Fungible Convictions

A compliment to Abe Stein’s post “Baseball, Time, and the Value of our Humanity”, in which he suggests that we should welcome the length of baseball games, or at least agree that it’s not a threat to the game.

Coupla things…

1) It’s important to acknowledge the relative brevity of games before the mid-90′s. For the majority of baseball’s history, a game longer than two hours was considered over-long.

2) The economic pressures nudging teams to longer games are huge. Related to #1 above, for about half its history — during an era when its attendees were made up of urban, adult, hourly-working men — baseball was a daytime sport. Games had to be short, if still pastoral in their aesthetic. But as the population changed through the 1960′s and the target market (and stadium locations) skewed more toward suburban families, a baseball game necessarily became an evening event, with a 7:35 pm (later 7:05 pm) game’s horizon stretching out toward midnight.

Meanwhile, while I haven’t heard an owner say it outright, a four-hour game is two more hours of concession stand sales and TV commercials. NFL owners, unable to lengthen games, do use that logic to try to lengthen the season. But unlike baseball players, football players have a lot to lose (their bodies, their minds) through more play.

None of that contradicts anything Abe says. In person, a four-hour game — with breaks between pitches, between innings, between action — is four hours I get to spend talking to my dad, my friends, my wife. Or, on TV or the radio, it’s church — a priest and a deacon reinterpreting the same stories for modern times, with familiar if distant characters that build, challenge, and reinforce our faith.

The last week or so have been a set of downright pleasant days. Shall we count the ways:

• Baseball’s position players reported to spring training yesterday
• I exchanged awesome emails with the wife of the late jazz great Charles Mingus
• We caught my friend Walter‘s really excellent show at the Armory Cafe in Somerville
• We hung out with friends at Toad a couple nights later
• My wife gave me an early birthday present of a high-priced Invictus wristwatch bought for a preposterously low price
• And I wasn’t immediately shot down when I floated the idea of going to Chicago on the Center for Future Civic Media’s dime to present projects to high schoolers who happen to be students of one of my best friends

It’s like I’m Gatsby and life is a squirrel, and we’re just waiting for the right moment to attack and/or spoon each other.

It’s a lot better than the week or two prior, which was capped off by a scream from the bathroom as my wife accidentally discharged a loaded heart-shaped Valentine’s liquid soap:

I received a little last-minute gift yesterday: two center-ice tickets to the season opener for the Boston Bruins. While the Bruins played pretty terribly against my once-favorite team the Washington Capitals, it was really something to be about a dozen rows back from the glass, watching Tim Thomas and Donny Beaupre Jose Theodore make great saves and, though Boston hates him, Alex Ovechkin make every other player look like a midget-leaguer in comparison.

Because the game stunk for the Bruins so much—an ugly 4-1 loss—the highlights were elsewhere. Such as seeing Patriots beloved linebacker Junior Seau ride the Zamboni:

Or hearing Rene Rencourt sing the national anthem:

One thing I have to say is that the fans in North Station after the game were just completely awful people. As my friend RJ and I slowly made our way to the Green Line, a Bruins fan shoved an older man to the ground just because he was wearing an Ovechkin jersey—and didn’t just shove him but walked off so that no one knew who did it. The gentleman on the ground needed a minute to get up, during which the woman with him, also wearing a Capitals jersey, yelled for the “asshole” to show himself. The men behind me muttered to each other that they would help but she wasn’t attractive enough to justify the effort. The whole thing reflected so badly on the fans and the city.

It’s always struck me as odd: the whole minor-league system for professional baseball, compared to the developmental systems of other American sports. Football, you’d think, would need to offer a young player time to learn their team’s system, to grow much stronger, even to mature a little to stay out of trouble during the week (when the average day ends at 3:30pm). But by and large college football players are drafted as 21- or 22-year-olds and play in the NFL the next fall.

Yet baseball, drafting players at that same age, puts them in the minor leagues for years, spending enormous sums to train hundreds of young men, most of whom teams know with statistical certainty will never make it to the major leagues.

Are there tons more pro-level baseball players than football players? Is baseball harder to learn, even for someone who has played it for, say, fifteen years?

I don’t think so.

The only explanation that half-satisfies me is that drafting baseball players is much more of a crapshoot. For some reason, a college player who can hit a 90 m.p.h. fastball isn’t certain to hit a 95 m.p.h. fastball as a professional, and the whole system has to compensate for that failure rate; conversely, in football, a college wide-receiver who runs the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds will do so as a pro. Therefore baseball teams draft—have to draft—as many players as they (and the minor league system as a whole) can support.

But I say only “half-satisfies” because the crapshoot argument doesn’t explain why more training is needed. Why can’t the country’s best college pitcher as of June start for a major league team the following April when year in and year out, the country’s best college quarterbacks get drafted and command offenses in the NFL the next season.

So what is it about baseball?

Bain News Service,, publisher.

Fenway Park exterior

[between 1910 and 1915

1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.

Notes:
Date based on research by the Pictorial History Committee, Society for American Baseball Research, 2006.
Forms part of: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).

Format: Glass negatives.

Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

General information about the Bain Collection is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.ggbain

Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.11857

Call Number: LC-B2- 2554-7

A Wake Forest friend just shared this…

“This is making the rounds,” he writes. “Pretty great, if true.”

Rarely are there moments in our lives that as soon as they occur, we know we will remember them for the rest of our lives. But when they do occur, they must be cherished and appreciated. For me, one of these such moments happened last night. The following will recount this awesome development of events.

A little background: As I am sure most are familiar, Greg Paulus (former Duke PG, professional ******) is now trying to play football somewhere next year. He worked out for the Packers, and early on the rumors were it was nearly a done deal to Michigan. Apparently, Michigan eventually backed off and he began to look elsewhere. The University of Nebraska has been talking to Paulus, and he is also looking at Syracuse (where he should go). Most Nebraska fans are not in favor of bringing Paulus in.

Yesterday, Greg Paulus was visiting the University. I attend the University of Nebraska for those who don’t know (well, at least for one more week, I graduate on Saturday May 9). Greg Paulus is on my campus. Go through the entire day without seeing him. Fast forward to last night when we are downtown at the bars. I get a text from one of my good friends that says “Greg Paulus at the Rail!”. ******* awesome. First thought that pops into my head: we have to rip on him. And then it comes to me: the ultimate move. A few of my friends and I have a long standing tradition of “taking charges” or “flopping” on random people in public places. This manuver is executed exactly how one would think. When someone is walking the opposite direction of you, you simply get in front of them, let them bump into you, and you fall over, like a charge in basketball. The humor in this comes from observing their reactions and the overall strangeness of this occurring in a public place.

So instantly I tell my friends that we have to flop on Greg Paulus. Paulus is the epitome of flopping. Much of his douchosity comes from his egregious flopping on the basketball court. These flopping endeavors have been well documented on youtube and blogs all over the internet.

As my friend and I are leaving the bar we are currently at to head to The Brass Rail, where Paulus is at, we see the opportunity. Ahead of us, Greg Paulus is walking down the street towards us. Paulus is bordered by a random dude on each of his sides. My friend looks over at me and says “This is my moment. I have to do this.” As Paulus gets closer, he gets ready. And then right before they get to us, he slides over, sets up in front of Paulus at the last second, and Paulus bumps into him. He takes the charge, flopping to the pavement. Paulus then gets the weirdest look on his face like WTF? My friend makes the charge signal that referees do, gets up, and we continue walking. The look on Paulus’ face was priceless. After a few seconds of being confused as ****, I think it sunk in to him what we had just done.

I know to most of you this story may sound childish, boring, or not really that funny. To me, it represents the culmination of years of flopping, Duke hatred, and Greg Paulus douchebagginess all rolled into one. I never imagined something this ******* awesome would happen. Indescribeable.

Yankees Slash the Price of Top Tickets: nytimes.com

Previously: How to solve the problem of empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium

The last few days I, and a good chunk of my colleagues, and my wife, and my wife’s colleagues, have been at the Media in Transition conference at MIT. There’s lots available online now about the conference proceedings, including podcasts that I’ve posted at the CMS website, but right now I want to pass on a thought I had at the conference while in the hard-core thinking mode at the same time that I passed a TV with the Sox/Yankees game on…

The new Yankee Stadium is getting slammed for its field-level luxury seating, which in this economy is ridiculously overpriced and is thus largely empty:

What I’m wondering is, why hasn’t sports adopted an adjustable pricing system for their seats? There’s the now relatively common model of eBay-style auctioning—that seems like a no-brainer and could be easily implemented for buying those seats online.

But for the Yankees’ situation, and really for any event that’s running a risk of not getting a butt in every seat, what about a physical, in-person auction at the stadium ticket booths?

Here’s what I imagine…

Some of those empty seats at Yankee Stadium cost $2500. On gameday, the Yankees organization knows those seats will stay empty. So outside the stadium before the game, they should set up parallel lines based on how much people would be willing to pay for those seats.

Line 1: $2000
Line 2: $1500
Line 3: $1000
Line 4: $500
Line 5: $100

People then queue up half an hour before the game. Whoever is willing to pay the most—those in Line 1–get first dibs. Anyone who thinks, “Psh, I’ll just lowball the Yankees and stand in Line 5″ runs the risk of losing available seats to people who go ahead and pay more.

This system would also encourage people to pay what they’re really willing to pay—because it’s a line. Changing one’s mind would mean going to the back of another line.

I see this as a fair, progressive way to sell seats that would otherwise remain empty due to overpricing.

I just saw on SportsCenter that Mike Mussina is retiring. ESPN baseball “analyst” Tim Kurkjian made the argument that Mussina should go to the Hall of Fame thus:

Mussina has a career winning percentage of .638. All other pitchers combined, during Mussina’s career, only had a winning percentage of .501.

Considering every single baseball game has a winning pitcher and a losing pitcher, well. Thanks for your insight, Tim.

Though: where does he get that .001?

…has been arrested on child pornography charges.

You’ll recall from another post that Bob “The Great” Gamere broke the ice by coming over to our friends Christmas party, uninvited, with a Bud tall-boy in his hand, nodded to us, and then loudly said, pointing to the ornaments on the Christmas tree, I’VE GOT BIGGER BALLS THAN THOSE.

Kinda sad that this reads like an obit:

Former ‘Candlepins for Cash’ host faces child porn charge
October 23, 2008 03:03 PM

By Globe Staff

Robert Gamere, the veteran sportscaster who once hosted the local TV show “Candlepins for Cash,” has been arrested on charges of transporting and possessing child pornography.

Gamere, 69, of Brookline, is charged in a three-count indictment with transporting child pornography videos on two separate dates last year and with possessing child pornography on his home computer, the US attorney’s office said in a statement.

Federal agents who executed a search warrant at Gamere’s residence also allegedly found printed-out images in a locked drawer in Gamere’s bedroom.

Prosecutors said Gamere had sent multiple people emails with child pornography videos attached.

Documents unsealed in federal court today showed that the case began when an undercover agent received an email with a child pornography video attached. The agent was able to determine that the video file had been sent previously by someone with the screen name “GreatGamere.” That screen name was subsequently traced to Robert Gamere, prosecutors said in a statement.

Gamere is to be arraigned this afternoon in US District Court. If convicted, he faces a minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of 20 years on the transportation counts, and a maximum of 10 years on the possession count.

Gamere, a veteran sportscaster who worked at a number of local TV and radio stations, told the Globe a year ago that he was “semi-retired,” though he had been doing some announcing at Boston University track meets and was until recently calling horse races at the Brockton Fair.

Gamere said he still got stopped on the street by people who appeared on Candlepins, which ran from 1973 to 1980.