This got personal.

It got personal, and it got ugly, and for the next half-decade, as Josh Hamilton wears a Los Angeles Angels uniform and faces the Texas Rangers 19 games every season, the malice will not abate. Welcome to baseball's best new rivalry: Angels vs. Rangers, neither of whom Wednesday acted like their nicknames might suggest.

Los Angeles played the gunslinger, swooping in to steal Hamilton away with a five-year, $125 million contract the club hopes will change the landscape of the American League West in a way that the $300 million-plus invested last year in Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson didn't. And the Rangers were more like seraphs, playing innocent to everything, miffed at how it unfolded, curious why they didn't at least get a phone call from Hamilton's agents with a chance to match like Hamilton said so often he would give them.Josh Hamilton is headed west to play with former Rangers teammate C.J. Wilson. (AP)

The race for supremacy in the West turned cutthroat, imbuing a rivalry in name alone with actual malevolence. Hamilton – spurned

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – On his first morning here, James Shields went to Starbucks with his new manager, Ned Yost, who revealed something of an embarrassing secret. To the baristas who take his order, he was not Ned. He told them he was Frank, because after back-to-back seasons of at least 90 losses with the Kansas City Royals, he didn't want them calling out his name and drawing ugly glances from the other patrons.

"Well, James is sitting there," Yost said Wednesday, "and I think, 'I'm not gonna have to use Frank much longer.' I'm excited about that."The Royals' front-office went all in with pitcher James Shields. (AP)

The last time there was this combination of optimism and chatter about the Kansas City Royals was a generation ago. The city did right by the All-Star Game, but that had nothing to do with the team. Zack Greinke won a Cy Young surrounded by mediocrity. Carlos Beltran got traded, and that was not a particularly optimistic moment. A 16-3 start in 2003 devolved into mediocrity. A drunk idiot and his son attacked the Royals' first-base

They are going for it all across baseball, from the Pacific to the desert to the heartland to the rust belt. Everybody understands something about a game in which one-third of the teams make the postseason: Teams don't have to be great to win a ring. All it takes is a ticket to the dance, and even the goofus can end up prom king.

Shin-Soo Choo will become the Reds' new starting center fielder. (AP)The new rules begot an old-school trade Tuesday night, a three-team, nine-player, win-now, damn-the-consequences wheeler-dealer of a hot stove treat. The Cincinnati Reds acquired Shin-Soo Choo to play center field, which was amusing seeing as both the Reds' left and right fielders have played more games in center than him. The Arizona Diamondbacks got their long-lusted-after shortstop, a 22-year-old named Didi Gregorius about whom one D-backs official said: "I don't know if he can hit." And the Cleveland Indians, whose bungling of big deals has left them reeling in recent seasons, made out best of all, landing Trevor Bauer, the young right-hander whose

James Shields gives the Royals the ace they've been seeking. (AP)

For four days, Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore sequestered himself in his suite at the Gaylord Opryland hotel and hunted for his ace. He burned up his phone's battery and sent his lieutenants out on reconnaissance missions to gauge the prices on every starting pitcher the Royals liked, wanting to leave the winter meetings with another starter. When he arrived at gate C-17 at Nashville International Airport on Thursday morning without his pitcher, he at least had a better sense of who he wanted – and who, in one of the biggest deals in years, he landed.

James Shields represents something different to the Royals than their trade partner, the Tampa Bay Rays, from whom they acquired him Sunday night in a blockbuster that sent the Rays consensus minor league player of the year Wil Myers as the headliner in a four-prospect package. The Rays valued him as a 200-inning workhorse, a pitcher on whom every homegrown pitcher they developed could model themselves – "a

James Shields finished 15-10 with a 3.52 ERA for Tampa Bay in 2012. (AP)

The Royals acquired top starter James Shields, right-hander Wade Davis and a player to be named later for minor league player of the year Wil Myers, pitching prospects Jake Odorizzi and Mike Montgomery, and third baseman Patrick Leonard on Sunday night.

After an offseason's worth of proposals, counterproposals and counters to the counterproposals, two of the smallest-market teams in the game struck one of the biggest deals in years. Prospects of Myers' quality almost never get traded before their major league debuts, and pitchers of Shields' acumen rarely are dealt from teams that harbor hopes of contention.

Still, the Royals' eagerness to win with a young, home-grown core necessitated a front-of-the-rotation pitcher, and they got something like it in Shields, who turns 31 in 11 days. For

Zack Greinke is the latest big money Dodgers catch. (U.S. Presswire)

The most expensive team in sports history spent another $147 million on Saturday night. This came 3½ months after the Los Angeles Dodgers spent $250 million, which came two months after they spent $42 million, which came two weeks after they spent $85 million, which came eight months after they spent $160 million, which came less than 18 months after they filed for bankruptcy.

This is something unlike what the sports world ever has seen: a franchise with seemingly no limits. The Dodgers handed Zack Greinke the largest contract ever for a right-hander and the highest per-annum salary for any pitcher with a six-year, $147 million deal. It thrusts their 2013 payroll to more than $210 million – and that doesn't include the $8.3 million they're still paying Manny Ramirez. Factor in that, and the money owed Andruw Jones and Tony Gwynn Jr., and the rest of the players needed to fill out their roster, and the Dodgers will spend at least $225 million next year, a record that will grow

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Baseball's winter meetings are over, and executives across the game are sorting through the detritus of three days inside the Gaylord Opryland hotel. The takeaways are fairly evident.

There is a lot of money in baseball. Like, $13 million-a-year-for-an-OK-and-aging-outfielder lot. Like, three-years-for-a-utilityman-or-one-out-lefty lot. Like, parents, if-your-child-shows-a-whit-of-talent-cultivate-it-like-a-cash-crop lot.

GM Brian Cashman and the Yankees didn't make much noise in the free-agent market at the winter meetings. (AP)

That money does not necessarily filter down to the traditional spenders. After an old-guy binge, the New York Yankees are eerily quiet. They got outbid for Jeff Keppinger and Nate Schierholtz. They're staring at budgetary restrictions for 2014 and beyond that are stifling any creativity. General manager Brian Cashman has privately expressed frustration with the team's uncertainty and unhappiness with his roster as it's currently constituted, sources said.

Of course, that didn't translate into any big-name trade activity. The only swaps

The antitrust lawsuit aimed at blowing up Major League Baseball's lucrative television-rights territories and forcing the league to abandon its antiquated blackout policy will proceed after a federal judge Wednesday affirmed the claims that MLB's media structure is anti-competitive.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin said MLB's policy, which includes offering out-of-market games only in a package and blacking out in-market games, raises prices, reduces competition among teams and used "monopoly power" to restrict fans' ability to watch games.

An influx of TV money has changed Bud Selig's stance on MLB's blackout policy. (AP)"Making all games available as part of a package, while it may increase output overall, does not, as a matter of law, eliminate the harm to competition wrought by preventing the individual teams from competing to sell their games outside their home territories in the first place," Scheindlin wrote in a 53-page decision. "And plaintiffs in this case – the consumers – have plausibly alleged that they are the direct victims of this harm to