Slashdot Mirror

The World Series isn't named after a newspaper either. Blame 19th-century sportswriters for their overly-grandiose statements, then watch the World Baseball Classic final tonight to know whether Cuba or Japan is truly the world's best baseball power.

Beaten at a game we invented*. Man, now I know how England feels.

* If the true inventors of baseball wanted to play, England would have sent over a team of schoolgirls to play rounders. They didn't.

I read on /. (so it must be true) that the World Series is named that way because it was originally sponsored by the World News paper.

But, according this it wasn't:
http://roadsidephotos.com/baseball/name.htm

I don't know what to believe, but please, just continue beating up on Americans. We like it.

If you don't want to buy a book, Doug Pappas' weblog is a good place to start. He posts a lot of interesting (to some people) articles about the money side of baseball. And if you really want the player salaries look here.

Incorrect.

The minimum salary for Major League baseball players this upcoming season will be $300,000. The overwhelming majority of players make this minimum (or more, but short of $1mil in most cases). The players who do make the big bucks, a la Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, in almost all cases put up brilliant numbers that do, in fact, earn the ballclub money equal to or greater than their salaries (um, hence why they are paid that much).

In any case, A-Rod will earn in the neighborhood of $21mil this season to play 162 games of baseball (not including postseason play, of which the Yankees are almost always participants). $22,000,000.00 / 162 is $135,802.47. The average baseball game length these days is around 3 hours. So A-Rod makes $754.46 every minute, assuming he practices for free. It probably takes him 10 seconds to put the average pair of shoes on, and in 10 seconds he makes $125.74 (not $8mil).

What is striking to me, however, is that when the baseball players threaten to strike (or in 1994, do strike), everyone seems to call foul on them. To understand the situation, you must not look at relative amounts of money of average American salary and average MLB player salary; You must look at how the owners hide profits (by reporting them as expenditures for their others ventures, e.g. George Steinbrenner's new YES network) so that they can justify not paying the players more, etc. The majority of the players, in actuality, are earning the ballclubs much more than $300,000. They do deserve their piece of the pie.

Later,
Patrick

Myth

Where just because somebody can type they think they know what the hell they're talking about.

The machines won't replace the umpires. That's not the umpires concern. Please stop posting that.

The core of beef on this system is a struggle for control between the umpires union and MLB. Ever since Richie Phillips (head of the Umpires Union) Tried to wrestle control of umpiring from MLB the two sides have been fighting over exactly who controls the game. MLB has been trying to get umpires to call the rulebook strike zone and Umpires have been trying to maintain their autonomy (a difficult task after the massive f**kup Phillips organized). Questec is a grading system for umpires and umpires don't like it. Players (Curt Schilling most famously) don't like it because they feel it makes the umpires tentative and inconsistent.

So far the system has had no affect.

The editors are apparently not quite capable of discerning exactly what the story is about or they wouldn't have titled it "Digital Baseball Umpires", which in turn would have kept the slashdot masses from posting random contributions pulled out of their ass. Honestly, do you think that a system which grades strike zone judgement is in anyway a threat to umpiring jobs? Will the strike zone grading system handle calls at the plate? Ejections? Can it call a ground rule double? Infield fly? Seriously people, think about it for about 30 seconds before you post the kneejerk crap that's flooding this story (Umpires == factory workers losing thier jobs to technology? What the hell are you smoking).

And before someone claims the "World" in "World Series" refers to a newspaper, let me be the first to say that this is not true.

Hey, you never know... It could happen.