“Peachy keen, jellybean.”

The Cubs, from the moment they acquired first baseman Anthony Rizzo 16 months ago, viewed him as a significant part of their future.

Now, they can guarantee it long-term.

The Cubs have reached agreement with Rizzo on a seven-year, $41 million contract through 2019, according to major-league sources. The deal also includes two $14.5 million club options, sources said.

Thus, the total value over nine years could be $68 million; Rizzo would not receive a $2 million ...

Maury adds…“And when I’m talking “plunge” I’m not talking Loria’s neckline.”

As of today, the decline would be 31 percent below what the club ended with last season. But, they are currently averaging 18,864. As of May 5 of last season, they were averaging 30,681, down 11,817 from the previous year, or a decline of 39 percent.

So, it’s very possible the Marlins could end worse than the Rays. It’s early, and anything could happen, but odds are good the Marlins aren’t going to get any ...

The thought goes like this: When a network pays huge money for a sports team’s TV rights, it hikes its carriage fee for cable providers. The best regional sports networks (RSNs) cost upward of $3 a month for cable and satellite providers to provide to each household. With monthly TV bills already exorbitant and more options to provide entertainment, from Netflix to Hulu and beyond, consumers could rebel against the single-payment system and choose what they view a la carte. One executive who ...

Madlock to Spurlock…Don’t Super Size Me!

Jumbotron? Just Say ‘No!’

The main problem is not the rooftop owners, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s great to have fans watching games from the rooftops across the street—a historic practice to which the Cubs have never objected—but outrageous that rooftop owners veto improvements to Wrigley on the basis of projected “lost revenues.” These “revenues” must be understood for what they are: a theft of the Cubs’ product, to not one ...

The ability to pay to get out of some sort of drudgery of everyday life or, alternatively, to get a taste of the good life. Front-of-the-line-passes. Elite status everything. It’s, in most respects, a logical extension of a capitalist system — if people want something, someone will provide it at some cost — but it also comes at another cost, and that of a shared civic experience.

THIS.  Nice post by Craig.

Maury adds…“As poet laureate Steve Perry said, “The party is over. I have gone away.”

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone likes to have their predictions come true. That’s certainly the case here. While each year writers look to predict the final outcome of MLB’s regular season, I’ve tried to look at attendance trends to see what may occur during the season.

The Red Sox were one of those cases. After missing the playoffs in the last day of the 2011 season, the whole “chicken and ...

“123
I guess I’ll go I’ll take a bath
there’s nothing else to do.”

The ranks of Major League Baseball owners include some of the richest men—and they are almost exclusively white males—in the country, as likely to open their wallets for a super-PAC as they are a top-shelf free agent. Viewed in the context of the competition, with its anti-discrimination settlements and SEC investigations, the Yankees are, like their Opening Day roster, fairly pedestrian.

So where does your team’s ...

“Headlines twice the size of the events.”

In baseball, there is always one other long-term prediction, namely that baseball is dying. The non-baseball experts have been bleating this for years, because, they say, baseball is too slow and doesn’t appeal to young people. Of course, the young people it wasn’t supposed to appeal to when baseball first allegedly started dying are now old people buying tickets and taking young people to games, but so it goes.

In fact, yes, baseball is too slow for ...

.... but were too poor to ask. (Hint: try to be a Rockies fan who loves going to midweek games against the Mariners in May or September.)

The first pitches have been thrown, and Rick Ankiel is on pace to hit 162 home runs this season. Time to buy some baseball tickets. To help you out, we’ve analyzed ticket prices for every regular season Major League Baseball game in 2012, using data from SeatGeek, which tracks prices on secondary markets like StubHub. The SeatGeek data provides a more ...

Using guidelines set by nonprofit watchdogs Charity Navigator, the Better Business Bureau and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Outside the Lines” found that 74 percent of the nonprofits fell short of one or more acceptable nonprofit operating standards. The standards cover all sorts of aspects, such as how much money a nonprofit actually spends on charitable work as opposed to administrative expenses and whether there are enough board members overseeing the organization. ...Read More...

Murray Chass, Bud Selig and…Craig Calcaterra? Your new baseball society sounds charming.

The writer, Craig Calcaterra, crafted an excellent criticism of Yahoo!’s Michael Silver:

Meanwhile, baseball’s ratings continue to plummet, irrespective of month or matchup. Those record-low Series of the last seven years featured the game’s biggest attractions, from the moneyed villains of Boston and New York to storied franchises like St. Louis and San Francisco. None stanched the bleeding.

Regular-season games have declined equally. FOX’s Saturday audience has gone down an average of 800,000 since 2001. Sunday-night ESPN telecasts have shriveled by a million viewers in just the ...

In its report, Forbes, which has been tracking the league’s finances since 1998, revealed that the money that all teams made from the $450 million sale of the Montreal Expos in 2006 was invested in hedge funds are now worth more than $1 billion.

“The value of a team used to be about a team itself,” Forbes executive editor Michael Ozanian said in a phone interview with ESPN.com. “Then it shifted to the stadium value and then to the television deals and now it’s more about what’s not on the ...

Don’t have time to wade through…rather check Cheap Miami’s latest Whorish Boorish.

With no one saying no, the networks see sports as a no-lose racket, with ESPN as its piper. The sports channel charges cable companies $5 a month per customer, by far the highest monthly fee in national television. While that may seem a pittance, it’s big money when spread over the 100 million U.S. households with pay TV. And it’s made the other big boys envious.

NBC and CBS have launched their own sports ...

Maybe they lied about the buildings dimensions…

The Yankees won a court order Tuesday temporarily preventing StubHub from opening a store near Yankee Stadium that is designed to allow customers to pick up their tickets before games.

The decision came days before StubHub was set to open the store on East 161st Street on Friday. The Yankees argued that the store was within 1,500 feet of the stadium, violating a New York State law that bans tickets from being resold that close to a venue.

...

“Pooped on Fans’ Feelings” grab it fast or I’m naming my next spychedelic band!

First, the Marlins alienated every taxpayer in Miami with their stadium deal. Then they pissed off every casual fan with a mass offseason firesale. Now, the team is burning bridges with the only true-blue Fish fanatics left—their longtime seasons-ticket holders.

That’s how Jan and Bill Leon are feeling, at least. The couple has paid tens of thousands for front-row season tickets since 1998. But last year, after ...

Buster Olney adds some info to the news we heard yesterday about the league and the union’s negotiations to institute and international draft:

Buster Olney     ✔ @Buster_ESPN

Major League Baseball said by sources to be willing to give up significant concessions to union to make international draft happen.

Buster Olney     ✔ @Buster_ESPN

In return for that international draft, union could get increased minimum salary, less service time required for arbitration, and more.

I ...

As the Chicago Cubs’ quest for a fair stadium refinancing deal continues to drag on with the Wrigleyville community throwing up roadblocks to slow down the settlement process, a new and potentially viable option to Wrigley Field has emerged.

Rosemont mayor Brad Stephens told me this morning in a CSNChicago exclusive that he is willing to give the Cubs and the Ricketts family a 25-acre parcel of land in the village that is a prime piece of real estate large enough to accommodate a new ballpark ...

“Bet A Million” Wilpon: No comment until the time limit is up!

The 2013 season is Sandy Alderson’s final Mulligan.

This is the last year the Mets general manager gets to explain away a worsening major league product in the name of cleansing the old, building the new and waiting for money to drop from heaven — or at least from a Wilpon.

...Indeed, Alderson has followed the right course in trying to find cornerstones while shunning the patchwork route that undermined Minaya: Attempting ...

Major League Baseball 2K13 is an offensively recycled product and an embarrassment to sports video games. In my five years as Kotaku’s sports writer, I’ve spent a good deal of time in comments defending the genre, and those who make its games, from the worn-out slur that annual sports titles are nothing but reskinned roster updates. Yet that is exactly what MLB 2K13 is, and its existence is forever an argumentative trump card to any advocacy I can make for sports…
[...]
Major League Baseball ...

Boodle, Boodle, Boodle…Megdal checks out the Legacy of Clean and other areas.

After all, the Mets’ rallying cry isn’t “Perhaps you should consider believing.” It’s “Ya gotta believe!” It’s mandatory. Reason doesn’t enter into it. Math has no meaning to those who still remain. A Mets fan doesn’t root for the Mets because it makes sense. A Mets fan roots for the Mets because of an otherworldly ability to dream that things will be better than they seem, regardless of realities financial or ...

TAMPA, Fla.—The Yankees have made a “significant offer” to Robinson Cano, according to general manager Brian Cashman, who is hoping to lock the All-Star second baseman into a contract extension before he reaches free agency.

Cashman confirmed on Thursday that an offer has been presented to Cano and agent Scott Boras. There have been negotiations between the two sides in recent weeks, but Cashman declined to comment further on the state of the talks.

Hey…I said the same thing about there being a Weiner Microcar Museum.

Count Michael Weiner among those skeptical of the New York Yankees’ stated plan to reduce payroll next year.

Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner says the team wants to get under the $189 million luxury tax threshold in 2014. That means the player payroll would have to be about $178 million at most, using average annual values of contracts, since the total for the tax will include at least $11 million in ...

Maury adds…“Would you like some tripe, monsieur? It’s wafer thin.”

The worst thing about this behavior is that it’s poisoning the market. The Marlins don’t have much history to lean upon. This is still the first generation of baseball for the Marlins. This isn’t the Yankees or Red Sox, or even the Brewers. What Loria and Co. are offering is a sports fan’s version of battered-spouse syndrome. You get a few glimpses of happiness and a lot of abuse. Along the way, he’s saying it will ...

Speaking in a telephone interview, candidly explaining his modus operandi, but before these latest headlines were posted, Bob Bowman said, “I absolutely want to remind people if they want ‘At Bat’ or TV, it’s available to buy. I guess you consider that advertising as you would consider selling tickets for the World Baseball Classic. We’re reminding people how they can buy uniforms and bats. I guess that’s an advertisement, but that’s what people want to know.

“We remind people ...