Jonah Keri has ably analyzed the Colon trade and its ridiculousness for the Expos. I want to focus on the deal as an indicator of the shadiness and shame implied by the league’s ownership of the Expos.
I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail this week asking if I’m going to weigh in on the possibility of a Pete Rose reinstatement to baseball. This is in the wind because Rose met with Bud Selig to discuss how this might happen, and Selig, lacking both a backbone and any sense of integrity, didn’t say “You’re not getting back in, thanks for swinging by, I’ll have my assistant call you a cab.”
One of the biggest questions this off-season has been what Major League Baseball will do with the Montreal Expos.
The week in quotes, featuring Omar Vizquel, Bob Melvin, Bud Selig and more.
I’ve written a piece for this site on Pete Rose, Bill James, and the Dowd Report. It took me far too long to write it: I was reluctant to pursue the project, because the volume and tone of the hate mail anyone who writes about Rose gets is numbing. I dedicated myself to getting it done after Major League Baseball trotted Rose out as part of the MasterCard Major League Baseball Memorable Moments event. Rose got cheered, I made a snippy comment in an ESPN chat, and everyone moved on. But the scene continues to bother me. Baseball’s treatment of Pete Rose under the leadership of Bud Selig has been shameful.
“Now I’m kind of wondering what’s next. I went to sleep with `Karate Kid’ and woke up to Peter Gammons, which was a little frightening.” –Doug Mientkiewicz, Twins infielder, on falling asleep in front of his TV Thursday August 29th
MLB’s top management is not to be trusted, and needs to be overhauled.
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 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.
To test your mettle, we’re offering a quiz on contraction. Let’s see how closely you’ve been paying attention and how well you understand the new math that Major League Baseball has unveiled during its current round of labor negotiations.
I’m the new owner of the Angels.
Disney kept the team from leaving Anaheim, but their tax break was mostly expended, and running the team took energy the company wanted to spend persecuting peer-to-peer file sharing. The franchise didn’t come cheap, mind you, but I think it will be worth the money. Now, I’m Bud Selig’s worst nightmare, because I’m going to derive millions of dollars through his proposed revenue-sharing plan and field a team that’s going to thrash his precious Brewers for the foreseeable future.
Selig insisted that liabilities under the 60/40 rule have always included the value of salaries for future years, and any suggestion to the contrary was “just bullshit.”
Add Forbes to the ever-growing list of those who don’t believe MLB’s cries of poverty.