Mad About the Cost of TV? Blame Sports

Your cable bill—$80 or $90, or whatever it is—is best understood as two prices. The programming (i.e. the channels you watch) and the distribution (i.e. the infrastructure and profits for the cable companies). Every time you pay a cable bill, the channels collect a small fee. It’s called an “affiliate fee.” The most in-demand channels tend to negotiate the highest fees. And those tend to be sports channels. Take a look.

By my rough calculation, if you pay $90 a month for cable, you are paying about $76 a year (about 7 percent of the total cost of cable TV) just for the NFL.

How to Write about Baseball in the Major Leagues

Two writers - Peter Abraham and Jayson Stark - talk about their craft.

ESPN: Szymborski: Projecting the AL Standings (INSIDER)

Seasons are simulated a million times using a Monte Carlo method, the percentile performance of player projections and estimates of roster construction. There are other bits of mathematical nerdery involved (linear algebra for the win!), but I’m sure you want to get down to the results, so here we go.

And the NL.