ghost of miles

From The Athletic. Today's Dodgers make the George Steinbrenner-era Yankees seem like penny-pinchers: "Nobody spends money quite like the Dodgers. Their latest luxury spend: outfielder Kyle Tucker, who signed a four-year, $240 million deal, with opt-outs after Years 2 and 3. With deferrals ($30 million over the final three years), his “luxury tax” salary for 2026 is $57.1 million. At roughly $90 million over the highest luxury tax bracket threshold, L.A. will be paying a 110 percent tax on Tucker’s contract. I did the math … That’s $119.91 million out of pocket just in 2026. According to FanGraphs’ projected 2026 payrolls, that’s more than 11 teams will pay their entire roster. L.A. will also forfeit four of its top six draft picks. It seems it's stopped worrying about any coming “cliff.” Since November 2023, per Spotrac, there have been 29 nine-digit contracts/extensions in baseball — about one per team. Tucker is the Dodgers’ sixth after Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell and the Tyler Glasnow and Will Smith extensions. Sixteen teams have not handed out any such contract over that time. The Dodgers currently have eight players projected to make more than $20 million per year in 2026. That’s (obviously) the most, with the Yankees, Mets and Phillies at six each. Eight teams (Pirates, Cardinals, Reds, Nationals, Marlins, White Sox, Twins, Rays) have zero such players. Five teams (Rockies, A’s, Mariners, Guardians, Orioles) have one." Of course the Dodgers have the right, under current rules, to spend like this if they're willing to pay the luxury taxes cited above. And I'm no fan of a salary cap--that's not about reducing fiscal inequality among teams (fiscal inequality as a general value, last time I checked, is something tycoon owners have no problem with at all), it's about controlling player salaries. And yes, the Dodgers have done other things to create their present prowess in addition to exorbitant spending. But if you want to hate a team that goes out and buys any player it wants, hard to beat L.A. in that category these days.

I repeat: Dodgers are the new Evil Empire. Yankees were never in on Tucker, but I share Dan's relief that he won't be playing for Toronto this year.

Was just listening to the first disc of this last night. Right now:

We'll be re-airing Proving Herself: Melba Liston, First Lady of Trombone in March, but I'm upping it now in honor of her centennial today.

We recently re-aired Jazz a la Sauter, and it remains archived for online listening. I wasn't aware of this when I scheduled the broadcast, but Loren Schoenberg has released a new CD of previously unrecorded Sauter charts written for the Red Norvo-Mildred Bailey band: So Many Memories

Perhaps the best best-of by any 1980s indie band.

Such a great series!

Ah! That would certainly explain the varying release dates that we've seen. I've got it pre-ordered, whenever it comes out! Thanks for this and all of the other jazz-history work that you've done, James. Anybody wishing to study West Coast jazz now or in the future will need to delve into it.

Disc 2 of this treasure trove, which includes the set with Chet Baker and Miles Davis (which has been issued before, iirc, but most of the music on this L.A. Jazz Institute collection has not) A classic! Gotta revisit that one soon.

Pretty sure mine was a June 2026 date when I pre-ordered, but that was quite awhile ago at this point.

Amazon's release date has moved up a couple of months to April 2.

I also have this 1975 Columbia double-LP stashed somewhere around the house. Imagining this was the main representation of the Thornhill oeuvre that was to be found in the 1970s bins, or were there any other compilations that circulated?

Listening to a Claude Thornhill anthology that provides a nice overview of his prime years, from the mid-1930s into the early 1950s. Caveat that it's a 2015 Acrobat CD-R release, but it was seven bucks new at my local record store: Praise always to the late Alastair Robertson for having shepherded eight CDs of Thornhill material into being through his invaluable Hep series, though I still wish Mosaic had been able to usher something of its own into existence--but I imagine the market for a Thornhill set might have been thin even 20-30 years ago. The individual Hep volumes remain my go-to Thornhill CDs, but this is perfect for an anthology mood (and about half of the first disc consists of sideman and early leader dates that took place before 1940, when the Hep series begins chronologically with the Snowfall CD).