How is the former confirmed bust doing this? To my amateur eye, the key thing looks like pull rate. He isn’t swinging faster or generating more hard contact than before, nor has he increased his launch angle; in fact, all of those things are ticking down in 2025. Instead of trying to spread his contact to all fields, though, Torkelson is absolutely cranking on everything on which he can get his bat to his pull (power) side. Not everybody can be Miguel Cabrera, obviously, and sometimes it can help to stop pretending otherwise.
Probably associated with that, Torkelson also appears to have made a conscious decision to alter his stance, moving back in the batters box and farther away from the plate while widening the angle of his feet. This, one assumes, allows him more time to see balls and turn on the meaty ones.
No, Torkelson is not going to maintain a .474 BABIP over the course of an entire season. But if he says good enough to justify his appearance in the lineup over the course of an entire season, that will be a win. And if he continues to deliver in some more key moments throughout the rest of the season, that’s icing on the cake and, even better, a real reason to rethink Torkelson’s career trajectory.
ALDLAND 