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Monday, January 05, 2009

Wait, are we this dumb?


This has nothing to do with baseball or even sports, but since a lot of sciencey types read THT, I thought it worth noting. From an AP story about the size of our galaxy:

Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore. The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, Calif.

When was the last time you saw even the most basic science story describe the concept of mass as "like weight"? Mass is mass and weight is weight, and the last I checked, it was a concept that was taught in grade school. Heck, when was the last time you saw a science story that felt it necessary to explain the concept of mass at all?
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:14pm (6) Comments

Hamels goes to Arbitration


I am far from an arbitration expert, but the book on the process over the years is that it is one to be avoided for several reasons.

For one thing, there is no baby splitting, meaning that if you lose, the other side's number wins, and nothing in between. Yes, this is probably intended as an incentive to deal, but if no deal is reached in the meantime, there is a lot of risk involved.

Another thing people hate about arbitration is that it forces a team to essentially poor-mouth their own player right in front of him, or at least his representative. Want to win an arbitration? You have to explain why your guy is nowhere near the player of the three or four comparables his lawyer has up on the PowerPoint. That can't be good for morale.

Finally, there are the lawyers themselves. An arbitration is an adversary proceeding, and that requires lawyers and fees and prep time and all of that, and no matter who is footing the bill, an adversary proceeding can be expensive.

So why then do the Phillies seem to insist upon entering arbitration with their young stars?

Fresh off a campaign in which Hamels established himself as one of the game's most dominant pitchers and became a World Series MVP at age 25, the young lefthander and his agent are prepared to cash in on his early success. But just how big of a payday they will reap remains to be seen. While logic says the Phillies would be prudent to lock up their young ace to a long-term deal, Hamels won't be a free agent until after the 2012 season, meaning the Phillies control his rights for the next four seasons.

Enter the wonderful world of salary arbitration, which begins today, the first of a 10-day period when major leaguers with at least 3 years of experience - and a select few with at least 2 - can file for the process.

Hamels, like slugging first baseman Ryan Howard, is a special case, one who has little precedent with which to compare.

A season that started with him publicly expressing his discontent with his $500,000 salary ended with him winning the NLCS and World Series MVPs on top of throwing 227 1/3 innings in the regular season, second in the National League.

I'm really not the right guy to run the numbers -- and maybe there aren't enough numbers to be run at this point -- but I wonder if there is some method to the Phillies madness or if, alternatively, they are simply penny wise and pound foolish. I mean, it's possible that someone has made a reasoned analysis that paying Hamels arbitration awards for the next three or four years and then letting him walk is a more efficient than signing him to a long term deal now. But if such an analysis exists, is it the same kind of analysis that led to the Phillies preferring Raul Ibanez over Pat Burrell? Like I said, I don't have a strong opinion here because this really isn't my area of expertise, but it certainly seems like Philadelphia is doing things differently with their young stars than any other team is.

Maybe they're right to do so -- they are the World Champs, after all -- but I wonder.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 4:24pm (10) Comments

Bargain Bin Burrell


According to Rosenthal, it's two years and $16 million for Pat the Bat:

The Rays, filling their need for a power hitter, are close to signing free-agent Pat Burrell to a two-year, $16 million contract, according to major-league sources.

Burrell, 32, will serve as the team's designated hitter. The Rays, nearing their payroll limit, could use some combination of Ben Zobrist, Gabe Gross and Fernando Perez in right field.

The Rays had considered a number of free agents, including Milton Bradley and Jason Giambi, to fill either their DH or right-field vacancies.


That a really good deal for a guy who will get on base at a .370 or .380 clip and slug .500. Much better than the one the Phillies gave to the guy who is replacing him in left.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 2:58pm (6) Comments

Whose house?  Bobby Abreu’s house!


It's for sale, anyway. Nice digs. Paid $3.5 million for it in 2005 and now wants north of $7 million. If he remains unsigned when spring training comes it means that he's overvaluing the market for corner outfielder/DH types just as much as he's overvaluing the market for real estate.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:10pm (3) Comments

Andruw Jones


Richard Justice tries to get his mind around Andruw Jones falling off a cliff:

Whatever the reason, Andruw Jones is one of the real strange stories in sports because few players have fallen so far so fast.

The Dodgers can't even give him away. Even after he agreed to a restructuring of his contract, Jones remains with a team that no longer wants him.
Just two years ago, he appeared on the fast track to the Hall of Fame. Yes, two years ago. Not five years ago, not 10 years ago.

He was a 10-time Gold Glover in centerfield and coming off back-to-back seasons in which he averaged 46 home runs and 128.5 RBIs.
He was a great player no matter how one defines greatness. Beyond the numbers was the fact that he had an easygoing personality that wore well during a long baseball season.

Jones seemed headed for one of those breath-taking contracts in 2007. And then with so much on the line, he was unable to deliver.

Nothing wrong with the Justice piece. I just think that he and others who have written about Jones have dwelled on his weight and alleged lack of desire a bit more than is warranted and have discounted his injuries by the same amount. As others have noted, Jones changed his swing pretty dramatically prior to his power surge of 2005. Jones' dropoff in 2007 had a lot to do with nagging injuries that prevented him from really loading up like he had in 2005 and 2006, and by the end of that season, he looked completely lost and unable to adjust. Yes, the inability to adjust -- even to go back to his pre-2005 swing -- could very well be a sign of loss of focus or desire, but to suggest that Jones' trainwreck of a 2008 was all in his head or because he lost all of his talent or something is to overstate things.

As for his legacy? I think he had a chance to make the Hall of Fame if he had enjoyed a nice slow decline that tracked what you typically see from good players. No, he was never spectacular, but because he started so young, the counting stats following such a decline would have looked good (500 home runs, perhaps). Once you looked at his defense, that package would have made him a Hall of Famer in many people's eyes.

Falling off a cliff like he has? No chance, of course. He's toast, and maybe even off the ballot after year one. As a guy who has always liked Andruw Jones, I find this pretty sad.

UPDATE: Even sadder.

(link via Neate Sager, routed through Pete Toms. No, I don't understand Canadians either).
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:03pm (9) Comments

El Indio


I'm a cat person, and as such, I don't like to hear about anyone's cat dying -- not even George Bush's. That said, it's pretty spiffy that he named his cat after Ruben Sierra.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:13am (2) Comments

One for you 19 for me


Someone has taken the trouble to calculate the tax revenue to the State of New York by virtue of the big salaries being handed out to Sabathia, Teixeira, and Burnett, as well as existing obligations to Jeter and A-Rod:

Here's another way to add revenues to the hard-pressed state treasury: have pro games played in New York by high-priced athletes. To that end, the New York Yankees are likely to help add a few million dollars a year in personal income taxes from the salaries it will be paying to just four of its players.

The Department of Taxation & Finance made some calculations using the average annual salaries of A.J. Burnett ($16.5 million), C.C. Sabathia ($23 million), Derek Jeter ($18.9 million), Alex Rodriquez ($27.5 million) and Mark Teixeira ($22.5 million).

The ballplayers — excepting Jeter, who has battled the tax department over his legal domicile — appear to be nonresidents. Taxes on nonresident athletes are based on "duty days," which include all days they are with the team from spring training to the postseason.

All told, that's $3 million in tax revenue from those guys. If they all relocated to New York on a permanent basis, it would be $7 million.

Question for New Yorkers: is there sales tax on fast food there? If so, they're going to need to recalculate to account for Sabathia.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 9:30am (8) Comments

Baseball’s Law Firm


Here's a story from Saturday's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about the relationship between the Foley & Lardner law firm and Major League Baseball:

Mary K. Braza, the head of the sports industry team at the Foley & Lardner law firm, has a nice view of Milwaukee and Lake Michigan from her office at the U.S. Bank Center.

So does Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who maintains an office on a different floor in the same building on E. Wisconsin Ave.

That as much as anything explains the strong relationship Major League Baseball has with Milwaukee's best known law firm.

Braza heads a team of approximately 36 lawyers at the prestigious firm. And while Foley serves a variety of clients in the sports world, it is the firm's long and strong connection to Major League Baseball where it is best known in sports law circles.

Chambers USA, which ranks law firms in various categories, has given Foley a solid ranking. According to Chambers, "the team's reputation has been forged through its dedication to providing a 'solid all-around service.' "

Foley does everything for baseball, and I'm assuming it's a pretty good client for Ms. Braza to have. This interested me, though:

Foley was, in fact, a key player in the Mitchell Report, baseball's defining document on the use of performance-enhancing substances. The report, produced by former Sen. George Mitchell and which came out a year ago, was Selig's effort to lay out the problems of baseball and performance-enhancing substances.

It was a significant project for baseball and Foley & Lardner.

"We were baseball's lawyers," Braza said. "We weren't independent investigators. That was Mitchell and the lawyers he worked with. We were instructed to be facilitators for Mitchell. We were the liaison between Mitchell's people and the league office, making sure people were producing information for them, setting up interviews and making sure that was happening across the board with respect to the other clubs," she said.

That's funny. My copy of the Mitchell Report says "DLA Piper" on the front page, which is George Mitchell's law firm. You'd think that they'd at least get a proper-name shoutout here. You'd also think that, given how political and superficial a document the Mitchell Report truly was, people would be running away from it as opposed to trying to take credit. Unless of course the pitch is "Hire us! We'll whitewash your business' problems so thoroughly that people will forget they ever happened!" You laugh, but there's a lot of money in that line of work.

That aside, this reads like a sales brochure for Foley. Or for any other large firm, really. My experience working for such places tells me, however, that whenever lawyers talk to you about how they'll "think proactively" for you and serve as "facilitators" it really means that they'll continue billing you at a healthy clip when there aren't any deals on the table and there isn't much pending litigation. Personally speaking? I'd rather hire smart salaried people in-house to, in Braza's words, "think about the next thing I have coming down the road" and have my expensive, outside, hourly lawyers on stand-by for bigger problems.

It's always a buyer's market for legal services as long as you at least try to approach it as such. The days where you can just hire the biggest firm in town and delegate all of your thinking to them like Major League Baseball seems to have done with Foley is a thing of the past.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 8:00am (10) Comments

Quotable.  Maybe.


MLB.com has a profile on Trevor Hoffman and Mariano Rivera's eventual Hall of Fame chances. Straight forward enough, but this stuck out:

"Trevor Hoffman is a Hall of Famer, in my opinion," Commissioner Bud Selig once said. "So is Mariano Rivera. Look, Yogi Berra once said, 'If you ain't got relief pitching, you ain't got nothing.' So where in my mind do you think Trevor Hoffman figures? Relief pitchers are critical."

Call me crazy, but that does not sound like something Yogi Berra would have said. Rather, it sounds like one of those things people like to say that Yogi Berra said. A regular, boring statement Yogi-fied by the use of the word "ain't" and a double negative.

A few searches reveal nothing of that phrase other than Selig's use of it in this article. Your assignment, super sleuths: find me a single example of Berra saying something like that. If we can't find it, I'm going to assume this is an example of Selig hiding behind a phony quote of someone else, unable to make a solitary stand on even the most uncontroversial of issues.

UPDATE: We have at least one other source attributing that to Yogi (see the comments). If that holds up, I'll stand corrected and offer my sincerest apology to Mr. Selig. Still, it's not like there's a law that you have to have Berra backup to say something like Rivera and Hoffman are Hall of Famers.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:30am (11) Comments

Bye-bye Wukesong


There was talk last summer that the baseball facility built for the Olympics would help spur development of baseball in China, maybe even one day helping to make the land of billions a real source of talent for the bigs. Now it seems like the only development it will spur is that of an Orange Julius, a Gap, and an Auntie Annie's pretzel joint:

Hopes that Beijing's Olympic baseball venue would be preserved for the future development of the sport in China have been dashed as the stadium's developer revealed it would be dismantled and replaced by a shopping mall.

The 15,000-seat Wukesong Sports Center baseball field, listed by Olympic organisers as a temporary venue even before the Games were held in August, had become the first venue slated for the wrecking ball, the Beijing News said on Monday.

"Our preliminary plan is to supply Beijing residents with a leisure centre combined with shopping, culture, sports and entertainment," Guo Jinjiao, deputy manager of the development company, told the paper.

The 200 million yuan ($29 million) stadium played host to a Major League Baseball exhibition game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres last March.

Hey, can't blame them. According to the article, the place has generated no income. Given the state of the global economy, I don't think there would be much opposition to them bulldozing Wrigley Field, the Hall of Fame, and Mickey Mantle's restaurant right now if they promised some jobs out of the deal.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:00am (3) Comments

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