All you ever hear about small-market teams is that they can’t afford to sign their good players when they become free agents. Well, look at the bright side, Royals fans: your team goes to great lengths to ensure they won’t have any free agents to lose. The Royals aren’t losing Johnny Damon to free agency;…
Part One The second column of MLB’s financial disclosures sets forth each club’s purported revenues from local television, radio, and cable contracts. As the table below shows, media revenues are heavily affected by the size of a club’s local market. For example, the Mets and Diamondbacks have identical media contracts on a per capita basis,…
Roundup We’ve tabulated this year’s HACKING MASS results, and we’ve got ourselves a winner. Keith Lindahl led his imaginatively named squad to a fantastic 371.76 ESPN to easily capture the 2001 HACKING MASS title. Keith’s winning team is a smorgasboard of stiffness: C Mike Matheny 1B Kevin Young 3B Cal Ripken IF Rey Ordonez OF…
I probably shouldn’t admit to this–there’s a book publisher who would rather I be spending my time in other ways–but I spent a good chunk of Thursday following the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing, starring His Dishonesty. It was entertaining, to say the least. For those of you who didn’t see it…well, I can understand that….
(Ed. Note: Doug Pappas is the chairman of SABR’s Business of Baseball Committee and a highly-regarded analyst of the game’s economic issues. This is the first of a series of pieces he will be doing analyzing the game’s finances.–JSS) Shortly before Commissioner Bud Selig’s testimony before Congress on December 6, Major League Baseball released the…
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…
This is hard. I knew when I signed up to continue this column that it would be a chore to write a thousand words about the Royals every week, but I didn’t think it would be this difficult. Trying to comprehend Shaggy’s lyrics is easier. Even after taking a week off to recuperate from Thanksgiving,…
A fascinating season of immense accomplishments … a riveting post-season capped by an implausible Game 7 in the World Series … postseason awards that confounded the experts … what better way to cap off the 2001 baseball season than voting to determine whose face will grace a plaque in Cooperstown next summer? Yes indeed, it’s…
THE WORST IDEA EVER MARCHES ONWARD "Did we miscalculate? No. Do I think we should have started this earlier? No. After Sept. 11, I wouldn’t have had the unmitigated gall to interrupt the playoffs and the World Series with this." —Bud Selig, commissioner of baseball "It’s the system. It’s a very easy answer. I have…
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….
At this writing, there’s something of a consensus that Jason Giambi is going to sign a big contract with the New York Yankees, something like seven years and $119 million total. Signing the first baseman is the Yankees’ top priority this offseason, and they’ve thrown the most money and the most attention at him of…
Baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws–which prohibit actions that unreasonably restrain competition–stems from a 1922 Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that antitrust law did not apply to baseball. The rationale was that baseball games were local affairs, not interstate commerce. The Supreme Court upheld the antitrust exemption twice, first in 1953 and again…
I know I’m supposed to be really worked up over Ichiro Suzuki being voted the American League MVP by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and initially I was. Ichiro, for all his positives, wasn’t the best player on his team this year, wasn’t one of the five best players in the AL, and got…
The laughter has finally died down. It was less than four months ago that Allard Baird stood before the baseball world and announced that he had traded one of the best right fielders in the game for Neifi Perez. In one of the great non sequiturs of all time, Baird claimed that because the Royals…