Earlier this week, we talked about what the future of baseball’s national TV contracts might look like. Here’s a glance at their past.
This is a bittersweet column for me, as I write now to announce to the Baseball Prospectus readership my departure from the writing fold. On January 2, I joined the front office of the Toronto Blue Jays, working for General Manager J.P. Ricciardi on matters of player evaluation. For me, this marks the end of…
I’ll give baseball’s owners some credit, since they are actually going to come somewhat clean on the money they make. How clean they come will determine how well they fare in the next round of labor negotiations, and to what degree they seize the villain’s throne in the eyes of the fans. ESPN.com reported yesterday…
Plenty of small items to clean up amongst the mess that is baseball today: First, contraction. At this point, it seems safe to say that baseball won’t be eliminating any teams before the 2002 season. The lawsuits currently pending will slow the process enough to kill it by means of a pocket veto of sorts….
Hand Bud Selig and the owners of Major League Baseball a loaded gun and they will successfully shoot themselves every time. Some time on Tuesday morning, someone handed Selig an Uzi and several rounds of ammunition. Unfortunately, he survived…and held a press conference. What we got was even more disgraceful than the worst scenarios any…
One criticism levied against the A’s this year is that they are somehow too dependent on home runs. There are two reasons to scorn this pointless argument. One is that it’s essentially a last-gasp defense of batting average: The A’s have a poor team batting average, and we all know that’s bad, like pollution and…
Two months ago, the Cardinals were thought to have given up the 2001 season, having made just one minor deal–giving away the established player–at the trade deadline. They made a mad run at the NL Central title, and ended up as the league’s wild card. They’ll face the Diamondbacks, who had three of the league’s…
Tuesday’s column over on ESPN.com on the Favorite Toy produced quite a reader response about omitted players, such as this note: I enjoyed your ESPN column today–it is fun to speculate about these things. One thing I noticed was the absence of the player who, prior to 2000, usually led all of these discussions–Ken Griffey….
A few weeks back, a column on the legality of capping draft salaries generated plenty of email from the JDs in the audience, including an interesting exchange with Greg G., who responded thus to a question about how the union could bargain away the rights of players who have yet to join: It’s a neat…
The specter of contraction has reared its ugly head again. The very public tiff between Jerry McMorris, principal owner of the Colorado Rockies, and the Montreal Expos, has brought the subject back into the public debate. For those who missed it, McMorris proposed that last weekend’s series between the Rockies and Expos be moved to…
A number of readers found more in my Labor Day column on "hope and faith" than was actually there. The primary point of the column was to dispel the Chicken Little garbage frequently spewed by some mainstream sportswriters who argue that fans of most baseball teams can’t hold out any hope of contending in April…
Much ado is being made in the baseball press these days about the high cost of draft picks, and the increasing probability that some sort of draft cap or rookie cap will be put in place in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the Lords of the Realm and the MLB Players Association. While…
Tell me again about hope and faith. Before the season–heck, before every season–the irresponsible among the baseball media like to tell us that half to three-quarters of the teams in baseball have no hope of contending or reaching the playoffs. Most readers of Baseball Prospectus know that this isn’t true, regardless of their opinions on…
The Twins are falling, and therefore, so is the sky, according to those who drink heavily at the fountain of MLB swill. It’s no surprise that one of the first cries showed up on MLB’s own site. Mike Bauman, apparently just purchased from Jim Henson Productions, issued a typically opinion-laden, fact-free piece last week stating…
Through the beneficence of an anonymous, nonexistent informant, Baseball Prospectus has obtained tapes of an actual conversation from the night of July 31. "Hello?" "Carl?" "Yes. Who’s this?" "What do you mean who’s this? It’s Bud!" "Bud…oh, yes, Bud. What can I do for you?" "It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?" "What…
The Great Imbalancer went away, conducting some major business transactions of his own, but he’s back because he’s needed. The lies and filth of MLB ownership are starting to build like dot-com resumes in a recruiter’s inbox. The latest is a real classic: John Henry, new owner of the Florida Marlins and perhaps holder of…