A midsummer dream

 And now we arrive at the All-Star break, and Babe Ruth 2.0 -- aka Shohei Ohtani -- leads all of baseball with 32 home runs, and on the bump he's tied for fourth in strikeouts with 132, and now I'm falling asleep and dreaming about a headline in the newspaper.

Pirates Sign Ohtani To Monster Deal, it says.

And, yeah, OK, so an aardvark will fly before that happens. But it's a pleasant midsummer dream, so buzz off.

In my dream, see, Pirates owner Bob Nutting is visited by three ghosts, or maybe three guys named Luca Brasi.  Together they convince him to stop pinching every penny until it screams like Jamie Lee Curtis in "Halloween." Luca adds that Roberto Clemente is watching what Nutting's doing to his Pirates, and he ain't pleased, know what I mean, Bob?

Anyway, Bob decides he doesn't need any more ski lodges, and that pile he's sitting on isn't bringing him happiness, and. damn, those pliers Luca's carrying look kinda scary. So he decides the fans he's been fleecing deserve a ballclub worth its proud heritage, and he opens the vault and asks Ohtani how much he wants.

Either that, or he sells the team to someone who actually cares. That'd work, too.

At any rate, in my dream Othani's wearing black-and-gold, and the Pirates go out and get some other guys to go with him, and suddenly they're the Pirates again and no longer the Cruds I've been watching with such weary contempt. And all of us in our Clemente jerseys live happily ever after.

"That's the stupidest dream I ever heard," you're saying now.

Yeah, well, Ohtani's gotta go somewhere, right? 

That's the buzz right now, it seems. The Angels once again are not going anywhere, and now Mike Trout's on the shelf with a broken wrist, and so the trade rumors are flying. 

What good is the best player in baseball if you're still below .500 at the All-Star break? And with Trout out, not likely to get much better?

The situations fairly shollers "reset", and the Angels could get a whole lot of resetting for Ohtani. Of course, it'll be a club that has money and is willing to spend it that winds up with him. 

This raises the intriguing possibility the Cubs might have a shot, but of course not really because it's the Ricketts family and because, you know, it's the Cubs. So it'll likely be the Dodgers or the Yankees or the Red Sox, one of the usual suspects.

Although ... 

Although someone the other day floated the idea of Ohtani-to-the-Orioles, who are two games back of Tampa Bay in the AL East and poised for a breakthrough that hasn't happened in decades. 

The O's in the Series again? Really?

Gotta admit. That would be kinda cool.