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That's been a huge factor in the long term financial success of the Maple Leafs, and also a decent factor in the slow decline of the Montreal Canadiens, as the Canadian head offices of major companies left Montreal for Toronto (and, more recently, other major Canadian cities). As it stands, a very high percentage of box office revenue for the Leafs comes from various corporations, who can write off the cost as a business expense.
That is an excellent point. Wish I'd thought of it.
Sure, Morgan, Stanley, Goldman, Sachs...Oh,wait.
Seriously, it is a pretty good reflection of market size. However, what sport(s) big money puts its promotional and tax-deductible dollars into is sometimes up for grabs. Here in Toronto, we've got plenty of companies with the scratch, but few with the itch, for baseball. Back in the early 90s (recession and all), it was all the rage with the new stadium and all, but the corporate types have by and large returned to hockey and to a lesser degree moved to basketball.
But Tampa/St Pete actually isn't that big and is poor for a Major League area. I mean, that's an interesting way of looking at it, but I wonder how a ranking like this would be different from one based simply on population and income. Tampa-St Pete is 156th by income (between Fayetteville, NC and Fayetteville, Arkansas) and 19th in MSA population. There's no Tampa-St Pete CSA, meaning it's probably functionally smaller than 19th as a baseball market. Big, successful companies should mean higher incomes, which should raw more people, etc.; that's rolled into the other rankings.
I don't doubt that it's a nice analysis they've done, but it seems like it's essentially meaningless in explaining the differences between the Rays and the Yankees - Red Sox - etc. It just tells you the same thing using a different measure.
Which is obviously why the Mariners, Red Sox and Cubs have been so frugal...
GM; Ford; and Citigroup all say hello, and were wondering if you could perhaps fill themm in on what those limits might be, as they don't seem to be able to reach them.
You forget Orlando, sir.
Ahem.
That shows that Smoltz spent about 40% of his time in the minors with the Braves, which includes pretty much the only good stretch of his minor league career. While true that he spent more than a year (more like a year and 3/4) in the Detroit system, the greater point is about which team developed him. When the Braves acquired him, Leo Mazzone fixed his mechanics, which the roving Detroit instructors had ruined. It erroneous to say he was "developed" by the Tigers.
One short season of A+ and 3/4 of a AA season = "all of one year".
Orlando is one of those areas that's kind of in-between. St. Pete is too close to make a weekend of it, but it's a pain in the ass to get there for a night game (and IIRC, the Rays play few day games) and get back to Orlando at a reasonable hour of you have to work the next day.
There is no "fast" way to get from Orlando to St. Pete. It's 109 miles, and in order to get there from downtown Orlando for a night game, you'd have to leave town by 3:30pm to avoid rush hour/theme park traffic, and then still run into the teeth of Tampa/St. Pete traffic (highlighted by the aptly named "Malfunction Junction"). As someone who makes this drive on business occasionally, trust me, it's better to watch the game on the telly.
Also, on a couple of occasions I've travelled from southern NH to Fenway, and used public transit all the way (Amtrak from Dover NH to the Boston subway system) and from downtown Atlanta to the ballpark (walked to the MARTA station). I found both very easy.
Well, now that the numbers are out, I can't see this as a terrible inequity. It looks to me like the Braves FO basically expected him to come back no matter what and structured their offer accordingly.
As a point of order is an example of "NFL style facism." Same crappy sport, just the other end of the political spectrum.
I'll say, and talk about second-half surges! Smoltz has pitched at or above his current career ERA+ every year since 1995. I wonder if that's ever happened before, imagining the cut-off half way through a guys career.
I understand the kind of affection that develops for a star after a long and successful career. But Smoltz wasn't a career-long Brave any more than Bagwell was a career-long Astro, or Clemente was a career-long Pirate. He's done enough great real stuff that people don't need to gild the lily with phony ####.
Do any of you Red Sox fans happen to know what the sum total of those deals is, and why Boston didn't lump that cash together and pick up a good, reliable ballplayer?
And I'm sorry, but it's just stupid to call a guy a lifelong Brave if five minutes at the library can get you a photo of him wearing a Tigers cap. A guy isn't a lifelong teetotaler if he stops drinking at 20, or a lifelong Democrat if he changes his registration when he's 20, or a lifelong American if he immigrates when he's 20. This is no different.
How pedantic can you get? Is it your contention that Lou Gehrig wasn't a lifelong Yankee because he once wore a Columbia University uni? Robin Yount wasn't a lifelong Brewer because he once played winter ball? George Brett wasn't a lifelong Royal because he didn't come out of his mother's womb wearing a KC cap?
I know you know what the terms mean and you are just being argumentative.
Wakefield is at $4M per season.
Baldelli is at $0.5M base, with $1.75M in roster bonuses, and $5.25M in performance bonuses.
Smoltz is at a base of $5.5M, with up to $4.5M in bonuses (probably based on innings)
Penny is at $5M, plus up to $3M in playing time bonuses
All told, that's a base of $14.5M. I'm not going to bother adding up the bonuses as, if they're achieved, then the players will likely have put in enough value to justify their salaries. I'm not a Boston fan, so I have no idea as to why they did it this way, rather than just throw $14M per year at a single player. My best guess would be that there wasn't a $14M player willing to take a one year deal who also matched their specific needs - other than Catcher, what do they really need?
Bagwell was was a career-long Astro, and Clemente, bless him, was the very definition of a career-long Pirate. Indeed, those two guys are pretty good exemplars of precisely the sort of players we hold up, along with the Musials, Kalines and Bretts, as being the one-team, one-career ideal.
I have no idea why you think minor leagues matter in this whatsoever. A player stays his whole major league career with one team, he counts. John Smoltz has pitched 3395 major league innings for one team. If all goes well with his rehab, that will change with inning 3396, with the Red Sox. It sure didn't change with the Tigers, for goodness sakes.
Chipper remains, of course . . . for now.
I obviously know what the terms mean, because I posted my definitions in the thread. I'm being argumentative because I'm right.
"Is it your contention that Lou Gehrig wasn't a lifelong Yankee because he once wore a Columbia University uni? Robin Yount wasn't a lifelong Brewer because he once played winter ball? George Brett wasn't a lifelong Royal because he didn't come out of his mother's womb wearing a KC cap?"
The clock starts once a guy signs a contract (major or minor) with a ML franchise, and it ends when he retires. This isn't rocket science - don't pretend you don't understand what I mean.
"Indeed, those two guys are pretty good exemplars of precisely the sort of players we hold up, along with the Musials, Kalines and Bretts, as being the one-team, one-career ideal."
Which is wrong, and I complain about it when people do it with those guys, too. Not a particularly popular stand here in Pittsburgh, but such is life. When people forget that Clemente came from the Dodgers, they're crossing out a big part of his life - and he was important enough that I think he deserves accuracy rather than facile myth-building.
You may be right in a very technical way but you're also an idiot. Happens frequently, actually.
Everybody? Really?
Come to Pittsburgh some time, and ask people on the street what team signed Clemente. I doubt you get even a simple majority for the Dodgers, and that's in the city that should theoretically know him the best.
"For better or worse, no one considers a player's minor league career when considering their major league career."
It's worse. And just because a lot of people do it, doesn't mean that they're right. A lot of people write "RBIs" instead of "RBI", too. They aren't any less wrong just because there are other wrong people doing the same thing.
Talking about a non-one-team player as a one-team player is just another way of saying that things were better in the old days, aspiring to something that didn't exist in the first place. We're supposed to get all weepy because the Braves are envisioning life without Smoltz. Well, they must've envisioned life without him at some point, because he lasted for 22 rounds in the draft and they chose a whole bunch of other people that year instead. So now he's leaving a team that didn't want him all that much in the first place. Big whoop. It's not a sad commentary on the loyalty and honor of modern times - it's just a guy changing teams. Again.
The other thing to consider is the length of the deals; they're not on the hook for an extended period of time if any of these guys don't work out. Other than Teixeira or CC, who was available that you'd want to lock up to a long contract (who also fills a need)?
The Red Sox didn't pick up a good, reliable ballplayer because they're highly risk-averse in the long term, and very risk friendly in the short term. Getting a good player who is reliable would just be too easy.
I wouldn't say the Braves (or a great many other teams for that matter) "didn't want him all that much". A lot of teams passed on Smoltz - who was considered borderline first round talent - because it was assumed he was unsignable since he had a full ride basketball scholarship to Michigan State.
It was only when his home town Detroit Tigers took a flyer on him in the 22nd round, that he signed. I haven't been able to find out what his signing bonus was with Detroit, but I'll wager it was a great deal more than the typical 22nd rounder got...
They might be wrong because no one had ever asked them before - it's a minor (ahem) distinction.
It's more than that - it;s a guy leaving the organization he'd been in for two decades, for which he was one of the most public faces. I don't begrudge Smoltz leaving, or the Braves for not keeping him* - but I understand the emotional response.
* though they have been a little whiny this offseason in general.
Now, I have no idea how Smoltz is revered, or the reverse, in Atlanta ...
I don't remember the exact details, but wasn't there a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in the New York media when it looked like Bernie was going to sign with the Red Sox? It seems to me that he was about as heavily identified with a team as someone could possibly be.
Oh, I do as well. I think it's normal and natural and understandable for fans to be sad when a longtime contributor leaves. Those fans all have a lot of good memories of Smoltz in red and blue. I don't object to their sentiment at all. But I don't think that there's any purpose in trying to draw a distinction between Smoltz and a longtime contributor like Maddux.
Honestly, I have kind of an issue with even legitimate one-team players. A lot of those one-team players in the olden days were effectively slaves, shackled to their teams by the Reserve Clause whether they wanted to stay or not. And nowadays we like to retroactively imagine this deep and abiding respect between the team and the player and the city, when in fact a lot of those players resented being trapped and lowballed, and would've been out the door for an extra five dollars if they'd had the opportunity. There's really kind of an uncomfortable power dynamic below the surface there, if you think about it, a desire to totally elminate the possibility of rejection by the player. Like an abusive boyfriend who pines for the days before restraining orders.
And even he might only be 99% there. It's not clear whether Vlad is just being argumentative or if he's in fact semantically illiterate.
Kisses to you too, booboo.
You may be right in a very technical way but you're also an idiot. Happens frequently, actually.
I dare say that half the time a thread at this site turns sour, it could be because this line wasn't used earlier.
My position is perfectly clear. If you claim not to understand what I'm saying, you're either dumb or trolling.
Do you have some examples, Vlad? A lot of the one-team guys who were very highly respected developed business and civic connections with their cities: Ernie Banks in Chicago, Stan Musial in St. Louis. Charlie Gehringer (from rural Michigan) became a very successful businessman in the auto industry in Detroit. Yaz loved Tom Yawkey, if not always Boston fans. Clemente was very important to the Pittsburgh community. By contrast, guys who were pains in the rear, like Rogers Hornsby or Joe Medwick, tended to make the rounds of various cities. The best example of somebody chained to one city that he was usually at odds with would be Ted Williams in Boston, and he is not really what people think of when they get nostalgic for the one-team star.
Or using plain English. Most people do not consider the minor leagues to be part of a MLB player's "career."
Most people also think that one plus one equals two.
So much for "plain English".
That depends. Do you mean illiterate in a semantic sense, or illiterate about semantics?
See, if you try hard enough, there's really no such thing as plain English.
Too long to quote the whole thing, but here's a good article about Joe DiMaggio's holdout, with both sides playing hardball.
That's all I feel like pulling out now, because I'm hungry and I want some lunch, but there are a lot more just like them. Hell, even Saint Stan himself had a moderately acrimonious holdout in 1946.
I mean, unaware of the processes by which words and phrases acquire meaning, and thus unable to correctly use terms that have acquired meanings which are not perfectly aligned with their component words and his own (to some degree arbitrary) definitions. In short, usage determines meaning. Vlad, no matter how strong his protestations to the contrary, does not.
You may think that, but Sam doesn't. Read #210.
Does anyone, really?
He's saying that neither of things he's adding have a value of 1. The second clearly has a value of 3/4, and the other clearly has a value of less than 1. If the first has a value of, say, 1/2, then the total would be 5/4, which is close enough to 1 to be rounded to such in a non-rigorous discussion.
Thank you. To be more precise, I think "one year" of baseball (for a starting pitcher) = +/- 200 innings or +/- 30 starts.
The minor league season is shorter -- you rarely see minor league pitchers with this workload. Starts generally max out in the high 20's, and IP/G is pretty low, it's unusual to see more than 180 IP. Although that's in the current decade, back when Smoltz was a tyke and men were men, things may have been different.
EDIT: Looking at the numbers now, for the first time, I would tend to agree that Smoltz had two seasons in the Tigers system, if the only other choice were one season. I'd probably say "most of 2 seasons" if I had unlimited options. However, I think to characterize Sam's statement as 1 + 1 = 1 is to not understand it.
It's my theory that any Primer thread that makes it into its third page should be required to include this statement.
As for 1+1=2. That's always true as long as you work within our accepted mathematical forms. However, there's no intrinsic reason why that should be done. Non-Euclidean geometries work and are perfectly internally consistent. It's certainly possible to construct a mathematics where 1+1 doesn't =2. The only reason why we don't speak with such possibilities in mind is that our lived experience utterly contradicts that idea. Heck, multiverse theory suggests there may be other places in existence at this moment where all of our assumptions about physics and the laws of the universe totally break down. And then there's relativity which means that numbers need not add up.
Any time you start assuming that there is an absolute and perfectly secure objective nature at work, you're probably going to be wrong. The reason this doesn't cause total breakdown of communication is because people recognize that you can construct shared understandings of terms and ideas. In this instance, 99% of baseball fans consider actual MLB games played. Vlad disagrees. Fine, whatever. But don't pretend like you're "right" and the whole world is "wrong."
I'm a math person, but I don't go very abstract. Is this really true?
I would start here:
+ is an commutative, associative, and invertible operation
0 is an identity element for +
Z is a set of cardinality at least 3 that is closed under +
1 is the smallest magnitude non-identity element of Z
If we accept these, then it seems to me that 1 + 1 is a pretty good definition of 2. So to have 1 + 1 =/= 2 you have to assign a different meaning to at least one of {+, 0, 1, Z} and these seem to be pretty basic definitions, so that you'd want to use a different symbol if you want to change any of these, otherwise you're just saying something like 1 + 1 = 1 where + means multiplication.
EDIT: a couple clarifications
I'll admit to being fully out of my league on this point, though. Still, being a social scientist, I'm more than willing to fall back on Bertrand Russell or Mill or Dewey, who all offer variations on the idea that numbers are purely abstract inventions. Well maybe not Russell since he simply replaces the abstraction of numbers with the abstraction of logic.
Also, there's the more prosaic example of binary, where 1+1 doesn't equal 2 but instead is 10. That one's a bit of a cop-out of course, but still...
Seriously, Vlad, the percentage of people who would start the clock with a player's minor league career for this question is ridiculously small. That you happen to be part of this percentage is no excuse for your failure to acknowledge your functional wrongness.
What can I say? I'm pedauntless.
Worst post ever.
We're supposed to get all weepy because Vlad is envisioning life without his wife. Well, he must've envisioned life without her at some point, because he lived for x years and dated a whole bunch of other people before he met her. So now she's leaving a guy that didn't even know who she was in the first place. Big whoop. It's not a sad commentary on the loyalty and honor of modern times - it's just some whore screwing the neighbor. Again.
Since when did I get married? And to a whore, at that?
Do I at least get a discount rate?
If you're sad about Smoltz leaving, it's because he was a good player for the franchise for a long time, and you have a lot of happy memories from his career. It doesn't magically become any sadder just because his first ML game came in a Braves uni. Cubs fans weren't any less sad when Sandberg retired because he broke in with the Phillies. It's the memories and the emotional connection that resonate, not the ####### laundry.
Consider it a message...from the FUTURE!
(and they're all whores)
Frank Miller, is that you?
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