Thread hijack: Yankees, MLB and making everything better.

[TheLegend]

dan this is richard and your wrong

you werent the only yankee fan there was james. and on the red sox alcs note no team has ever come back from being 0-3 and won ever!! and as you are a misguided yankee fan that you are (one day i hope you will see the the light and realize that the yankees are evil) you must realize that you love the yankees or hate them.

however being player of the game is enough for you, you have to whine about one trival at bat. =P

[TheLegend]

also while i am an oakland A's fan, first im a baseball fan. i just love the game. and thats why i dont like the yankees when a teams #9 hitter is robinson cano thats just wrong. i have felt that baseball needs to have an extraction ie the royals or the rockies or the devils rays. now i feel that if the yankees werent hogging all the talent the gaame would be way more interesting. i mean alex rodriguez SHOULD NOT be playing 3rd base, HE IS A FUCKING SHORTSTOP FOR CHRISTSAKE!!! (breathe richard breathe)

ok now i feel better (puff)

all i am saying is imagine the yanks only have 5 superstars instead of 12 also im not just dogging the yanks but all the big spenters

baaseball needs a salary cap

well i probaally should have maade this another thred :shrug:

[TheLegend]

dan this is richard and your wrong

you werent the only yankee fan there was james. and on the red sox alcs note no team has ever come back from being 0-3 and won ever!! and as you are a misguided yankee fan that you are (one day i hope you will see the the light and realize that the yankees are evil) you must realize that you love the yankees or hate them.

however being player of the game is enough for you, you have to whine about one trival at bat. =P

1. Just because James wears a Yankee hat it does not make him a Yankee fan. I believe he is a Giants fan so that leaves me.

2. At no point did I discount the Red Sox amazing victory. Like yourself I am a baseball fan first and I enjoy history taking place in my lifetime. The Yankees deserved to lose that series, they were awful from game four on. Besides 1 title does not destroy teh Yankee dominance over those bums...it just gives the Yanks a chance to start a new streak. You don't have to love the Yankees or hate them. Therein lies the problem, most people spend so much time hating and blaming the Yankees that they forget to look within the problems their own teams have to assess why the SUCK. (I'll address your second post in a bit.)

3. Obviously the stat board is not that important to you though you're ranked pretty highly in some categories. That one "trivial" at bat has implications for the entire season (see Scott's example). I gave thanks for player of the game but we're in March, I plan on getting a lot of those. What's the point of the hard work these guys put into keeping stats (thank you fellas) if you're not gonna be aware of where you are and whether everything is being recorded properly.

I hope you recognize I was joking about you and Seth. I know he didn't do it on purpose, hell like I said, he was the one who pointed it out to me.

[TheLegend]

also while i am an oakland A's fan, first im a baseball fan. i just love the game. and thats why i dont like the yankees when a teams #9 hitter is robinson cano thats just wrong. i have felt that baseball needs to have an extraction ie the royals or the rockies or the devils rays. now i feel that if the yankees werent hogging all the talent the gaame would be way more interesting. i mean alex rodriguez SHOULD NOT be playing 3rd base, HE IS A FUCKING SHORTSTOP FOR CHRISTSAKE!!! (breathe richard breathe)

ok now i feel better (puff)

all i am saying is imagine the yanks only have 5 superstars instead of 12 also im not just dogging the yanks but all the big spenters

baaseball needs a salary cap

well i probaally should have maade this another thred :shrug:

I think we've had this conversation before: during their championship run the Yankees basically only had 5 SUPERSTARS so not only can I imagine it, I can remember it. Don't blame the Yankees or the big spenders, blame the system (which you did) and teh players/agents. It is not the Yankees fault that they play in a market that generates so much revenue and allows for them to have their own channel. It is not their fault that because of their history they have been the most globally marketable team and therefore make tons of revenue off of that as well. They work within the system and have a owner who shells out the money he makes on players. Yankee games always sell out even though they cost triple what A's tickets do. The fact that I can still purchase tickets for the Yankees A's openeing series is all you need to know about the A's fanbase. Support your team, have your owner get a geal radio/tv deal and maybe you'll sign some productive additions besides Bradley and Thomas....ughhhh. I read Moneyball, nice concept, but it can only get you so far in this system. The big market teams and the payers union (strongest union in America) will not allow for a salary cap. Be thankful there is a luxury tax and beg your owner to spend more money with the kickbacks he gets from said luxury tax. The Braves and Cardinals don't spend tons of money, why are they always in contention?

The Royals have too much history to contract and Scott is from the area so watch what you say. The Rockies are said to have a great fan base...it's just the altitude that kills their pitching. The Devil Rays are getting better as is evident from their performance last year and the prospects coming up. Change their GM, who every other GM hates and move them to an actual "city" and they could thrive. Their outfield should be sick this year.

ARod is a great baseball player...he could probably catch if you let him. Plus, even if the A's had the money, he would not play in Oakland. NY is where the stars go to maximize their capitalist potential...Oakland...not so much. You can't transcend popular culture in Oakland. Just the facts.

[tallguy]

Can open...worms...everywhere

[TheLegend]

Dan is right, I'm afraid. The Yankees are basically just a wonderful example of what happens to a national pastime in a capitalist society. Similar to Manchester United back home, whose fan base reportedly is 90-plus percent outside the UK. What is interesting to me is that not every sport has quite such a dominant team.

[TheLegend]

just to clarify, i did not mark an AB in the 9th on the sac. if it is marked, it happened after the fact. i don't really know the rules you guys use, so if there's any question, i'm gonna ask.

and the yankees are evil, evil, evil. it's true that they play within the system, and it's the system that's wack, but that only has to do with why they're evil. they're still a bunch of evil bastards. i'm not saying that it's derek jeter's fault (though if i ever meet him in a dark alley...). it's clearly MLB's fault. i can't even blame george for spendin' whatever he can. i can look at the state of MLB and notice that a few things are way out of wack (incidentally, i'm just as pissed that there are teams like the devil rays that suck, suck, suck, with no real hope of improvement (and, yeah, they're gonna have a pretty good outfield. fat lot of good it'll do them with nothin' but shite in the starting rotation (and, yes, i'm embarassed that they have a better outfield than baltimore, but so it goes))). where was i? oh, yeah. point is that the yankees have such a huge advantage that you gotta route against them. there's nothin' better than beating the yankees.
it's also true that i, as an oriole fan, am especially jaded. even if they could put together a decent team (which they're not that far from doing. give 'em an outfielder and a closer and they can compete in any other division), there's no real hope of winning the division. the best i could possibly hope for is a wild card berth. that's pretty much bullshit. there's no other division that even comes close to this lack of parity. yeah, atlanta keeps winning, but it's close, and another team (i.e. that other super star loaded NY team) could very well unseat them. i love being in the AL East, because there are great rivalries. the teams (minus the rays) are all interesting and they play each other well. that being said, my team has absolutely no shot of winning the division, short of a miracle. the red sox don't even have much of a chance (and certainly not this year), and they're pretty big spenders as well. it's tough to even win the wild card, as they've got to play the yankees and red sox so many times (though baltimore does play well against both. if only they could beat the rays...). bottom line is that the o's and the blue jays pretty much suck, so it doesn't really matter too much, but it could. actually, if you put either team in at least half of the divisions out there, they'd have a pretty good chance. it's just in comparison to the yanks that they suck. ok. i'm done my fairly incoherant ranting. gotta go to work.

[TheLegend]

Thank you for your rational, unclouded understanding of my point Paul. To answer your question in two words: salary cap. The other leagues, especially the NFL, understand that a cap equals parity, parity equals larger profit for more, thus allowing the league as a whole to flourish. Also, Baseball, I believe, is the only league with an agreement (I forgot what it's called) that does not allow the federal government to intervene in labor issues. This gives the players union all the power it needs to keep the salary cap off the table no matter what the outcome. The owners and management also are to blame because baseball in general has a sense of entitlement based on it's history adn therefore believes it should work within it's own margins and without influence from other sports. It assumes it will always succeed because until recently, it always had. The NFL has it right with a cap and non-guaranteed contracts which is why it has overtaken baseball as the most popular sport....by a mile. (Betting also has a lot to do with that). The NBA players don't care enough about their union to fight for what they want and they make so much anyway (especially off endorsements) that it doesn't matter that they have a cap. Teams have money to spend on less players per team with nothing going towards upkeeping a farm system. Who cares about Hockey?

Funny that ManU. has a partnership with the Yankees and they are broadcast on the YES network.

[TheLegend]

the issue isn't the Yankees. The Boss is doing exactly what a MLB owner should: spend every dime he has on dominating the league. The problem is with the MLB: every proffesional sport MUST HAVE a salary cap in order to remain competative.

Look at the NFL- profits have been soaring while profits for every other major team sport (no, car racing doesn't count) has been bottoming out. Why? Because people are more interested in seeing two evenly matched teams duke it out than watching the Lakers pound the Clippers 179-56 four times a year (and yes, I do know that the Clippers have a better record than the Lakers right now).

Allowing every fan a (more or less) rational hope that their team may win a game is always going to be better than having one team that's expected to win it all every year, which, at the beginning of the season at least, is what the Yankees have.

when running a proffessional sports league you must always remember the five p's:
parity
parity
parity
profit sharing and
parity

and while we're on the topic of what's wrong with MLB

The season needs to be shorter. Significantly. like... cut it in half. I don't want to watch 162 baseball games for the same reason I don't want to watch 1 basketball game: When there's so much scoring (or in the MLBs case winning), one basket (game) is almost completely irrelevent until the last 3 minutes (weeks) of the game (season).

Cut the season in half... or if you insist on playing 100+ games a year, split it into sub-seasons (i.e. name a "first half champion").

PERFECT IDEA:

split into 8 divisions (4 al, 4 nl).
every team plays exactly 80 games before the AS break (40 home/40 away).
a first half champion is named for each division.
play 80 more games.
a second half champion is named for each division.
(up to) 16 team playoff starts with first-half champs playing second-half champs for division championship with whoever had the best overall record awarded home field advantage (which should be 5 games by the way... but that's a whole 'nother conversation)
if a team wins thier divisions first half championship and their second half championship they receive a first round bye in the playoffs

by having each championship decided by half as many games, it makes every game twice as important, and the fact that HFA and a first round bye are on the line will keep teams that won the first-half championship playing hard in the second half.

the more I think about this the more I like this idea!

[TheLegend]

The NFL has it right with a cap and non-guaranteed contracts which is why it has overtaken baseball as the most popular sport....by a mile. (Betting also has a lot to do with that). The NBA players don't care enough about their union to fight for what they want and they make so much anyway (especially off endorsements) that it doesn't matter that they have a cap.

NFL contracts are very unfair to the players. Most long-term NFL contracts are back loaded (i.e. a 4 mil over 4 year contract will be: $600k, $800, $1.1m, $1.5m) and very often result a player getting cut or re-negotiated before he get's the money he agreed to. I'm not for the NBA's guarenteed contracts either do to the widespread infection of Shawn Kemp syndrome (long-term contract= woohoo! i don't have to work anymore!).

I think that contracts should not be guarenteed, but when a player get's cut he should be able to apeal to an arbitrator. If he can show that he has lived up to the expectations of his contract (i.e. that he was cut for salary cap purposes) he should be able to collect on his remaining salary (which won't count against has former team's cap) if he doesn't get resigned or some % there of if he does.

To the same end, players should not be able to hold out. If two people agree to a contract, they sould both be bound by the terms of the contract... that's the way it works in every other business...

[AntMoOAK]

The fact that I can still purchase tickets for the Yankees A's openeing series is all you need to know...

Wait... a bit of hyperbole right ? No way.

[Blancito21]

The fact that I can still purchase tickets for the Yankees A's openeing series is all you need to know...

Wait... a bit of hyperbole right ? No way.

Nope...just bought three tickets.

[AntMoOAK]

OaklandAthletics.com show Opening Night sold out. There may be a few sporadic seats available at the Coliseum Box Office though

[Blancito21]

Read my post again, I said opening series.

Nevertheless, pathetic.

[Baseball=Life]

The fact that I can still purchase tickets for the Yankees A's opening series is all you need to know about the A's fanbase.

Hahah never mind the fact the A's shut down the third deck for 2006. But you should speak specifically to the magnitude (or lack thereof) of the ticket-buying fanbase, that's only part of the overall A's "fanbase".

There's some awesome A's fans..... some really A's-addicted people, baseball lovers... I've only been an A's fan for about 6 years (since living in CA), but it's been fun to be a part of, despite the open seats, unbought tickets. I think it's a good fanbase, but I hear you on how few of those loving fans actually buy tickets. There's soo many throughout the Bay who never make it to actual games, though. A's merch sales away from Oakland is not bad, nowhere near top sellers NYY and BOS, but respectable relative to the overall average.