Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Get it in writing


Just before a critical vote on their taxpayer-funded playground, the Marlins are making promises:

With final voting on the Florida Marlins' long-sought ballpark less than two weeks away, club president David Samson says he expects near-capacity crowds nightly the first year in the team's new home, with annual attendance above 2 million for at least seven seasons.

Such an increase for the attendance-challenged Marlins would allow them to climb into the middle of the major league pack in player payroll, Samson said Monday.

"As soon as our revenues goes up, our payroll will go up," Samson said at a luncheon to promote the upcoming season. "In the new ballpark, our payroll will always match our revenues, but our revenues will be higher."

The Marlins have been last or next-to-last in the majors in payroll each of the past three years. In 2008 payroll was $22 million, while the median in the big leagues was $80 million.

"This is not a small-market team," Samson said. "It has been a low-revenue team. Miami and its surrounding counties to me are at least a mid- to above-average market. If we can get the revenue that should go along with that size market, then we certainly should be at least in the mid-range."

I'll believe it when I see it. I have zero faith that a team owned by Jeff Loria will pay one penny more in payroll than it takes to field a team that doesn't actually forfeit games. If they build that stadium, I expect them to skate on the novelty of the joint for a year or so, then complain that pre-construction revenue projections were unduly optimistic, while continuing to ship off the decent players the baseball operations side always manages to unearth prior to arbitration.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:10pm

They couldn’t resist


A month ago I was sad to see the MLB Network cave in to the perceived need for perceived gravitas and give Bob Costas a feature spot on its debut broadcast. At the time, however, I was comforted by the fact that it seemed to be a one-off. Apparently it's now a forever-off:

Bob Costas, a 19-time Emmy Award winner and NBC broadcaster, has signed a multi-year contract to join the upstart* MLB Network, CNBC has learned, though he will remain at NBC Sports.

The MLB network, which debuted on Jan. 1 as the largest launch in cable history at 50 million homes, will announce the news later today.

Costas will host original programming on the channel and will serve as play-by-play commentator for a select group of regular season games broadcast by the network, which is owned by the league.

I think Costas was -- and probably still is -- a great play-by-play man, but his Keeper of the Game shtick wears thin in a hurry. If they send him to class-up a Thursday night tilt between the Pirates and the Rockies, wonderful. We'll all be better for it. If they stick him in a plush armchair and allow him to wax sepia, however, it will represent a major step back for the MLB Network.


*I suppose MLB Network is an "upstart" in the most literal sense (i.e. it just started up) but describing a channel backed by a $6 billion business and owned in part by the nation's largest cable companies as "upstart" kind of stretches the normal meaning of that word, don't you think?
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:32pm

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Today at THT


There's a quote by some author which goes "no winter lasts forever and no spring skips its turn." I can't remember who said it, but he certainly wasn't a baseball fan from Ohio.

Today at THT:

  • Brian Borawski has the week in business. Item #2 on his list is about the Israeli Baseball League. Readers of old ShysterBall will remember that I had a strange fascination with the IBL back in 2007. Not an interest really, but I did watch it not unlike the way you'd watch the aftermath of a car wreck or something. Here's hoping it returns if, for no other reason, than because I think the world is a better place when 50 year-old guys can make a professional roster somewhere.


  • Matthew Namee takes a look at those guys who weren't good enough to get Hall of Fame attention but who can't really be said to have been slighted, either. Just really good players who have been somewhat overlooked, albeit not criminally so. Before I even got into the article I was thinking "oh, guys like Rusty Staub." And I'll be damned if Staub isn't on that list. Fun group of players.


  • Tuck! sketches Pedro's curious PR operation.


  • Finally, over at Fantasy Focus, Derek Carty continues his series on the potential upsides of drafting injured dudes. The takeaway: if you're serious about your fantasy league, you could do worse things than to hire someone to go and break Albert Pujols' knee, thereby ensuring that he falls to you at the end of the first round. Just be careful that you don't do any ligament damage, because that stuff's chronic.
    • Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:45am

    When will it end?


    As anyone who has read this blog for a long time knows, I am firmly against Kevin Costnerly-funded stadiums, but people continue to be suckered into such deals over and over again.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:00am

    Great Moments in Self-Promotion


    With the newspaper business in as much trouble as it is, you'd think that reporters wouldn't do stupid things to hurt their credibility like consult blatantly unqualified sources for expert commentary, but they still do it all the time:

    Craig Calcaterra, a Columbus, Ohio, lawyer who applies his expertise and baseball passion to a blog called “The Hardball Times,” said yesterday in a telephone interview: “There needs to be a second half to [testing] for it to mean anything. Since Clemens has admitted to taking B-12 shots from McNamee, unless they also can establish those needles were used for steroids or some other performing-enhancing drug, I’m not sure this advances the story.”

    The Post reported that the syringes are being analyzed at the Anti-Doping Research Institute in Los Angeles, where the task, Calcaterra said, is to “put Clemens’ DNA at the scene” of steroid traces.

    ...Some steroids, such as Winstrol, are more stable and “probably still detectable,” Wadler said. “The same scenario with HGH is a bigger problem. And if [tests for drug traces] turn out to be negative, could it be that, over time, the molecule was significantly altered? Or it never was there in the first place?”

    Best part: the reporter -- Newsday's John Jeansonne -- was nice enough not to include me yelling at my daughter to stop picking on her brother in the middle of that quote.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:40am

    The People in My Neighborhood


    It's a slow news day, so let's leverage the ShysterBlogosphere for some content:

  • Jason joins the chorus of people who believe that Jeter needs to step up and defend his emotionally-stunted teammate from the attacks of their former boss. I see the point -- and apparently so too does Jeter -- but it's gotta be hard for him being in the middle of a dustup between a manager with whom he is close and the New York press. Unless of course he was one of the guys screaming "A-Fraud, in which case I don't care.


  • The Common Man exhorts everyone (with a specific demand to yours truly) to get on the stick and watch the MLB Network, because there's good stuff on there. Best selling point: it ain't football.


  • Jorge Says No! is running down the offseason's winners and losers, and notes that there is a pretty damn direct positive correlation between how early one signed and how much one got paid.


  • tHeMARksMiTh recalls the time Doug Mientkiewicz decided to keep -- or swipe, depending on your point of view -- some valuable memorabilia. Scroll down for a nice profile of Carl Hubbell. These posts are a couple of days old. Normally I wouldn't worry about it -- unlike me, Mark has a life -- but he lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and in light of what's been going on down there, it's not unreasonable to think that he's sitting frozen like Jack Nicholson at the end of "The Shining" right now. Hope the lights come back on soon, Mark.


  • Ron Rollins, man of the world, has been reading up on baseball in South Korea, and has a list of guys with Major League experience currently plying their trade over there. Roberto Petagine sighting!


  • Fack Youk is down to 10 on their countdown to spring training. Holy Cow! May want to click while you can, however, because it appears that the Fack Youksters may get hauled off to jail sometime soon.


  • Finally, over at Wezen-Ball, Lar profiles Roberto Alomar, extolls the joys of keeping score by hand, and recalls the starting lineup for the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team. I don't need to tell you that that was an awesome episode. If you want to ratchet up the awesome, however, click to its Wikipedia page and read about how difficult Jose Canseco made life for "The Simpsons" production team.


    • Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 9:02am

    Grandstanding in the Citi Field grandstand


    Blood is clearly in the water with respect to the Citigroup-Mets naming rights deal, and when blood is in the water, reason is often the first thing thrown overboard:

    "They just act as though the taxpayers' money is free money, and they can spend it any way they want. Well, no they can't," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D, Ohio), who adds that taxpayers have the right to be upset.

    "Their money is going for these banks that are just doing anything they want with it," Kucinich says. "Well, that's not right, and they have to be called on it."

    Another article on the subject up and asks "should companies that receive federal bailouts be putting big money into these types of naming rights deals?"

    Would I pay the Mets $400 million for naming rights? Probably not (though it may not be the craziest thing in the world). But I'm not running Citigroup, and the people who are (or were) made that decision and signed that paperwork years ago. They have a binding contract, and unless it has some sort of escape clause -- or unless the federal government or the increasingly critical masses want to help them defend the inevitable lawsuit in the event they welsh on the deal -- they are pretty much stuck, no? I'll go a step further and guess that if someone really wanted to take a fine-toothed comb to Citigroup's books, they'd find things way more outrageous than the money currently slated to go to the Mets. No one can get on TV by complaining about those things, however.

    In any event, when it comes to existing naming rights deals like this one, it's not a matter of "should." That horse left the barn long ago. It's a matter of "now what?" So please let us ignore anyone with their knives out over the Citigroup-Mets deal -- especially elected officials with cameras in-tow -- unless they have a proposed solution to go along with it.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 12:51pm

    On the matter of decorative pillow shams


    I got a Pottery Barn Kids catalog in the mail today because I'm a suburban father and that's what they send us when they stop sending our wives the Victoria's Secret Catalog.

    Anyway, I was kind of interested in one of their new product lines:

    Introducing our Major League Baseball collection of officially licensed products.

    Bring the excitement of the big leagues to your child's room. Sewn of pure organic cotton and featuring every MLB logo, our exclusive collection makes it easy to create a space that celebrates their favorite sport and their #1 team.

    There's bedding and rugs and framed jerseys and decorative shams and lamps and everything you can imagine. It's pretty cool stuff! The bedspreads come in queen size too, so for the first time in years, Mrs. Shyster may soon be getting a surprise in the bedroom. Since she hates baseball, however, the surprise is likely to be just as disappointing as the last one. Anyway.

    My only quibble -- aside from introducing kids to the concept of decorative shams and merchandise that is approximately 200% more expensive than it has any right to be -- is that they seem to be going out of their way to use mascot logos instead of the traditional team logo. This doesn't bother me with the better-known mascots like Mr. Met and the Phanatic, but it seems a bit much to include that stupid Diamondbacks wolf, whatever the green Red Sox thing is, and any number of simply cartoonized animals that aren't even official mascots.

    Not to go all old man on you here, but when I was a kid I was fascinated by the actual team logos. They seemed cool and official and maybe even a bit grown up. If someone gave me a gift with baseball wrapping paper or something I would look at it forever, studying the logos and thinking how totally cool they were. There was something excitedly menacing in that realistic Tigers' logo and something almost artistic or poetic in the Cardinals' birdies on the baseball bat see-saw. Sure, those are commercial logos like the Nike swoosh and all of the rest, but I wanted to look at them longer and, more importantly for baseball's sake, I wanted to own more stuff with the logos on them.

    My kids get enough cartoons. If I was the kind of guy who bought them decorative pillow shams and got them one with a smiling cartoon bear (Twins) or dinosaur (White Sox) on them, I'm certain that they'd cast them aside when they got older and interested in more grown-up things. My worry, both as a father and as a baseball fan, is that they'd cast aside all that is associated with those silly cartoons too.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:24pm

    Thursday, February 05, 2009

    Today at THT


    Things to read while thinking about how long you have to be unemployed before you can start putting down "blogger" as your occupation on official forms . . .

  • Colin Wyers continues his series on how to measure a player's value. I think the worst thing about this is the table in which it is shown that Jeff Francoeur is even less valuable than Corey Patterson. I mean, I have made so much fun of Corey Patterson over the years that I'm almost bored with it, but according to Colin, he'd be an improvement over a guy on my team. God, I wish the Braves had one legitimate outfielder.


  • Jeff Sackmann breaks down Division I baseball. Don't worry, though, he puts it back together again.


  • Finally, over at Fantasy Focus, Michael Lerra writes about how to design the perfect keeper league. I like to think that the keeper league I'm in is better than anyone else's. Why? Because we actually keep the players. Literally. I have Carlos Beltran in my basement chained to a wall at this very moment.
    • Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:39am

    Bonds Documents


    For those interested -- especially fellow shysters with a PACER login and password -- here's the mother lode of US v. Barry Bonds documents, pleadings, etc. I haven't had a chance to really go over them in any detail, but my cursory review of it confirms what has been obvious for some time: the government is in deep doo-doo if it can't somehow compel Anderson to testify, because it needs Anderson to authenticate almost all of the documentary evidence that implicates Bonds. Without it, they are relying on considerable amounts of hearsay. The government has argued that the hearsay is admissible due to several exceptions in the rules, but for reasons that will be boring to anyone who isn't a lawyer (and most of us who are) I find their arguments to this effect to be less-than-compelling.

    Obviously the judge may disagree, and however she comes down on the issue is going to, obviously, go a long way towards determining the outcome of the case. If I had to handicap it at this point, however, I still say: Advantage Bonds.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:00am

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