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April 25, 2003
by Doug Pappas
Yesterday, Commissioner Bud Selig announced his intention to retire when his current five-year term expires on December 31, 2006. I'll believe it when I see it.
Selig claims never to have wanted the Commissionership. Less than a month after becoming Acting Commissioner on September 9, 1992--after leading the insurgency which forced his predecessor Fay Vincent to resign in midterm--Selig told Hal Bodley of USA Today that he planned to remain in office "two to four months." In December 1992, he assured Claire Smith of the New York Times that he had "zero interest in the job."
April 1, 2003
by Doug Pappas
Doug Pappas takes Andrew Zimbalist to task for his latest ill-informed sputtering on baseball, and praises Commissioner Bud Selig's efforts to save the game.
March 31, 2003
by Doug Pappas
Last year, I introduced a new measure of a team's efficiency: marginal dollars per marginal win. An article by Michael Lewis in the March 30 New York Times Magazine excerpted from his forthcoming Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, used my analysis to illustrate how Oakland gets so much more performance than other teams out of its low payroll.
March 21, 2003
by Doug Pappas
Commissioner Bud Selig recently extolled Major League Baseball's place in the daily lives of millions of fans. This public affection for the game came just a day after the public finally learned the extent of MLB's cold-blooded plot to take the game away from many of those fans.
Last spring, MLB settled its lawsuit with the Minnesota Twins' landlord within days after being ordered to produce sensitive internal documents relating to contraction. Some of these documents have now been leaked to the press. As this Newsday article, and others like it, show, just months after MLB's hand-picked Blue Ribbon Economic Panel had concluded that contraction was unnecessary, high-ranking MLB executives had begun a yearlong process of identifying which teams should be killed.
March 11, 2003
by Doug Pappas
In the first part of this survey, BP authors were asked to comment about the game off the field--labor, economics and the Expos. The final survey question asked our respondents to take the Bud Selig Prediction Test.
March 4, 2003
by Doug Pappas
For the past seven years, I've surveyed the members of the Society For American Baseball Research's Business of Baseball Committee about issues relating to baseball labor and economics, publishing the results and a cross-section of the comments in the winter issue of the Committee's quarterly newsletter. With a new CBA in place and the Expos still in limbo, I decided to survey my fellow Prospectus writers, too. Unlike the usual Prospectus roundtable, no one saw or commented on anyone else's answers.
BP writers who responded to the survey included Jeffrey Bower, Will Carroll, Gary Huckabay, Rany Jazayerli, Jonah Keri, Doug Pappas, Joe Sheehan, Nate Silver and Derek Zumsteg. As you'll see, our views are far from monolithic.
February 19, 2003
by Doug Pappas
Whenever "competitive balance" is debated, the debaters inevitably turn to published information about team payrolls to support their positions. This sounds straightforward. Unfortunately, "team payroll" is a fluid concept. The four most widely reported measures each use different methods and can lead to different conclusions.
January 22, 2003
by Doug Pappas
Last week, Major League Baseball's owners unanimously approved Commissioner Bud Selig's proposal to give the league that wins the All-Star Game home field advantage in the World Series.
December 20, 2002
by Doug Pappas
Major League Baseball's governing documents aren't intended for public consumption..
August 16, 2002
by Doug Pappas
July 10, 2002
by Doug Pappas
Fact: DuPuy exaggerated MLB's operating losses by at least 22%.
by Doug Pappas
The Baseball America website
features transcripts of lengthy interviews with the protagonists
in the current labor dispute:
Bob DuPuy,
MLB's president and chief operating officer, and
MLBPA head Don Fehr. Editor Alan Schwarz sat down with each man for an hour, asking tough questions and following up as appropriate. Each transcript runs over 6,500 words.
Unfortunately, not all of those words are accurate.
While both men used the interview as a forum for presenting their positions
to the public, one went further. DuPuy made several unambiguously false
statements about the economics of Major League Baseball.
April 26, 2002
by Doug Pappas
Selig insisted that liabilities under the 60/40 rule have always included the value of salaries for future years, and any suggestion to the contrary was "just bullshit."
by Doug Pappas
April 3, 2002
by Doug Pappas
Add Forbes to the ever-growing list of those who don't believe MLB's cries of poverty.
by Doug Pappas
March 20, 2002
by Doug Pappas
The second week of March may have marked a permanent change in Commissioner Bud Selig's status. He's no longer simply an incompetent, lying, permanently conflicted embarrassment to an office once held by judges and senators. Unless the owners who hired him wake up in time to stop him, Czar Bud will have become an active threat to their own wallets and a walking advertisement for the repeal of MLB's anti-trust exemption.
by Doug Pappas
March 13, 2002
by Doug Pappas
As noted in my last column, operating losses account for only $232 million of the $519 million Major League Baseball claims to have lost in 2001. Another $112,491,000 represents net interest expenses. Here's how the interest was distributed.
by Doug Pappas
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