A belated Happy Thanksgiving to everybody; I hope your Turkey Day was as good as mine. Andra and I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in our small East Village apartment, with her mother visiting us from Milwaukee and my brother and his girlfriend joining us as well. Andra did a superb job on the bird and all …
It’s been 31 days since the Yankees lost the World Series to the Florida Marlins, which means it’s been 30 days since armchair GMs started tripping over each other to offer blueprints for fixing the numerous glaring weaknesses of a team which won 101 regular-season games and its sixth pennant in eight years. The past …
Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat continues its fine interview series this weekend, checking in with David Pinto of the prolific Baseball Musings blog. What’s most interesting about Pinto is that he has a lot more professional experience around baseball than most bloggers. He built software for Stats, Inc., working with Bill James and John Dewan and …
I’m pleased to report that my surgery on Wednesday went well. In an operation that lasted about an hour, my surgeon made four small incisions and put in two anchors to repair my torn labrum. He said the surgery went “perfectly” and that there was no damage in my rotator cuff. I’ve been convalescing in …
Wednesday is my labrum surgery, and as you can guess I’m a bit anxious. But after all of the homework I’ve done, the consensus of people I’ve talked to — doctors, physcial therapists, family — is virtually unanimous; this needs to be done. I spoke to my doctor today and he reassured me about the …
Neil deMause’s book Field of Schemes (co-written with Joanna Cagan) has been in my reading pile for quite a while, and I thought of him a couple times over the past few days while reading and writing about the Milwaukee mess. The book’s subtitle, “How the great stadium swindle turns public money into private profit,” …
Continue reading ‘Can the Great Stadium Swindle Continue?’ »
With the Brewers Payne-ful situation lurching towards a conculsion, Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an article examinning a situation Milwaukee fans are all too familiar with: when bad ballclubs enter new ballparks. The consistency of this trend is alarming: The lessons learned in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Cincinnati in recent years have …
Call this a remix of what I put online earlier this evening… Grab the Money: Superdupestar Barry Bonds pulled a puzzling move the other day by announcing that he was pulling out of the Major League Baseball Players Association group licensing agreement. The move is a first in Players Association history but not unprecedented in …
An ugly situation is brewing in Milwaukee. Brewers team president/CEO Ulice Payne is apparently being forced out after one season by the team’s board of directors, who have also decided to slash the player payroll by 25 percent, a move which will make the club an even tougher sell to a skeptical fan base. And …
In the AL Rookie of the Year voting, I cast my own ballot for K.C. shortstop Angel Berroa at the Internet Baseball Awards and had Hideki Matsui second. In a narrow vote, the Baseball Writers Association of America came to the same conclusion. But the way they arrived at that result rankled some, including Matsui’s …