Dumb Dora/Donald doesn’t pretend to be enough of an ____________ .

If an already-signed player who hits an average of 20 home runs and 80 RBIs per year makes, say, $5 million per season, then surely a second player who is averaging 24 home runs and 86 RBIs deserves $6 million per year. It made perfect sense in those honest days, before the introduction of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs to the game.

But teams made deals based on the supposed integrity of the accumulated statistics ...

Jerry Meals just threw up his…lunch.

As if Yasiel Puig, or any other major league outfielder, doesn’t have enough to worry about, add one thing to the list. Umpire Jordan Baker is quickly gaining fame for a pretty gross habit: After each half inning, he turns and throws his chewing gum into the outfield.

The gum-throwing, first reported by Lobshots.com, means that at the end of each game Baker leaves 18 wads of chewing gum in the outfield. Who has to clean this up? You have to bet if an ...

Megdal’s latest…

So now consider the real winter ahead for the New York Mets owners. They have less than a year to either find a way to pay J.P. Morgan Chase $320 million, or convince the bank to give them more time. And they’ll have to do so with more than just a Fred Wilpon press conference sunnily declaring his money problems a thing of the past. If the bank believes, unlike Standard and Poor’s, that the Mets are on the cusp of profitability, or that a forced sale now will produce less ...

“They’re undesirable,” said Dave Rosenfield, a longtime Norfolk (Va.) Tides executive. “Nobody wants them.”

Rosenfield was Norfolk’s general manager when it became the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate in 1969 (it was named Tidewater then) and was still on the job when the Mets left in late 2006. Only a one-hour flight from New York, Norfolk was perfectly suitable for the Mets. And for decades, the two got along well enough.

But Rosenfield said the relationship soured after Jeff Wilpon ...

El Paso, Texas, the second-largest U.S. city without a professional sports team, is borrowing $53 million with yields at record lows as it joins municipalities nationwide betting that stadiums will rejuvenate downtowns. [...]  The Tucson team moving to El Paso sold 3,000 tickets per game last year, the lowest attendance in the 16-team Pacific Coast League. El Paso’s team will do better, said Mike Feder, general manager of the Tucson Padres.  “They’ve never had Triple A baseball, their ...

The night the unstinkable stank!

“These guys are in charge,” Walter said before the Dodgers’ 3-0 victory over the Angels. “Nobody wants me running this team. If they do, that’s a huge mistake. I’m not qualified to run a baseball team. I hope people know that.”

Walter is chief executive of Guggenheim Partners and one of the partners in Guggenheim Baseball Management, the company that owns the Dodgers.

Is there a point at which Walter will become involved in making baseball decisions?

“I ...

For most baseball players, a 50-game drug ban would be a career low-point. Most baseball players aren’t Josh Sale.

The Tampa Bay Rays’ minor league prospect showed the world how much of a winner he really is by boasting on Facebook about humiliating a stripper for cheap laughs.

More proof that money can’t buy class, I guess.

TONY RANDAZZO NO MISTER ROCK AND ROLL, MR. COMMISSIONER.

Major League Baseball should immediately adopt reforms to the umpiring system. MLB is now a $7 billion dollar industry awash in cash so the costs of these changes can hardly be the reason to defer making them.

  1. MLB should buy the umpire schools and take over the training and development of all umpires in professional baseball. The recruitment, training and compensation of minor league and major league umpires should be controlled ...

Shades of Hairspray!...“It was a time of tradition, a time of values, and a time…to shake things up.”

For a journalist, chance encounters at a restaurant or a hair salon can become a major opportunity for advancing a story and in some instances the journalist is in the right place at the right time because he was with his wife. I had a very chance encounter with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Saturday afternoon in lower Manhattan because my wife happened to have an appointment at a ...

Qu’ils mangent de la bukkake!

Hal Steinbrenner spoke at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. He disagreed with the assessment that tickets are overpriced in the Bronx. This is different point of view than what I generally hear from fans. This is what Hal had to say about ticket prices being too high:

  “You hear about that in the media,” Steinbrenner said. “You don’t hear that there are thousands and thousands of affordable seats in the $25 range for every game, not to mention the specials that we ...

“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.

...