• Fascinating and disturbing article from the Sacramento Bee website about train fatalities.  More specifically, people who suicide by train.

• Saw a link to this page of kitten photos from a blog I happened upon a link to, for one very clever passage (#2).  They (the kitty photos) are pretty unremarkable, but like a typical pet-owner, he thinks absolutely anything involving his kitties is super cute.  This goes triple for new parents, BTW.  God help you all when I get my digital camera in a week and a half!

Another funny item on that blog is his commentary on this one, about the various flaming gays in Afghanistan trying to get it on with British soldiers.

He also has some fun with this amusingly clueless article, by Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard, one of those important, influential commentary magazines that about 50 people actually read, but everyone in upper class social circles in NY and the Beltway buy to leave on their coffee tables, since their friends are doing the same thing. It's almost too easy to slap around someone writing an article like this, so I'll just quote Andrew from his blog.

I find it amazing that someone (Chris Caldwell, in this case) could write a whole article on this, without making any sort of self-deprecating remarks to leaven his whine.  He couldn't really be unaware of how stuffy and out of it he makes himself appear with this George Will-esque griping about the state of popular culture?  I am similarly-annoyed that crappy "musicians" like Aaliahannahaahaa (or whatever) and R. Kelly are/were famous, but I wouldn't be quite dense enough to pretend I'd never heard of them.  I only do that about country musicians.

• Chatterbox is a nice feature on Slate.  They take a quote from a famous person or entity, and post it with a direct refutation from some other source, or even the person themselves.  In other words they expose and prove someone is lying about something.  The most recent one I see if about Ari Fleisher, a presidental spokesman and expert prevaricator, who is caught lying about Bush's promises that he'd never get into nation-building.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page and view the archive with several more examples from each month this year, and dozens more from 2001.  Find a person you don't like, read about them being caught in a lie, and chuckle.  At least that's pretty much my M.O.  The Linda Chavez one is pretty funny.  There are half a dozen by President Bush (no surprise really?) and this one about how he Loves New York (at least when it's politically-expedient) is impressively-crass.

• Paul McCartney is getting married, and this is apparently big news in the UK, and to all the American 50-60 y/o's who were alive during the Beatle days in the 60's and still care about them now, despite the fact they've been not a band for like 30 years, and two of them are dead.  As you might guess, I don't care about them too much.  Anyway, the media are in a frenzy over Paul's marriage, which is being kept somewhat secret.  Here's a funny picture today, with a truck delivering like half an ocean of beer for the event.  It would appear there will be no shortage of guests, eh?  I was going to point out that it's pretty cheap to not have a properly-refrigerated truck, to keep the beer cold, when I remembered that the English prefer their beer at pond-water temperatures.  There are tons of photos of the grounds and the guests arriving, including aerial surveillance, and even one of Ringo, who I suppose they had to invite.

I only kick France when they are down, since it's the thing to do, especially with the various English and ex-English I talk to on ICQ. Who of course can't stand the frickin' Frogs, as they call them.  I'd like to go to France some day, tour around Paris, especially the Louvre, though I can't be bothered learning any of their language to do so.  Too many weird, non-phonetic pronunciations, with all of those silent letters and oux's and such. I suppose I'd learn to speak it, but I can't see being able to read or write it.  So it'll be "How to Speak French" in audio tape form, rather than dictionary, on the flight over...

ere follows a discussion of a sports article, but it's not really about sports, so even if you don't care you may find it interesting. My essay here is mostly about another article that was about sports, one that uses many of the usual political editorial article tricks to mislead and confuse the issue.  Selective factual comparisons, intentional lack of objectivity, confusing comparisons, and more; all things that I regularly rail about in my commentaries on this site.  My objecting to various editorial isn't really based on my agreeing or disagreeing with the opinions they express; I can read one I totally disagree with, but if I don't think they are cheating and twisting the facts to fit their opinion, I won't object.  I'll certainly disagree, but another person can (and probably will) look at the same event and come to a totally different conclusion than I would.

Anyway, on with it.

Looking at an article on Baseball Prospectus, I saw a link to a Jayson Stark article on ESPN.com.  I found myself "tisk tisk'ing" as I read it, and got more annoyed as I went.  It's clearly an opinion piece, and one that was structured in advance.  Stark's opinion is that there's no need for any sort of salary cap or controls on revenue in Major League Baseball to achieve more competitive balance, and he uses various examples of the lack of competitive balance in the NBA to make his point.  He fails at that, since he's arguing against something by pointing out that it doesn't always work in another case, which isn't the same as proving it doesn't work in the case you are actually discussing.  His argument is like saying that brakes aren't needed in cars since there are still accidents in cars with brakes, or that one time a guy had no brakes and managed to stop without hitting anyone.  Exceptions happen.  He's basically correct about the NBA, though there are mitigating factors that make comparing it to Baseball a flawed comparison.  He also completely ignores other sports that have a salary cap, such as Hockey or Football in the US, where there is a salary cap and there is a lot of parity.  Which is to say that the richest teams don't always win.

All of this is standard operating procedure for political commentaries, and I've criticized editorials by numerous pundits for doing this sort of thing.  Ann Coulter is one of the worst offenders, or at least the one whose writing I see the most often, and it's almost uniformly crap, the way she twists and misleads and selectively-quotes things to try and make her points.  I've commented in some detail on her shenanigans once or twice.  A quote, from my blog on April 20th.

Returning to the Jayson Stark article at hand.  I wrote a semi-long email to the Baseball Prospectus guy, disappointed as I was in his quick endorsement of such a shoddy piece of journalism.  This is a reprint of that email, with a bit of organization added to it, which is easier to do on a full page, rather than typing into a small article feedback box.  Plus I'm not in such a hurry now as I was this afternoon making my initial comments.

I'm not so deeply-attached to this subject or the article in question that I'll do a whole point by point rebuttal.  I don't care that much, you care even less.

As a bit of background info, for the non-sports fans out there: Baseball is really in trouble, with constant labor strife, due to the player's union being very strong, and the owners not united.  They (the owners) cry about salaries rising, say they are losing money, may have to fold some money-losing teams, say they need new stadiums to compete; then go out and get in bidding wars over free agents.  They are a lot like those of us who drive our own cars and sit in traffic, wishing other people would ride the bus so there wouldn't be so much traffic for us to drive in.  All the owners want lower salaries, and want everyone else to start paying them first.

Professional Basketball, Football, and Hockey all have salary caps, which limit how much a team may pay its players.  These salary caps are implemented in various ways, with various penalties for exceeding them.  Since these three sports implemented the caps, there has been revenue sharing among all of the owners.  There are national TV packages for those sports, and one or two networks bid on games, pay a fee to televise them, and that money gets divided up more or less evenly between the teams.  Money from merchandise sales is divided up also.  Teams usually get all of the money from their actual games though, in terms of tickets, concessions, parking, etc, though they have to share some % of the gate with the visiting team.  The details of all this fill books of legalese, but take my word for it, they are complicated, and very detailed.  The point being, three of the four major sports have salary caps, controls on what rookies can be paid, and these allow every team to compete on an at least somewhat even footing.

Baseball has some limited revenue sharing, but it hardly matters.  The main problem with the sport is that most of the money comes from local TV revenues.  I don't have the figures in front of me, but the Yankees in New York get something over $100m a year from their televised games.  Some of the teams in smaller markets get around $2m a year.  That money is the Yankee owner's to keep; he can pocket it and be richer, he can spend it on players that no one else can afford, or both.  It would seem self-evident that a team with 1/50th the income of another team can't possibly hope to compete with the richer team in obtaining quality players.  Certainly not established players, ones who command top dollar when they become free agents.  Poor teams can't even trade for these guys, since they couldn't afford to pay them if they did, and the player would just leave in a year or two when their contract was up.  The real killer in Baseball is that drafted players can get as much money as they like.  So bad, poor teams can't even pick the best young players available, since they know if they do they won't be able to pay them what the kid will demand.  If you don't pay your draft pick in Baseball, they can just go back into the draft next year, playing minor league ball in the mean time.  They lose a year of time, but the team loses the opportunity to get a great player.  So obviously poor teams pick guys who are pretty good, that they figure they can afford, and leave the great players to be picked by the richer teams.  And the rich get richer, quite literally.  In Basketball and Football drafted players are somewhat limited in how much money they can sign for, highly-limited in Basketball, which allows the worst teams to sign the best young players, and hope to build a winner around them.

My, that was a long intro.  Anyway, as I wrote to Joe Sheehan of BP.com:

I'm surprised you would endorse that Jayson Stark article, which had more holes than a Salvation Army blanket. Surprised he'd write it, really. It was obviously trying to prove his point, one against the "no competitive balance" argument, and mangling reality to do so, while ignoring all objective evidence that would go against him.

Obviously there are good and bad teams in the NBA, but it's absurd to compare it to baseball's situation. All NBA teams have roughly the same money to spend on players, and can afford to sign their top draft picks, and bid on top free agents. Some teams can go over that and make less profit (or more if they have a huge local income, like say the Knicks with MSG) and some teams have an advantage based on their peripheral benefits, but you see top, marquee players in every market, large and small. Teams that spend the most don't necessarily win the most. See the Knicks. The Lakers are one of the lower spending teams, with their cheap owner refusing to go at all over the salary cap (despite being very rich, selling out every home game in a brand new building for 3 years straight, etc) a penny. They're winning since they were run brilliantly-enough to get the best player in the league, and a very good side kick, and just those 2 are enough to be better than a team stocked with a lot of very good players but no real superstars, as the Portland and Sacramento series proved.

The whole talk of dynasties in basketball is very skewed from baseball anyway, since basketball is a team game, but with very few players on the court at a time. There's not one player on LA other than Shaq or Kobe who is even borderline all star material, but since you've only got 5 guys out there at a time, and often only 2 or 3 are really doing anything important on offense, you can win basketball games with 1 or 2 great players, and a bunch of mediocre guys. See NJ, SA, Orlando, etc, teams that make the playoffs with just one great player pulling the whole load. Baseball requires a team, and especially a bunch of good pitchers. One or two great players can skew the wins a lot, but as writers are often pointing out, even the best players are only worth 3 or 5 or 7 wins a year, over a replacement-level player. Tim Duncan or Jason Kidd are worth 25 or 30 wins, and that's in an 82 (?) game season. Barry Bonds worth 50 or 60 wins a season would be the equivalent, and he'd have to make about 60 starts at a 2.00 ERA and hit 150 homeruns to do that. My point is that you can't compare winning team ingredients of basketball Vs. baseball at all evenly. As Stark seems to be trying to do.

There are great differences in the team income as well.

NBA teams share their income, and most of it comes from national television and merchandise sales. The Lakers don't get 50% of the total TV money, which they are probably entitled to based on the ratings, # of times televised, or public interest. They get the same share that the Clippers and Memphis and Golden State and all the other perennially crappy, unpopular teams do. It comes down to how well a team is run, and how lucky they get with drafting a top player, or getting one to sign with them as a free agent. Some teams do a much better job of things than others, which is why some win and some lose, but at least the lesser teams can compete on an even, or nearly-even, financial footing. If the Yankees had a $90m payroll, the next tier of teams was around $80m, and the lowest teams were around $50-60m, we'd have something interesting in MLB. This would be a clear, large advantage for the NYYs, but at least it wouldn't be as absurd as things are now where NYY has a payroll 4 or 5x the size of some of the smallest income teams, and they still make a fortune.

It's not as if they're sacrificing profit for success, Steinbrenner gets richer every minute, while still out-paying almost every other team for every top player, and having the overall biggest payroll. Some of the smaller markets have owners who are fine being a loser, while still making a good profit on their team, and you'll hear arguments pretending that anyone buys a sporting team as a business venture, rather than a publicity/glamour vanity purchase, that might also make them some money in the meantime, and will almost surely pay off big when they sell it. I think the better comparison would be a luxury mansion you want to show off to your friends. You pay more than it's really worth, enjoy it for a while, and then sell it for a lot more than you paid for it, against for much more than it's worth, since it's a desirable property, in a scarce field. There are only X number of pro sporting teams, and any anonymous businessman can become instantly famous and be on TV for spending his money on one. That's the real benefit to owning a team, and comparisons of them to *real* businesses are bogus.

I suspect Stark would have liked to make the same anti salary-cap argument about Hockey and Football, but of course he couldn't since there the salary cap has worked just as it's supposed to, and while some teams are long-term successful, there are constantly new teams coming up to be winners, while established teams have to fight to stay on top, and can't just buy their way out of any problems they get into with poor free agent choices or drafts. Basketball hasn't worked that way, mostly since it's such an individual game, and just having the best QB and Middle Linebacker in the NFL isn't enough to guarantee you success, unlike in the NBA.

The Lakers are the best since they have Shaq and Kobe.  How did they get them?  Shaq came as a free agent from Orlando, and the Lakers had to trade or release about half their roster to make room for him under the salary cap, and if he hadn't signed with them, they'd have been screwed for years.  Kobe they got after he was drafted 13th in 1996 by Charlotte, by trading a pretty good, but not All-Star player (Vlade Divac) for him.  So nearly half the teams picked someone else instead, and all of the rest could have traded more than the Lakers did to get him from Charlotte.  This obviously has nothing to do with financial advantage, and everything to do with smart management.

This is quite opposite of Baseball, where poor teams can't even hope to draft the top players, can't hope to get them as free agents, and can't compete for the top foreign players who come in outside of the draft.  Those types of players, like Ichiro Suzuki, aren't even entered in the draft; all of the teams get to bid for the right to negotiate with the player, who comes in as a sort of restricted free agent.

So my point is that in basketball the Lakers had to be risky, clever, and gutsy to get the two best players.  In baseball teams just have to cut a check, as the Yankees did to get the best hitter in the American League, Giambi, from Oakland.  This year the Yankees are again very good, while Oakland is struggling, as a direct result of this exchange.  Oakland gets a couple of draft picks in compensation, which might turn into a good player in 3 or 4 years, assuming they can even afford to pay a top pick the signing bonus he'll demand.

This is going on and on, but I think it's overwhelmingly obvious that Baseball has enormous competitive balance issues due to how the finances of the league are arranged.  The fact that some teams suck even with big budgets, and some achieve with small ones just shows the random nature of sports and projecting results in advance.

Using the example of dynasties in Basketball as evidence to prove that a salary cap wouldn't prevent them in Baseball is a very flawed concept, since Basketball is such an individual game.  The best team in basketball almost always has the best player on it; Chicago won most of the titles in the 90's with Jordan.  LA is winning everything in the 00's with Kobe and Shaq. This isn't true in baseball, since everyone has to bat, and pitchers can't pitch all that often, at least over the regular season.  In the playoffs the team with the best 2 or 3 pitchers has an advantage, with more time between the games and short best of 5 or 7 series.

Unlikely Baseball vs. Basketball, comparisons in terms of team structure and salary are relatively accurate between Baseball and Football, which both require a lot of good players to be a champion.   Hockey is much the same, though there individuals can make a bigger difference, with such low-scoring games, and the ability to play most/all of every one of them, as goalies do.  If baseball only played 3 games a week, or if they only had to bat their best 6 players, it would be dominated by teams that had 2 or 3 great players, since their impact would be far greater.  On the other hand, if basketball required that every team play all 12 players at least 10 minutes each, and no player more than 30 minutes a game, the impact of one or two superstars would be much less.

My conclusion is that Stark's article is contorting the facts to try and support his argument, while leaving out all of the facts that would be evidence to the contrary.  As an intelligent writer, he must have realized this to some extent, and the fact that he presented his article as he did says to me that he cares much less about analyzing the issue than he does about trying to make his point.  Excellent tactics and credentials for political commentary, but not all that good for readers who wish to be impartially-informed.