ARLINGTON, Texas — Padres players from time to time wear T-shirts with a cartoon Jurickson Profar on the front doing his base hit celebration.

The cartoon Profar is smiling, and his arms are raised with his elbows bent and down to form the top of a heart over his head. On the front of his jersey is the word, “RELEVANT.”

The shirts were made in response to the poetically ill-timed response in a postgame interview by Dodgers catcher Will Smith in April.

In the fifth inning of the middle game of a three-game series at Dodger Stadium, Profar took exception to an inside pitch from Gavin Stone and let Smith know he was not pleased. The benches cleared, though nothing more than a little shouting and a lot of standing around happened.

After the Dodgers’ victory that night, as Profar was acknowledging he had been wrong to think Stone was throwing at him because he had squared to bunt, in that the pitcher had a perfect game at the time, Smith was saying this to the Dodgers’ flagship radio station:

“I don’t know why we would have thrown at him. He’s kind of irrelevant.”

The next night, Profar’s bases-loaded double in the seventh inning drove in the deciding runs in a 6-3 Padres victory.

Profar has always downplayed the incident, and there was no apparent ill will when the Padres and Dodgers played in May in San Diego.

Now, the two players are on the same team in the All-Star game.

They had not talked as of early Monday.

“It doesn’t matter,” Profar said. “It’s going to be OK. He’s another baseball player. He’s not the enemy. I have seen enemies in front of me before. Really, really enemies in Curacao. Will Smith is a baseball player.”

Profar felt Smith did not mean what he said to be as disrespectful as it sounded. He also agreed that perhaps at the time, he could be viewed as irrelevant, in that he hit .236 for the Rockies in 2023.

Smith said Monday he didn’t really even mean to include Profar.

“That had nothing to do with it,” Smith said of Profar’s accomplishments as a player. “It was the situation only. My bad. It was nothing personal. … He’s fiery, plays hard. He’s a competitor. In competition, the best and worst comes out of us. He’s a competitor and a good player.”

Profar seemed most perturbed that some seem to think it was Smith who got him going on his way to what is so far the best of his 11 seasons in the major leagues.

“People say it was him that lit a fire,” Profar said. “It wasn’t him.”

Profar has talked many times over the past few months about his love for the game and for the Padres and his desire to keep playing and prove he could be the player he has always felt he could be.

Profar arrived at spring training having signed a $1 million contract and knowing he was replaceable.

“With my contract,” he said Monday of his thoughts at the time, “obviously they are going to get someone (else) to play the outfield.”

Profar pretty much had it nailed. Signing Tommy Pham or making a trade for an outfielder was very much in play at the time. But the Padres decided during Profar’s strong spring that they could hold off on a move and focus their resources on acquiring pitcher Dylan Cease.

The reality, however, is the Padres signed the 31-year-old because they thought he believed in him as a leader and thought he would be useful enough in the outfield and at the plate. In no way did anyone believe he would be hitting .305 with an .870 OPS, be tied for the team lead with 14 home runs and starting in left field for the NL in Tuesday’s All-Star game.

“No,” Profar said with a hearty laugh. “Because they didn’t pay to believe.”

Profar has earned earned $300,000 in playing time incentives and is seven plate appearances from adding another $200,000. That would leave another $1 million that could be earned if he were to reach 600 plate appearances.

“I worked hard,” he said. “The hard work is paying off.”

Originally Published: July 15, 2024 at 7:21 p.m.

Re “Cost of gasoline in California is likely to soar” (July 5): When will Sacramento and Washington legislators wake up to the fact that the number of gasoline cars on our roads is decreasing every day? The old gas excise tax model is no longer fair or just as the only source of funds to pay for road repairs or building roads. The advent of EVs and bicycle lanes has changed the landscape forever.

Yes, “Californians pay the highest gas prices and endure some of the worst roads”! It is time to create a new tax system that taxes all of our road users fairly. All classes of vehicles, cars and trucks (gas, hybrid, electric, propane, etc.) and bikes (human-powered, electric and gas) should pay a new tax or fee based on road use. The more you are on the road, the more you will pay.

All bikes should be licensed for use on our roads, especially rental bikes. $100 a bike may help with road maintenance.

— Vince Loughney Sr., Oceanside

Originally Published: July 15, 2024 at 5:00 a.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump goes into the Republican National Convention with bold promises about the U.S. economy, but he has sketched out notably few details about how his plans would actually work.

The convention’s first day is still expected to focus on the economy even after Saturday’s shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania in which the former president was injured.

If the program goes ahead as planned, expect speakers to argue that Trump’s agenda of sweeping tariffs and lower taxes would jump-start the economy.

The former president says he wants tariffs on trade partners and no taxes on tips and would like to knock the corporate tax rate down a tick. The Republican platform also promises to “defeat” inflation and “quickly bring down all prices,” in addition to pumping out more oil, natural gas and coal.

The platform would address illegal immigration in part with the “largest deportation program in American history.” And Trump would also scrap President Joe Biden’s policies to develop the market for electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Democrats and several leading economists say the math shows that Trump’s ideas would cause an explosive bout of inflation, wallop the middle class and — by his extending his soon-to-expire tax cuts — heap another $5 trillion-plus onto the national debt.

Trump has released few hard numbers and no real policy language or legislative blueprints. Instead, his campaign is betting that voters care more about attitude than policy specifics.

The Associated Press sent the Trump campaign 20 basic questions in June to clarify his economic views and the campaign declined to answer any of them. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted that Trump best speaks for himself and directed the AP to video clips of him.

By contrast, Biden has an exhaustive 188-page budget proposal that lays out his economic vision, even as his campaign had increasingly devolved before Saturday’s rally shooting into questions about his age and whether he should remain the nominee after a self-defeating June 27 debate.

A recent analysis by the Peterson Institute of International Economics showed that deporting 1.3 million workers would cause the size of the U.S. economy to shrink by 2.1%, essentially creating a recession.

Stephen Moore, an informal Trump adviser and economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said Trump is unique in that he’s already been president and voters can judge him off his record in office.

“You want to know what he’s going to do in his second term, look at what he did in his first term,” Moore said.

Democrats have argued that Trump would be more extreme in his second term, using his own remarks to say he would put independent federal agencies under his direct control and use the federal government to settle scores with his perceived enemies. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint is a template for what a second term would look like, they argue, a claim that Trump has disputed.

But Moore said he believes that Trump would be pragmatic in office and focus on the needs of business to drive economic growth.

“There is an idea that it’s going to be like slash and burn — I don’t think it’s going to be a radical agenda,” Moore said.

Some of Trump’s plans have gotten bipartisan backing. Both of Nevada’s senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, are Democrats who would like to ban taxes on tips paid to workers, even as the Biden White House favors a higher minimum wage for tipped workers.

Companies do like Trump’s ideas to cut regulations and further lower the corporate tax rate from 21% to 20%. The tax rate had been 35% when he became president in 2017. Democrats, by comparison, want a 28% corporate tax rate in order to fund programs for the middle class and deficit reduction.

But Trump has also floated huge tariffs that he says would protect U.S. manufacturing jobs. Biden preserved the tariffs on China that Trump introduced and went a step further by banning exports of advanced computer chips to China.

Companies generally dislike tariffs — which are taxes on imports — because they can raise costs, which are then likely borne by consumers. An analysis by the economists Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely found that Trump’s tariffs would cost a typical U.S. household $1,700 a year in what would effectively be a tax hike.

Trump’s tariff plans could worsen inflation as a result, even though the Republican says in videos that he would reduce inflation. It’s unclear how Trump would lower inflation, which peaked in 2022 at 9.1% and has since eased to 3% annually.

“The tariff issue is extremely important — and people are not paying enough attention to the magnitude of the Trump tariff policy, what the consequences would be,” said Clausing, a former Biden Treasury Department official and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

But tariffs might be more of a political winner than an economic strategy, according to a research paper earlier this year by the economists David Autor, Anne Beck, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson. The research found that the tariffs during Trump’s first term did not increase employment, but the tariffs did help Trump politically in the 2020 election in the industrial areas that lost jobs to China and other countries.

Clausing noted that Trump is proposing tariffs on more than $3 trillion of imports, a 10-fold increase over what he did in his first term. She noted that the tariffs could make it more expensive to bring in the raw materials that U.S. factories need while also raising prices for consumers already struggling with high inflation. She said she wants people to understand the risks Trump’s economic policies could pose before it’s too late.

““I think people will notice when everything gets wildly expensive,” she said. “This is going to be a huge disaster.”