Leaderboard

You know who tends to be good at football? Rich kids whose parents can pay for any and every football program through their junior high years. Then they got convinced to attend a football high school because a college scholarship is more likely. Just look at what Loyola has become.

Peace in the Middle East will happen sooner.

It might be the cheapest, but the price for the actual importance of each game is much less. When no one game really matters because there are so many, people might not feel compelled to go to any one game thinking they could feasibly go to a game at a different date with the same relative importance. The problem that MLB has is that people then don't go to as many games because they find alternatives and by the time the actual importance of the games is increased, most of the teams are out of the playoff race so there is even less reason to go. And the game being slower and more boring now is a problem. From a basic economics standpoint, for any given price point, your utility is now lower while the utility obtained from competition at the same price point is likely higher because of the vast amount of entertainment options younger generations have. And on top of all of that, teams are actually raising prices when they should probably be lowering them to compete with the other options available to young fans. To me, teams are making a mistake and are sacrificing potentially exponentially higher future profits for current profits by trying to find the absolute most they can get out of people for tickets, merch, and TV viewing. You might be able to make more money by using higher prices to offset (and more) the lower customer base, but you are losing fans in an asymmetrical manner such that you are losing the fans with the highest potential future spending (young people who have more years to spend money) while retaining those who will likely drop out of the consumer base sooner (older people who will no longer be able to attend games/die) while also doing almost nothing to replace those who are lost. The worst part is that I don't think the owners even care. They are now getting so much from TV deals that they can make money even with poor attendance while the values of their franchises continue to rise seemingly partly because they do nothing but rise in value. As long as there aren't a ton of sales where they actually lose money on their investments or they all start losing money every year I don't think anything drastic will change. People suck at changing in small ways when something could possibly happen in the future. They are much better at reacting to drastic situations. While I don't know if my doomsday thought process will actually happen, I really fear it will. /end rant

Baseball has to be the cheapest sport to attend out of the big four. Young fans are losing interest because they have limited attention spans and the game admittedly is slow as fuck.

The Rockies need offensive help, don’t have a ton of money, and could use a right-handed hitting OF. This is probably a huge long-shot, but I’d float Avi Garcia for Jeff Hoffman and offer to take on one of their bad relief pitcher contracts. For example, Bryan Shaw is going to make nearly $9M per over the next two seasons, posted a -0.3 WAR last year, & saw his velocity decline in the second half of the season. Again, probably a long-shot, but I’d be willing to throw in a small sweetener to make the deal more attractive to the Rockies.

Even on this site the obsession with K's is insane. That results of that poll are crazy, but not that surprising.

Even if Rutherford doesn't pan out...right now we have substantially more value in our organization than we would have if we hadn't acquired him. One reason why people are talking about prospect for prospect swaps to fill our 3b hole is that thanks to this trade, we do actually have a legit glut of outfielders. We could choose to cash that bill in right now, or we could choose to hold onto those OFs if we think they are particularly promising. If we'd been caught holding Kahnle when he collapsed, we'd be hoping he could rebuild some value this year - instead we're already holding the value and deciding what to do with it. We've got the cash in our pocket, we just get to decide how to spend it.

I could see Toronto Blue Jays taking Mendick. Hiring of Carson Cistulli Fringe 5 was always high on him.

Would love to but: 1) Most of these people probably don't have kids or student loan debt they are still paying off in their 30's; 2) Living on 40k a year doesn't account for college expenses for their kids in the future; 3) when I retire I want to be traveling 6 months out of the year; I don't want to retire and just sit at my house; 4) healthcare costs; 5) most importantly, i'm a habitual consumer of all things so I need money!