Thursday, May 09, 2013
Former Cardinals OF Fernando Tatís Is Good at MS Paint… No, Really
(www.insidestl.com)
Former Cardinals outfielder Fernando Tatís once famously hit 2 Grand Slams in one inning and set a Major Leage record with 8 RBI in one frame but that may not be his biggest feat. Lately it seems that Fernando has been lighting up the world of graphic design and his all original creations are truly a sight to behold and the world needs to stand up and take notice.
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< 1 2 3 4 5 6 >The last is clearly untrue: interest in baseball has never been higher than it is today and the vast majority of fans enjoy the expanded playoffs. It's only the self-appointed guardians of tradition who make ridiculous claims about the "true meaning" of this and that, as though Abner Doubleday descended from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone instructing the custodians of MLB to have only a single round of playoffs. There is no Constitution of Baseball to defend. Snap out of it.
--drove adam dunn out of town
--harrassed and nitpicked ken griffey jr thoughout his stay
Just following the lead of our HOF announcer, Harv...
edit: Adam Dunn is one of my favorite players ever, didn't want to see him leave, but, by 2008, it was time for he and the Reds to part ways. Jr got a raw deal, but, then he didn't come anywhere close to filling Reds fans expectations. Nor his own, most likely. Plus, neither of them were top-of-the-line starters and that's what the Reds really needed those years.
edit edit: Harveys, I should have read your next post. A lot of it was definitely Marty. As he goes, so follows the Reds' fan base.
You're on psychotropics if you think interest in the 2012 playoffs is higher than in the pre-wild card era. What's the evidence for this claim? The empty seats in Yankee Stadium for ALCS games? The sub-NFL-Draft TV ratings?
the reds fans didn't use to be like this. it's kind of alarming actually. the passion has a real edge to it.
And we'll take it in stride and follow our glorious leader (Whiney Herzog) and find a way to blame it on some random crap (Denkinger, Home field advantage etc) :)
I would prefer a plot that ensures multiple consecutive world series victory.
Yes, it's only the greedy owners who like a system that keeps more teams in contention later in the season. That's why teams drew 14,000 fans per game back in the Golden Age of 1968.
Teams like the Cardinals stay "in contention," but teams like the Yankees and Nationals don't get their just reward. Their just reward is a division title that means something, and a postseason spot much closer to the ultimate prize than a best-of-5 against the fifth-place team in the league.
I'm sure that the "fans" don't mind it; after all, the interests of the good but not great -- typically in the name of "fairness" -- will always trump the interests of the cream of the system and the truly accomplished. One wouldn't expect American fans to be able to distinguish the two.
Funnily enough, this was the game that turned me into a baseball fan.
the reds fans didn't use to be like this. it's kind of alarming actually. the passion has a real edge to it.
Harvey
I think living through Leatherpants Bowden's lying, Bob Boone, major league manager, and Fat Jimmy Haynes, Opening Day starter was enough to put the fanbase permanently on edge. :-) It's hard to imagine any of the current players being run out of town... This city truly loves the current team.
This was wrong yesterday, and it still is. The expanded playoffs are selling out everywhere except the new, expensive and unliked stadium of a team that has made the postseason almost every year for two decades, and which has fielded a 2012 team that its fanbase doesn't seem to like. NYS attendance in a vacuum from attendance at other parks is a terrible indicator of fan reaction to the "diluted" postseason, and it certainly isn't compelling.
You just have to laugh.....
You cannot be serious about this. That is the most backwards thing ever said on this site. Fan interest has risen because of expanded playoffs, to deny that is insane/ridiculous/stupid. Now if you are saying it might have diminished interest in the last seven games of the post season, there might be a little bit of truth to that, but on the whole, baseball popularity/profit/interest is much higher than it was in the 70's or 60's etc, and that was when they were basically the only game in town.
Actually, it's a leading indicator.
Not if attendance at NYS this postseason is your sole barometer for fan interest!
If you're talking about the regular season, we've been through this a million times -- attendance is higher because the mallparks are better places to while away a summer afternoon or evening than the parks of yore. Where there are no mallparks, yet very good teams (Oakland and Tampa), attendance is no different than 1975-91 and worse than in the best markets of that time. The Yankee Stadium attendances and ticket prices confirm this; there's no more demand to go to that mallpark for an LCS game than a whole bunch of regular season games. Why? Because large swaths of people aren't going for the baseball -- even in New York.
But the evidence is pretty clear that these things make MLB a lot of money relative to how they used to do it. MLB would be crazy not to keep with the trend.
I was telling someone the other day how much I love baseball and they asked how much I spend on it. It occured to me that I don't really spend anything on it. I bought Dad ExtraInnings once but don't have it myself. I don't subscribe to MLB online services. I haven't been to a MLB game in 5 years - and that was with family we were visiting and they paid.
Basically, I love the sport but the actual experience of attending is less and less gratifying. And I find the regular and post-seasons less and less compelling.
However, I'm a demographic outlier. I don't like most of the things that are very popular and like stuff that isn't. That doesn't make me cool and I'm not judging - a company would be a fool to make me a target.
Please explain, with reference to why every other team selling out all postseason games (except Texas's mid-day play-in, I believe) does not indicate sustained fan interest in the "diluted" postseason.
It's the beginning of a trend that's going to hit postseason gates and interest in other cities in the coming years. Fans in regular postseason participant markets will become blase about the tournament, as has clearly happened in New York.(*)
Of course, the measure of interest isn't just attendance; it's also TV ratings which continue to languish far below the ratings of LCS and World Series games of yore. People just aren't as interested in the baseball postseason as they used to be. There are too many games, too many flukish outcomes, too many matchups of the less deserving.
(*) I believe there has been a non-sellout in Detroit this postseason also.
The A's drew almost twice as many fans this year as they did in 1974, when they were in the process of winning their third consecutive World Series.
We haven't been through this before. I don't have a clue what a mallpark is. There is a game going on, you pay a ticket to go to a stadium, you watch the game. The stadium may or may not have other crap to do, if you consider St louis stadium to be a mallpark, then your definition of a mallpark is insane.
Attendance is up for lots of reasons, mostly being that there are more people in the population to go, but who cares why it's up, the simple fact of the matter is that it is up. Per game attendance over the past decade blows away per game attendance any time prior. It's not a debate, you can't debate facts.
That has to be the most uninformed comment ever. ALL tv ratings are down for everything. In the 70's and even the 80's a 20 share would land you in the bottom quartile of tv ratings and threaten you with cancellation, nowadays a 10 share is a hit show.
Surely the Cardinals would be a good test of this hypothesis?
Are you really this stupid?
What is it that you're envisioning happening here? And whatever it is, didn't it happen over ten years ago, with the vanguard being Atlanta? I think I was hearing jokes about Braves fans not caring about playoff games before I had my first email address.
And who are the "regular postseason participation markets" anyway, other than 1) New York, and 2) St. Louis, Home Of History's Best Fans who would obviously never become blasé?
Yes. I'm stunned you bother to follow the actual results at all. Why not just run 1000 Diamond Mind simulations instead? Hell, that's how they do things on Wall Street these days, right?
I know it's your habit to imagine people are saying things that they really aren't. All he is pointing out is that he considers teams with equal pyth to be equally talented teams. The standings are the standings. But when people say derisively about a team with a poor record who had a good pyth "they are only a 88 win team"... the point is that they were a more talented team than their actual won loss record indicates.
You don't have to agree with that, and he's not saying that the standings should be determined by pyth record, he's just saying that his evaluations/opinion of the quality of the team starts with pyth record over actual won/loss record.
1974 wasn't in my time period, and I've never called that time a "Golden Age" or any such thing.
The A's drew 1.3M more fans in 1990. They've drawn almost 3M to the Coliseum. They drew more in 1982 than 2012.
The 2012 A's also drew far fewer fans than went to the concrete circles in the late 70s, as shown by the following random figures:
Montreal, 1979: 2.1M
Philly, 1978: 2.5M
Cincy, 1978: 2.5M
San Fran, 1978: 1.7M
St. Louis, 1979: 1.6M
Los Angeles, 1978: 3.3M
Los Angeles, 1979: 2.8M
To be fair, Pittsburgh, which has never really drawn that well, drew only 1.4M to Three Rivers in 1979.
Then there's Tampa, a team that drew 1.55M to a grungy dome with a very appealing and successful young team. Let's compare good years for not quite as good a team that played in a grungy dome in the 80s:
Houston, 1980: 2.3M
Houston, 1986: 1.73M
Houston, 1987: 1.9M
Taken together with the TV ratings, which have precipitously dropped, there's little evidence that baseball qua baseball is any more popular now than it was 30 years ago.
(Eyeroll.) Fine, use 1975 then, even though leaguewide attendance dropped by a couple hundred thousand between the two seasons. This year's A's outdrew the division-winning, three-time-defending-champion '75 team by 600,000.
They didn't outdraw 1982 and they were 1.3M short of 1990. Though it's better than in a lot of years, the A's attendance is far short of peak. The population of the Bay Area and the United States has also grown since 1980; that alone should be driving attendance up.
And it's not just Oakland, it's Tampa.
Random? You choose a year for Montreal that they were 4th in attendance...let's look at that year.
Tm Attendance Attend/G 1979 National League
LAD 2860954 35320
PHI 2775011 34259
CIN 2356933 29462
MON 2102173 25953
HOU 1900312 23461
CHC 1648587 20353
STL 1627256 19845
SDP 1456967 17987
SFG 1456402 17980
PIT 1435454 17722
NYM 788905 9621
ATL 769465 9740
Best team drew an average of 35,000, worse team drew an average of 9700...
Let's look at this year.
Tm Attendance Attend/G 2012 National League
PHI 3565718 44021
SFG 3377371 41696
LAD 3324246 41040
STL 3262109 40273
CHC 2882756 35590
MIL 2831385 34955
COL 2630458 32475
ATL 2420171 29879
WSN 2370794 29269
CIN 2347251 28978
NYM 2242803 27689
MIA 2219444 27401
ARI 2177617 26884
SDP 2123721 26219
PIT 2091918 25826
HOU 1607733 19849
Very comparable.
The worse team(that is the 16th ranked team) Out drew 6 out of 12 teams(including my Cardinals), and the 15th worse team outdrew all but four teams from that year...yep attendance is an issue. (I hope you get the sarcasm)
If baseball has grown so much in core popularity, why are the crowds in Oakland tepid and the crowds in Tampa terrible? Tampa draws way less than the good Astro teams drew to the craptastic Astrodome in the 80s. Why do the A's draw way less than the concrete circles -- supposedly the worst creations in the history of man -- drew in the 70s and 80s?
I don't know what a mallpark is. Better designed stadium with comfort? Is St Louis a mall park, and if so, why?
Why don't you explain your disagreement? Try to use small words, so I can understand.....
Year Finish Attendance Attend/G Rank
2012 1 1679013 20729 12th of 14
2011 3 1476791 18232 14th of 14
2010 2 1418391 17511 13th of 14
2009 4 1408783 17392 14th of 14
2008 3 1665256 20559 13th of 14
2007 3 1921844 23726 12th of 14
2006 1 1976625 24403 12th of 14
2005 2 2109118 26038 8th of 14
2004 2 2201516 27179 7th of 14
2003 1 2216596 27365 6th of 14
2002 1 2169811 26788 8th of 14
2001 2 2133277 26337 7th of 14
2000 1 1603744 19799 11th of 14
1999 2 1434610 17711 12th of 14
1998 4 1232343 15214 13th of 14
1997 4 1264218 15608 14th of 14
1996 3 1148380 14178 14th of 14
1995 4 1174310 16310 12th of 14
1994 2 1242692 22191 13th of 14
1993 7 2035025 25124 11th of 14
1992 1 2494160 30792 4th of 14
1991 4 2713493 33500 3rd of 14
1990 1 2900217 35805 2nd of 14
1989 1 2667225 32929 2nd of 14
1988 1 2287335 28239 7th of 14
1987 3 1678921 20727 11th of 14
1986 3 1314646 15839 11th of 14
1985 4 1334599 16894 11th of 14
1984 4 1353281 16707 11th of 14
1983 4 1294941 15987 11th of 14
1982 5 1735489 21426 6th of 14
1981 1 1304052 23287 4th of 14
1980 2 842259 10398 12th of 14
1979 7 306763 3787 14th of 14
1978 6 526999 6587 14th of 14
1977 7 495599 6119 14th of 14
1976 2 780593 9637 11th of 12
1975 1 1075518 13278 6th of 12
1974 1 845693 10441 11th of 12
1973 1 1000763 12355 8th of 12
1972 1 921323 11965 5th of 12
1971 1 914993 11296 7th of 12
1970 2 778355 9609 9th of 12
1969 2 778232 9608 8th of 12
1968 6 837466 10090 8th of 10
Baltimore @ Texas was a night game. (Sorry, this is BBTF, where we correct things :) It didn't sell out, but it drew more fans than a lot of the Rangers' "sellouts" this year. I'd say there were >45K people in the seats. I went walkabout midgame because it was so desperately awful, and ended up in the only really open section, third deck in left field, where nobody ever sits. I think they didn't sell all the tickets because it wasn't till two days before that anybody in DFW suspected there could possibly be such a game, and when it happened it was a shock and a downer. But it still drew very well.
EDIT: To clarify "walkabout": I had a ticket in third deck, right field, which was packed, and I got tired of sitting next to other people, especially the nice young Orioles fan sitting next to me, who deserved to enjoy the game and not sit next to some goddamn Eeyore.
Likewise, when MLB expanded to have enough teams that it needed to let more than 4 of them into the playoffs, baseball became bad. It was inevitable. It couldn't withstand the trend from other sports which let virtually any team with a .500 record into the playoffs. Even though baseball still has far fewer playoff spots than other sports, it is now bad. Even the word "playoffs" is bad. It is not possible for more people to like baseball now than the number of people who liked it when it was good.
Even if you're a fan, you may subconsciously be less inclined to shell out the bucks to go to a place that is marketed as a dump.
LCS ratings are way up this year
Sure, they are -- and plenty of people do just that.
Here's a good ballpark vs. mallpark story published in SI a couple years ago -- it's about Philly:
As noted in Cliff zips beneath the overpass that leads to the Walt Whitman, the bridge no one needs to jump off anymore, and turns left onto Packer. Finally the forest of row houses sighs and surrenders to a vast clearing: the parking lot where the Vet used to be. Ahh, the memories... .
"It was San Quentin," says Head.
"It was a circular concrete slab of crap," says Boo.
"It was a green dying turd," says Dan Tarng, a first-generation Taiwanese-American fan who needs to meet Head and Boo.
"You'd sit there feeling like you needed to call the suicide hotline," says Jacklin Rhoads.
Jacklin? Is that ... a woman? Take a long look around as Citizens Bank Park's homey red bricks and towering light stanchions arise from the asphalt. Even now, four hours before game time, everywhere you look, something never seen before at ball games in Philly: females in droves. Queuing up for standing-room-only tickets, playing Beanbag Toss and Beer Pong amid a daily tailgating festival that used to materialize only on NFL Sundays. Teenage girls who don't hang at the mall anymore: They hang at CBP. Women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who don't have Girls Night Out or Happy Hour at bars or restaurants: They throw down light beer in the CBP parking lot, hard lemonades in the concourses, low-fat wraps and water ices on Ashburn Alley. They eyeball Cliff and Chase and Cole. The Phillies blew up San Quentin. They built Friday night on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore.
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