Quick World Series Beard-Off, Now!

I was just going to post closeups of all the ill beards in this World Series but then I got a lil brazy. And if players are gonna keep it au currant with fashionable beards that would blend right in on Bedford Ave, why aren't they going back to 80's skinny baseball pants?

old man gray beard

dirty sexy crazy love 'stache

coming up small gettin overpaid by the yanks beard

ill chin strap beard

ace beard

Shook Santa Claus Beard

Boring Beard

Adrian Beltre Game 5 Homer aka Somewhere in those Three and a Half Hours is a Great Two Hour Baseball Game

Why Watch the World Series?

Is a sport still major if no one watches it?

Why Ratings are Relevant:

Ratings for the just-concluded ALCS (4.4) and NLCS (2.9) were abysmal. Sunday's dreary Vikings-Bears match-up on Sunday Night Football drew a 6.6. The pre-game drew a 5.3. Forget football, the NBA Eastern Conference Final this past Spring between the Heat and the Bulls averaged a 6.2  The ALCS and NLCS numbers are even behind the Stanley Cup Finals. The numbers are trending down toward MLS Cup levels.  

It's not about small-market versus big-market. After all, last year's World Series between the fifth-largest market, Dallas, and the sixth-largest market, San Francisco, tied for the lowest rated Series ever. 

Now, in our modern sports culture, plenty of people absorb and follow sports without ever watching a minute of actual game action, which speaks to just how sick a hobby following sports is. (Imagine meeting a metalhead who says "Me? Oh no, I don't pump Maiden, I just read Metal Circus." or a cinephile who says, "Oh, I never go to the movies but I play box office fantasy and read Entertainment Weekly and Sight and Sound.")  But tv ratings are important because it means the vast majority of people do not want to see baseball actually being played. And while I don't suggest that baseball will disappear, it can continue to become more irrelevant in this country.

How much less fun would baseball be to follow without being able to share it with our fellow fans? How many of us are planning to get together to watch the World Series together? Compare that amount with the throngs filling the bars on Saturdays and Sundays (including those arising very early on those mornings to watch soccer). And if fewer people watch will fewer people in this country play? Where would the game be today without the 30% of players that come from abroad? 

High Attendance is a False Sign of Life:

Major League Baseball argues, through attendance figures, that the sport's never been healthier. 

Attendance is a terrible way to track baseball's health. People will always want to sit outside on a sunny day to inhale hot dogs and guzzle beers. The very existence of the minor leagues is a testament to the appeal of getting drunk under the sun. No one filling the Brooklyn Cyclones' ballpark is there for the baseball, well, except for the solo Bellevue escapees with yellow AM/FM walkmen, enormous 1980s eyeglasses, and greasy WFAN giveaway sweatshirts. All the new ballparks, for all their talk of optimum viewing angles are really designed to maximize our consumption while limiting our viewing of the game. "Listen, I'm gonna go grab some garlic fries, a donutburger, I'll be back in five innings."  Fuck you, Feed Me. 

Think of the way bars have evolved. When I was coming up in the booze game there were many old-man bars. Dark places where you could while away the daylight in boozy silence. Now, every bar has to have amusements, shuffleboard, fusball, trivia, beer pong for chrissakes. Even the old-man bars now have to have flatscreen tvs wallpapering the joint. You can't look deeply into the bottom of your pint without being distracted by the roast highlights on the eigth showing of SportsCenter. Shea was beautiful because there was little to do but watch the game. That era has passed, and it's largely for the sport's betterment because teams would be bankrupt if, like football, it had to rely on tv money. 

TV money is king, and without decent tv numbers we can genuinely be concerned about the long term health of the big leagues. Look at college sports, where perfectly healthy basketball leagues like the ACC and the Big East are being dominated by their football teams because despite the crappiness of the football in those two conferences, the football money dwarfs the basketball bucks. 

The Playoffs Insult Common Sense and Two Solutions:

So why watch this year's World Series on TV? There are two compelling reasons not to, one is the game's length the other is the format. A lot of attention in recent years has been on the late start time, so baseball moved first pitch up to 8:05. It doesn't matter when it starts, it matters when it ends. A friend of mine has a great quote, "basketball is about tempo while baseball is about tension." But there needs to be a baseline rhythm to the game, a rhythm that is sorely lacking in today's game. The biggest difference between watching a game today and one from 20 or 30 years ago is the stepping-out-of-the-box after every pitch.

This is easily solved by limiting the pitcher to one time off the rubber during an at-bat and limiting the batter to one time-out during an at-bat. Or leaving the matter entirely up to the umpire who would only be allowed to grant the batter a time-out after a brushback or near-beaning. This one rule change could shave 30-40 minutes from the game without changing how the game is played. This rule change will never happen, however, because it is to the owners' advantage to have long games because it means more time for the home fans to eat hot dogs. Short cheese, it's always the short cheese over long. 

The second problem is the postseason format. Baseball, for decades, had the most meritorious postseason format. Win your league, and advance directly to the World Series. Then in 1969 we got a League Championship Series and divisional play in 1995. 

The small divisions mean most fans don't follow teams in other divisions which means come playoff-time few teams have national followings. Moreover, the structure is fundamentally unfair in that an AL West team must only beat out three teams for a playoff spot while an AL Central team must beat out five. Worst of all, in many seasons, a non-playoff team finishes with a better record than a playoff team which happens to win a weak division. 

2008 is one example of many, the Mets, Marlins, Astros and Cardinals all finished with records as good or better than the N.L. West Champion L.A. Dodgers. Toronto would be a contender in almost any other division or in a bigger division format that awarded playoff berths on wins. Baseball once rewarded teams based on wins, now it rewards them based on geography. 

So if the postseason is not a meritocracy baseball may as well make arbitrary changes to force excitement. Changing every series to 5-on-5 would reward flukier teams (so what? The wild-card Cards, who finished six games behind the Rangers were rewarded with home-field) but it would make each game super-tense and would greatly increase the chance of a do-or-die Game 5. 

The two most popular postseason tournaments in American sports are the NFL playoffs and March Madness, which are both single-elimination. The last World Series Game 7 was in 2002. Baseball can't afford to have long gaps between Game 7s. Look at how Horse Racing has suffered in its Triple Crown drought. Plus, making each round best-of-5 could help competitive imbalance by making it easier for cheaper teams to compete. Teams like the Yankees and Red Sox have extraordinary depth. But in a best-of-5 system, teams could get by with less. 

Would it mean that the best team would not advance? Without a doubt, but that's the system we have now anyway. 

Are these ideas extreme? I don't think so. But in an era of ratings that approach hockey levels, the status quo is simply not good enough. 

Clever

via uniwatch

I Just Looked Up Smug in the Dictionary. And Wikitionary.

Mike "Big Fucking Pelf" Pelfrey Has Been Pitching, Poorly, for the New York Mets Since 2006

Career

49

50

4.35

459

1.44

Career

49

50

4.35

459

1.44

I realize Pelf had little to do with the outcome of this one, but still.

An Important Met Memorandum from the Desk of Fred Coupon: Jason "Baynilla" Bay Easily Trumps Bobby "I'll Show You the Bronx" Bonilla as the Worst Mets Free-Agent Signing of All Time

It's not even close really. Bobby Bo, for all his off-the-field crap, wasn't that terrible. Of course, if the Mets hadn't signed Bonilla, they coulda maybe been in the market for Barry Bonds, but whatevs. Keep a keen eye on tonight's Met broadcast to see Freddy Coups waving the awesome sign above in the stands.

Who Was The Shittiest Mets Closer of Them All?

I was always a little partial cuz of our shared name.

What if we implanted the desire to blow a close game....in his dreams???

I didn't make this one, but I found and decided I couldn't do better for a Braden Looper image. He's Peter Criss by the way. And by the way, time may have forgotten that double blown save against Pittsburgh, but I haven't.

quick quiz, a picture of a random Met fan from the upper deck or Met closer and son of Sanitation Worker John Franco?

misunderstood, but not by Paul O'Neill.

UGGGGHHHHH Make it Stop; Derek Jeter Reaches 3,000 Hits, Wade Boggs is like "bro, call me when you crush 64 beers on a cross-country flight"

what, were Bishop Desmond Tutu, Pope Benedict XVI, President Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Bruce Springsteen, Saint Paul O'Neill, Jay-Z, United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, Ed Koch, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not available? Such disrespect!

Das Racist: Biased Umpires Don't Call Strikes Strikes

Freakonomics dudes posit that umpires are hate-hate-hatin. 

Baseball can easily solve this problem by replacing the home plate umpire with dogs with bees in their mouths that shoot tiny lasers that form a strike zone for each batter.

Is it worth 75 cents to see Mike Pelfrey Take the Mound For the Mets at Dodger Stadium?

Well, 70 cents, or could splurge on an 88 cent seat. No thanks. 

The Complete and Utter Absuridty of Left Field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum When it Was Set Up for baseball and the Los Angeles Dodgers

Came across this pic, it's newish so it probably dates from when the Doyers played an exhibition, against the Red Sox methinks, a few years back to commemorate the four years they spent playing at the L.A. Coliseum after they moved from Bucktown, USA. Look at left field! I could see the bizman or edotage or k.w. von Ruffnhuggz hitting a stickball home run outta there.

Lou Gehrig Teaches Us How To Take A Fucking Load Off After a Ballgame

via Uniwatch and the Life Magazine archives

The Superiority of the Soccer System of Promotion and Relegation over our Fixed Franchise System

Column I have up at a site devoted to England's lower leagues about how the league system of promotion and relegation found abroad is more democratic than what we have in place here where franchises can move on a whim. Long story short, if we had the system in place here that's in place in most of the world, the Brooklyn Dodgers would still be in Brooklyn.

Your Predictions for the 2011 New York Mets

For all of 2010's crap, the Mets actually finished with 79 wins, so I figured they can't be as bad as last year, but then you take another look at that rotation, and realize that Reyes will be gone and that Santana won't be back, and, well, I say 75-87.

What say you?

Should the Yankees Trade for Johan Santana?

photoshop credit: Tirico Suave

By Al K. Mza, unable to post directly:

Should the Yankees trade for Johan?

Think about it, Wilpons are broke, he’s due to make 20 mill plus over next three seasons, and Yankees need pitching depth. How about one of the Yankees catcher prospects, plus a minor league/draft pick poopoo platter for getting Santana’s obligation off the Amazins? Brian Cashman has swayed away from these mega signings in the last few years, but what if Johan comes back healthy and CC opts out at the end of this season? At the very least it would make Suzyn Waldman go insane. This isn’t a crazy idea is it?

Joel Sherman is a Genius

There's no doubt that every non-NFL league could do with some contraction. It's not that there is not enough talent to stock all these basketball, baseball and hockey teams, it's that there are too many teams for fans to follow. In the NFL, it doesn't matter if your team doesn't make the playoffs or gets knocked out early, fans will watch football regardless of whether their team is in it. Not so for the other three sports. A Dodger fan may not watch a Phillies-Reds NLCS, for example.

These sports need teams in nationally televised playoff games that the casual fan will care about. Too often, expansion teams are in markets that can't support themselves let alone get a fan from another city interested in. When a teams like the Arizona Diamondbacks or Carolina Hurricanes or Orlando Magic make it to championship series, casual fans don't care. If those teams didn't exist, then there's a better chance that franchises from cities that casual fans do care about will appear in the big games.

Joel Sherman, in today's Post, has an great idea for how to achieve baseball contraction. He proposes that the Oakland A's and Tampa Rays get shut down, and then have A's owner Lew Wolff take over the financially troubled L.A. Dodgers and have Rays owner Stu Sternberg take over the Mets. It's worth a read and worth consideration. No casual fan would blink if the A's and Rays were to go away.

Poo-Poo Platter: Super Intense Winnipeg Goldeyes Logo and Phucked Phillies Phainting

Via the always-amazing Uniwatch:
"The logo features a muscular Goldeye fish wearing a red jersey and red baseball cap. He has a menacing facial expression, while gripping a gold bat." 4-rlz.
------
This creepy mural of all-time Phillie greats comes from an obsessive site dedicated to getting Dick Allen in the Hall of Fame:

The New York Mets 2011 Season Marketing Slogan: So After the Laughter I Guess Comes the Tearz

The Mets put out a bummer of a survey last week.
Followed by an even sadder commercial. The rap response: After the laughter, comes tearz. The rock response: Sad But True.

For All The Schtee In the World (Randoms From the Vault)

A very metal photo.

Impressive, if not overly accurate.

 

There's a lot wrong with this picture, the least of which is the pink towel. 

 The O.G. Genesis of Smoovy Suav/Suavy Smoov

And finally, just a happy reminder.