MJ and Baseball, or How Hitting .202 is Considered a Success and Double-A is Better Than Triple-A

I happened to flip on First Take the other morning. It's a real rarity these days for me to "embrace debate," but I was feeling particularly bored with the eleventh Lakers story of the previous 15 minutes on SportsCenter, or at least it seemed like it had been that many (side note: Jay Pharoah as Stephen A. talking about the Lakers on SNL was magnificent). Anyways, Skip and Stephen A. (and Steelers receiver Antonio Brown, wearing a bow tie and what looked like a classy straw hat) were dealing with the question "Jordan v. LeBron: Who's a better athlete?" For my money, it's LeBron, simply because he's a 6'8", 260-lb. manimal who can run the floor like a point guard - but as I'm not getting paid to disagree with somebody on national TV, what does my opinion matter? Skip took MJ, Stephen A. took King James, I forget who Brown took because I was too busy laughing at his ridiculous outfit, and the yelling commenced.

Then Skip veered off into a potentially interesting line of thought, but ruined it by saying two things in defense of his argument that immediately sounded completely ludicrous to me.

NLCS Preview

I'll just get right to it then, seeing as the game starts in 40 minutes (from the time I'm writing this sentence).

2.5 Outta 4 Ain't Bad

Well, I nailed the ALDS predictions exactly. Can't say the same about the NLDS. Correctly picked the Brewers to win, but the Dbacks took them one game further than I thought they would. And I was all kinds of wrong about the Phillies-Cardinals. But happily so - I like the Phillies, but I like the Cardinals too and was happy to see the underdog win. Bud Selig and his cronies must be simultaneously ecstatic and scared out of their minds. For as much as the final 4 teams prove all his arguments about parity...there are no East Coast teams left. The likely favorite to come out of the NL plays in the MLB's smallest market. The TV ratings from here on out, no matter the World Series matchup, might well reach historically bad levels. So as great as these matchups are in terms of competitive balance, they couldn't have turned out much worse from a business standpoint. Selig should at least be happy, however, that the Rangers managed to take care of the Rays - the Rays may be on the East Coast, but their own fans *generally* don't care about them.

Interesting note - the 4 teams left were the 4 middle playoff teams in terms of payroll. As a result, the average payroll of the remaining teams has dropped to $97.2 - which would have put them at 13th this year if they were a real team ($6 million behind the mediocre Dodgers and $5 million ahead of the Rangers). Just a nifty tidbit.

About Last Night...

Robert Bleeping Andino.

No, actually I'm not going to talk about last night. It's still too raw. I'll leave it to these guys - Joe Posnanski, Tom Verducci, and Jon Paul Morosi - who put it in much better terms than I ever could. Scroll down far enough on Mr. Posnanski's, and you'll notice a familiar name among the comments.

What I'm really going to do is do a quick rundown of the first round of the playoffs. You may remember that last year, I attempted to show why baseball didn't need a salary cap - using the payrolls of the playoff teams as my examples. That was so much fun that, before I offer up a quickie preview/prediction of each divisional series, I'm going to do it again.

We Don't Need No Salary Cap

I've argued to friends before that, unlike other sports, I don't think baseball needs a salary cap. Unfortunately, I've never had much to go on other than my personal beliefs and the recent success of the Rays. But today, I made this nifty discovery. That's right, a chart that plots win-loss record against payroll. And oh, would you look at that - as of this morning's standings, the 8 projected playoff teams (Yankees/Rays/Twins/Phils/Padres/Braves/Reds/Rangers, along with the Giants, which had an identical record to the Rangers) have an average payroll of $108.2 million - or about $3 million higher than that of the White Sox. And I don't hear anybody railing against the White Sox for having a ridiculously high payroll (despite them, admittedly, having the 7th-highest in the MLB). Take out the Yankees, who have a payroll a ridiculous 27% higher than the second-deepest-pocketed team (the Red Sox), and the average drops to $94.2 million, or a payroll $700,000 more than the Cardinals, who have the 9th-highest. But again, I don't hear anybody whining about the Cardinals throwing money around. Additionally, according to this chart, 14 teams are getting more or the same number of wins relative to the rest of the league than their payroll would seemingly indicate - most notably, every single one of the eight current playoff teams. Even then, only the Yankees and Phils are getting the same relative number of wins.

End of an Era

Well, I lied. Manny is gone. Traded to the Dodgers. Along with $7 million, and Craig Hansen and Brandon Moss to the Pirates for Jason Bay. Ironically, the move comes 4 years to the day after the Nomar trade. And as with that move, it involves trading away a disgruntled superstar - a Boston icon - in order to remove the problem they pose to the clubhouse.

All-Star Game Thoughts

Yes, yes, I know, I know - I said I'd be doing politics and life in general (excluding the daily weather, despite the name of the blog), yet all I've done is write about sports. Well, I'm SORRY for deciding to start right around the All-Star break of my favorite sport, and the continuing saga of one of the most beloved football players ever. Whatever. It'll work out in the end. Quick word on Jesse Jackson (yet again) though - does anybody hear echoes of the phrase "double standard" being thrown around? I do, but only in my own mind. Honestly, why doesn't the media call him out more on it? Not that what he said was right, but Imus has hell to pay and gets fired over calling the Rutgers women's basketball players "nappy-headed ho's", and Jackson doesn't ignite a similar controversy over what HE has now said twice??? I wonder sometimes...

Anyways, to my main topic - the Neverending All-Star Game. More specifically, the Yankees, Fox, and the New York fans. First the New York fans. Okay, we get it. You hate the Sox. You hate the Phillies. But the All-Star Game is neither the time nor the place to remind us and their players of it. Totally classless move to boo Chase Utley. Totally classless move to boo every Sox player. It's the one time a year where the Sox and Yanks are on the same team - buck up and swallow your hate for just 9 (in this case 15) innings. It doesn't do anybody good to hear all the boos. The All-Star Game is supposed to be a showcase of the best the game has to offer. Don't remind us of the worst.

The REAL Natural

Normally, I'm going to try and stay away from using too many superlatives, too much gaudy language, too many outrageous stances, and too many words in all caps. I see that as just an extension of the countless screaming matches that pervade both the blogosphere and TV shows these days, and a shameless attempt to drag in more readers. But there are some special cases where that mentality gets thrown out the window, and all the stops just have to be pulled out. What Josh Hamilton did last night at Yankee Stadium ranks as one of them.