Prospectus Q&A: Ken Fo... (12/28)
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December 28, 2008 Every Given SundayRickey Definitely Yes, McGwire Unfortunately No
The Hall of Fame voting deadline is fast approaching, as ten-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America must submit their ballots by midnight on Wednesday. Candidates must be named on 75 percent of the ballots cast to gain induction into Cooperstown, with the voting results to be announced on January 12. The most interesting of the 23 names on the ballot this year are Rickey Henderson and Mark McGwire. While both players were on the Athletics' last World Series-winning team in 1989, the similarities end there, at least when it comes to the expected outcome of the voting. Henderson will likely be a near-unanimous choice; he holds the all-time records in runs scored (2,295) and stolen bases (1,406), and he posted a .401 career on-base percentage while hitting 297 home runs. On the other hand, McGwire seems to have little chance of receiving a favorable vote in his second year on the ballot. As one of the most visible players from the Steroids Era, he garnered just 23.5 percent of the vote last year, despite hitting 583 career home runs and having a .394 on-base percentage and .588 slugging percentage. As manager of that 1989 World Series Athletics team, and of the Cardinals in '98 when McGwire set what was then the major league home-run record by hitting 70, Tony La Russa has an interesting perspective on both players. La Russa has long been an ardent McGwire supporter, and in giving his take on why his former first baseman should be in the Hall of Fame, he said that he believes McGwire showed a great deal of integrity by walking away from the $30 million owed him over the final two years of his contract when he abruptly retired following the 2001 season after finishing with a line of .187/.316/.492, with 29 home runs in 364 plate appearances. "He walked away from it because he didn't feel like he could play to that level," La Russa said. "That, to me, shows a certain amount of integrity for the sport, for self-respect and everything. Now, our guess is that a whole lot of guys, just being normal, would have figured some way to have either talked to the organization and got a buyout, like for $5 million instead of $30 million, or just gone ahead and played less than their best and collected a check for two years. Do you think that's a good sign of character, to walk away from $30 million if you didn't think you could play to that level? How would you take that decision and not make sense of it?" La Russa understands that McGwire's legacy is threatened by suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs, and that while showing integrity in one aspect of his life, he has made questionable moves in another. "I'm just saying that the fact that he walked away from that money has been under-discussed and under-publicized," La Russa said. "I know I have not discussed it, and I think it is a hellacious sign of the type of person he is."
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Team Health Reports: Washington Nationals
"Club president Randy Levine told Michael Schmidt of The New York Times that the entire sport benefits when the Yankees go to the ATM. "
Yeah, I'm sure the Orioles or Royals or Nats really benefit a lot by being outbid for top talent, that way their fans can just kick back and wait for the Yankees to come into town, and save money they would otherwise spend on watching their own team win.
I've never heard so much sanctimonious BS as what has been spewing forth from NY the last week. Enough already.
Of course, you're ignoring the millions of dollars that the O's, Royals and Nats get in revenue sharing, a large chunk of which comes from the Yankees. I would absolutely rather have an ownership that reinvests its revenues in the team rather than lining its pockets.
And of course you're ignoring the backwards incentives the revenue sharing system creates that makes it less likely for teams like the O's, Royals and Nats to reinvest. Because you pay more into the revenue sharing pool as your revenues increase in addition to receiving less from the pool as your revenues increase, the teams with the lowest revenues face an extremely high marginal tax rate on their revenue. The net marginal revenues that a good player brings in are lower for low revenue teams than for high revenue teams.
Of course a salary cap is a stupid solution to the problem; all salary caps do is increase the wealth of the already wealthy owners. Baseball should seek to equalize revenues across teams, but without this absurd revenue sharing system. It's time to be like the NFL: negotiate a national TV contract and split that revenue equally across teams. NESN, the YES network, WGN, etc., will become significantly less profitable and market size will also be significantly less important.
You can't have a national TV contract when the teams in your sport play 10x the number of regular season games as the NFL. The regional/local networks are a necessity in baseball in order for teams to have the majority (or all) of their games televised.
Clearly "good for the game" means everyones talking about baseball. Quite impressive being December and football still has a lot of unsettled playoff spots to play out. Whether people are rooting for or againt the Yankees doesnt matter, whats matters is that they're rooting.
I'm so sick of the Yankees.
They are not "good for the game."
The Nats weren't outbid. Washington had the highest bid, but Teixeira didn't bite.