What in the blessed or not-so-blessed names of Branch Rickey, George Steinbrenner, Ted Turner, Jerry Reinsdorf, John Henry, Steve Cohen and baseball owners everywhere, historical and current, is going on around here?

Has Utah gone mad? Mad with major league money?

Let’s see if we’ve got all this straight.

The Beehive State, its hopes for baseball, is running up on the Battle of the Billionaires.

That’s right. Don’t even get in this fight if you don’t have b-b-b-b-b-billions. Nobody wants to take your first $B.

It used to be that the state didn’t have enough ridiculously rich people in it to afford to lure or land an MLB team here. And now, like planes stacked up at Salt Lake International, it’s got too many. And the struggle between them is on, on like Donkey Kong. Thing is, none of these individuals had much financial firepower when that game was actually en vogue.

They do now.

Utah, it appears, is a prime spot for Major League Baseball expansion in the near future, what with its fast company, its expanding population, its hunger for top-level sports, its politicos’ willingness to fork over more money than ol’ King Farouk to some lucky titan, with Utah taxpayers swinging the big bat to help somebody, anybody with enough zeros in their bank account to get a team.

I asked Larry Miller back in 2007 if Utah could ever get a big-league club here. He said he thought it could if the price was right, but he figured it might take some 20 years to see it happen.

Um. The man was downright visionary. Turns out, the time, the price is right, whatever it will end up being. Where were we? Oh, yeah: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to rumble!

In this corner, speaking of Larry, we have the Miller family, which already owns Real Salt Lake, the Utah Royals and half the land in Utah. And in this other corner, we have Ryan Smith’s group, which already owns the Utah Jazz, the Utah Mammoth and half the Utah tech industry.

It could be an even bigger battle. There are other billionaires in Utah, too, but they presently are busy with business and church-related matters in other realms.

The Miller-Smith showdown is both interesting and a contrast.

The Millers have been publicly planning for a major move on baseball for years, talking about their intentions openly, rounding up support for the effort, meeting with MLB’s commissioner, talking with other owners and execs, drawing up detailed plans for a stadium to anchor a Miller real estate project on the west side of Salt Lake, installing as an ambassador one of the game’s and state’s favored sons in Dale Murphy, two-time National League MVP and overall great guy.

Smith, on the other hand, has seemingly been positioning for his and his associates’ candidacy in a different way. He’s done his finagling on the down-low. That is, until the man who built his fortune via software endeavor Qualtrics blurted out during a recent podcast that baseball was in his sights.

Say, what?

The Smith Entertainment Group is denying such involvement. But if you listen to what Smith himself said, that claim seems rather at odds, twisted up in contradiction. It sure sounded as though he wants to bring MLB to Utah, and not via the Millers. That surprised a lot of folks for a few reasons:

1) Smith previously had said next to nothing about this intention, 2) Smith and his partners have had their hands full with the Jazz, with the NHL’s Mammoth, with everything connected to those teams, and with renovating the Delta Center to be suitable for basketball and hockey, and 3) people have wondered just how much money Smith has or has access to. Already, multiple partners are involved with owning these teams, beyond just Smith. You have to wonder how deep his pockets actually are. Is he, at least as a figurehead, buying franchises because he has the money or because he knows others who have the money and they want to use the teams to make more money, with public funding as a boost?

What are his plans for a stadium? Where would he put it? Would he go to Point of the Mountain or just tear down what’s left of the Shops at South Town, where his practice facilities are or will be, and build there? The suspicion here is the latter, but …

But.

The Millers’ story is more than familiar.

The longstanding pro team owners have provided Utah sports fans all kinds of thrilling moments and memories, on something of a budget, by saving and keeping the Jazz here when the franchise was otherwise all set to head on out to a different state.

You know the story. The previous owner was out of cash, out of luck, out of his league in the NBA, and Larry stepped in, at great personal risk, coming up with enough to buy half the club with money he didn’t have, then later, all the club with money he did have. It was good to be in the growing car business back then.

Larry liked basketball, but he loved baseball.

After he passed in 2009, Gail Miller, his wife, savvy partner and confidant, took over ownership and operation of the Jazz and eventually sold the franchise to Ryan Smith because she said she figured the young tech billionaire to be a good, trusted steward of the team right here in Utah. He wanted a team here. Turns out, he wanted teams here. And the Millers wanted money from the sale and money from the sale of their dealership empire.

Meanwhile, as the Millers bowed out from pro sports ownership for a time, they got into, among other enterprises, real estate.

Now, they want back into sports, having purchased RSL from Smith, and having made their plans and their moves for baseball.

Who should paycheck-to-paycheck Utahns who are just trying to get by in a crazy economy but who also love their sports, root for in the B of the Bs?

How about this: Whoever demands less public money to make it happen and whoever will charge less for tickets to the teeming and teaming masses, and whoever will commit enough of their own attention and resources to build an authentic winner from scratch — a difficult thing to do.

Utah sports fans don’t want to spend their own energy and time and money and emotional commitment on a dog, on a loser that will just drag along, making money for the owners, but never reaching the top of Major League Baseball.

Failing that, how about this: Let the Millers have baseball. It was, as mentioned, Larry’s passion. They’ve made that clear. It would benefit the family, to be sure, and it would benefit Utah sports fans.

If Ryan Smith and partners want to expand their empire, want to spend more — and gain more money — here in Utah by way of sports ownership, then have them go after the NFL. That would take even more cash, but … think about it: the NBA, the NHL, MLB, the NFL (and MLS and NWSL) and major college sports here in our humble little burg and the state that surrounds it.

That’s something every sports-minded person could get behind.