problem

Was Edgardo Henriquez the best option to pitch to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in the seventh inning with two outs and runners on the corners?

Maybe, maybe not.

And that was the problem.

The problem was that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts didn’t have a choice that was clearly better than to place the game in the hands of a hard-throwing but unreliable 23-year-old rookie.

Henriquez walked Guerrero on a 99.9-mph fastball that sailed into the opposite batter’s box, evading the grasp of catcher Will Smith and allowing Addison Barger to score.

A manageable two-run deficit was now three and about to become four.

The Dodgers were on their way to a 6-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays on Wednesday night, the Game 5 result placing them at a three-games-to-two deficit in this World Series.

For Roberts, that seventh inning didn’t represent a manager’s nightmare. That was a manager’s night terror.

What else could Roberts do?

Stick with starting pitcher Blake Snell? Snell had already pitched to Guerrero three times and his pitch count was at 116.

Use closer Roki Sasaki as a fireman? He’s their only dependable reliever and Roberts wasn’t about to use him in a non-elimination game in which his team was down.

Turn to last year’s postseason hero Blake …? Never mind, that question isn’t even worth being asked in its entirety.

“It’s hard because you can only push a starter so much,” Roberts said. “I thought Blake emptied the tank.”

The Dodgers somehow concealed their piñata of a bullpen in the three previous rounds of the postseason, but that bullpen is now catching up with them.

Reversing their series deficit will almost certainly require some of their starters to pitch in unfamiliar roles over the next two games, including Shohei Ohtani as an opener on three days’ rest in a potential Game 7.

Snell figures to be a candidate to also pitch in Game 7, perhaps as a middle reliever. Tyler Glasnow is expected to be available out of the bullpen in at least one of the two remaining games.

Besides Sasaki, the relievers can’t be trusted.

In each of the team’s three losses in this series, the games turned when the starting pitcher was removed with men on base. In all three instances, the bullpen made a mess of the game, allowing the inherited runners to score.

“You look at the three games that we lost, it spiraled on us with guys on base,” Roberts said. “Guys got to be better.”

They can’t.

This reality makes the bullpen’s heroic performance in the 18-inning victory in Game 3 all the more miraculous. The Dodgers are fortunate this series isn’t already over.

The construction of this particular bullpen has to be one of the greatest front-office blunders in franchise history, as it could cost the team a World Series in a season in which it has Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and a billion-dollar rotation.

How did this happen?

Start with Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates. The Dodgers committed a combined $85 million to the two relievers and neither of them is even on the roster.

Look at the injured list. Brusdar Graterol missed the entire season with shoulder problems. Evan Phillips underwent Tommy John surgery.

Finally, examine what the Dodgers didn’t do at the trade deadline. Everyone — and by everyone, I mean everyone except Andrew Friedman’s front office — knew they were in desperate need of bullpen help. Counting on some internal solutions working out, the only reliever they acquired was Brock Stewart. The notoriously brittle Stewart went down with a shoulder injury and didn’t pitch in the postseason.

What the Dodgers did was the baseball equivalent of building a breathtaking mansion but forgetting to install any toilets.

Now, the entire residence stinks, the Dodgers one loss away from losing a World Series that should be theirs.

The ex-wife of the Angels employee who gave pitcher Tyler Skaggs fentanyl-laced opioid pills was steadfast in her testimony Monday and Tuesday that Angels executives knew of her then-husband’s opioid abuse for several years before Skaggs died after chopping up and snorting the pills in 2019.

The testimony of Camela Kay directly contradicted that of the Angels then-vice president of communications, Tim Mead, and traveling secretary Tom Taylor, both of whom testified during the first week of a trial in Orange County Superior Court that is expected to last until December.

Skaggs’ widow, Carli, and his parents, Debbie Hetman and Darrell Skaggs, are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Angels and are seeking $118 million in lost earnings, unspecified damages for pain and suffering plus punitive damages.

Camela Kay’s testimony fortified the Skaggs family’s contention that the Angels knew that Eric Kay — the team’s communications director of 23 years who is now serving a 22-year prison term for his role in Skaggs’ death — had serious drug problems and that his supervisors and co-workers did not follow team and Major League Baseball policies in dealing with the issues.

Leah Graham, another in the Skaggs family’s deep roster of accomplished attorneys, questioned Camela Kay, taking her through a timeline beginning in 2013 when she first recognized that her husband had a drug problem.

During an Angels road trip to New York to play the Yankees, Eric admitted to her, “I take five Vicodin a day,” Camela testified. She said he made the admission in front of Mead and Taylor, whom she described as shocked, and they told her they “were going to do whatever they could to help him.”

She continued to suspect illicit drug use, however, and the issues came to the forefront in 2017, when the Kay family staged in intervention at their home on Oct. 1, the day after the Angels’ season ended.

Camela testified about a phone call that day in which she said she told Taylor that Eric’s sister, Kelly Miller, had notified her that Eric was distributing pills to Skaggs. Camela said of Taylor’s reaction, “He blows me off.”

The next day, Mead and Taylor visited the Kay home to try to convince Eric to go to rehab for “opioid addiction,” according to Camela. He said Eric told Mead to go into his bedroom and find pills he had stashed there. Mead returned with a handful of baggies containing pills.

“I was standing afar, and Tom was on the couch with Eric, and all of a sudden I see Tim walk out of our bedroom with baggies of pills,” Camela Kay said.

She said Mead placed the pills on the coffee table in front of the couch where Eric Kay and Taylor were sitting. She testified that she believed her then-husband — their divorce was finalized in 2023 — was selling the baggies of opioids to players to make extra money because the family had financial difficulties.

Both Mead and Taylor denied in their testimony that they had any recollection of finding or seeing any baggies full of pills. Mead said he recalled “very little of that morning” and did not remember going into Eric Kay’s bedroom or finding pills there.

Camela Kay testified that she witnessed team employees and players handing out opioid pills on a team flight. On cross-examination, Angels lawyer Todd Theodora asked her how many team flights she had been on, and Camela answered 10 to 12.

Theodora also pointed out discrepancies in her testimony compared to what she said in her deposition several months ago. He also pointed out that in nearly 200 texts and emails to Angels personnel, she never warned them that her husband might be taking or distributing opioids.

Camela said she had strong suspicions throughout the 2018 season that Eric was still using because he displayed erratic behavior and noted that she shared those concerns with Taylor, whose office at Angel Stadium was adjacent to her husband’s.

The Angels have attempted to establish that Eric Kay was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although Camela disputed that. When Theodora pressed her on her assertion that she had never heard her husband was bipolar, she replied, “He had a drug addiction.”

Camela testified that Eric told her that he was taking opioids to mask mental health issues that included depression, but that he was not taking prescribed medication for bipolar disorder.

A crisis occurred Easter Sunday — April 21, 2019 — when Eric was acting erratically at work and was hospitalized that evening after Taylor had driven him home. While taking Eric’s items from Taylor’s car, Camela said, she found an Advil bottle filled with blue pills next to the car and dumped them on the passenger seat to show Taylor.

Taylor testified that he while he did recall Eric acting erratically and driving him home, he didn’t recall the blue pills in the Advil bottle.

Although Camela said she was forceful in telling Mead and Taylor that Eric needed detox and inpatient care, instead he went through an outpatient rehab program in late April and May. He returned to work — by this time moving up to the position Mead had held before he departed that spring to become president of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. — and about a month later was assigned to go on the trip to Texas that resulted in Skaggs’ death.

Angels communications employee Grace McNamee testified last week that when she learned Eric Kay was going on the trip, she asked colleague Adam Chodzko, “Is this a good idea?”

“Maybe I was talking out loud, the mother in me, it just felt like maybe Eric should spend some time at home after being on leave for, you know, bipolar and mental illness,” McNamee testified.

Testimony last week from Angels human resources executive Mayra Castro established that Eric Kay wasn’t fired, but instead was allowed to resign Nov. 2, 2019. Graham said this bolstered the Skaggs family’s contention that the Angels repeatedly gave Kay special treatment rather than treating his behavior the way they would with other employees.

Castro told Graham that a 63-year-old longtime Angels custodial worker was fired for drinking a hard seltzer during a break. The employee was not visibly intoxicated and told HR she was unaware the drink contained alcohol, Castro testified. The Skaggs family’s lawyers suggested that had Kay been punished similarly, Tyler Skaggs would still be alive.

Castro also admitted to deleting and then restoring an August 2019 text she sent to a co-worker that said of Kay, “Dude he gave me tweaker vibes.” The co-worker responded: “Omfg, I always thought he definitely looked like a tweaker and sketch.” Castro testified that she realized deleting the text was wrong and turned it over to the Skaggs family‘s legal team as part of discovery.

The United States has carried out strikes near Venezuela that President Donald Trump says are targeting drug gangs.

That is disputed, but the major military mobilisation has brought the issue of narcotics front and centre.

How bad is the problem in the country, and what’s Trump’s strategy?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests:

Sanho Tree – Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of the Drug Policy Project

Carrie Sheffield – Senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum

Ernesto Castaneda – Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University

If this World Series is going to turn into a food fight about the economics of baseball, Dave Roberts tossed the first meatball.

The Dodgers had just been presented with the National League Championship trophy. Roberts, the Dodgers’ manager, had something to say to a sellout crowd at Dodger Stadium, and to an audience watching on national television.

“They said the Dodgers are ruining baseball,” Roberts hollered. “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball.”

The Dodgers had just vanquished the Milwaukee Brewers, a team that did everything right, with four starting pitchers whose contracts total $1.35 billion.

The Brewers led the major leagues in victories this year. They have made the playoffs seven times in the past eight years, and yet their previous manager and general manager fled for big cities, in the hope of applying small-market smarts to teams with large-market resources.

The Dodgers will spend half a billion dollars on player payroll and luxury tax payments this year, a figure that the Brewers and other small-market teams might never spend in this lifetime, or the next one.

The Brewers will make about $35 million in local television rights this year. The Dodgers make 10 times that much — and they’ll make more than $500 million per year by the end of their SportsNet LA contract in 2038.

Is revenue disparity a problem for the sport?

The owners say yes. They are expected to push for a salary cap in next year’s collective bargaining negotiations. A cap is anathema to the players’ union. At the All-Star Game, union executive director Tony Clark called a cap “institutionalized collusion.”

The union could say, yes, revenue disparity is the big issue and propose something besides a cap.

But that is not what the union is saying. The union does not agree that revenue disparity is the issue, at least to the extent that the players should participate in solving it. Put another way: Tarik Skubal should not get less than market value in free agency to appease the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

For the most part, the union believes the owners should resolve the issue among themselves.

And the fundamental difference might be this: To most of the owners, the Dodgers’ spending is the big problem, or at least the symptom of a big problem. This was Commissioner Rob Manfred at the owners’ meetings last February: “Do people perceive that the playing field is balanced and fair and/or do people believe that money dictates who wins?”

To the union, the problem is not one of perception. The union believes the problem is that the Dodgers’ spending exposes other owners who would love a salary cap that would give them cover — not to mention cost certainty that could increase profits and franchise values.

“Players across the league show up every day ready to compete and ready to win,” Clark told The Times. “Excuses aren’t tolerated between the lines, and they shouldn’t be accepted outside them either.

“When decision-makers off the field mirror the competitive drive exhibited on it, everybody wins and baseball’s future is limitless. Fans and players alike deserve — and should demand — far more accountability from those to whom much is given.”

Tony Clark, executive director of the MLB Players’ Assn., speaks during a news conference in New York in March 2022.

(Richard Drew / Associated Press)

In its annual estimates, Forbes had the Dodgers’ revenue last season at a league-leading $752 million and the Pirates’ revenue at $326 million. The Pirates turned a profit of $47 million and the Dodgers turned a profit of $21 million, according to those estimates.

The Pirates — and other small-market teams — make more than $100 million each year in their equal split of league revenue (national and international broadcast rights, for instance, and merchandising and licensing) and revenue shared by the Dodgers and other large-market teams. That means the Pirates can cover their player payroll before selling a single ticket, beer, or Primanti sandwich stuffed with meat, cheese and fries.

“The current system is designed so larger markets share massive amounts of revenue with smaller markets to help level the playing field,” Clark said. “Small-market teams have other built-in advantages, and we’ve proposed more in bargaining — and will again.”

The union would be delighted to get a salary floor — that is, a minimum team payroll. The owners would do that if the union agreed to a maximum team payroll — that is, a salary cap.

Whether the owners believe recent and potential future changes — among them a draft lottery, more favorable draft-pick compensation for small-market teams losing free agents, providing additional draft picks for teams that promote prospects sooner and for small-market teams that win — can begin to mitigate revenue disparity is uncertain. Whether the players can condition revenue sharing on team progress also is uncertain.

And, perhaps most critically to owners, the collapse of the cable ecosystem means many teams have lost local television revenue that might not ever bounce completely back, even if Manfred can deliver on his proposed “all teams, all the time, in one place” service.

Whatever the issues might be, fans are not throwing up their hands and walking away. The league sold more tickets this year than in any year since 2017. Almost every week brought an announcement from ESPN, Fox or TNT about a ratings increase, and the league did not complain about the outstanding ratings the Dodgers and New York Yankees attracted in last year’s World Series.

Dodgers fans celebrate after Shohei Ohtani hits the second of his three home runs in Game 4 of the NLCS against the Brewers at Dodger Stadium on Oct. 17.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Payroll is under the control of an owner. Market size is not.

Of the top 15 teams in market size, six made the playoffs. Of the bottom 15 teams in market size, six made the playoffs.

Is that a reasonable exhibition of competitive balance? Would the Dodgers winning the World Series in back-to-back years define competitive imbalance, even if they would become the first team in 25 years to repeat? The only other team currently dedicated to spending like the Dodgers — the New York Mets — has not won the World Series in 39 years.

The Kansas City Chiefs have played in the Super Bowl five times in six years, winning three times. That is because they have Patrick Mahomes, not because the NFL has a salary cap.

In the past three years, the Dodgers are the only team to appear in the final four twice — more diversity than in the final four in the NFL, NBA or NHL, each of which has a salary cap.

The league used to happily distribute information like that. After the winter chants about the Dodgers ruining baseball, the league started talking about how no small-market team had won the World Series in 10 years.

Payroll itself should not define competitive balance, but that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if an owner decides competing with the Dodgers would be no less futile by spending another $25 million on players.

It is premature to count heads now. However, at this point, you wonder whether any team besides the Dodgers and Mets would lobby against the league pursuing a salary cap in negotiations. If the owners really want a salary cap, they need to be prepared to do what the NHL did to get one: shut down the league for an entire season.

We should be talking about the magic of Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts. Instead, on its grandest stage, the talk around baseball will be all about whether its most popular team is ruining the game to the point of depriving us of it come 2027. Well done, everyone.

Angels superstar Mike Trout testified Tuesday morning that he knew team employee Eric Kay had a drug problem but that pitcher Tyler Skaggs showed no signs of drug use.

Trout, a three-time American League Most Valuable Player, has played with the Angels his entire 15-year career and is under contract through the 2030 season. He was a teammate of Skaggs from 2014 to 2019, when the left-handed pitcher died in a Texas hotel room July 1, 2019, after snorting a counterfeit oxycodone pill that contained fentanyl, a powerful opioid.

Key, a former Angels communications director, was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison after being convicted in 2022 of providing the pills that led to the Skaggs’ overdose.

According to trial transcripts, Skaggs lawyer Daniel Dutko asked Trout about his reaction when he learned the next day in a team meeting that Skaggs had died.

“Cried,” Trout answered.

“You loved him like a brother,” the lawyer said as Trout nodded affirmatively. Trout added that he was unaware of any drug use by Skaggs.

Skaggs’ lawyer asked questions to elicit testimony from Trout that would humanize Skaggs, to establish that he was a valued teammate and friend. Trout said he and Skaggs were roommates in 2010 when both were 18 years old and playing for the Angels affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Trout, the highest-paid Angels employee making more than $37 million a year, attended Skaggs’ wedding in 2018.

Neither Dutko nor Angels attorney Todd Theodora asked Trout why he didn’t inform a team executive or human resources when he suspected Kay’s drug use.

Skaggs was found dead in his hotel room in Southlake, Texas, on July 1, 2019, before the Angels were scheduled to start a series against the Texas Rangers. The Tarrant County medical examiner found that in addition to the opioids, Skaggs had a blood-alcohol level of 0.12. The autopsy determined he died from asphyxia after aspirating on his own vomit, and that his death was accidental.

Trout’s testimony followed that of longtime Angels executives Tim Mead and Tom Taylor. Kay reported to Mead nearly his entire 23-year career and worked closely with Taylor, the team’s traveling secretary. Both men testified that they had no idea Kay was addicted to opioids or that Kay supplied Skaggs with drugs.

Skaggs’ widow, Carli Skaggs, and parents Debra Hetman and Darrell Skaggs are seeking $118 million from the Angels for Skaggs’ lost future earnings as well as compensation for pain and anguish, and punitive damages.

The Angels announcement that longtime former big league catcher Kurt Suzuki was hired as manager coincided with Trout’s testimony.