MLB Star Power Index: Milwaukee Brewers win baseball’s 2023 Big Ten championship

Welcome to the MLB Star Power Index — a bi-weekly enterprise that determines with terrible authority which gamers/baseball entities are dominating the present zeitgeist of the game, no less than consistent with the slim perceptions of this depressing scribe. While one’s presence in this record is regularly celebratory in nature, it will also be for functions of lamentation or ridicule. The gamers/dwelling baseball phenomena indexed are in no explicit order, similar to the telephone e-book. To this version’s honorees/dishonorees …

The 2023 MLB Big Ten Champions

The time has come to award the Gus and Louie Varland Plaque of Solid Michigan Cherry Wood is upon us. As you are indisputably breathlessly conscious, this sturdiest of laurels is going each and every yr to the MLB Big Ten Champion. 

At this level, those that love to distract from the bigger level with inane questions is also asking what the MLB Big Ten championship even is. Fine, we will inform you. Thanks to paperwork retrieved from the scriptoria of quite a lot of medieval European monasteries, we all know no less than two issues concerning the Big Ten convention because it was once supposed to be conceived and completed: 

• Written utterance of the Big Ten shall by no means entail use of the numeral “10.” Reference to a non-existent factor referred to as the “Big 10” can be punishable through a swift go back and forth to a collection of wood gallows that still serves because the Purdue-Northwestern competition trophy. 
• The constituent establishments of the Big Ten shall stretch now not from sea to shining sea however reasonably from honorable cornhole board to invasive species of carp fished from the Great Lakes that shall quickly sicken us through the sunshine of the campfire to the closing hand of euchre till the following hand of euchre. The Big Ten is the Midwest, simply because the Midwest is the Big Ten. 

To our everlasting chagrin, this 2nd principle has been grossly violated through the Actual Big Ten, which incorporates the distinctly un-Midwestern likes of Rutgers and Maryland and can quickly permit such infections to unfold with the addition of USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon. In this area, then again, the ones explicit balrogs shall now not go. Take again the streets? We’ll get to that after we will. Our extra urgent price is to Take Back the Big Ten. 

Yes, it falls to us to revive geographical coherence and morality to the Big Ten with Major League Baseball as our vessel. We have accomplished and proceed to do that through awarding the MLB Big Ten identify to the staff with the most productive steady season throughout each the National League Central and the American League Central — i.e., Big Ten Country. 

MLB’s central divisions are geographically good, no less than through the criteria of the style. The NL and AL Central groups occupy seven other states, and 6 of the ones are house to exact Big Ten groups. Better but, none of the ones six states is New Jersey or Maryland or California or Oregon or Washington. The one state that is not part of Big Ten nation is Missouri, house of the Cardinals and Royals. However, you’ll be able to nonetheless flood a basement there and get in public shoving fits over mustard. 

One could be questioning whether or not the AL East and NL East can pair up for the ACC identify or whether or not the 2 west divisions quantity to MLB’s Pac-12. No, they can not, and that is for causes of Midwest Uber Alles. Fire pits! Rust-Belt craft beer! Mowing the backyard all the way through a twister watch! Winter tongues burned again to existence through scalding pierogies! Waffles eaten from a bowl! A borrowed snow blower in any case returned years later handiest after the borrower dies of cardiac arrest whilst shoveling! Thawing frozen custard within the radar vary! The Varland boys! Sump pump bought at a backyard sale! Fond du Lac! 

With the ones justifications laid out just like the asbestos floor of grandma’s dust room, it is time to honor the 2023 MLB Big Ten champ. Become exalted, you Milwaukee Brewers! 

The noticer of items will understand that the steady season isn’t but entire, and for the reason that MLB Big Ten champion is decided through the regular-season standings, that is all extraordinarily untimely. Perhaps, however the iniquities of the calendar make this the general SPI of 2023, and that implies we need to generally tend to this important trade at this time. Besides, the Minnesota Twins, Chicago Cubs, and Cincinnati Reds have lovingly agreed to not go the Brewers within the Big Ten standings and thus now not topple those assumptions in a gross and most likely felonious act of inconvenience. 

Now that now we have offered the 2023 Brewers with the Gus and Louie Varland Plaque of Solid Michigan Cherry Wood, allow us to recite, in a rather nasally accessory that inspires the traditional head colds of Saxony, all the MLB Big Ten champions. 

Note that this hallowed ledger starts in 2012, when the Houston Astros have been mercifully drummed out of the Centrals, thus restoring purity and permitting the MLB Big Ten to be born. Regard: 

MLB Big Ten champions/recipients of the Gus and Louie Varland Plaque of Solid Michigan Cherry Wood

• 2013 St. Louis Cardinals
• 2014 Detroit Tigers
• 2015 St. Louis Cardinals
• 2016 Chicago Cubs
• 2017 Cleveland Indians
• 2018 Milwaukee Brewers
• 2019 Minnesota Twins
• 2020 Minnesota Twins
• 2021 Milwaukee Brewers
• 2022 St. Louis Cardinals
• 2023 Milwaukee Brewers

Now move forth, freshly topped Brewers, and lose to Alabama 34-9 in a bowl recreation. If the temperature is above freezing however under 50, then it’s possible you’ll put on shorts together with your puffy jacket.