Major League Baseball is a product. It’s packaged and sold in a number of ways. You can buy tickets and attend the games in person. You can sit through commercials and listen to the games on radio. You can either pay for a broad selection of games on TV, or settle for a more limited…
Americans are big fans of cognitive dissonance. It’s hard to identify a single segment of society that doesn’t have a significant amount of hypocrisy.
Let’s check out the Florida State and California Leagues.
Ok, so Mike Piazza says he’s not gay. Bobby Valentine says that MLB’s ready to deal with an openly gay player. Mike Timlin says he’s already knowingly played with a gay player. Steve Phillips says that statistically, you’d expect a gay player in every clubhouse. He also encapsulates a lot of good thinking on the subject by saying “Who cares?”
Hard as it may be to believe, I’m going to spend less time than usual on this column, despite the large number of interesting things to talk about. Sexual Orientation Ok, so Mike Piazza says he’s not gay. Bobby Valentine says that MLB’s ready to deal with an openly gay player. Mike Timlin says he’s…
Among longtime rabid fans, there’s a kind of vague denial, wrapped around the idea that “there’s no way they’d let 1994-95 happen again.” With all due respect to those people, 1994-95 wasn’t that bad for the owners or players. It was bad for addicts. I don’t think I got rid of the shakes until about 1997. Baseball attendance recovered almost immediately, well before the Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa show.
There’s a state people kind of ease into when things around them are collapsing. It could be that their company is in the midst of a death spiral, or perhaps their group of college friends is gradually drifting apart. Or, in a strictly hypothetical example, an activity that’s a core part of their enjoyment of…
Anyway, let’s go on to the minors. I apologize if there’s not a lot of breadth here; I’m focusing on those guys who I’ve been able to talk to some scouts about, and I’ll get to more over the course of the season. I’m concentrating on guys with some upside, or guys who, for some reason or other, are interesting because their level of performance may have changed.
Since we’re about a month into the season, and I’m getting a lot of mail with specific questions about prospects, I thought I’d bounce through some of the early performances from the minors and talk to a few scouts. Originally, I had hoped to have a Win Shares review done by now, but the responsible…
There’s a book out now by Phil Kaplan, who runs a very famous Web site called f—edcompany.com. His book is basically a re-hash of what has run on his site during the past couple of years, as lots of Internet companies predictably cratered. Kaplan’s basic premise is pretty simple–it’s ridiculous to expect to make money…
As the Month of Gory Managerial Death fades away, is there some sort of central lesson that can be learned from the various dugout purges? Were the decisions to hire Davey Lopes, Phil Garner, Tony Muser, and Buddy Bell just bad decisions from the outset, or were they good decisions that just didn’t have good outcomes? Is there anything at all to be learned from this wave of firings? What will a smart organization take away from all this?
One word thrown around a lot when a manager is fired is “accountability.” At the end of the day, managers are accountable for what happens on the field–the wins and losses.
Some thoughts on Ichiro Suzuki and baseball’s “inevitable” return to Washington, D.C.
I’d like to get to a couple of topics today, so let’s jump in… Ichiban! On Valentine’s Day, I made the mistake of making an apparently unflattering comment about an extremely popular player. I wrote: TV, as a visual medium, lends itself to interesting moments, and all of us have a tendency to remember the…
As I explained last week, we asked the attendees at each Pizza Feed to predict the results of the divisional races this year, along with the World Series winner, major award winners, managerial firings, etc. This week, we’ll take a look at the American League divisional races.
As I explained last week, we asked the attendees at each Pizza Feed to predict the results of the divisional races this year, along with the World Series winner, major award winners, managerial firings, etc. This week, we’ll take a look at the American League divisional races. For each division, the average rank of each…