One of the major offseason, spring training, and early season story lines for the MLB season was how the downturn in the economy would impact baseball. The worry was that high unemployment and tightening budgets would lead to a significant drop in ticket sales, with some projecting a 20%+ drop in attendance numbers. I discussed [...]
Posts from ‘April, 2009’
The Problem with Early Season Story Lines – 2 Weeks Isn’t Long Enough to Tell a Full Story
Not to beat a dead horse, but a mere 3 weeks into the season, many of the early season story lines have already begun correcting themselves. Sure, everyone appreciates a great storyline, an underdog overachieving, the promise of youngsters out performing the veterans. Unfortunately, in baseball, 10 games isn’t long enough to tell the whole [...]
Berry Blondes? Never Heard of Her.
How many times have you seen the clip of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run? 25? 100? 500? I still consider myself a young chap, but having been nursed and nannied by ESPN Classic, I can easily put the figure in triple digits. The images are unforgettable: Al Downing’s doomed leg kick, the First National Bank [...]
Ian Kinsler & Early MLB Storylines Follow Up
The recent Ian Kinsler: Historic Fantasy Games & Innings post and the Early MLB Season story lines posts from earlier in the week led to a fair amount of follow up emails. So I thought I would speak to a few of those follow ups. Dedicated reader The Commish, who wrote out first guest post, [...]
NFL Draft Coverage Starting… Now
ESPN does a very good job of feeding the insatiable beast that is fan hankering for NFL Draft coverage, prime contributors being the Joe, Bob or Carl in the cubicle next to you who is always talking about “who the Redskins will take at No. 13″ or, better yet slightly off-topic but similar in nature, [...]
Major MLB Story Lines of First 2 Weeks
A spin around some major early season storylines: Economy Induced Attendance Drop During the offseason, estimates of how the downturn in the economy (in case you hadn’t noticed yet the economy is in shambles) would impact attendace at MLB games varied significantly. Peter Gammons reported that MLB was informing teams to plan for a 17%-20% [...]
Ian Kinsler’s Unheralded (Relatively), Historic Game
AB R H RBI 6 5 6 5 That is Ian Kinsler’s line from the Rangers game against the Baltimore Orioles from April 15th. Kinsler hit for the cycle – one of three guys to do so in a 4 day span , just the fourth time that has happened in the history of the [...]
Minor League Watch – The Intros
Spring Training, when professional baseball players from around the world descend upon Florida and Arizona, provides a truly unique stage as today’s stars, today’s role players, yesterday’s stars, and tomorrow’s stars practice and play together for 5 weeks. It’s a chance for fans to reacquaint themselves with their squad and see how their offseason acquisitions [...]
Basketball in Florida: Six Degrees of Uncle Phil
To round out our tip-to-buzzer college basketball discussion this year (give us a break, NCAA Tournament Media Relations Department, we started in March), I can’t help but put a few words up about this year’s “coaching carousel”. We started by bringing to you very quickly, if not first, the news of Virginia’s new hire, Tony [...]
The Foolishness of the First (Or For That Matter, Any Single) Week
I have a coworker who left for the bar below our office building at 4:30pm today, just about eight hours after returning from two weeks of vacation. Whilst admiring his boldness yet feeling a bit timid myself (I left at 4pm yesterday), I’m struck with boredom as I sit here, without anybody to talk cube-to-cube [...]
