Another Reason to Pay Attention to the Detroit Tigers

I've been saying the Detroit Tigers are a special baseball team and worth watching on so many levels, as first evidenced by the way they interacted with their fans after beating the Yankees to go to the World Series last year. (one of my all time top 5 moments in baseball I've seen) Here's another reason to watch and cheer for the Tigers. Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez. Sure, as a Rangers fan, I am biased towards Pudge and I've always thought he was great. But he is great. He's gone from being an athletic superstar in his younger playing years to now a seasoned game caller and a pitching mentor. Here are some stats I got out of Baseball Weekly on Pudge.

• Pudge is 1st all-time among catchers with Gold Gloves (12). That's 12 Gold Glove awards in 16 seasons. He's tied for 5th all-time among any position with Gold Gloves.
• Pudge is 4th all-time among catchers in games caught with 1,995, and he'll probably make 3rd place late this season or early next.
• Pudge is 7th all-time in home runs at catcher with 277.
• Pudge's lifetime batting average is .303 with 1161 RBIs.
• Pudge has been to the playoffs with every team he's played for including winning the World Series in his one year with the Marlins.

King James Version

Another great article in today's Wall Street Journal... An interview with Bill James. CULTURAL CONVERSATION The Boston Red Sox's Sultan of Statistical Analysis By DAN ACKMAN June 20, 2007; Page D7 Boston After 25 years on the outside, Bill James was invited to take a seat at the center of the baseball universe. Since Mr. James, the statistical oracle and author of the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, was hired by the Boston Red Sox in 2002, the team has broken the Curse of the Bambino, won the World Series and is currently tearing up the American League. As Mr. James, raised on the Kansas City Athletics, is a Yankee-hater from way back, he might be expected to take even more pleasure in the New York team's faltering start to the season. But sitting in a restaurant a long fly ball from his bare office in Fenway Park, Mr. James refuses to revel. "Who was it who wrote the book 'They Only Look Dead'?" Mr. James asks. He also refuses to take credit for the Red Sox rise. "Nothing I do leads directly to consequence, and if it did I wouldn't tell you," Mr. James says. Indirectly, it's a different story. Starting in 1977 with his first Baseball Abstract, Mr. James transformed a century's worth of conventional wisdom and forever altered the way ballplayers are judged. Applying the scientific method to the game, he and a band of amateur analysts who Mr. James termed sabermetricians (for the Society for American Baseball Research) attempted to answer through objective statistical analysis what factors led to scoring runs and winning games -- and which players contributed most to those goals. Mr. James, for instance, has long held that the ability to get on base was underrated and that the sacrifice bunt was overrated. After gaining a wide following among fans, his work started to influence at least a few baseball general managers, a process chronicled in "Moneyball," the 2003 best seller by Michael Lewis about the Oakland Athletics and General Manager Billy Beane. Now, more than 20 books of his own later, Mr. James has a desk in Fenway Park and a title, senior baseball operations adviser. So what does he do for the team? "I see it as being my job to ensure as much as I can that we act on the basis of actual evidence." Of course, if it weren't for hope and blind faith, interest in the Red Sox might have dried up years ago. As it is, the team, with its current eight-game lead over the Yankees, has never been more popular, and Fenway is sold out almost every night. As for the Curse of the Bambino, Mr. James says: "I didn't even believe in it before." Mr. James, a rationalist in a church of red-blooded true believers, takes the long view: "In any given season there is an immense amount of luck in who wins the division, even if it's a lopsided race," he says. "People are made very uncomfortable by the notion that our lives are random, but there are huge random parts in everything that happens. It's uncomfortable because it's our job to drive the randomness out and make the system work." Since Mr. James was hired by Red Sox owner John Henry in 2002, the team has yet to win the division. It did, however, win the World Series in 2004, beating the Yankees in seven games to win the pennant. A year earlier, the Sox lost to the Yankees in seven games. Two years later they had fallen to third place in the American League East. What accounts for this year's dominance? "We think we have a good organization, and we thought we had a good organization last August when we couldn't win a game to save our soul," Mr. James says. With "Moneyball," Mr. James's style of analysis has become associated with relatively poor teams. The Red Sox, however, are one of the richest. "There is a certain backwardness to it, yes," he concedes. But he adds that Boston is "committed to the challenge to figuring out the best way to do things. Nobody in the organization is traditional." That would include Mr. James, who started writing his Abstracts while working as a night watchman at a pork-and-beans factory in Lawrence, Kan. Even as his fame grew as a writer, Mr. James says he never imagined working in baseball management. Unlike Theo Epstein, who interned for major-league clubs in college and was hired as the Red Sox general manager at age 28, Mr. James says he was never the type to put together a résumé and go find a job. Even today he allows that "there are very good reasons why Theo is the GM and I am not." Now age 57, Mr. James says he does better working in an organization than he suspected. Still, even after moving to Boston two years ago, he spends a lot of time alone. "A lot of my friends think that I don't like people. The reality is I do like people -- I just need time to myself to work. So I tend to turn off my cellphone," he says. With the success of the Athletics and of "Moneyball," baseball analysts like Mr. James were given more credit for helping teams draft and trade players more intelligently. In 2006, Time magazine named Mr. James one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Inexplicably, Time dropped him from this year's list even as the Red Sox moved from third place to first. Go figure. Mr. James is known for claiming that some statistics (such as runs batted in) are less important than was commonly believed, while others (like on-base percentage) are more important. Both are now conventional wisdom. Is there some wrongheadedness still in vogue? "I do have an answer, but I can't tell you what it is. . . . I do think we know at least some small things that not everybody in the world knows." Even if the analytical tools he helped create are now widely employed, Mr. James says that just as some teams stay richer, others can stay smarter. "In reality, knowledge is a very dynamic universe -- and what is most valuable is not the body of knowledge, but the leading edge of it." Mr. James does allow that "when a team has resources, there is a powerful tendency to solve problems by spending money. It is less attractive to experiment." The Yankees' recent signing of pitcher Roger Clemens for $28 million a season is "probably" an illustration of the idea, he says. "I have a lot of oddball ideas. I always have," Mr. James says, even if some of his ideas once considered odd are now popular. His theory on baseball and steroids may or may not be odd, but it is certainly not in vogue. "I don't know," he says, when asked if steroids account for the surge in home runs in the late 1990s. "Speaking globally . . . the reality is that there are many changes in the game which could cause batting numbers to jump. And no one really knows to what extent the increase is a consequence of steroids. I strongly suspect that the influence of steroids on hitting numbers is greatly overstated by the public." Other factors include ballpark dimensions and bat design. "I've never understood why nobody writes about it, but the bats are very different now than they were 20 years ago," Mr. James says, with different woods and finishes. "[Barry] Bonds's bats are still different from everybody else's," he notes. "People think they understand how to win in baseball much more than they really do," Mr. James says. This is true of the statisticians as much as it is of traditional scouts. While "Moneyball" treats scouts and analysts as at odds, Mr. James says he learns from the scouts all the time. "The scouts see a lot of things that I can't see. And some of the things they see I have learned to see. But some of the things they see I can't see at all. And I'm not suggesting it's not real, it's just that I can't see it," he says. "There is no reason for there to be a conflict. The conflict exists only when people think they know more than they do." After a lifetime of studying the game, Mr. James reckons he still has plenty to learn. The internationalization of the game is one source of new wisdom, he says. "One of the great things about the Cubans and the Japanese is that they develop their own traditions and a lot of the things we think they know they don't necessarily buy into. Incorporating those other traditions is a source of wealth for baseball, and if we're smart, we'll do more of it." Ichiro Suzuki, the Seattle Mariners centerfielder and perennial hits leader, is one example. "He's a great player while violating 48 rules about how everybody is taught to hit," Mr. James says. Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, the wily Cuban-born New York Mets pitcher, is another case in point. "We have a set pitching pattern, and then you get a guy like El Duque doing everything wrong and he beats you. It's a wonderful object lesson for all of us." Mr. Ackman writes for the Journal about sports, culture and law.

No Hitter

People ask me sometimes why I get the MLB season package on Direct TV every year. At the time I can never really give a good answer. However, tonight is why I get the MLB package. Justin Verlander pitched a 12 strikeout, no hitter against the Milwaukee Brewers with a 4-0 victory tonight in front of more than 30,000 rabid Detroit Tigers fans at Comerica Park. It was the first time a Tigers pitcher has thrown a no hit game in 23 years. (Jack Morris did it last on 04/07/1984). Just like last year's Tigers, this is a fun team to watch and they look to be headed for another special season. I only caught the 9th inning but I wouldn't have even turned on the television had I not known Verlander was pitching and finding that interesting after watching him dominate the Rangers in person last week. But I'm glad I did turn it on and I watched a dominating pitcher in really what is only his 2nd full season in the major leagues. With a nasty curveball, a high 90s fastball and throwing 73 strikes in 112 pitches, this was an awesome performance by a great young pitcher on an exciting team!

The Economics of Ballparks

A great read combining some of my favorite subjects....baseball, The Wall Street Journal, economics, and politics.

A New Ballgame Sports stadium don't have to drag down the local economy. As long as they're done right. By THADDEUS HERRICKJune 11, 2007; Page R12

San Diego -- Local boosters have long pitched new stadiums for professional sports teams as economic-development tools, even while academic research shows they are nothing of the sort. The overwhelming evidence is that sports venues put a drag on local economies by eroding spending on other activities and boosting municipal costs.

Sow how to explain San Diego's Petco Park, a $454 million project that included $301 million in public money? Since the new home of Major League Baseball's San Diego Padres opened in this city's downtown in 2004, completed development within a 60-block area around the ballpark has topped $1 billion, according to the Centre City Development Corp., a public nonprofit group leading San Diego's downtown redevelopment effort. That figure includes 3,040 residential units, 750 hotel rooms and 550,000 square feet of commercial space. Another $3.1 billion in residential and commercial development is either planned or under way. "When they built the ballpark, things exploded," says Jerry Sanders, San Diego's mayor since 2005. The key, it appears, is that instead of simply building a stadium and hoping for investment to follow, the city of San Diego and the Padres undertook a more ambitious plan to transform a languishing industrial neighborhood known as East Village. That included the unusual -- and sometimes controversial -- arrangement of Padres owner John Moores acting as a master developer of some 26 blocks around the stadium through his firm, JMI Realty Inc. The project faced more than a dozen lawsuits, many of them from opponents of its public funding, all of them eventually dismissed. "We took a broader urban-planning perspective," says Erik Judson, who oversaw Petco's construction as the Padres' vice president of development. "Our intent was to create more than a ballpark." Even though it is only a few years old, Petco already feels like part of the fabric of downtown San Diego. The stadium is tucked into the southwest corner of East Village, an iconic building of sandstone and steel that has views of San Diego Bay to the west and Balboa Park to the north. The surrounding neighborhood is dotted with contemporary midrise residential towers and renovated historic structures. On game nights, crowds mill about the streets, some paying $5 to watch the Padres play from a grassy three-acre park overlooking centerfield or ducking into hip, spacious eateries for pizza and beer. "The stadium creates a sort of bustle," says Hallie Smith, a 31-year-old speech pathologist who paid $369,000 several years ago for her East Village condominium. To be sure, other publicly financed stadiums have succeeded in helping to generate economic activity. Coors Field in Denver, home of the Colorado Rockies, is widely seen as having helped spark the residential and commercial revitalization of the city's Lower Downtown, or LoDo, neighborhood. And the Baltimore Orioles' Oriole Park at Camden Yards helped transform the city's Inner Harbor into a vibrant mix of hotel, retail and office space. The project was such a hit that the Maryland Stadium Authority added M&T Bank Stadium for the National Football League's Baltimore Ravens. HOME RUN Petco Park helped to speed up San Diego's development. More Than a Ballpark In both cases, as in San Diego, success depended on doing more than just building a ballpark. The area around Coors Field benefited from historic preservation and guidelines encouraging residential development, while Camden Yards was part of a broader effort that sought to create a sense of place. But more typical is Houston's Minute Maid Park, the home of the Houston Astros, which opened in 2000 as Enron Field amid high hopes for downtown revitalization. Today the stadium is surrounded mostly by asphalt parking lots, and a cluster of turn-of-the-century buildings several blocks from the ballpark are wanting for tenants. "A ballpark by itself is not likely to spur other development," says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. "It hasn't done it. It won't do it." In "The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities," published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2000, Mr. Zimbalist and John Sigfried of Vanderbilt University cite several studies that show no statistically significant positive correlation between stadium construction and economic development, including one by sports economist Robert Baade, a professor at Lake Forest College in suburban Chicago, that found "no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four premier professional sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not." Mr. Zimbalist allows that a professional sports team can create a better quality of life in cities by helping to foster an urban identity and providing a shared experience. But he says money spent watching professional sports detracts from spending in other areas, such as other forms of entertainment, while professional sports venues increase costs for cities in areas such as security, sanitation and debt service. Such research raises questions about how much credit Petco deserves as a generator of economic development. Indeed, downtown redevelopment was well under way before the ballpark was built and San Diego was enjoying an extraordinary economic boom, resulting in downtown housing prices rising more than 75% between 2001 and 2005, to $603 a square foot from $343 a square foot. Would the transformation of East Village from low-density warehouse district to hopping urban village have happened regardless? "Over time, the area would have developed," says Gary London, president of London Group Realty Advisors Inc., a San Diego consulting firm. "But the ballpark speeded up the time frame, probably by a decade." City officials viewed the ballpark as a key anchor in their efforts to redevelop downtown, some 1,500 acres between San Diego Bay and Interstate 5. They figured a stadium could do for the 350-acre East Village what Horton Plaza, a major open-air shopping mall, has done for downtown's Gaslamp Quarter, a once hard-luck district that is now full of restaurants, bars and boutiques. Together, they argued, the two adjacent districts could create a 24-hour downtown. The ballpark measure San Diego voters passed in 1998 by about 60% allowed the city to acquire some 26 blocks, some of it through eminent domain. It also required Mr. Moores's JMI Realty to take the lead in planning and developing the area around the stadium, including two hotels, two parking garages and the renovation of two historic buildings. This arrangement allowed the Padres to create a funding source for the city through a levy on hotel rooms and increased property taxes. Still a Risk Still, the project faced considerable hurdles. It was dogged by opponents of publicly financed sports facilities, including one former city council member who filed about half the lawsuits against the stadium. In 2000, with litigation putting the financing plan in jeopardy, the Padres suspended construction of the project. Mr. Moores, meanwhile, was caught up in a scandal when a San Diego city council member resigned after she admitted accepting gifts from the Padres owner in the midst of a vote on the project, including air travel. An investigation cleared Mr. Moores of any wrongdoing. Construction resumed in 2002, but by that time the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had discouraged investment in the ballpark area. Mr. Moores had counted on a number of partners, but most backed off amid the recession. The Padres owner barely managed to get financing for a key project, the 511-room Omni San Diego Hotel, which includes 38 luxury condominiums and direct access to Petco via a pedestrian skybridge. Today he has invested some $695 million in hotel and residential projects. Downtown San Diego still presents some risk for investors. Much of the development around the ballpark was intended to be office space, but as the office market slowed, developers undertook residential projects. Now the softening condominium market has left East Village with considerable inventory. Yet Mr. Moores continues to build. In his pipeline is the $1.4 billion Ballpark Village, a mixed-use development with 3.2 million square feet located on 7.1 acres of what is now two parking lots. Meanwhile, Mr. Moores is trying to adapt the Petco model to other communities through JMI Sports LLC. In the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear, Ariz., Mr. Judson, principal of the firm, is working on a plan with local officials to transform a 240-acre cotton field into a $75 million, 10,000-seat spring-training stadium for the Cleveland Indians surrounded by an urban village. The strategy of including surrounding development in stadium plans is increasingly winning favor among developers, but the scale of such projects and mix of uses can make them difficult to pull off. Still, flush with success in San Diego, Mr. Judson is undeterred. "This is absolutely about trying to integrate development of stadiums and downtowns," says Mr. Judson. "We intend to get something done." --Mr. Herrick is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Houston bureau. Write to Thaddeus Herrick at thaddeus.herrick@wsj.com URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118114569911326558.html

The Changing Face of Journalism

I love the daily newspaper. For as long as I can remember, I've been reading the newspaper. My father taught me the importance of this when I was younger....Understanding your world, your community, becoming educated. I grew up reading Dave Campbell in the Sports pages of The Waco Tribune Herald. I learned what great reporting and great writing was. I still truly believe that a daily newspaper is one of the most educational and important tools we have. And yet we take it for granted. Because we live in a free marketplace with free speech, we don't truly understand what it is like for a government to determine what we can and cannot read...the news that is fit for us to see. In this country we have multiple media outlets and news sources, and that most often allows us to see more than one side of the story. Today I read two newspapers a day regularly, The Wall Street Journal and The Dallas Morning News. I often also read The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Orleans Time Picayune, The Economist, Baseball Weekly, and Slate. Media is changing though and along with it the newspaper seems to be dying a slow death. Bloggers now are taking more of your traditional newspaper reading cicurl I remember when The Dallas Time Herald folded into The Dallas Morning News. I remember when Gannett and Knight Ridder started buying up all the newspapers. I remember when The New York Times used to have standards of impeccable journalism before Jayson Blair started making up stories. And now, it seems one of the greatest newspapers of all time, The Wall Street Journal, may be entering a new chapter, not necessarily for the better. Media baron Rupert Murdoch has offered an extremely generous premium on the price of Dow Jones stock (parent company and publisher of The Journal). The offer is about $6billion. Currently, a majority of Dow Jones shares are held by the Bancroft family, whose ancestors founded the newspaper. The unique thing about the Bancroft family is that they are truly "hands off" on the editorial content of The Journal and unlike many media companies including News Corp., they do not try and influence the content of their publications. This allows for The Wall Street Journal to provide unique reporting focused on business markets and the global impact of business and politics on our lives. As reported today in The Opinion pages of today's Journal, William Grimes editorialized in 1951 that the newspaper's philosophy was "we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road. Our comments and interpretations are made from a definite point of view. We believe in the individual, in his wisdom and his decency. We oppose all infringements on his individual rights, whether they stem from attempts at private monopoly, labor union monopoly or from an overgrowing government. People will say we are conservative or even reactionary. We are not much interested in labels but if we were to choose one, we would say we are radical. The editorial in today's people goes onto to say their worldview hasn't changed since then and that it "still sounds pretty good to us." This unique philosophy in the individual and individual rights has won The Journal the most influential and affluent readership of any periodic publication worldwide that I am aware of. I've read editorials from Vladimir Putin and Rudy Guiliani in these pages. I've read interviews with everyone from Boone Pickens to Alan Greenspan. This is a newspaper that has never endorsed a Presidential candidate, but instead endorsed policies and ideas. Despite its well-known philosophy that often aligns with conservatives, this newspaper only today called President Bush's Administration marked with "cowardice" and "incompetence" in regards to Scooter Libby and the Valerie Plame CIA Leak affair. They've also often praised his Aministration for other works and policies. I know of no other newspaper anywhere that stands singularly for ideas in this way and is not afraid to deliver news and opinions based solely on their ideas and not the political party or persons of their liking or disliking. That's why it would be a great shame if Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. does buy The Wall Street Journal and slowly errodes the journalistic independence of this newspaper in the name of business. I don't fault Rupert Murdoch for buying the paper or trying to make money. That's his bottom line business. I only hope that if he or anyone else does buy The Journal, that it remains as it is. And that is profitable, and profitable with integrity.