biggentleben

That's the thing, though. It does nothing for the Mets. They own nearly none of their affiliates, so the real beneficiaries of the media circus at his games will be the team owners where he plays, not the Mets. That's another reason I thought a team like the Yankees or Braves made a lot of sense due to the amount of their affiliates that they own and would make money off of with the media circus. You saw this when Bryce Harper was skipped over certain levels that the Nationals didn't own for similar reasons.

Don't you have to ACHIEVE ace status before you can return to it?

Great question, by the way. Boudreau is a great character.

I would guess one of the tough ones would be Tommy Lasorda, who I remember from an interview he managed when Lasorda was pitching. I know for sure you'd have Ted Williams, Enos Slaughter, Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Larry Doby, Billy Williams, Bob Feller, Satchel Paige, Bob Lemon, Joe Gordon, and George Kell. Then himself as he was a player/manager for the Indians. That'd be 12. My great-grandma was a huge Cubs fan, and I remember her talking about the year that he managed the Cubs. They had Don Zimmer, who should be a HOF guy eventually, but he's not in yet.

Tremendously good book. Definitely a biased view, but it's well-sourced and researched to Passan's viewpoint.

Could be worse. The Twins initially went to the Braves and the Braves rejected J.R. Graham for Span.

That's true today. Who knows that may be true for the 2017 draft once the CBA is finalized this winter.

This is hog wash. Complete and utter. The product on the field is bad, but in no way have the Braves ever made a personnel move based on pursuing the #1 pick. They called up their top prospect and traded away a useless vet (one of the worst players in all of baseball by WAR up to that point) to make room for him. A team truly tanking would have held down the top guy for service time BS and let the vet crap the season away. They're actively sending down arms that struggle, not running them out just to take losses. I know that you want to make a point here, but make it accurately, please.

Between this and the closing of Turner likely to draw enough fans to bump the Braves out of the bottom 10 revenue teams....grrrrr

Battle for #1 - Twins and Braves tied, Braves have the tie breaker right now. Bigger deal for me as a Braves fan, per SBJ, Braves are currently sitting 8th-worst in revenue this year, which would qualify them for the competitive balance picks for the first time ever.

Yes. While I appreciate Netflix series, I also find that they often are stuck on their 13 episode format, and there are usually 3-4 throw away episodes that I could just as easily do without. This stretched for sure and could have been an extremely fast-paced 5-6 episode series, but the 8 episodes was a solid format to me.

I enjoyed the entire story line. I also liked that it was short-run so that I wasn't 13 episodes into a season waiting for things to finally work out.

I thought that was just a product of Canadian education

I never said it wasn't. However, he'd be a legit 4+ WAR player right now with his defense and his road numbers.

Which is 100% park factor BS.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNTw3x40I0o[/media]

Thing is that Arenado has been playing other-worldly defense this year. Fangraphs' WAR really kills Arenado for park effects when Bryant plays at a bandbox as well, which I just don't understand. What is crazy to me is this - their numbers are near mirror images of one another in the traditional roto stats and slash line stats, but Bryant has a .344 BABIP while Arenado is actually slightly UNLUCKY compared to his career BABIP this year with a .275. Add in that while they walk at the same rate, Arenado strikes out 10% less than Bryant, and he's to me a far better hitter. He'll have my vote in IBWAA if the election was right now.

I think you guys are selling Arenado short, especially with the national love he's finally getting. It's as if owners didn't realize he existed before last season, but he's been phenomenal this year, and he's getting a lot of mention when national guys are talking about NL MVP.

While the park may be great, the behind the scenes stuff with it is absolutely despicable, so I'm going to struggle with it. Even on the media video tours they've done, I'm not seeing anything that'd ever supplant PNC for me.

The slot money means nothing to the Braves. They were over the allotment anyway, so one slot's value traded away is just that much more tax to pay on what they've already done going over their max.

Not a chance. I'm not worried at all about what the major league team is doing. Of course, I've been writing about the Braves minor leagues for multiple years now, but I've watched maybe 10 major league games of the team this year, including the ones I attended in person at Target Field. They are doing things right at the lower levels to have wave upon wave of pitching and hitting to come for a decade without bringing in anyone else, let alone considering that they'll be getting the top pick next season and will qualify for the competitive balance lottery for the first time ever this year. The scorched earth way of rebuilding seems to bug a lot of people, but when you know that's the purpose, I don't have an issue with it. It's when a team has one foot in and one foot out that it's miserable to be a fan.

I just finished The Jinx on HBO as well. Incredible series, but you can see the difference in approach of both filmmakers.

The first suggestion loses the younger fan who can easily check on their MLB.tv whether a call was right over and over. That's what predicated instant replay in the first place. Your second suggestion is laughable. Football begins games in September with the Super Bowl in February. That's 5 months. Basketball begins in October and ends in June. That's 8 months. Hockey is the same as basketball. Baseball begins in April and ends in October. That's 6 months. If you want to argue that baseball plays too frequently and should hold back to 2-3 games per week like baseball/hockey to have less games and make it more of an event, then fine, but certainly basketball and hockey are much longer than baseball in season length. Football is not all that much different, but it's a different animal altogether. Coverage-wise, football is non-stop, so I find it to be numbing to constantly get updates on a team without much change in content. Baseball has an ebb and flow of its season and offseason, including having the draft within the middle of the season. One of the things that actually attracts younger audiences when you ask is that they have what is really akin to "seasons" of a year within the sport. There are a lot of things that baseball can do to change things, though I do find it interesting that there are so many "what is wrong with baseball" when baseball has the largest market share it's held since the 1994 strike, is experiencing incredible growth in revenue (beyond that of nearly all major sports), and have by far the most-renowned technologically advanced sport by far as far as production and presentation done by the league, led by MLB Advanced Media. The game is actually very, very healthy.

I think you'd be surprised how many people worldwide are disgusted by the way the Olympics are run now. The economic destruction felt once an Olympics leaves is known world-wide.

In all seriousness, I think a lot of the world is beginning to have eyes opened to the terrible-ness that is the Olympic Games. I did not watch anything live intentionally just because I did not want to support what the Olympics have become. The Real Sports special on Rio was incredible. There have been exposes on more mainstream shows like 60 minutes as well that have exposed much of America to the hypocrisy of the IOC and the destruction to local economies and such that the games have produced in their most recent locations. Oddly enough, those silly Canadians were about the most successful in actually making real use of their Olympic space post-Olympics after the Vancouver games.