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MLB commissioner Bud Selig claims 25 of 30 baseball teams lost money last year. That's completely unbelievable. But let's say that it's true (and I'd love to let some auditors go over the books for a few months to check that out). Let's see, owners get hundreds of millions of dollars from Fox and ESPN and local networks to broadcast the games, they get huge new baseball stadiums that are funded by tax payers (I'm still bitter about paying for two damn stadiums here in Seattle), they raise ticket prices every year, and they can't make any money? What do they want, a government subsidy? If that's true, I should be running a baseball team. You bet I'd figure out a way to make a team profitable.
Except maybe the Expos.
Dean Kamen's secretive new device "Ginger" gets unveiled this Monday on Good Morning America.
Baseball gave out its end of year awards today. I find the whole process of allowing sportswriters to vote on these awards to be so imprecise that the awards are meaningless. The two Chicago sportswriters were the only two who voted Sammy Sosa as the National League MVP. I'm from Chicago, and even I recognize that Barry Bonds had a far better season. In the AL, as Rob Neyer points out, the only two sportswriters who had Boone--Ichiro--Giambi as their top three choices were the two Seattle Tacoma writers. These hometown biases might even out across a pool of writers and might not even alter the vote in any year, but to me it just means that the awards themselves are fairly arbitrary as a barometer of value among the top players. As are any subjective awards, right? We should all think for ourselves.