Monday, May 20, 2013
The Changing Gigantics of SF | Bill James Online
(www.billjamesonline.com)
Is this really true?
Read More...Baseball teams change at a glacial pace. I’m not talking about how a team does in a given season…that can change quite dramatically…I’m talking about what a team is: the broad scope of a team’s talents, their strengths and weaknesses. A team that’s good at converting a double play generally stays good at turning the double-play, just as a team with a terrible bullpen can’t make that bullpen a strength, at least not quickly. A team that gets lots of production ...
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1 2 >It seems like there could be a name missing from this list, but I can't figure out who it could possibly be. Certainly nobody as important to Giants history as Frank Robinson, I'm sure.
Darren Lewis?
Fred Lewis?
Darren Baker.
Those pesky football and basketball programmes and their tens of thousands of tickets, beer and souvenirs that they sell each week....
Tom Goodwin.
Reggie Sanders.
Just from 2002 there are so many important African-Americans from the Giants - how could they overlook these men of valor.
Shoot, Russ Ortiz is half black.
OK. Maybe not.
If your goal is to educate as many students as possible, putting an scholarship limit is contradicting that goal in the most asinine way possible.
If universities wanted to educate as many students as possible, they wouldn't have admittance quotas.
This.
I teach at a small school (9,000 students) and we have D-1 baseball and basketball, but no football team and it seems they are struggling to keep the doors open on the whole athletic program as they try to grow from what was a formidable D-2 program into a ####-tastic D-1 program. Without the cash cow of football it seems they are struggling. Also, as tuitions rise all over, the cost of those scholarships go WAY up. Here in the CSU (California) those scholarship costs have doubled in the last 6-8 years.
I wish college athletics just went away, but that ain't happening.
Why didn't I think of that?!?
You can't really blame this on football and basketball programmes and scholarships. The mismanagement of the state of California finances and subsequent cutting of funds to unis in California is a tragedy of epic proportions. The one area governments should always be justified in collecting taxes is for spending on education, at any level.
If you added 50% to the education budget tomorrow, it wouldn't move the needle on actual education one bit. The only result would be teachers and administrators driving better cars, taking better vacations and working in nicer offices. In it's current configuration, education is a black hole, you can shovel money in it all day long and never get any additional societal benefit.
Jon Dowd?
Joe Young?
I totally agree. I was just saying that the price of those scholarships is real. And they rise with the rise in tuition/fees. So, an athletic program has to raise that much more money to pay for those scholarships, etc. I'm just saying that their job got much harder in the last 8 years. That's all.
Spoken like someone who hasn't quite got a grip on what goes on in a classroom. I'll grant you the administrator bit. But teachers are rarely the beneficiary of the big salaries. For every professor making $100,000 where I work there are 10 administrators and that's on a campus of 9,000. It is totally unjustified, but it isn't the teachers - for the most part.
Assessment culture has created many problems throughout the nation from k-12 and higher education. Teaching to the test. Running science and history out of the k-6 classroom. Focusing - to a fault - on english and math. Ignoring the concepts of critical thinking and problem solving and the list goes on and on. But the worst thing I am seeing as we approach 15 years with NCLB on the books - is that the constant assessment has created a "need" for middle managers galore to be able to sift through - on a daily basis! - all of this marginally valuable data. We in CA are pissing away millions on folks that provide very little marginal value to an institution. So, Robert, while I see your point and understand that concern - the problem is at the administrative levels of my institution and that of the k-12 folks I know and work with in my region.
I'll agree to disagree here. There is a societal benefit to educating the public. The more students served increase that societal benefit. But, I'll agree that we need more vocational schools, trade schools and the such that prepare folks for careers without the need to rack up $60-$100 K in debt. We are burying students in debt and THAT has a negative societal benefit - I'd argue.
I think you're confusing things here. We're talking about how much people pay to go to state universities more than the quality of education. Throwing 50% more money at them will mean that fewer people are priced out of a college education.
OTOH, baseball is the only sport that allows you to get a paycheck straight out of high school. You'd think that would be more attractive than free tuition for a lot of kids, particularly since so many college football and basketball players will never earn a pro paycheck. And its not like college baseball teams used to offer tons of scholarships and black players were playing college baseball in droves, so that doesn't really explain any kind of decline in numbers for African-Americans in baseball.
And many universities struggle even to fund football. The most recent data on profits (for 2011, released late in 2012) shows the major established programs making huge amounts of money, as one would expect. "But about a third of the teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision broke even or lost money." TCU is notable as the biggest spender not to make any profit on football in 2011, despite a gigantic push to enter the elite ranks.
Of course, football is not all about the bottom line. It's about marketing and branding. TCU dominates one-quarter of the daily newspaper in Ft Worth, mostly due to football (a little bit to basketball, though tenuously, and only if they do well).
I reckon problems are compounded for many schools, especially smaller private colleges, that must maintain football to keep a media presence alive, break even or lose money on football, and are then faced with a number of other unprofitable sports that soak up scholarships, cost lots of overhead to run, and offer just about zero returns in terms of publicity.
Does any school center its "brand" on college baseball? There are popular programs, like the Arizona universities, Texas, USC, but they're not "baseball-first" schools. Cal State Fullerton, maybe; Dallas Baptist in my neck of the woods. It's a marginal speciality.
Long Beach State maybe.
If teachers had better cars, nicer offices and better vacations, wouldn't you attract better teachers? At least, that's the justification put forward for paying CEOs seven figures and giving them golden parachutes.
You left out eating finer dinners and wearing fancier clothes.
Beyond that, yes, your statement is obvious.
I think the first part of this is true, but the second is not. The money is not being spent on salaries, its being spent on lavish capital projects as part of the "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality on college campuses. The money is being spent on yoga centers, coffee bars, and rock-climbing walls as a way to entice high school kids to come to your college because of the lavish free* amenities they can enjoy.
*-hahaha, just kidding, you'll pay for it for decades. Enjoy that latte!
I believe this sort of motivation is only effective with the right sort of people.
The second part is half true; administrative bloat is real and is sucking up a ton of resources. The professors themselves aren't really seeing much of all that money going to the universities. The assistant supervisor working for the Associate VP of the Department of Diversity Compliance is probably making more than most tenure track professors; they're certainly making much, much, more than the adjuncts and graduate students who are actually doing most of the teaching work.
With respect to higher education, Universities have their pick of Ivy league Ph.D.s who are willing to work for peanuts right now. They're already attracting the highest quality candidates.
This 100 times.
MLB is actually pretty representative of the general population if you look at US born players. The NBA is absurdly imbalanced.
Stormfront won't print my articles because I'm Jewish.
Presumably because there's no sense that whites aren't interested in those sports, as a quick glance at most high school rosters or youth league courts and fields or small college campuses would indicate. The opportunities are certainly there for white players to perform in those sports, and they are taking advantage of those opportunities. That they don't end up reaching the NFL or NBA isn't for lack of effort (or expense, in the case of basketball).
The question with African-Americans and baseball is whether they are rejecting the sport at the initial stage. And if that's the case, a) why is it that way, b) what can be done about it, and c) what should be done about it.
If any sizable subset of the American population is not interested in baseball, that's something that MLB should explore. Not because we need some racial quota to fill at the big league level, which is ridiculous, but because you don't want to just write off a potential audience for your game at home.
I don't give a rat's ass what the percentage of African-Americans, or Caucasian-Americans or Latin-Americans make up the rosters of MLB. I do care if large chunks of young people in this country don't have genuine access to playing baseball. 'Cause that ain't right.
Presumably because there's no sense that whites aren't interested in those sports, as a quick glance at most high school rosters or youth league courts and fields or small college campuses would indicate. The opportunities are certainly there for white players to perform in those sports, and they are taking advantage of those opportunities. That they don't end up reaching the NFL or NBA isn't for lack of effort (or expense, in the case of basketball).
The question with African-Americans and baseball is whether they are rejecting the sport at the initial stage. And if that's the case, a) why is it that way, b) what can be done about it, and c) what should be done about it.
If any sizable subset of the American population is not interested in baseball, that's something that MLB should explore. Not because we need some racial quota to fill at the big league level, which is ridiculous, but because you don't want to just write off a potential audience for your game at home.
I don't give a rat's ass what the percentage of African-Americans, or Caucasian-Americans or Latin-Americans make up the rosters of MLB. I do care if large chunks of young people in this country don't have genuine access to playing baseball. 'Cause that ain't right.
Good answer.
But, I don't think the fact that US born blacks make up 8% of MLB players, 11% of US born, is prima facie evidence that opportunity is lacking. That's about the % of blacks in the US pop.
I also wouldn't dismiss so quickly the idea that there are barriers to US whites in the NBA/NFL. It makes no sense that there should be so many European whites in the NBA, and so few US born whites. It is entirely possible that whites are stereotyped with the "slow and can't jump" label.
Well the population of Europe is twice that of the United States, so it does make some sense.
I think the fact that opportunites are lacking is evidence that opportunites are lacking (not just for African-Americans, but lower income people). Baseball has become very expensive, even at the entry level.
There may very well be (in fact, I'm almost certain there is, at least at the individual, though perhaps not the systemic, level). But just as I don't care about the percentage of blacks in MLB, I'm not going to get worked up about the percentage of whites in the NBA or NFL (to be fair, I don't care about the percentage of anything regarding the NBA).
I disagree on many levels; first, this assumes that the absolute best people are going into academia now, instead of medicine or law or finance or management. Second, a person's quality of work (even a desperate one!) is not independent of compensation, far from it. That PhD. that you hire at rock-bottom wages (or, what amounts to the same thing, who is given a greater work load) is simply not going to be as effective. Third, your argument fails to explain why CEOs get the salaries they do, since if anything the glut of potential CEO candidates is even greater than the glut of PhDs.
Because they pack the board of directors with their cronies (mostly other CEOs), who have every interest in seeing CEO pay go up.
It's basically theft.
I think I read that the league is 20% white non-American, 6% white American.
That doesn't seem right. Maybe it's by minutes played.
Eyeballing current rosters:
non-American (49 - Greivis and Bogut went to school here, Kanter tried to): Pachulia, Shengelia, Teletovic, Belinelli, Radmanovic, Casspi, Varejao, Dirk, Fournier, Gallinari, Kofos, Mozgov, Calderon, Jerebko, Kravstov, Bogut (AUS), Biedrins, Delfino, Garcia, Motiejunas, Asik, Ohlbrecht, P. Gasol, M. Gasol, Rubio, Barea, Shved, Pekovic, AK-47, Ilyasova, Pryzbilla, G. Vasquez, Prigioni, Thabo, Turkoglu, Vucevic, Dragic, Scola, Gortat, Haddadi (Iran), Claver, Pavolvic, Freeland, Manu, Kleiza, Bargnani, Valancianus, Kanter, Vesely.
American (40): Korver, B. Lopez, S. Randolph, Jeff Taylor, Mullens, McBob, Hinrich, Walton, Zeller, Kaman, Singler, K. Thompson (?), Lee, Parsons, Hansbrough, Hansbrough, Plumlee, S. Blake, M. Miller, Birdman, Leuer, Ridnour, Love, Budinger, Stiemsma, Redick, Dunleavy, R. Anderson, R. Lopez, J. Smith, Novak, N. Collison, Hawes, Babbitt, M. Leonard, Bonner, Jimmer, Aldrich, Gray, Hayward.
North American, not USA (2): Steve Nash, Gustavo Ayon.
No.
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