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.

The Next Level of Live Blogging

Devoted readers of this blog may remember my last attempt at a live blog - Election Night, 2008. It was a rousing success at keeping track of what went on that night, and it still serves as a reminder of all the historic events that unfolded. Unfortunately, it also serves as a reminder of two things - 1) all the inanities served up as analysis by the news networks, and 2) the fact that it wasn't actually a live blog. It was more of a running diary that I published after the fact.

Back Again

Yes, that's right. I'm back - again. And this time I mean business. Why, you ask?* Why, Sean, are you back - you're at grad school. Doesn't that take up most of your time?

*All three of you that will likely read this. Just go with it, for now. I like pretending that more than myself and maybe a random Google bot read this every now and then. Give it time.

You'd be correct, I am at grad school. It does take up most of my time. As I've proven over the years, I am not the greatest at keeping this blog updated even when I do have free time. However, there's a game-changing difference this time around - another blog.

So I Got a Job...

It would figure, wouldn't it? Right after I wrote that last blog post, I managed to get a summer job at a wild birds store - thus once again thwarting my efforts to write more consistently on here. Among my responsibilities at work has been writing things like this, this and this - admittedly not the most exciting thing in the world for someone who wants to go into sports journalism, but at the end of the day, there are 3 things I remind myself of:

1) It's 3 minutes away.

2) The people are really nice.

3) It pays.

Those make it all worth it. Plus, if nothing else, I've learned that I can still write reasonably well about things that I don't know much about. Just think of how well I'll be able to write about sports now, knowing that I've aced the test of writing about bird feeders. Anyway, I'm finishing up there next week, and then it's off to Phoenix and ASU for grad school on the 14th. Little daunting, but I'm up for a challenge. In the meantime...hopefully I'll be able to write more frequently on here? Sweeping promises and big plans haven't really worked out before, so I'll just cross my fingers this time and hope for more time and ideas.

So...

School's out (I graduated! Magna cum laude!), it's summer, I temporarily don't have a job - and thus, I have no excuse for not posting things on here. Expect greatness. Haha.

Chase-ing a Respectable Season

I'm going to make this one short (I promise), because I really don't have that much to say, or a lot of free time. That's the thing about trying to get going on this blog...I say all the right things, I might put one or two posts up and trick everyone into thinking that I'm really serious about it this time - and then life intervenes in the form of endless homework and marching band commitments. Oy vey. But anyways, on to business.

I wanted to just quickly weigh in on the QB situation brewing up here on the Heights. With Shinskie definitively out as the starter, multiple sources are saying that Chase Rettig, a true freshman, will get the nod against Notre Dame in primetime this weekend. The team, however, has neither issued a definitive statement on the situation nor a depth chart for Saturday's game - leaving the door open for speculation.

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.