Setting aside the deal for Pujols, teams have gotten smarter about the arc of a typical player's career and when it's best to invest. John Dewan, the founder of Baseball Info Solutions, which provides data analysis to major-league clubs, said an offensive player's value peaks at 26 to 27 and remains fairly steady for the next five years. The decline begins at 32 and then accelerates after 35 (a pitcher's career is less age-dependent and harder to predict).

Given those numbers, logic dictates that investing in great young players during their early years of free agency makes economic sense. And the money is there: As baseball's overall revenues surpass $7 billion, each team stands to receive about $40 million from the league's central fund, a figure likely to rise in 2014 after baseball signs a series of new national-television deals. Revenue sharing also redistributes tens of millions more from the game's richest clubs to its poorest.

The statistics are disturbing. By the time they have been retired for two years, close to 80% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress. Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

Baseball players are not immune from this alarming trend. Recently, a number of players found themselves ensnared in the Allen Stanford fraud, with their money frozen. Indeed, over the years, scores of great ballplayers found themselves in the poor house. Here's eight.

Once the playoffs begin, the numbers suggest the wealth will rise even farther toward the top, rather than trickling down. Under the old system, wild-card teams had about a 9% chance of winning the World Series. Now, adding in a one-game playoff, their chances shrink to about 4.6% for a world title. Division winners, meanwhile, have a 13.6% chance of becoming world champs, about the same as their chances under the old system.

The difference now though, is winning a division title means having a chance to win the World Series that is 300% better than a wild card's. Under the old format, a division winner's chances of winning the World Series were only about 44% better than a wild card's.

White Sox' chances at the playoffs leap from 8% to 9%.

24. WHITE SOX (-3.9) Key Acquisition: OF Kosuke Fukudome (0.8) Key Loss: SP Mark Buehrle (2.6) Outlook: There is a school of thought that sending manager Ozzie Guillen to Miami was addition by subtraction.

(Hey, they nicked Fangraphs. MSM getting cozy with Saber stuff.)

t's a great story: The classic underdog sports tale, with the stats geeks and rejects joining forces to triumph over big money and big-name talent. The folks in Hollywood liked the story so much that they got Brad Pitt to play Billy Beane in the movie, which opens Friday.

What some are beginning to ask, though, is whether that story is real and, ultimately, whether Mr. Lewis, having fallen in love with his scenario, looked at it through rose-colored sunglasses.

Reading "Moneyball" again eight years after its publication raises questions about some of its basic premises. "For more than a decade," Mr. Lewis wrote, "the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in other professional sports and widening rapidly."

The first three games of the 1918 Series were played at the White Sox home, Comiskey Park, because it had more seats than the Cubs’ home field. The extra seats were not needed; the first three games, of which Boston won two, averaged about 22,000 fans.

On the train to Boston for the final games — the teams rode together — the players added the gate receipts and calculated their shares, which figured to be about $1,100 for the winners and about $600 for the losers. That was roughly half the money they expected.

"From the beginning of Game 4, things started to look funny, or wrong, on the field," Deveney said. "The first three games had been tight and well-played. The next three games had all these strange blunders."

I had never heard of Dorfman when he called in 1989 after reading my book, "The Psychology of Winning Baseball." He said a number of major league clubs were looking for somebody like me, who had played professional baseball and had a background in psychology. I was flattered and told Dorfman, "Feel free to give out my name and number." Most general managers, I thought, still believed in the old-school philosophy that no baseball player needed a sports psychologist.

But within the next few days, I started to receive phone calls from representatives of major league teams like the Indians’ Hank Peters, the Orioles’ Roland Hemond and the White Sox’ Jerry Reinsdorf.

When Fisk as a coach was being discussed earlier in the week some were concerned that a confrontational coach might not wash. However, as this piece states, Dorfman succeeded because of his controntational style.

The greatest living baseball player hits a milestone. In my eyes, the greatest of all time.

For almost a century, the 1919 Chicago White Sox have left a permanent stain on the game of baseball. Their throwing of the World Series that season not only tainted the sport, but the lives of the eight White Sox players who participated in the fix.

"Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, Eddie Cicotte, Swede Risberg, Chick Gandil, Fred McMullin, and Buck Weaver were all banned from Major League Baseball for life.

But flying miles under the radar for all these years is a baseball scandal possibly just as great as the infamous Black Sox.

It involves the 1918 World Series, and the implication of another team for doing the exact same thing.

What team might this be?

The Chicago Cubs.

And who tattled on them?

None other than one of the banned White Sox players, pitcher Eddie Cicotte.

When Nick Swisher slid hard into second base last week and broke Minnesota Twins rookie Tsuyoshi Nishioka's leg, the pundits in baseball circles generally wrote it off as a gritty play. But considering the historical precedent of Japanese middle infielders suffering major injuries in similar fashion, Nishioka's situation suggests an alarming trend.

There have been four Japanese middle infielders to play in the major leagues. Three of them—Nishioka, Kazuo Matsui and Akinori Iwamura—spent significant time on the disabled list as a result of an opponent's aggressive slide. The fourth, Tadahito Iguchi, was upended by vicious take-out slides in 2006 and 2007 but escaped serious injury.

But this season, for the first time, Little League is banning most composite-barrel bats because they enable kids to hit the ball too fast and too far. The moratorium follows years of percolating concern about injury rates in youth sports.

The timing of the youth ban caught bat makers, retailers and parents by surprise. Little League, the world's largest youth baseball organization with 2.6 million participants, announced bans on composites for older kids and for its giant 12-and-under divisions last year.

Yet within that sturdy sameness, the individual goes to town. Robinson Cano flips the ball to first like a 95-mph fastball. Mariano Rivera locates his cutter anywhere he wants to. The Pirates’ Andrew McCutchen runs like a sprinter, and the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols hits everything a country mile. Baseball is the only major sport in which the person, not the ball, does the scoring. Huge Adam Dunn of the White Sox has batted a career .250, while Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki (170 pounds?) has batted .331. And every feat seems all the more amazing because it is accomplished within the confines of an orderly universe.

(Of course Adam Dunn is not maximizing his potential like Ichiro!)

The Wite Sox didn’t make a ton of moves in the offseason, but the addition of Adam Dunn was a significant improvement to the lineup. They have a nice balance of good hitting and pitching to make a run at the 2011 AL Central title along with the Twins and the Tigers. There is good reason to believe they will be playing meaningful baseball late into the season.

All rite!

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.

(I believe the author of this piece has been looking at the BMO threads.)

Chicago White Sox

1920: 96-58
1921: 62-92
Win decline: -34

The 1921 White Sox put an interesting twist on the whole lose-your-players-because-you-won't-pay-them bit. The players decided to make a little freelance money fixing the 1919 World Series, which, of course, resulted in the famous Black Sox Scandal, which first affected the team in the final week of the 1920 season and really hit hard in 1921. Key players got banned from baseball and 62-92 happened.

(The Bears are on the NFL list and the Bulls on the NBA list. Volatility, thy name is Chicago sports.)

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, and to honor African American players in the major leagues, I have compiled a nine player lineup of the greatest African American players in baseball history.
There were a number of tough decisions in naming the team, and the likes of Ken Griffey Jr, Joe Morgan, and Frank Thomas, among many others didn't make the cut.

My respect for elders long preceded my time in the early 1990s as commissioner of Major League Baseball, but few institutions have more regard for its history than baseball. It was my great good fortune to know and listen to such old timers as Tommy Henrich telling of Lou Gehrig sitting and smoking cigarettes after going 0 for 4, Bob Feller talking of his wartime duty on the USS Alabama, Buck O'Neal proudly extolling Negro League baseball, Warren Spahn describing the collapse of the Bridge at Remagen in World War II, and Larry Doby praising his friend and mentor, the legendary promoter Bill Veeck. What joy it was to listen to them.

Frequently, you’ll hear a fan say of an athlete — as I recently heard a co-worker say of Randy Moss — "If he just tried harder, imagine how good he’d be." Perhaps that’s true, but consider how less often we hear people say of David Eckstein, "If he were just bigger and stronger and faster and better, imagine how good he’d be." Because we view all those things as involuntary, it never occurs to us that Eckstein is expressly lacking those traits. Furthermore, it’s possible that Randy Moss is great because of his approach to the game. Likewise, Hanley Ramirez: perhaps the same impulse that led him to jog after the ball in left field — whatever quality that is — is also something that’s aided his excellence in some other way.

You might see how quickly this could become a racial issue for some — and it’s a concern raised both by Rob Iracane of Walkoff Walk and Junior of Fire Joe Morgan, whose respective thoughts on the matter I endorse.

Discuss. (I can't help it.)

My question is why sports figures are not taking steps to generate tax- favored income by bargaining to get ownership interests in their teams. Imagine how much better off old timers like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris would have been if they had been able to obtain even tiny shares of the Yankees franchise in 1961. In today's context, it is true enough that the tax rate on capital gains income may soon rise to 20%—but that's still far below the rates levied on top income earners

Team #Gms Attend(09) 09Avg #Gms Attend(10) 10Avg DiffDif
Per %(+/-)
Twins 81 2,362,149 29,162 81 3,223,640 39,798 861,491 10,636 36.47%
Reds 81 1,747,919 21,579 81 2,060,550 25,439 312,631 3,860 17.89%
Rangers 81 2,156,016 26,617 81 2,505,171 30,928 349,155 4,311 16.19%
Rockies 81 2,665,080 32,902 81 2,875,245 35,497 210,165 2,595 7.89%
Giants 81 2,861,111 35,322 81 3,037,443 37,499 176,332 2,177 6.16%
Braves 81 2,373,631 29,304 81 2,510,119 30,989 136,488 1,685 5.75%
Phillies 81 3,647,249 45.027 * 84 3,777,322 44,968 176,629 515 4.91%
Marlins 81 1,464,109 18,075 81 1,524,894 18,826 60,785 750 4.15%
Pirates 81 1,577,853 19,480 81 1,613,399 19,919 35,546 439 2.25%
Yankees 81 3,765,807 46,027 81 3,765,807 46,491 46,449 573 1.25%
Athletics 81 1,408,783 17,392 81 1,418,391 17,511 9,608 119 0.68%
Nationals 81 1,817,280 22,436 81 1,828,066 22,569 10,786 133 0.59%
Angels 81 3,240,386 40,005 81 3,250,814 40,134 10,428 129 0.32%
Red Sox 81 3,062,699 37,811 81 3,046,445 37,610 -16,254 -201 -0.53%
Rays 81 1,874,962 23,148 81 1,864,999 23,025 -9,963 -123 -0.53%
Padres 81 2,154,203 26,595 81 2,131,774 26,318 -22,429 -277 -1.04%
Cardinals 81 3,343,252 41,275 81 3,301,218 40,756 -42,034 -519 -1.26%
Cubs 80 3,168,859 39,611 81 3,062,973 37,814 -105,886 -1,796 -3.34%
D-backs 81 2,129,183 26,286 81 2,056,697 25,391 -72,486 -895 -3.40%
White Sox 81 2,284,163 28,200 81 2,194,378 27,091 -89,785 -1,108 -3.93%
Tigers 81 2,567,192 31,694 81 2,461,237 30,386 -105,955 -1,308 -4.13%
Mariners 81 2,195,128 27,100 81 2,085,630 25,749 -109,498 -1,352 -4.99%
Dodgers 81 3,761,669 46,440 81 3,562,320 43,979 -199,349 -2,461 -5.30%
Astros 81 2,521,081 31,124 81 2,331,490 28,784 -189,591 -2,341 -7.52%
Brewers 81 3,037,451 37,499 81 2,776,531 34,278 -260,920 -3,221 -8.59%
Orioles 81 1,907,163 23,545 81 1,733,019 21,395 -174,144 -2,150 -9.13%
Royals 81 1,799,686 22,218 81 1,615,327 19,942 -184,359 -2,276 -10.24%
Blue Jays 78 1,786,626 22,905 * 78 1,495,482 19,173 -291,144 -3,733 -16.30%
Mets 81 3,154,270 38,942 81 2,559,738 31,602 -594,532 -7,340 -18.85%

White Sox: SS Alexei Ramirez, +4.5 WARP. This might seem a bit of a surprise given Paul Konerko's career year (and Paulie is at +2.8), but the Cuban import has settled in to deliver an excellent second season at shortstop after getting moved across the bag in 2009, which shows up in WARP as well as in a variety of defensive metrics. Add in his getting some of his power back, and you've got a much better player.

Forty years ago, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates raised the degree of difficulty to new, well, heights. He threw a no-hitter with Richard M. Nixon calling balls and strikes and Jimi Hendrix, wielding a Fender Stratocaster instead of a Louisville Slugger, digging in at home plate. Or at least that is what he thought while pitching under the influence of LSD.
Ellis walked eight and hit a batter but beat the Padres, 2-0, before 9,303 fans who turned up at San Diego Stadium on June 12, 1970, for the opener of a doubleheader.

(I post this only because I saw Buddy Guy last night in Daytona Beach chanelling Hendrix, and the no-no story has been referenced on this site numerous times. Fantastic.)

Dick Allen, 1972 and 1964: Allen is the one non-Hall of Famer who I think had TWO all-time great seasons — both so great that it’s hard to choose which was better. WAR says 1972 was better — he hit .308/.420/.603 with a league-leading 37 homers and 113 RBIs. Win Shares says 1964 was better — that was his rookie season and he hit .318/.382/.557 with a league-leading 13 triples and 125 runs scored. He also played 162 games at third base that year, and even though he made 41 errors, he still offered some positional value. Allen had three other 30-plus Win Shares seasons… many people believe he belongs in the Hall.

DeWayne Wise, your run is over. The reigning unbelievable wall leap of the moment goes to Hiroshima Toyo Carp's Masato Akamatsu, who turned in this unbelievable Spider-Man impression while robbing Yokohoma's Shuichi Murata of a home run on Tuesday night.

Absolut horseshit. The announcers weren't even that excited.