OK So Moneyball Did Not Win The Million Oscars It Deserved But At Least Lady Gaga Really Liked It

Lady Gaga is the best

I am sure that you will agree that Moneyball was robbed last night of its rightful and deserved glory, but that is not the most notable or important thing to have happened to Moneyball of late, because Lady Gaga wrote about it in her V magazine column. And it is insane. An excerpt:


I lay down on the airplane back from Japan, tossing around some dashi, fondling my pearls. I watched the movieMoneyball for the first time. I began to laugh and smile as [Brad] Pitt talked romantically about the game. I suddenly imagined that my pearls were teeny-tiny baseballs. When a player hits a home run, the baseball is flung into an abyss of enigma and screams so great. It travels so far that only rarely is one caught in the bleachers. Where do these balls go? Where do all these wins get encased? Are they in a heavenly baseball land floating around for players who pass to acknowledge? Or do they disappear?

By the end of the film, we discover the truth about winning from our hero. It only matters if you’ve changed the game. Being kicked in the teeth is par for the course for this kind of win, a win that not only pisses off the team you’ve beat, but every other team, their coaches, owners, and even some of the greatest baseball players of all time. You’ve made your own set of rules and gone so far on your own talent, no one can possibly crack the truth behind your wins. You were either lucky or were cheating. Nobody likes the game that they’ve won over and over again to change.

Pitt expresses this as the central objective to his life, as we see a flashback to an old Oaks game. Batter hits and runs, doing what he does normally, running past first to take second, but trips, falls, and scurries back to first. He’s so focused on the game, so focused on the team winning, head so down into the dirt of the stadium, he doesn’t even realize he’s got a home run. The crowd roars, and he’s not sure why.

In this moment I looked down at my pearls, and I saw all the teeny-tiny home runs I’d hit over the past year. I knew some of them were more perfect than others, but I knew only an eye trained in pearls would notice. The thing about music is you’re not in competition with anyone else. You’re in competition with the psychology of the industry as a whole. You’re in competition with you. You must delve deeper and deeper into your creativity, history, and modernity to change not just this moment, but every moment that came before it. How can I hit a home run that will make every player question every run that was ever scored? How can I round third to home plate and bewilder some of the greatest players of all time? How can I change the game, until 30 years goes by and someone changes it again?

Sometimes my face is buried so deep in the work I forget to look up. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve won, because the stadium is either cheering or screaming so loud it doesn’t even matter. So this season, in the spirit of the Super Bowl and all things sporty, wear your pearls. Wild, cultured, real, or fake, wear them proud. And look up, or rather down, at all of your home runs. (Unless you’ve made them into a crown with a glue gun.) Then look up! In fashion and in life we all deserve more pearls, please. A moment of revelation to remember that we are timeless, we all matter, and every win like this is as important as the next. When you are changing the way people think, your life achievements are working toward the greatest accessory of all time: nerve. So collect your tiny baseballs, string your pearls, and remember that you are as timeless as the pearls on your neck. And if you forgot to be a lady and wear them, then shame on you.

The rest is here. You should probably read it.


KS

I Think I Love You, Moneyball Starring Brad Pitt

There was no reason to think this was even filmable, was there? Despite my enthusiasm for the Michael Lewis book -- I've read it four times, I think, and maybe the most fun I have ever had at a ballgame was at a meaningless laugher on a Sunday afternoon in Toronto against the A's right after my wife and I had both finished reading the book for the first time that we refer to as Moneyball Day -- but when a movie adaptation was announced roughly one million years and several rewrites ago, the very notion seemed to me absurd. Like, what's the narrative arc, even? As amazing as those dirt-cheap hundred-win teams were -- and if you do not believe in the magnitude of Billy Beane's achievement, you must be way better at Baseball Mogul than I am or will ever be -- I spoiler nothing by telling you that the Oakland Athletics have yet to win a championship under the guidance of Billy Beane. And the Oakland draft of 2002 that Lewis makes so much of in the book never really turned out to be especially good. And the A's are still a sadsack broke-as-hell team with a horrible stadium and probably no long term future in Oakland. So what do you even make the movie about, really?


Billy Beane, haunted by his own past in the game as a failed can't-miss prospect, is open to new ideas about the valuation of baseball players; these new ideas are provided by a somewhat Paul Depodesta-like Peter Brand (with much, much talk of Bill James); the A's win twenty straight games and thus pull off another great season despite losing Giambi and Damon (and Isringhausen, sure); in recognition of his achievements, Beane is offered a contract by forward-thinking and dapper Red Sox owner John Henry that would make him the most highly paid GM in all of sports; Beane declines amid flashbacks of the lone decision he has made in his life based solely on money (signing with the Mets rather than attending Stanford) and family concerns. So, the book, basically. The book. 


And it all works. It totally works. There are of course plenty of nits that can be picked, as with anything based on a true story, but all of the changes make dramatic sense, even if they upset Keith Law. Does it make baseball sense that Billy Beane would fly to Cleveland to suggest a few minor deals in the office of Mark Shapiro? I guess not, but dramatically, it's a scene that motivates Beane's interest in Brand, a fat guy who seems to know what Billy's up to, a little. Also, it's really funny. Getting bent of shape about details like that position you as an enemy of fun and quite possibly the arts, in my view. The only thing that had me scratching my head a little is when the movie makes it seem like Jeremy Giambi was a new addition to the A's lineup in 2002, rather than the guy who didn't slide in the 2001 ALDS, not because I think that's an important detail that needed to be represented, but because I thought for a minute maybe I was remembering it wrong. But of course I was not, and I put the matter out of my head entirely when Jeremy Giambi danced with his pants half down in the clubhouse. There are perhaps hairs that could be split, were one so inclined, but come on. You love this movie. 


The main thing I want to communicate to you about Moneyball is that it, and everyone in it, is awesome. Just awesome.  That Brad Pitt is one of our finest actors in addition to being almost offensively good looking -- in Jonah Hill's words, from an entertaining but nonessential interview on The Howard Stern Show last week, "It's fucked up, how good looking he is" -- is widely known, so why belabour the point, but holy shit is he awesome in this. I applaud his ongoing, systematic efforts to make himself look physically bad on camera, which is I think what all the eating is about, but it's not working. 


Jonah Hill's Peter Brand is surprisingly well drawn, and not the complete caricature of a spreadsheet enthusiast I expected when I heard that Depodesto didn't care to have his name used in the movie. Brand, despite his reasoned, rational approach to the mathematical problem of winning ballgames, is still a romantic. Why else walk around with a baseball in your hand? What a nice touch that was. He's a Jamesian, fully realized: there's nothing cold and unfeeling about anything Bill James has ever written, despite the way he sometimes get discussed. It's impossible to read Bill James and not come away with a sense of his unfailingly, romantic, obviously silly love of baseball, right? Rejecting sportwriterly cant and the unthinking acceptance of old saws, and looking for novel answers to the old questions of the game doesn't make you a robot. It might very well make you someone like Peter Brand, though. I was surprised that Brand was as well drawn as he was, actually, given that it was not a character Depodesto wanted to be attached to, but I think I get it: Depodesto is still very much trying to make his way in baseball, and the dismissive "Google Boy" tag that dogged him during his too-brief tenure in Los Angeles has proven hard to live down. Given the extent to which the very, very old men who still write baseball stories for newspapers have taken this movie's release as an opportunity to rail against all things Billy Beane, the last thing Paul Depodesto needs is to be any closer to any of that. I get it, or at least think I get it; maybe that's not it at all. 


Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Art Howe has come under fire from, well, just from Art Howe, I guess, actually. He called it "character assassination," and has actually blamed Billy Beane for it, in a fantastic recapitulation of the whole "Billy Beane shouldn't have written that book" Joe Morgan situation of a decade ago (that it was Joe Morgan's voice set against the images of the A's failing in the 2002 playoffs is perfect). Honestly, I thought Howe emerged as an entirely sympathetic character in this telling: working on a short-term contract, Howe is asked to mange his team in a way that is well and good for Beane and Brand and their grand scheme, but will be utterly indefensible to the twenty-nine other non-Billy Beane GMs that Howe is going to have to justify this to in order to, you know, work. If Beane extends him, fine; he'll be happy to buy in. Otherwise, this seems to Howe professional suicide. That's perfectly reasonable, isn't it? Hoffman was great; the character made sense; and if Art Howe is upset with it, I think he might not be great at watching movies.  


Very much unlike Art Howe, I have no complaints, really. Moneyball gets it right. It speaks to the constant tension between reason and emotion that is at the heart of not just Billy Beane as a character -- trading Jeremy Giambi, posterboy for his rationalist experiment, in a fit of pique (remember the Giambi for Mabry thread on Baseball Primer, with people trying to figure out a rational explanation for it, because there had to be one, because it was Billy Beane?) -- but at the heart of the game itself, of our experience of it as players, as fans, as writers, as readers. However it is we engage with baseball, that's how and why it moves us, I think, this kind of Apollonian/Dionysian interplay that is no doubt best left to Roger Angell to describe in prose, but that Moneyball manages to put perfectly on the screen.


KS  

Keith Law vs. Michael Lewis: Everybody Is Jerks

Mean mugging.

It is of course entirely possible that in his private life, ESPN.com's Keith Law is a kindhearted and generous spirit. But he is, in both print and the delicate art of podcasting, totally a jerk, right? Would we all agree on that point? I genuinely enjoy his work, so this is not intended as a dismissal or broad condemnation of all things KLaw, but even an admirer of much of what he does -- and I am indeed an admirer -- has to concede that Law's entire public persona is about belittling people whom he has decided are dumb, right? And he has decided that an awful lot of people are dumb. That is, I think, a pretty uncontroversial characterization of what it is Keith Law does, in addition to knowing everything about every prospect ever. 


This week, Law attended a preview screening of Moneyball, the Brad Pitted adaptation of the Micheal Lewis book we have all read because we enjoy baseball and are on the internet. And, as he outlines on his blog, he did not care for it: "Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out." There are those who have pointed out that this runs counter to most professional reviews of the movie so far, but to that one can only say whatever, and, writing as someone who has himself both reviewed professionally and been professionally reviewed, let me add a second "whatever," because, seriously, whatever. Who could possibly care that? That is a pretty silly thing to point out, I think. Anyway, Christopher Rosen of the site Moviefone, which I knew nothing about until yesterday, got in touch with Michael Lewis, and asked him what he thought of Keith Law's take. The result is an ethering:


"Billy [Beane] called me and said Keith Law had sent him his review. I looked at it and I thought, What's he talking about? It's very weird that he's on this. He's intellectually dishonest, and I don't know to what purpose. I don't understand why he goes from being -- when I interviewed Keith Law, and I did, at length -- he was so nasty about scouts and scouting culture and the stupidity of baseball insiders. He was the reductio ad absurdum of the person who was the smarty pants who had been brought into the game and was smarter than everybody else. He alienated people. And now he's casting himself as someone who sees the value of the old school. I can't see where this is all heading and why. But I learned from experience that the best thing to do is ignore it, because it goes away." 


First off, were Michael Lewis ever to denounce me as a smarty pants, I would probably never stop crying. That is absolutely brutal. I might very well be a buffoon in any number of ways, and were Michael Lewis to point that out to me, it would be rough, but I could probably handle it, I think. I could maybe even survive being characterized as intellectually dishonest, maybe, although that's actually pretty rough, but imagine, imagine trying to get through a single day of the rest of your now completely unlivable life after Michael Lewis called you a smarty pants, and, moreover, was right. Keith Law is totally a smarty pants. That is completely true.


Understandably, all of this cut Keith Law to the bone, and he took to the airwaves/internet tubes to respond in a way that tells you way more about the weird Blue Jays front office under J. P. Ricciardi than you probably ever thought you'd know. You can listen to the audio here (about nineteen minutes in, and worth listening to for Law's idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word "caricature" if nothing else), or you can read a transcript of this pretty remarkable and revealing stuff below -- endless, endless internet propers to the mighty Drunk Jays Fans for actually transcribing this, as transcription is agony:


When Michael interviewed me for Moneyball-- there was one long interview in particular in my office in Toronto; I can still picture where he sat, where I sat-- this was 2002. I was 28 or 29, less than a year into my job with the Blue Jays, which was my first job in baseball at all.

Before that I had been a freelance writer, a little for ESPN and a lot for Baseball Prospectus. I was very much a stats guy-- only a stats guy-- I had no scouting experience.

I was hired by JP Ricciardi-- who was the the General Manager, who came out of Oakland, worked for Billy Beane-- who had been a scout, but did not respect scouts or scouting. In fact, one of Ricciardi's favourite things to do, especially the first six months or so I was there, was call me into his office-- or sometimes just call me on the phone, if I was still in Massachusetts-- he'd pull out this binder-- this gives you a sense of how long ago this was-- this binder that had all of our printed scouting reports that amateur and pro scouts had turned in on all of these players that they'd seen, and he would pick a player that he liked. "Hey, let's go see what our genius scout said about Eric Hinske!" And I could still remember-- I know who the scout was, the scout's now a cross-checker with a National League club, and a friend of mine-- "You know what!? This idiot, he thinks Eric Hinske's an org. player!"-- which means a guy with basically with no Major League value, a guy who's good for a Double-A or Triple-A roster but that's about it-- which was a little light, but what is Eric Hinske? He's an extra player in the big leagues. I don't think that's a disastrous report. But this was how Ricciardi viewed scouts, particularly the Blue Jays scouts he inherited. And he ended up firing, or not renewing, more than half of the scouting staff, as I can remember-- many of whom have gone on to senior positions in other scouting departments.

So... I'm not trying to make an excuse here, but just to give you an idea of my mindset at the time. My whole baseball universe was my own work as an analyst, and the guy who brought me into baseball, who was my boss and somebody I admired at the time [oh shit "at the time" -- KS] and was trying to learn from, telling me, "Most scouts are useless," even though he had been a scout himself. And at the time that I sat down with Lewis, I was giving him the party line-- something I believed in, absolutely. That was nine years ago, give or take a few months, and I've only spoken to Michael once or twice since then-- I did talk to him a year or two later; he was planning to do a follow-up book that I think fizzled because the players drafted in the so-called "Moneyball Draft" didn't work out as well as hoped.

About two years, two-and-a-half years after that-- so 2004, 2005-- it became pretty clear to me that we were failing. And this was one of the major reasons I left Toronto. There were a couple-- that's a topic for another day-- but, it wasn't working. The stat-heavy approach was... we were basically two steps behind. What we were trying to do was what Oakland had been doing around 2000 or so, and the Red Sox and the Cardinals and the Padres and one or two other clubs-- Cleveland-- they were pretty clearly adopting some of these same methods. And we were left in the situation-- kind of a similar situation to where we were before we even got there, which was that we weren't innovating fast enough, and the market had become too competitive for the limited type of player we were going for.

It really became apparent to me in the draft room. I remember Tony LaCava-- who is still there, who is Alex Anthopoulos's right-hand man in Toronto-- independently had realized the same thing, which was we were killing ourselves, especially in the draft, because we would only take college players with "acceptable" stats. And that's such a narrow pool, especially when five or six teams are all going for the same type of player. You get to the third or fourth round and you're done. There's nobody on the board you think could even be an average regular in the big leagues. 

He and I both spent a lot of time between the '04 and '05 drafts, and again between '05 and '06, trying to convince Ricciardi, "We've got to change this; we've got to incorporate more scouting into our process; we have to be willing to look at high school players; we have to be willing to take some of these higher risk tool players who maybe don't have the perfectly acceptable stat line but give us some upside, some chance to look for hidden value that other clubs aren't identifying." And one of the reasons I left in 2006 was the recognition that this approach-- this so-called "new school" or "Moneyball" approach-- was not going to work. Was never going to work. And they ended up scrapping it after I left.

But while I was there I worked with many scouts-- like I said, some of whom have gone on to success with other clubs, many of whom are friends of mine now, and I have to say, many of whom tried to open my mind in 2002, 2003, when I was not open-minded, when I was 28, 29, and walked in the door and was told, "You're here, you're gonna replace ten scouts with the work you do." And I believed it, which was a terrible mistake on my part.

I recognize that Chris Buckley, now the scouting director with the Reds, and Tim Wilken, who's the scouting director with the Cubs-- these guys were trying to help me. Trying to open my mind. Mike Cadahia-- who is a cross-checker who was just let go from Seattle, but who is, I think, a very good scout and a very good person, and I hope to see him land somewhere soon-- he was trying. These guys were trying to help me realize that there are more ways to do this. And the more inputs you have, the more information you have, the better the decisions you're going to make.

Part of what I came to ESPN with in 2006 was this vision for a different kind of writing that incorporated everything. And so, when Michael Lewis claims that I was nasty about scouts and scouting culture, there's a kernel of truth inside the caricature which he paints-- which is kind of what he did to several people in the book-- Paul DePodesta, I think; there's a kernel of truth to the caricature of DePodesta in the book Moneyball. But to say that I'm "casting" myself "as someone who sees the value of the old school?" No, I see the value of the old school, and have for five or six years now. And I have tried-- I won't sit here and tell you I'm successful-- but I've really tried to incorporate both of those things into my writing.

And, I have to say, a lot of the credit for that goes to LaCava, Buckley, Wilken, Cadahia and Billy Moore, and Jeff Taylor, and Mike Mangan-- these are all people that I worked with in Toronto, and I'm apologizing for forgetting ten other people I should be crediting here. But they worked with me, they opened my mind, they showed me the beginnings of how to evaluate, but at a time when I wasn't receptive to it. They tried to show me the importance of this old school, of scouting players from a traditional perspective. It just all caught up to me-- two, three years after the fact-- that they weretrying to help me, and that I had kind of missed out-- maybe set myself back in the process. And leaving for ESPN kind of gave me the opportunity to start over and make this major change to my philosophy of baseball, which is what I think you've seen over the last couple of years in my writing.


This is all, in my view, bananas. As I have said before, the loathsome J. P. Ricciardi era is completely fascinating to me, since it's the time when I was at the ballpark pretty much every day, following the team as closely as anybody can, really: I was a graduate student at the time and thus completely unencumbered by the duties and responsibilities that come along with being a real person. So, any insight into how any aspect of that disaster (theirs, not mine) took shape, I totally welcome. I think it's also worth noting that it comes across like Law is kind of blaming Michael Lewis for not keeping up with the personal and professional development of Keith Law, as though Lewis should have signed up for an ESPN Insider account and realized the extent to which Keith has grown and changed over the years, when obviously Michael Lewis has no reason to care about that in the least, as he has been plenty busy being Micheal Lewis. That's kind of funny. But more than anything else, I am sympathetic with Law in all of this. Who among us was not a know-nothing-know-it-all in their twenties? Who among us does not regret this -- at least a little; maybe a lot -- now that we're older and least a little less convinced of our own genius, or even competence? We are all of us Keith Law, is what I am trying to say here, at least those of us who were smug jerks in our twenties but have more recently begun to realize that, beneath our smarty pants, we are all of us butts.


KS  

2010 Payroll per Victory Nerderies

I do not expect that Baseball Feelings will degenerate into nonsense interwebmetrics too often, as the spirit of this place seems to be spirit, not 0s and 1s. Nonetheless, I have for a few years busted out my calculator at the end of another long ass season to see just where teams stacked up in regards to how much payroll they shelled out per victory during the regular and post-season. This is not so much an exercise in some sort of metric system to evaluate how well a team performs per dollar, although you could certainly take it that way. Mostly I do it because it’s fairly ridiculous how much actual fake American money is spent per actual baseball field 9-inning (or more) victory achieved. Ridiculous. So indulge me a stroll through the 2010 season’s teams listed in the order of who paid the least amount of payroll per victory = total payroll on opening day divided by (regular season wins plus postseason wins where applicable). So yeah.
#1: SAN DIEGO PADRES – $419,992.22 per win. Just barely missed out on winning NL West due to end-of-season collapse. #2: TEXAS RANGERS - $563,781.07 per win. Won the AL West due to Nolan Ryan threatening to send underperformers to “the glue factory” and knocked off both the allegedly upstart Rays and ominously omnipresent Yankees in the playoffs before succumbing to the Giants in the World Series that time forgot. #3: PITTSBURGH PIRATES - $613,943.00 per win. Pirates never spend much, but still win some games, making me think that if you didn’t even pay players and just took volunteers, you could still win 35 games in the Major Leagues. #4: OAKLAND ATHLETICS - $637,714.81 per win. The birthplace of cybermetrics, so you would expect them to show well in anything involving calculators. #5: FLORIDA MARLINS - $695,518.75 per win. I’ve done this type of list for nearly a decade, and the Marlins have never been lower than the top 5 as far as I can remember, even winning a couple World Series in the process. What does this say? I don’t know. They don’t have a definitive fanbase in Miami, and they don’t exactly consistently make the playoffs, though they do always remain competitive beyond what one would expect from looking at them on paper. If the goal is to win titles, then perhaps this is the method to go, as they have done that, more than many older franchises (lulz to you Cubs and Indians). But as a successful business model, it doesn’t work. Then again, as we go through this list, I find it hard to believe more than like four of these teams are an actual successful business model. Baseball should just stop pretending to turn a profit and get owners who are just rich fuckers who want to be dicks to the world and blow money to win $1 bets with their 33rd Degree Freemason ski lodge cronies in upstate New Hampshire.
#6: TAMPA RAYS - $733,912.97 per win. Won the AL East, but then crumbled at the hands of the Rangers in the wild card round of the playoffs. The Rays are another team that operated on the Marlins gameplan for a while, full of young talent and always having someone to step in place of whoever disappeared. But in recent years they’ve made the switch towards saying, “We are a respectable team; we have everything we need now; so we will keep our players, pay far more money to people than we have been, and will still be successful. We have turned the corner.” Usually it seems when teams with fickle fanbases do this, it takes a couple of years before they are complete shit and destroyed financially for the next decade. It’s kind of like a regular person buying all their Christmas presents by maxing out a credit card, thinking, “Well, I’ve been steadily employed for a while now, everything should be solid, and I’ll be able to pay all this back.” You won’t. You’re fucked. #7: TORONTO BLUE JAYS - $737,521.85 per win. I did not translate dollar values to Canadian sheckles or give’rs or whatever they get paid up there, so we will assume it’s the same as American money for the sake of me not having to figure that shit out. #8: CINCINNATI REDS - $795,456.53 per win. Actually won the NL Central this past season, to shake a long stretch of ineptitude. Of course, winning the NL Central, when the Cardinals are in a down year, is not a large hurdle to clear. #9: CLEVELAND INDIANS - $887,014.01 per win. The easy thing to do would be to make a Major League the movie reference, except that just reminds me of how racist Hollywood is. Wesley Snipes is abandoned, framed on tax evasion, and has to go to jail. Meanwhile Charlie Sheen is fucking porn chicks and that nazi tattooed girl that the biker beard Sandra Bullock wore for a while was shagging as well, and getting drunk in Vegas and generally being a perverted nuisance to normal society, yet no one cares. #10: WASHINGTON NATIONALS - $890,217.39 per win. The Nationals are my home team so to speak, that I adopted for my personal loyalties when they moved to D.C. from Montreal. This has not brought me much pleasure in life thus far, beyond reading futuristic predictions from the year 2017, but hey, that’s baseball.
#11: ATLANTA BRAVES - $917,648.55 per win. Won the NL wild card berth into the playoffs, where they losted to the Giants. A consistently restocked franchise for nearly two decades now, featuring occasional purges of traditional talent, which is usually followed up by a blossoming of fresh, young talent. I have always hated the Braves, because my dad was a Braves fan and my dad was an unemployable abusive drunk. But I cannot deny when it comes to grooming new talent, they are one of the better franchises at such things. #12: ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS - $934,125.65 per win. I’m not sure I could name one player on the Diamondbacks at this point. #13: SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS - $949,794.50 per win. Won the NL West, beat the Braves then upset the Phillies in the NL Playoffs, and then beat down the Rangers to be World Series champions. When I was 8 years old, my first baseball team was called the Giants and I was like the shittiest bad kid on the team, meaning I played CF and wasn’t one of the kids that played the 2 inning minimum. But in my little naïve mind, if I played good and learned the game, there was a direct line from my minor league Farmville, Virginia, Giants team at a private school organization that didn’t allow black kids to play (seriously, this was in like 1981 too, not some ancient black-and-white days, but there was no alternative league), so they were always my favorite team for most of my life. I was there those awesome years with Kevin Mitchell and Will Clark making baseball’s most Odd Couple, and they always came up short, or got edged out by the Braves. I stuck with them during the Barry Bonds days, but grew tired of the bullshit in regards to Bonds. Plus, I live in fucking Virginia, how do I follow a goddamn team from California? Baseball is boring as fuck to watch on TV, more than acceptable live in person, and completely doable on radio, so when the Expos moved to D.C. and the local AM station carried Nats games, they became my team. What this all means is last year when the Giants made their run, I was caught up in it, feeling like a bandwagon fan or at least fair-weather one, and not being able to truly enjoy the successes without feeling like a chump. And then they won the World Series. It was kinda like a longtime ex-girlfriend getting elected Queen of Polynesia or something – I was happy I guess, but did not feel like it belonged to me anymore, so I was left feeling kinda weird. #14: COLORADO ROCKIES - $1,014,783.13 per win. The Rockies are the first team to cross the million dollar per victory barrier. Sadly enough, we will also cross the two million dollar per victory barrier before we are done. #15: MINNESOTA TWINS - $1,037,863.48 per win. They won the AL Central, but got punked by the Yankees in the wild card round of the playoffs, yet again. What can you do? They’ve locked down their supposed superstar talent, but what’s left to try and get to the next level? I guess they just keep plugging along and hope they stay afloat.
#16: MILWAUKEE BREWERS - $1,053,354.27 per win. Honestly, I think Bud Selig is a huge asshole and a general negative swirl of energetic influences over baseball, and being he secretly still owns the Brewers, fuck the Brewers. Also, they got Greinke from the Royals, and I was hoping he’d come to D.C. #17: KANSAS CITY ROYALS - $1,078,622.54 per win. For calling themselves a small market team, their still shelling out over a million per victory. The Nationals, Marlins, Pirates, etc. show that it’s hard to not at least win a few games. So somehow the Royals are a financially unstable mix of blowing money and blowing games. Those powder blue throwbacks are tight though. #18: ST. LOUIS CARDINALS - $1,087,683.17 per win. I usually associate supreme baseball nerdery with the northeast, which is easy to dismiss as a vast sprawling wasteland of idiocy. However, St. Louis proves that wrong, because there’s crazy baseball nerdery swirling around the St. Louis franchise, that goes back to the days of ticker tape parades using actual ticker tape because banks had that type of machinery in use. This upsets my geographical stereotypes of the world around me, which is upsetting, thus I can’t stand the Cardinals. They are truly the favorite baseball team of college professors. #19: LOS ANGELES DODGERS - $1,186,818.96 per win. It would be awesome if in the McCourt divorce, they both got like half of the team, so like maybe the wife got the pitchers and catchers and the dude got the rest of the field, and she sold her part to some crazy Japanese demented baseball genius, so that the Dodgers ended up being a team with really shitty hitting and fielding, but like this insane pitching rotation of guys who were never that great before who all pitch gyroballs and wacky Jap shit and like they cloned three Fernando Valenzuelas – one white, one black, and one Mexican – who come out the bullpen and shut shit down, rolling their eyes up to the sky, all pudgy and loveable and brining the great Los Angeles area together in racial unity through mad science. That’s what I wish would happen. #20: HOUSTON ASTROS - $1,215,203.95 per win. Until the world admits those rainbow uniforms as wore by J.R. Richard while having strokes on the field are awesome, there will be no peace.
#21: CHICAGO WHITE SOX - $1,230,377.24 per win. I will be honest – sometimes I outright get down on baseball and lack feelings beyond hatred for it. Not because of my team’s lack of success, but because I don’t get it. So boring and so statistical and so long-winded. But even when I get into those negative moods, there’s still about seven things I love about baseball. One of those seven is Ozzie Guillen. He is a national treasure, for wherever he is from. #22: BALTIMORE ORIOLES - $1,236,553.03 per win. Being Peter Angelos really screwed D.C. for years, and even squeezed a cut of their profits for himself with the stupid regional baseball TV thing, I do not like the Orioles. They cannot suck enough to appease my vengeance, which is really saying something, because they have really sucked for a long time. And they actually halfway spend money like they are still trying, but not really that hard. One time I was a wine-tasting room place in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, and I’m pretty sure Cal Ripken was there. But I didn’t care enough to go say “What’s up famous baseball player who I don’t know? How’s it going?” I mean, if it was Kevin Mitchell or Albert Belle or somebody awesome, I would’ve gone up and gave some daps, but it was just stupid uber-white Mr. Oriole Cal Ripken. #23: LOS ANGELES ANGELS OF ANAHEIM - $1,312,670.84 per win. Please just go back to being the California Angels. This is ridiculous. #24: PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES - $1,391,444.91 per win. The Phillies won the NL East, swept the Reds and then lost to the Giants in the NLCS. The Phillies are straight up going about things like the Yankees and Red Sox at this point, buying up free agents and rolling with it, to the point that anything less than a World Series title will be a disappointment. The thing in their favor is they’ve accumulated pitching and not sluggers, which is probably the better route towards success. That fucking rotation… man. #25: DETROIT TIGERS - $1,516,850.98 per win. The Tigers are a few years beyond that thing I spoke of in regards to the Rays, where you start to say, “Hey, we are now legit. Let’s spend money and be confident.” Whereas a decade ago, going 81-81 would’ve been seen as a decent year for the Tigers, there are expectations with a payroll of $122 million, and a perfect .500 does not answer those expectation.
#26: SEATTLE MARINERS - $1,612,732.24 per win. We are not getting into the most immensely fucked franchises when it comes to blowing money. And the Mariners are the only one in the bottom seven of this list who spent less than $100 million on opening day payroll, but all they could muster up was 61 wins last year, in the not entirely glorious AL West. #27: NEW YORK METS - $1,679,765.13 per win. The Mets, when you look at the amount of payroll they spend year after year, have to be the most disappointing franchise of the past ten years. They are consistently outperformed not only by other big payroll division rival the Phillies, but by the Marlins, who usually are spending about half what the Mets spend. Being someone who has listened to 660 the Fan on night time AM radio during long car trips, and hearing Mets fans talk, I have no problem with this trend whatsoever. #28: BOSTON RED SOX - $1,828,621.72 per win. Missed the playoffs last year, and Big Papi looked lost without steroids. Plus that little midget Pedro Martinez died last year, which I think was the final ending of their magical rebirth from the Curse of the Bambino. #29: CHICAGO CUBS - $1,958,120.00 per win. Really, the Cubs are one of those teams with a history – both long-term and recent – that you can’t even make fun of, because reality is worse and more hilarious than anything you could say. #30: NEW YORK YANKEES - $2,042,904.84 per win. Earned the AL Wild Card, swept the Twins, and then got knocked off by the Rangers. The Yankees define the financial excesses of Major League baseball, and really I try to ignore their existence. Seeing them fall every year is always something I am rooting for, but I can’t even watch them play. The fact they won over a hundred games (counting postseason) and still spent over $2 million dollars per victory is ridiculous. And the fact that a good portion of the rest of MLB is basically the Yankees quadruple-A farm team to develop talent for them to buy up, that’s frustrating as well. That’s my biggest problem with baseball is how awkward the money situations are. It’s not even like salary caps would fix it, because I’m not necessarily for that. You don’t want to stifle crazy billionaires who want to succeed. It’s just no one is really quite nearly as crazy as what George Steinbrenner put into place before his death. We need more crazy billionaires I guess.