Programming Note

Just a heads up for those who visit regularly: There probably won't be any more posts today unless something monumental/tragic/incredibly interesting happens - and even then it won't be until after work hours. Both Matt and I have our hands tied with other obligations and although we'd love to scour the baseball-related interwebz until we find something good to write about, that isn't always an option. Hopefully we can find some time to put together a few posts over the next couple of days, but it's probably going to be a little slow around here for the rest of the week.

In the meantime, check out Joe from River Ave. Blues on the FanGraphs podcast, Ross from NYY Stadium Insider's post on the Ticketmaster scammers, or Lar from Wezen-Ball's attempt to compile the history of the batting helmet.

Now please excuse us while we get back to the grind.

Fack Youk Field Trip: The Big A

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm stuck out in Southern California this week for work. I suppose there are worse places to go, but I'm an East Coast guy through and through. The pace of life out here just isn't my speed (e.g. going to dinner Friday night and having to wait a good five minutes before the bartender even acknowledged my presence - and it wasn't busy). Besides, going away for a week for vacation is one thing, having to get out of the usual routine and leave home for a week for work is another - especially when it costs me a precious weekend.

But it's not all doom and gloom out here. Having just got into town the night before and with the time difference in my favor, I woke up fairly early Saturday morning and managed to get my work done before noon. With that behind me, I hopped in a cab and shot over to the Big A to take in a game between the Halos and the Twinkies - I couldn't let Jay be the only Facker to spend Saturday afternoon at the ballpark. Despite my earlier misgivings about the relative safety of doing so, you'll be happy to know (or maybe unhappy to know), that I made it through the experience unscathed - no beer bottles to the head, no gun shot wounds, etc.

A tribute to Nick Adenhart still exists in front of the Stadium. Having just finished Marty Appel's Thurman Munson biography on the flight out (probably not the best setting to read a book about a guy who died in a plane crash), it was eerie to see the memorial to another man who died while an active Major Leaguer - a situation the Angels have dealt with far too many times in their relatively brief history.

The differences between The Big A and Yankee $tadium were apparent from the get go. Ballpark parking in Anaheim is $8 compared to $19 in the Bronx. I walked up to the box office and scored a field level ticket, twenty two rows back in leftfield, for $33. That kind of money won't even get you out of the terrace in New York. The beer is a lot cheaper as well - $6.50 for 16 oz.

I had hoped to take in BP, maybe even score a ball given my seat's proximity to the field, but it wasn't to be. There was no batting practice Saturday with the day game after the night game - or at least there wasn't at about 11:45 when I got to my seat. Rather than bake in the sun for an hour and a half, I decided to take a walk through the stadium to see what I could see.

As I passed by the Guest Sevices office, I dropped in to see if there were any attractions in the ballpark. I realize that not everyone has a Monument Park or a ballpark museum, but I figured there had to be something. Apparently not - my question was greeted with nothing but quizzical looks.

History apparently is not something readily embraced by the Angels organization. The retired numbers are located behind snack carts in the rightfield upper deck. The Angels Hall of Fame consists of a few paintings on a wall in the mezzanine - including one time Yankees Don Baylor and Jimmie Reese.

Also on the mezzanine level are wall sized photos of former Angel "greats". I laughed out loud at seeing the great Mike Witt up there. Witt, you may recall, was sent to the Yankees for Dave Winfield in 1990, and was perpetually injured, starting just 27 games over four seasons and pitching to a 4.91 ERA, all for the low low cost of $7.5M.

Without a horse in the race, I was just hoping for something interesting to happen during the game. So I was turning into a Twins fan after Nick Blackburn was perfect through three. That all came to a screeching halt in the fourth, as the Angels put up a nine spot on their way to an 11-5 victory.

I did get to see something interesting though, as a fan decided to take to the field in the late innings. He eluded security for a good bit, making it all the way to the outfield grass behind shortstop after jumping on from the right field line. Security usually lives for a situation like that, but the takedown was pretty weak. As the police escorted him out right by my section, the PA announcer made sure to remind the fans that running on the field is now classified as a felony. A felony! With one dead fan and one paralyzed one under their belts already this year, perhaps the local authorities should be more concerned with protecting the fans in their seats rather than prosecuting the ones out of them.

You'll also be happy to know that Bobby Abreu did not come within twenty feet of a fence all afternoon. I hope to be able to get back once more before I skip town.

Friday Injury Update

"It's Friday. You ain't got no job; you ain't got shit to do"

It is Friday. But I do have a job and I have a ton of shit to do, so I'm left counting down the hours to a weekend that won't really even exist for me. How about some good news regarding the Yankees walking wounded?

• Jorge Posada will be activated from the DL for tonight's game. Sayanora Kevin Cash!


• Melky Cabrera will rejoin the the team today. His injury is just a bruise and will supposedly keep him out 5 to 7 days, but he will not need to go on the DL. At least that's what the team says. They've been wrong (or lied) before.


• Brian Bruney got a clean bill of health from Dr. James Andrews. There's no ligament damage; his problems are being caused by the same flexor muscle that landed him on the DL in the first place. The bad news is there's no timetable for his return.


• Xavier Nady got into his first extended spring training game yesterday. As the DH, he went 2 for 5 with a HR and a BB. He's slated to start throwing on Monday.


• Molina, Ransom, and Marte worked out at the minor league complex. Marte did not throw.

The Next $305M Deal

[Sorry for the lack of content today, but I was knee deep in a gigantic report that I worked on 'til 10 on Friday night, put it on few more hours on over the weekend, which was due today and still probably isn't going out until tomorrow morning. This piece was originally drafted on Friday, but I didn't even have a chance to touch it up and post it. We should be back to the regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.]

If this offseason is any indication of things to come, I wouldn't be all that surprised if A-Rod's deal is still the biggest in baseball history when he retires.

Like the values of homes across the country, we just assumed contracts in sports would keep getting larger. For my entire lifetime, when you made an investment in a home, it inevitably looked better five or ten years down the road.

When the Yankees signed Derek Jeter to his 10 year extension in 2001, they probably thought the market was catch up with the contract, which is probably why they didn't include any reverse escalator clauses for what were presumably going to be his decline years. The market hasn't collapsed around that deal (yet), but it certainly hasn't outpaced it.

Think about how much of a reversal of public opinion is going to be necessary to turn around the economy right now. I see numbers for a economic tracker we are doing at work and I can tell you that roughly 65% of people think the economy is worse than it was a month ago, and basically everyone else thinks it's staying the same.

Since the Dow Jones is really just a reflection of consumer confidence, it's not looking like this is turning around anytime soon. At least during the Great Depression they didn't have 8,000 forms of media constantly reminding everyone how fucked they were. We can throw as much money at this problem as we want, but things are going to get better until people think it's getting better, because perception is reality.

At what point are people going to start putting new money in the stock market and expecting to make money, like before? I'm a child of the 90's. That's where I did most of my growing up (from 6-16), and financially, it couldn't have come in a more prosperous time. On January 2nd, 1990 the Dow opened at 2,753 and on December 31st 1999, it closed at 11,453.

That means if you just invested in the DJIA for ten years, you could have more than quadrupled your money. Today, the Dow is sitting at 6,874, so if you had kept it in for the last nine years (or 9 months), you would have lost almost half of what you made. Infinite growth is unsustainable. The expectation of infinite growth leads to exaggerations (Enron) and shortcuts (sub-prime) which ripple out from their specific domains (the current Banking mess). I'm an even worse financier than I am a sports blogger, so please tell me where I'm off-base.

[Bill Maher hit on some of this on Real Time on Friday night, after I had already written this. My sister will vouch for me. Stop looking at my drafts on Blogger, Bill. You dick.]

And unfortunately that means it's going to trickle down to sports at some point. I'm not sporting Bill Simmons tin foil hat just yet, but if attendance starts dropping, how can it not affect the bottom line? There are only so many other expenses you can trim on a sports franchise. The player's salaries make up the vast majority of operating costs.

Most importantly, who is going to be the type of player to get a bigger deal than A-Rod? Not a pitcher, obviously. It would have to be an excellent defensive player with power at either CF, SS, or possibly 2B, 3B or C. Hanley Ramirez got his and he's not that great defensively. Evan Longoria is locked up through 2016 with club options. Albert Puljos is going to be "31" when his contract is up. It would probably have to be some young buck who's just a prospect now, and tears up the minors, makes it to the majors at age 18, like A-Rod did, and becomes a free agent at 25. Even then, a $252M deal, much less a $305M one, seems like quite the lofty goal.

Anyone up for a friendly wager?

[This is my last depressing A-Rod related post for a while. I promise.]

This Is F___ing Depressing

I'm still at work, and obsessively hitting the Refresh button on Phish.com so I can torture myself with the fucking sick setlist they are playing.

Kill me.

It's cool though, I get paid extra for staying after 9 on a Friday.

(Oh wait, what's that? I don't?)

Sweet.