If anything encapsulates the Tampa Bay Rays' depressing reality, it is this: In 2012, they became the first team in baseball history to win 90 games and finish dead-last in attendance. Actually, maybe it is this: Their local television revenue for the coming half-decade is around $16 million a year, compared to the Dodgers' soon-to-be quarter-billion per annum.

No, no. It has got to be this: Until Monday, the most money the Rays ever guaranteed a player was $35 million – and that was Dec. 4, 1997, for Wilson Alvarez, a free agent they signed before the franchise had played a single game. 

Evan Longoria was all smiles after Rays owner Stuart Sternberg gave him a $100 million extension. In the interceding 15 years, as the Rays evolved from incompetent to hyper-competent, they could not change the one thing that could save them: geography. They are stuck in a lean-to of a stadium with an awful concession deal. Their fan base refuses to show despite more victories over the last five years than every team but the Yankees and Phillies. They continuously outrun the cycle of sports

Everyone knew the number would be big. Major League Baseball hates involving the legal system, and it went to court for the number. A team sold for more than $2 billion because of the number. A management group went on a drunken-sailor payroll escapade anticipating the number.

Now we know the number. Big doesn't begin to describe it.

Dangerous does.

The Dodgers' ownership group will have even more reason to smile with their new TV deal. (AP)Over the next 25 years, Fox is going to pay the Los Angeles Dodgers somewhere between $6 billion and $7 billion to televise its regular-season games, barring a last-minute snafu in negotiations, according to Deadline.com. That's twice the previous record for local TV rights. That's at least a quarter-billion dollars a year for the Dodgers and Dodgers alone. That's maxing out at $1.73 million a game for each of the 4,050 scheduled. That's the final tummy tuck on a body's worth of cosmetic surgery that could happen only in Los Angeles.

Most of all, that's the siren that baseball's new era has arrived, one in which the sport's best

The Kansas City Royals are pushing hard to contend in 2013, considering almost every option to upgrade their pitching staff. And that includes trading the best hitting prospect in baseball.

In their search for a top-of-the-rotation starter, the Royals have dangled outfielder Wil Myers, the consensus 2012 minor league player of the year, two sources told Yahoo! Sports.

Wil Myers hit a combined 37 homers last season between Double-A and Triple-A.While the Royals have designated Myers off-limits for anything other than pitching, teams with frontline starters understand Kansas City is desperate to add another pitcher after re-signing Jeremy Guthrie and trading for Ervin Santana. With the returns of Danny Duffy and Felipe Paulino from Tommy John surgery, plus the arrival of prospect Jake Odorizzi, an overhaul of the Royals' rotation could thrust them into contention in the AL Central – especially with a pitcher like Tampa Bay's James Shields, whom the Royals covet at the top of the rotation but are loath to trade for because only two years remain on his deal

If Jeffrey Loria knew as much about baseball as he does about deceit and fraud, maybe the Miami Marlins wouldn't have finished in last place two consecutive years and given him the impetus to turn the fail-safe key on his failed ballclub. Around the team, there is a joke about the baseball-operations leadership. Mike Hill is the general manager, but he's really third in charge. Larry Beinfest is president, a title larded with gravitas if not absolute power. That belongs to Loria, the mad king of his opulent castle.

Nowhere else does an owner walk up to players in the clubhouse and inform them of their need to start producing – or, in some cases, of an impending demotion. Loria struts about the players' domain as if he's one of them when so many look at him and wonder what he's doing there, why he wants to be the offspring of George Steinbrenner and Jerry Jones, only, you know, clueless.

Giancarlo Stanton follows through on one of his 93 career home runs (Getty)Were Loria not some megalomaniacal charlatan, he already would've complemented the Marlins'

A few days before the presidential election, some of the nation's most weathered political pundits zeroed in on a common enemy. His name is Nate Silver. He is a 34-year-old economist from Chicago. He is relatively famous now because the very thing for which the pundits derided him – his numbers-based system projecting the results of the presidential race – turned out to be 100 percent accurate. Barack Obama may have won the presidency, but Nate Silver won the election.

Mike Trout was the unanimous AL Rookie of the Year. (AP)

Silver took no time to gloat, for he was merely a proxy, the latest bespectacled face to represent the tried-and-true discipline of mathematics. As it has evolved from simple counting to mind-blowing string theory, math has been doubted, distrusted and disbelieved. Pythagoras, Aristotle, Galileo and even Silver: The most talented can bend numbers at their whim, though they know better than to do so. For to be taken seriously – to win over people determined not to be won lest it exterminate the usefulness of the

The conspiracy lives. It lives in Miami, where they're destroying baseball, just like they did in another city before. It lives in the hands of Jeffrey Loria and David Samson, the owner and president of the Marlins, the con artists who pilfered Miami's money before moving on to its dignity. And it lives especially with Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball who's letting it all happen again, because he's part and parcel to it.

Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, and president David Samson found a new low in Miami. (AP) By now, in the fallout of a trade nuclear even by Marlins standards, Samson and Loria have been marked radioactive. To dump $181 million in salary like they did Tuesday – to trade Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, John Buck and Emilio Bonifacio to Toronto for a few prospects, a bad-attitude shortstop and a backup catcher – was galling even by their standards. And these were two men who for years lied about their finances, lied about their intentions, lied all to get Miami to build them a $634 million ballpark that was supposed to end this wretched

The GM meetings are what the Winter Meetings used to be: a chance for the sport's illuminati to gather, mingle, gossip, booze and, if the voyeurs snooping on their little party are lucky, make a trade or two.

Starting Wednesday, baseball's 30 general managers and plenty of their confederates will gather in Indian Wells, Calif., for three days of the above, along with procedural meetings of more substance and consequence than usual.

In between all of that, they will fish around for who might be available or could be traded or would be desired or may head somewhere. This is all a game, remember, and this is where teams advance their pawns with the idea of striking soon thereafter. They've all got their eyes on the king, of course, and this offseason …

Josh Hamilton batted .285 this season with 43 home runs and 128 RBIs. (AP)

1. Josh Hamilton wears the crown. Because no matter how absurd or ill-conceived it may seem, there is a reality about his hunt for one of the longest and most lucrative contracts in sports history: Someone is going to give it to

An investigation by the MLB Players Association into the embattled ACES agency cleared powerful agents Seth and Sam Levinson in the attempted cover-up of Melky Cabrera's positive test for testosterone, two sources with knowledge of the findings told Yahoo! Sports.

While the union is expected to discipline the agency for lack of oversight over Juan Nunez, the consultant who helped concoct fake websites to explain Cabrera's positive, a memo distributed to ACES clients and obtained by Yahoo! Sports said such sanctions "will not compromise ACES' ability to represent you in contract negotiations."

Melky Cabrera was suspended 50 games after testing positive for high levels of testosterone. (Getty Images)Furthermore, the memo said the union will not investigate past allegations in the Mitchell Report or from Paul Lo Duca, a former ACES client, tying the agents to performance-enhancing drugs.

Shane Victorino, Jonny Gomes, Everth Cabrera and Nyjer Morgan have left ACES – believed to be baseball's second-largest agency – since Major League Baseball cracked the Cabrera ruse, though their