Major League Baseball
The Atlanta Braves made it all about Ludacris on Wednesday night (Sept. 4) when the team honored the hometown hero with a bobblehead night and a ceremonial first pitch. After handing out the bobble to the first 15,000 fans who showed up at Truist Park — depicting the Grammy-winning MC wearing jeans, a throwback Hank […]
Throwing out a first pitch at a baseball game can be the best, or worst, day of a celebrity’s life. Some, like Mariah Carey and the Howard Stern Show’s Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate, tank it so hard they become instant, and forever Mendoza lines for diamond disaster. Then there’s Machine Gun Kelly. The Northern Ohio […]
Major League Baseball’s players’ union is firing back at claims that it discriminated against Bad Bunny’s sports agency, saying the company was penalized due to “egregious and systemic” rules violations, including offering prospective clients free VIP tickets to Bad Bunny concerts.
Rimas Sports sued the MLB Players Association (MLBPA) last month, claiming the union had used a “pre-determined investigation” to ban the Puerto Rican agency to protect existing agents from competition. The lawsuit is seeking an injunction that would overturn the league’s penalties and allow Rimas to continue to represent players.
But in a response filing this week, attorneys for the union said Rimas had incurred the punishment through its own “unethical conduct” that had broken MLBPA rules — namely, offering splashy and valuable gifts to prospective clients to win them over.
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“The regulations strictly forbid such inducements,” the union’s lawyers wrote in a motion on Wednesday (June 5). “Player agents must compete for clients based on the quality of their representation, not the quality of their gifts.”
The MLBPA’s investigation into Rimas had unearthed “egregious and systemic violations” of those rules, the union’s attorneys said, quoting from an arbitrator’s ruling that said Rimas’ core strategy had been “building a baseball agency by luring players with forbidden gifts.”
“Immunizing Rimas from the consequences of its own bad conduct will harm players and other player agents by encouraging player-player agent relationships borne out of perquisites not performance,” the union’s lawyers wrote. “What Rimas seeks is a get out of jail free card for itself. The public has no interest in such an outcome.”
Launched in 2021 by Bad Bunny (Benito Martínez Ocasio) and his longtime manager, Noah Assad, Rimas Sports aimed to provide homegrown representation to Major League Baseball’s many players from Latin America.
But in April, the MLBPA handed down a raft of penalties against the agency, including decertifying one agent, barring Assad from seeking certification and prohibiting existing certified agents from joining the company. When Rimas challenged the penalties, an arbitrator rejected the appeal and upheld the union’s actions.
Last month, attorneys for Rimas escalated the dispute by filing a lawsuit in federal court that accused the MLBPA of imposing a “death penalty” on the new agency. They claimed the penalties had come from a “discriminatory” investigation that had been launched because Rimas had threatened established agencies with competition.
“The ‘good ole boy’ order of baseball sports agency … was being put at risk, as these Puerto Rican ‘outsiders’ were disrupting baseball sports agency order too much, too fast,” attorneys for Rimas wrote. “This was something that the MLBPA and Rimas Sports’ competitors would not allow.”
Calling the penalties “extraordinary and unprecedented,” Rimas sought a preliminary injunction putting them on hold while the case plays out. The agency claimed the penalties had caused immediate harm, including preventing the agency from completing its agreement to sign reigning National League MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. as a client.
In its initial filing of the lawsuit, Rimas did not specifically indicate what exactly MLBPA accused the group of doing wrong. But in Wednesday’s opposition, the union laid out the accusations in great detail.
According to the filing, certain prospective clients were offered free concert tickets, including VIP concert tickets to Bad Bunny concerts and suite access to a Phoenix Suns game. Another player was allegedly offered a $200,000 interest-free loan. “This kind of conduct became culture at Rimas,” the MLBPA wrote.
The agency was “so dismissive” of the rules around illegal gifts that it continued to violate them even after they were notified that they were under investigation, the union’s attorney wrote Wednesday.
In technical terms, the MLBPA has filed both an opposition to deny Rimas an injunction, as well as a motion to compel arbitration — meaning a judge will order that the dispute must be handled via private arbitrator, not in federal court. A hearing is set for later this month for the judge to weigh the key issue in the case.
In his two seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies, catcher Garrett Stubbs has played in just 87 of a possible 324 games — par for the course when you’re backing up J.T. Realmuto, commonly referred to by Phillies fans as the “BCIB” (Best Catcher in Baseball). But despite his limited time on the field, Stubbs has become one of the most beloved and recognizable Phils for his role as the team’s preeminent Clubhouse Guy — as well as their anointed post-game DJ.
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With the Phils’ locker room turning into Philadelphia’s hottest club over their five playoff series victories across 2022-23, Stubbs has also become one of the city’s most influential aux-cord wielders with his celebratory selections, collected in his publicly available “Phils Win” Spotify playlist (nearly 30,000 likes). The most famous of the bunch, Tiësto’s remix of Calum Scott’s cover of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” caught so much local heat after it became the Phils’ unlikely postseason anthem in 2022, which propelled the song back onto the Billboard charts, making the Digital Song Sales top 10 last October.
Below, Stubbs talks with Billboard about how he became The Guy for soundtracking the team’s champagne-soaked celebrations, as well as why his club loves a good dance remix, and whether they’ll ever be able to get away from “Dancing on My Own.”
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How did you become the sort of official team DJ/Spotify playlist curator here?
Somebody’s gotta do it, and I’d say because my role on the team as far as playing time goes is limited, I just became the guy who came into the locker room after the games to turn on the music. As guys started to like certain songs, I just started to accumulate the ones that everyone liked and put them into a playlist. And then slowly but surely, there ended up being 1, 2, 20, 50, 100 songs on the playlist.
Over the past couple years, who else on the team have been your supporting curators?
Schwarbs [Kyle Schwarber] is a big one. He’s certainly a guy that brings good vibes to the locker room. [Nick] Castellanos is another one. He’s got very eclectic taste in music — he’s a huge J. Cole fan and likes to play anything from rap all the way to ODESZA. And he is a big fan of those two — if you walk into the locker room and either one of those two is playing, he definitely got ahold of the sticks.
Do you need a sort of quorum of team approval to put a song on the playlist? Are there any times that you try to sneak one on that you like — or do you need to have, like, a couple co-signs before you put one on the official team playlist?
No, I put random songs on there all the time. [Laughs.] So I generally will just like a song and put it on there, and then it’ll play in the locker room at certain times of the day, or after the game, and when the song comes on, I’ll just around the locker room and see what vibe I’m getting from everybody. And if it’s good, it stays, and if it’s not good, it gets taken off quickly.
Do you remember any times you got a particularly bad response to a song you were excited about?
Not so much a bad response — I mean, sometimes guys get over songs. Like we have Waka Flocka [Flame] on there — Schwarbs is a big Waka Flocka fan, so he will put Waka Flocka on there. And at times, if we get too much Waka, it gets worn out quickly. But there are other songs on there that come and go as post-game music. But the top four songs are always [Shouse’s] “Love Tonight,” [Calum Scott’s cover of] “Dancing on My Own,” [Trey Lewis’] “D–ked Down in Dallas” and then [Alabama’s] “Dixieland Delight.”
But we make trades during the year, right? And we try to make guys feel comfortable as soon as they get over. And that’s how “Dixieland Delight” got on there. We got D-Rob [David Robertson] traded over from the Cubs, and he was an Alabama guy, so we quickly put on “Dixieland Delight.” And it ended up sticking in 2023! But it’s just a good way of getting guys connected — especially, like, Latin players who there’s a language barrier with. So we have Latin songs on there as well, for people to enjoy.
Brandon Marsh #16 and Bryson Stott #5 place a cup on the head of Garrett Stubbs #21 of the Philadelphia Phillies as Stubs gives a post game interview after a win in a game against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field on May 13, 2023 in Denver, Colorado.
Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
Do you add to it in the offseason?
No, I’ll listen to new music all the time. Unfortunately I feel like there hasn’t been a ton of great music coming out. I don’t know how you feel about that, but…
Well, you’re working for a very specific purpose — maybe people like the new Lana Del Rey album, but I’m sure that’s not gonna make it onto the post-game playlist.
No doubt. Yeah. I’ve been listening to — there’s a lot of good country music that comes out, but like you said, it’s not necessarily the vibe after a win to listen to friggin’ Chris Stapleton or like, a slow Morgan Wallen song or something. But we had big Dua Lipa love in 2022, starting with Kyle Gibson. And so the “Cold Heart” song got put on there. And that’s kind of the vibe we like to go with.
Do songs ever get nixed for being bad luck? Like if you hear a song before a big loss, or it’s the first song that gets played after a big loss, are you ever like, “All right, that song’s no longer part of the vibe, we gotta get it out of here?”
Well, so last year, we tried to get rid of “Dancing on My Own.” Which didn’t go very well at the beginning of the season. And so we ended up putting that back on. But we went through a number of different songs. I know that Juicy J was at one point getting played. I put on “Erryday” by Juicy J after wins. That quickly got axed. There was another J. Cole song that got played after wins — that was just a little too slow. And like, you’re looking around the league, there’s probably songs that get played that are in multiple locker rooms. So we try to keep it independent to ours. I’m sure at one point “All I Do Is Win” was just like the song that everyone played.
We try to stay away from the superstition part. Like, playing “Dancing on My Own” after wins isn’t a superstition for us — it’s just a good vibe. Everyone seems to be having a smile on their face. But also the connection that we got to have with the fans during that was pretty cool.
So I’m sure you’ve talked about it a million times by now, but when did you know that “Dancing on My Own” was connecting in that way?
Well, the funny thing is that all the music that got played in the locker room, not that it wasn’t supposed to get out of the locker room, but that was certainly not the intent at first. We basically were just playing certain songs, I started curating a playlist honestly just to make it easy to play the songs after the game — we could just click play on the playlist and then it would run through all the songs. At no point did I think the entire city was going to find my Spotify! And then realize that there was a “Phils Win” playlist. And then next thing I know, there was 1,000 people liking it, 5,000, 10,000, I think it’s up to like 20 or 25,000 now…
You’re almost up to 30 now.
OK, yeah. So that wasn’t the intent out the gate. But I think it’s a cool way for fans to kinda get a taste of what goes on in the locker room. I think fans enjoy seeing that side of our team. I think they also see that outside of the music, just how we interact with each other on the field. And we have a very unique, fun way of connecting with the people of Philly.
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That song specifically, though — when did you know that that was going to be the song that people most associated with you guys?
I don’t think we ever thought that people were going to associate themselves with it outside the locker room. I think we just kinda felt like it was a good vibe when we were listening to it inside the locker room. And then, very quickly, people found out that that was our song inside the locker room, and then they started connecting with it. That kind of just happened organically, which — I think that’s how the best things in life happen, right? You don’t really intend for them to be a certain way, but just over time, people just get drawn to a certain thing.
In general, just the vibe, the feeling that you get when you hear the song, is upbeat — Tiësto did a great job remixing it because obviously the original is a little slower. So I think the remix gives a good vibe, and all of a sudden you kinda get your head bobbin’, and it gives you good feelings inside, with the association of the winning part of it, along with just the sound that you get from listening to the song, is always positive.
I did notice, skimming the top of the playlist — and I’ve heard it in the locker room too — there’s a lot of dance remixes of non-dance songs. That seems to kind of be a sweet spot for you guys.
Yeah, I personally love bringing a little bit of house vibe to an old song. Seeing some of these new artists grabbing really great classics, and then remixing them with a little more modern house sounds that you weren’t necessarily able to make when they were making those songs, I really enjoy it.
So with 30,000 people following this playlist, do you ever hear it outside the locker room?
Well, after we would win we would go over to Xfinity Live, and immediately the DJ would start playing every single song from the playlist. We would celebrate in the locker room, and then afterwards we would go to Xfinity and celebrate again, and they would bring out those same songs. It was always fun watching the reaction of the fans to certain songs. My favorite song on the playlist [laughs] to have fun with is “D–ked Down in Dallas.”
I mean “Dancing on My Own” is obviously an incredible song, and associated with the whole city. But “D–ked Down in Dallas” is just such a fun song for all of us to have fun to, and whenever we’d go to Xfinity and watch everyone else sing along with it, it was hilarious to us.
Have you thought about what the next in line song would be if “Dancing on My Own” wasn’t working anymore?
I mean, we’ve thought about it plenty, right? We tried to get rid of it this last year. And I don’t even wanna use the words “get rid of,” but we tried to move on from it and find something new and fresh. And we ended up reverting back to it. I think the fans have certain feelings about bringing it back in 2024, which I totally understand — when you don’t win the World Series, a lot of fans feel like it’s not a success. And us players feel the same way, too. But there has been a lot of success — not just with the song, but with the team for the past few years — so we do have a lot of really good memories, and I hope that eventually we just do find a new song that gives us a good vibe and a new good energy that people can connect with.
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Shohei Ohtani, one of the top talents in the MLB today, announced a new deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers this weekend that has baseball fans stunned and reacting to the big news in various ways. Shohei Ohtani signed with the Dodgers for 10 years and $700 million, a cause of concern for some considering the two-play superstar has had surgeries.
ESPN reports Ohtani, 29, will sign with the Dodgers and while an official breakdown from the team about the contract is still presumably in the works, an outlet of ESPN’s stature wouldn’t come forth with their additional report without confirming some facts. With the deal, Ohtani, who hails from Japan, was awarded the richest contract in North American sports ever.
“Shohei Ohtani’s deal with the Dodgers is for 10 years and $700 million,” wrote ESPN’s Jeff Passan via X, formerly Twitter. He added, “Shohei Ohtani’s contract has significant deferrals that include most of his salary — an idea, a source said, that was Ohtani’s. In deferring the money, it reduces the cost of the competitive-balance-tax hit and will allow the Dodgers to build a better team around him.”
The news was big enough that even Shams Charania, who typically breaks news on the NBA, had to share with his massive audience the size and scope of the deal.
Ohtani’s credentials as a pitcher and DH cannot be put under scrutiny as he’s proven over the past three seasons with the Los Angeles Angels. Ohtani has won the AL MVP twice and did so unanimously this past season with a .304 batting average along with 44 home runs and 95 RBIs. He also started 23 games as a pitcher, winning 10 games with a 3.14 ERA. With the Angels, Ohtani’s numbers have averaged 30 home runs and 90 RBIs.
In addition to his talent, concerns have been raised around Ohtani getting a version of Tommy John surgery to repair an ulnar collateral ligament tear. It is the second surgery he’s had over the past five years according to reports. Still, Ohtani is on track to resume his dominance on the diamond, and given that he has the highest-selling jersey among MLB players, he’ll have several adoring Dodgers fans sporting the apparel here in the States and abroad.
As mentioned above, Ohtani shared the news first with his 6 million fans on Instagram but didn’t share a ton of details.
From Instagram:
First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to everyone involved with the Angels organization and the fans who have supported me over the past six years, as well as to everyone involved with each team that was part of this negotiation process. Especially to the Angels fans who supported me through all the ups and downs, your guys’ support and cheer meant the world to me. The six years I spent with the Angels will remain etched in my heart forever.
Check out reactions from MLB Twitter below.
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Photo: John McCoy / Getty
SeatGeek executives were scrambling to recover from an unforced error earlier this month when two discount codes leaked on social media granting users $500 discounts on the secondary ticketing marketplace. After about a half-hour of frenzied buying, the ticket resale site was forced to cancel thousands of sales and cover costs incurred by untold numbers of brokers.
The source of those troublesome codes? SeatGeek created the codes for a business conference for Major League Baseball box office managers and ticketing staff, sources tell Billboard — three months after SeatGeek signed a reported $100 million, five-year deal to take over from rival StubHub as the league’s official ticket reseller.
The $500 discount codes — “MLB1” and “MLB2” — were originally given out as prizes for a team building exercise during the event on May 3 at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home to the Texas Rangers. Known to most in the sports ticketing industry as the Baseball Ticketing and Marketing Meetings, the summit is a typically low key affair where baseball ticketing staff come together to network, share ideas and meet with league vendors. SeatGeek representatives were present at the meeting to discuss their new agreement with the league, according to multiple sources. The two discount codes did not include any expiration date or limit on how many times they could be used.
Nine days after the summit, the codes leaked onto the internet and quickly spread across social media. The first instance of the code sharing on Twitter on May 12 at 11:29 p.m. EST appears to have come from an account linked to a sports gambler named Drew Morgan, writing, “I just got 2 tickets to 2 different Steelers games 100% free on SeatGeek. Sounds too good to be true but there was zero catch at all.”
Holy shit I just got 2 tickets to 2 different Steelers games 100% free on Seat Geek. Sounds too good to be true but there was zero catch at all 🤯Use codes MLB1 or MLB2 for a $500 discount on the tickets. I have no incentive at all to promote this. My friend told me about… pic.twitter.com/8G6ELGHPkn— Drew Morgan (@DMProps) May 13, 2023
Three minutes later, an account calling itself “Lord Restock” with 168,000 followers posted the codes, kicking off a frenzy of fans using the codes to buy tickets to sporting events, SZA concerts and more.
Around midnight, SeatGeek staff noticed the frenzied use of the $500 discount code and took the SeatGeek site offline to investigate what was happening. The site remained offline for several hours before the issue with the codes was identified and the codes were deactivated.
A SeatGeek spokesperson declined to comment on specifics about the code leaks, but told Billboard in a statement, “Last week, some fans made purchases on our site using an ineligible promo code that was wrongfully distributed without authorization. Tickets acquired via these purchases are not valid and we are working to resolve each situation accordingly.”
Officials with Major League Baseball did not respond to Billboard’s inquiries about the SeatGeek ticket codes and how they leaked online.
In the days following, SeatGeek staff began contacting ticket sellers on the site, laying out plans to cancel any transactions that used the leaked discount codes, refund any money that was spent in transactions using the codes and claw back any tickets possible before they reached fans.
“At this stage, we have been able to contain the impact to SeatGeek, but that came at the cost of an operational burden that you have all helped us to shoulder,” company co-founder Russ D’Souza wrote in an email to ticket broker Randall Smith, CEO of America’s Top Tix, and obtained by Billboard.
SeatGeek operates as both a primary ticketing site for a number of sports teams, as well as a massive secondary ticketing site where tens of thousands of brokers list tickets for resale for concerts, sporting events and festivals. The company implemented a triage system to respond to the code leak, where sales made for teams that use the SeatGeek ticketing system could easily be canceled and reversed. Sales for tickets that haven’t been delivered yet will also be canceled.
Tickets originally issued by rival companies like Ticketmaster, however, were more difficult to claw back. While Ticketmaster technology does allow resellers to digitally transfer tickets from seller to buyer – a process SeatGeek can automate to occur immediately after a sale on its site is made – it can’t transfer the ticket back to the seller if an error is discovered. Because of this, SeatGeek is now covering any losses incurred by brokers who now must reselling tickets issued by Ticketmaster and other services.
As a result, dozens and maybe hundreds of fans who received Ticketmaster-issued tickets using the SeatGeek discount code are now in possession of tickets that can’t be canceled. Since the code was discovered and taken down, many of these fans have taken to Twitter asking other fans if they think the tickets are still valid.
Brokers on the site are also angry, saying SeatGeek took too long to respond to the crisis and should have to pay the same 100% fine it charges its own sellers when customer service mistakes are made.
“If a broker makes an error and cancels an order, they are penalized. If the exchange that dings you makes an error, they unilaterally effectuate a mutual cancelation without consent of the broker,” one reseller wrote on a forum for brokers. “It is a totally one-sided relationship, and I really hope customers, brokers, or both bring a well-deserved class action against SG.”
SeatGeek is the second largest ticket resale site in the United States and last year raised $238 million in Series E funding. A recently abandoned effort to take the company public valued it at $1.35 billion.
Organizers for the Innings Festival announced the lineup for the fifth annual edition of the Tempe, Ariz.-based fest on Wednesday (Oct. 26), with Green Day and Eddie Vedder headlining.
The two-day festival will take place Feb. 25 and 26, 2023, at Tempe Beach and Tempe Arts Park. Other acts confirmed over the two dates include Weezer, The Black Crowes, The Offspring and The Pretty Reckless on Saturday and Marcus Mumford, The Revivalists, Mt. Joy and The Head and the Heart on Sunday.
Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, The Glorious Sons, Paris Jackson, Annie DiRusso, Umphrey’s McGee, Magic City Hippies, Heartless Bastards and Hazel English will round out the 18 bands and artists participating in the baseball-themed festival. Additionally, Jake Peavy will host an “All-Star Baseball Jam” and Off the Mound featuring Ryan Dempster will will host an on-site talk show during the event. Numerous Major League Baseball stars will make appearances over the weekend like Randy Johnson, Dontrelle Willis, Grady Sizemore, Kevin Mitchell, Vince Coleman, Bret Boone, Vinny Castilla, Matt Williams, Edgar Martinez, Mike Cameron and more.
General admission, GA+, Platinum and VIP tickets for one or two days will go on sale Thursday (Oct. 27) at 10 a.m. PT on the festival’s official website. Hopeful attendees can also sign up for the official Innings Festival email list or SMS text alerts to get updates on the event.
Next year, Green Day is also confirmed to headline the second-ever When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas alongside the newly reunited Blink-182. Vedder recently covered The Beatles’ cheeky cut “Her Majesty” with his Pearl Jam bandmates to honor the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
Check out the lineup announcement for Innings Festival 2023 below.
As the Division Series kicks off, we highlight eight artists whose music is the most popular with MLB players on the remaining playoff teams.
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