A month later, despite Bud Selig and Bob DuPuy’s continued Thelma and Louise-style drive towards a cliff–which probably includes hand-holding–I’m still thinking of something I saw during the World Cup. Baseball doesn’t need to borrow much from other sports (oh, the good announcer/bad announcer from wrestling, sure), but it should steal the "cheer clubs" from…
Lost in the chaos that surrounded the All-Star Game–and the spate of anti-marketing that followed it–was that the players did not set a strike date. They met, they authorized team votes on whether to walk, but no date was set, and none has yet been set.
Last year, I started messing around with something I call the Walk Gap, which is just the difference between a team’s walks drawn and walks allowed. Because we’ve spent so much time hammering home the importance of plate discipline and throwing strikes, I thought this might be a good indicator of team success.
Continuing our discussion from last week on how to build a team at Coors Field, this time, from the run-prevention side.
Last Tuesday night around 9 p.m., my mother asked me how I was planning to write about the All-Star Game if I wasn’t watching it. I told her that I wasn’t writing my column while away, and that I wouldn’t write about the All-Star Game when I returned because no one cared about the All-Star Game past about 10:30 a.m. the next day.
You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
True story #1: A few weeks ago, I was talking with Chris Kahrl about the week I was planning to be on vacation. I made the comment that the All-Star week was a good one to be out of touch, because there were just four days of games and usually the days around the Midsummer…
Continuing our discussion from last week on how to build a team at Coors Field, this time, from the run-prevention side. In Baseball Prospectus 2002, Joe Sheehan wrote: "If putting balls in play is the best approach for hitters in Denver, then it makes sense for the Rockies to favor pitchers who strike out a…
“Unfortunately, as of this date, it looks as if, quite frankly, it’s possible that I made a bad decision here and there.”
HOT IN HERE, NELLY "I take full responsibility for everything that goes on in regards to the clubs, and if the club fails, I failed." —Kenny Williams, White Sox GM "Unfortunately, as of this date, it looks as if, quite frankly, it’s possible that I made a bad decision here and there." –Williams "I can’t…
So how come the media, for the most part, doesn’t connect the dots, and call GMs on the carpet more for some of these downright miserable signings?
This year marks the tenth season of major league baseball in Denver. It is
clear now that none of us fully understood what we were getting ourselves into
when we allowed Rocky Mountain thin air to be unleashed on our national pastime.
Nine years and literally thousands of hanging curveballs, home runs, and
destroyed pitcher psyches later, we’re still trying to wrap our hands around the
conundrum that is baseball at altitude.
(And before you mention the word “humidor”, consider that with the recent run of
explosive offense at Coors Field, the Rockies and their opponents have combined
to score 11.74 runs per home game, compared to 8.61 runs per game on the road –
a 36% increase. It may no longer be the best hitters’ park of all-time – Coors
Field increased run scoring by 58% from 1999 to 2001 – but it’s still the best
hitters’ park of our generation.)
Fact: DuPuy exaggerated MLB’s operating losses by at least 22%.
The Baseball America website
features transcripts of lengthy interviews with the protagonists
in the current labor dispute:
Bob DuPuy,
MLB’s president and chief operating officer, and
MLBPA head Don Fehr. Editor Alan Schwarz sat down with each man for an hour, asking tough questions and following up as appropriate. Each transcript runs over 6,500 words.
Unfortunately, not all of those words are accurate.
While both men used the interview as a forum for presenting their positions
to the public, one went further. DuPuy made several unambiguously false
statements about the economics of Major League Baseball.
So how come every time it looks like there might be some sort of a labor stoppage in baseball, some group of people feels the need to put together some sort of “fan organization” with a bad acronym, with no apparent purpose except to whine?