MLB 2018 - Hope for a 7-game WS so they'll play on Halloween

Even as a Dodger fan I loved Willie McCovey. :(

Reports have the White Sox interested in Machado. That would be the perfect place for that jerk to land: On MLB’s most obscure major market team.

I thought that was the Mets.

If you’re talking about on-field performance, you have a point. However, in terms of public consciousness in their home town, it’s amazing how under-the-radar the Sox are in Chicago. I sometimes wonder if anyone from the Loop on north knows they exist. When the Cubs won the WS in 2016, it seemed like the entire city was festooned with “W” banners. When the Sox won it in 2005, there might have been a sign posted somewhere within the city limits, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Really enjoying Powerball, by Rob Neyer. It’s inspired by Nine Innings, by Daniel Okrent, but it’s a great look at baseball today, with plenty of interesting digressions in the footnotes, using a stat-friendly but not necessarily stat-heavy style. It doesn’t hurt that he picked a game between two of the more interesting teams from 2017; the champion Astros, as well as the previously cellar-dwelling but now respectable Oakland A’s.

Some fun notes on Matt Chapman before he became Nolan Arenado 2.0, a very good bit on short players through baseball history culminating in Altuve, etc. Mariners fans will enjoy the characterization of Ryon Healy as the next Chris Carter. Highly recommended.

Damn, Bill. I’m guessing he hasn’t read a lot of Dale Carnegie.

Isn’t that pretty much a part of the Moneyball philosophy as employed by the A’s.

I’ve heard some podcasts with Bill James, you would think the guy invented the cure for cancer… he has a serious case of inflated ego. He seemed almost like a bitter child.

Also anybody catch that picture of a Bryce Harper going to White Sox leak?!? That would be … unexpected.

In the first edition of the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, he essentially just goes off and throws a temper tantrum about anyone wanting to have Shoeless Joe Jackson in the Baseball Hall Of Fame. It’s the dishonesty, Bill tells us. You can’t gamble on baseball.

Bill’s favorite player in that edition was a guy who’d just hung 'em up a few years ago, and was currently managing the Reds: Pete Rose.

When the next edition of the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract came out in the late 1990s, the Shoeless Joe entry was replaced with a perfunctory one. And the Pete Rose entry was all about how baseball was doing a great disservice by not having one of its greats fully enshrined in the Hall.

I don’t mind it too much if someone wants to be a stern moralist, if they’ve got a well-elucidated point of view.

But wishy-washy shit like that?

Fuck Bill James.

I think that was more that they figured they could find players that other teams under valued, but there was certainly a strong Jamesian element to it.

Bill James seems to be saying that all the money in baseball should go to the billionaire owners and that GMs should be spending the billionaire owners money as efficiently as possible. How can you be into sports yet have such a lack of emotional attachment to the players. It’s all just one giant spreadsheet to him, he should stick to OOTP.

So who gets Machado Harper?!? SO EXPENSIVE! Is it worth it?!?

I really dislike this era of knowing player salaries.

As hard as it is to believe most crazy contracts in sport (except for injuries or real busts) usually pan out because of the inflationary state of professional sports salaries. Pay a guy crazy money now, in 5-6 years that crazy amount isn’t so crazy. But the real crazy part is the length of the contracts. 10 years is insane without team or player buyouts. Even with buyouts that is insane for pitchers.

That era would be 37 years now, since the settlement of the 1981 players strike included disclosure of player salaries.

Joe Mauer officially calling it quits today.

15 year career, with an MVP award. One of the best pure hitters in the game.

Man. That 2009 Twins team was about as offensively gifted as any team of the era…but that pitching rotation. Yeesh. (They did have a helluva 'pen though.)

I remember when Koufax (or was it Drysdale) held out for $100k.

It was both actually.

Looks like MLB is trying to send me back to bootleg streams.

I have now read Baseball Cop, and it certainly shows MLB in a terrible light. Stifling the “independent” Dept of Investigations in order to allow various shady practices to continue under the radar or delay punishment: PEDs, taking advantage of families in poverty in the DR and other places, supporting human traffickers who manage to get Cuban players out of the country.

It’s not a particularly well-written book. Not much of a coherent narrative, lots of bouncing around in time, too many details in some places and not enough in others. But if you’re reading it, you probably don’t care a whole lot about that. The book exists to blow the whistle on shady practices in baseball and how MLB prevents cleaning it up.

I doubt the book alone will make any kind of difference. Someone with power would have to believe it and follow up. But at least it puts some information out there that will hopefully make it more difficult to hide these kind of activities in the future.

MLB wants more money from the RSNs for the streaming rights, and they want the in-market streaming deals to run as long as the linear TV deals that each RSN has with its MLB teams.

I have a feeling that this is the real key point that MLB is pushing for and the money is more of an early negotiating thing. MLB has been pushing (slowly) to unify their various media contracts and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s their aim here too.

That’s weird, I heard baseball was dying!