Getting accurate injury information is about as easy as getting good seafood in Indianapolis, so adding in language barriers, time zone calculations, and trying to figure out the vagaries of international calling on my cell phone makes things especially challenging. So went the quest to find out the status of Mariners reliever Kazuhiro Sasaki.
Without getting off into a tangent on why the Reds backed off their plan to move to a four-man rotation, any Reds fan should be a bit concerned that so much is expected of Graves.
Serious Baseball Analysis Hits the Airwaves
After any article in which I include a toss-off reference to politics, like calling our president “President-by-court-order,” I get a lot of email that says, essentially, that I shouldn’t talk about politics. For those of you in this group, I’m going to get to baseball here in about four paragraphs.
Baseball is steeped in politics. The issues of tax burden and allocation: is it right to build a stadium for a team, and what good (if any) does it for the city? Labor relations and the roles of unions in the modern economy.
Dr. Chris Yeager: I finished my Ph.D. at Southern Miss and my study was on the biomechanics of the baseball swing–specifically the effect of the stride and weight shift in the swing. Based on that and my research is where I draw my philosophy and conclusions on how force is produced in the baseball swing.
Today’s Expos trade of Bartolo Colon and Quadruple-A infielder Jorge Nunez for Orlando Hernandez, Jeff Liefer, Rocky Biddle and an undisclosed amount of cash in a three-way deal with the White Sox and Yankees caps a two-month circus that’s left fans of the Expos and plenty of other teams nauseous. The Yankees dealt Hernandez and $2 million cash to get righty set-up man Antonio Osuna and Triple-A pitcher Delvis Lantigua.
Flash back to January 1987. Walk Like an Egyptian is at the top of the pop charts. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has coasted past 2,000. John Elway has broken Cleveland’s heart for the very first time. And in baseball, the free agents are getting utterly and completely shafted.
Almost from the day it opened, the Baseball Hall of Fame has had some form of a Veterans Committee to supplement the player selections voted on by the Baseball Writers Association of America. In fact, Cy Young, who finished sixth behind the first five inductees, also received the fourth-highest 1936 vote total from the Old-Timers Committee.
UTK took a look at the principles in the deal and comes away wondering if anyone asked the doctors about this.
I picked up Last Commissioner for a couple of reasons — I wanted to read his take on Rose, labor issues, and Vincent’s own ouster.
Of the many, many dumb things in the United States tax code, there’s a provision that allows teams to write off the salaries of players when they acquire the team on a limited schedule as depreciation. It’s an easy, fun way for them to show massive losses while they make tons and tons of delicious cash money. The write-off lasts five years, and then you sell the team for its increased value and find something else to do, like buy an arena football team, or make a nuisance of yourself in another sport.
A total of 3558 voters cast ballots this season.
“I am a Bud Selig man. I consider him a good friend. he’s a master at building people together. But while I’m loyal to Bud Selig, the biggest beneficiary in this whole plan are the Milwaukee Brewers. That doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t know how he sleeps at night sometimes.” –George Steinbrenner, Yankees owner
Baseball ownership groups have for too long resembled Dark Age European royalty–closely related and weak. Hand-picked for convenience and agreeability rather than on any objective basis, they’ve given us undercapitalized owners like Steve Schott, lapdog owners like Jeff Loria, evil owners like Carl Pohlad.
Between the persistence of Pete Rose, the ongoing turf war between Tribune Co. and the Wrigleyville neighborhood, and the deteriorating mental health of John Schuerholz, the most oft-reported story of this winter has been the apparent deflation in the market for free agents.
When we got our new collective bargaining agreement this season, I figured the results would be predictable: dumb teams would remain dumb and squander their new money, smart teams without money would do better, smart teams with lots of money would do a bit worse.
I figured the Yankees might do one of two things. They could tone things down a little. With the free agent winter, they could easily spend much less on the supporting cast and save a lot by not exceeding the salary cap as greatly. It looked like they were headed this way, throwing little fits over hours of elevator operations, making big deals out of little cuts.