Culture
When your landlord bats leadoff: Inside the cliquish world of baseball real estate
Shortly after haggling his way out of free-agent purgatory and into a new contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kiké Hernández asked his wife, Mariana, to investigate another market. She contacted former Dodger Rich Hill’s wife, Caitlin, with a request: Could the Hernándezes live in the Hills’ house again?
The Hills had bought the property, located in the Toluca Lake neighborhood, in 2017, soon after Rich signed a $48 million contract. The family decided not to sell it after Hill’s final season with the team in 2019. The house has since become a popular destination among Dodgers personnel. Catcher Austin Barnes lived there one season. Manager Dave Roberts has inquired about its availability. When Hernández rejoined the team at last year’s trade deadline, he moved into the house, which is a convenient 20-minute drive from Dodger Stadium, with access to three different highways.
“It’s very appealing, because of the location,” Hill said.
But that’s not its only selling point; almost as important is that the homeowner understands his tenants’ nomadic baseball lifestyle.
When searching for a place to live, players often rely upon each other’s recommendations, connections, and familiarity with baseball’s unique schedule and travel. That has led to a different kind of hot stove market each winter, when baseball players buy, sell and trade homes amongst themselves — swapping houses, directing young players to the right spots and passing certain key properties down as the cycle repeats itself.
It is not uncommon for players to report to spring training without a residence for the regular season. Sometimes free agents sign later than expected; sometimes trades happen without warning. In the final days of February, Toronto Blue Jays infielder Justin Turner was still looking for a lease in the suburbs of Toronto to sync up with his one-year, $13 million contract. Caleb Ferguson, a New York Yankees reliever acquired in early February, was scrambling to find somewhere on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a park nearby for his newborn son. Surprised by a Feb. 11 trade from the Miami Marlins, Minnesota Twins reliever Steven Okert said he had “no idea” where he would live in the Twin Cities. “I’ve never even been there before,” Okert said.
The primary problem is the length of the lease. The regular season lasts about six months. Renting a house often requires a longer commitment. “It’s always a pain,” Yankees infielder DJ LeMahieu said. He described the process of finding housing as “throughout my time in professional baseball, one of the hardest things to do,” which is why his wife, Jordan, takes care of it. Spouses often shoulder the load: Yency Almonte, the reliever who was traded from the Dodgers to the Chicago Cubs in January, will live this summer in the Chicagoland home of Joe Kelly, the reliever who was traded from the Chicago White Sox to the Dodgers last summer; their wives brokered the deal.
Yankee Stadium is DJ LeMahieu’s on-field home; he rents another residence to his fellow ballplayers. (Alex Trautwig / MLB via Getty Images)
In the offseason, LeMahieu lives in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, Mich., where he owns two homes. For nearly a decade, he has rented out the secondary residence to various Tigers. So many players have stayed there that LeMahieu has lost track. The first tenant was second baseman Ian Kinsler. The longest-standing resident was pitcher Daniel Norris. “I think they all left the places better than they found them,” LeMahieu said. “I came back and there was new stuff. Super clean. I was like, ‘Wow, this worked out really well.’”
In 2022, his final year in Milwaukee, reliever Brent Suter lived in a home once occupied by former Brewers teammate Corey Knebel. Suter rented a townhouse through VRBO for his 2023 season with the Colorado Rockies. When he signed for 2024 with the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team, Suter did not need to search for a house. But he did have the ballplayer network to thank.
A few years earlier, while pitching for Cincinnati, Wade Miley purchased a four-bedroom home in nearby Anderson Township, Ohio. An older couple started building on a lot across the street. Miley eventually learned his new neighbors were Suter’s in-laws. He called his former teammate. “When I’m done with the Reds, I’m selling you this house,” Miley told Suter. Suter laughed at the offer. When Cincinnati placed Miley on waivers after the 2021 season, Suter received another text: “Go check out the house. We’ll open the garage for you.” Miley, Suter explained, “hooked us up with our dream house for life.”
During his time with the Cleveland Guardians, first baseman Carlos Santana lived in Bratenahl, Ohio, an affluent suburb on the shores of Lake Erie. After Santana signed a three-year, $60 million deal with the Philadelphia Phillies heading into 2018, he rented his home to former teammate Edwin Encarnación. Santana did not last long in Philadelphia. The Phillies shipped him to the Seattle Mariners in December of 2018. Less than two weeks later, the Mariners traded Santana to Cleveland — in exchange for Encarnación. Santana moved back into his old house.
Edwin Encarnación and Carlos Santana were Cleveland teammates in 2017. After that, things got more complicated. (Duane Burleson / Getty Images)
Do not take total pity on these athletes, who play in a league where the big-league minimum salary is $740,000. Teams provide them resources, recommendations and real estate agents. Their own agents often do the same. The collective bargaining agreement contains provisions that compensate them for their living expenses if they are cut or traded.
Their privilege still contains complications, and not every serendipitous swap ends happily. In the summer of 2005, the Boston Red Sox acquired an infielder named Alex Cora from Cleveland in exchange for fellow infielder Ramón Vázquez. The two Puerto Ricans were friends. They agreed to trade houses. “The price was the same,” Cora said. He had been living in a four-bedroom, two-story place with a yard. He was aghast when he moved into Vázquez’s apartment near Faneuil Hall. “It was a one-bedroom, a f—ing matchbox,” Cora said.
The dollar does stretch further away from the coasts. Ferguson, the Yankees reliever, grew up about 20 minutes outside of Columbus, Ohio, the home of Cleveland’s Triple-A affiliate. He harbors dreams of renting his home there to one of the Clippers. He joked about his willingness to pay the utilities for potential tenants as long as they paid his mortgage. “I don’t want to make money off of you — I just want to stop losing it,” Ferguson said.
Rich Hill stumbled into his role as the landlord of the Dodgers. During the 2021 season, Hill heard Barnes was commuting about two hours roundtrip to the ballpark. Barnes and his wife, Nicole, had a newborn son. The driving was draining. Hill mentioned that his place in Toluca Lake was empty. “It’s a really nice house,” Barnes said. “He just let us live there.”
Barnes had better luck than Roberts, who found the house occupied when he asked Hill about renting it. Hernández met the same fate after signing his new deal with the Dodgers. Hill was already renting to a family for 2024. Turns out, non-ballplayers need houses, too.
“As much as I want to rent it to the guys,” Hill said, “I can’t kick the people out who are there right now.”
(The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, Chad Jennings, Zack Meisel, C. Trent Rosecrans and Sahadev Sharma contributed to this report.)
(Illustration by Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photo of Kiké Hernández: Michael Zagaris / Oakland Athletics / Getty Images; Photo of Rich Hill: Will Newton / Getty Images; Photo of Wade Miley: Frank Jansky / Icon Sportswire )
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Indianapolis, IN8 minutes agoIndyCar driver Felix Rosenqvist had the busiest week after winning the Indianapolis 500
-
Pittsburg, PA11 minutes agoDirt bike rider killed in collision with bus in Homewood
-
Augusta, GA16 minutes agoVolunteers come together to clean up Augusta neighborhood
-
Washington, D.C23 minutes agoTexas man indicted in shooting near Washington Monument that left bystander hurt
-
Cleveland, OH26 minutes ago3 Options For the Cavaliers to Replace GM Mike Gansey
-
Austin, TX31 minutes agoOne dead, victim unidentified after APD responds to deceased person call in South Austin
-
Alabama38 minutes agoLive Game, Weather Updates: Tuscaloosa Baseball Regional, No. 7 Alabama vs. USC Upstate
-
Alaska41 minutes agoWayne and Wanda: I’m ready to break up with Alaska but facing resistance from everyone
