Professional sports are not my personal choice for entertainment, but I do enjoy the side benefit that it provides steady employment for some consistently entertaining writers. As, for example, Tom Scocca at Slate, in a post subtitled “I Know Why I Cheer for a Birther Moron, But Why Does ESPN Cheer for Him?”
Last week, Amy K. Nelson of ESPN wrote a long profile of Scott, who she identified as “one of baseball’s most complex characters” and someone who “will require a deeper line of thinking.”
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Nope. Luke Scott, as he showed Nelson while roaming around Florida with her during spring training, is a standard-issue ignoramus, whose otherwise unfurnished mental spaces have been filled in with white-exceptionalist superpatriotism, gun-fetish paranoia, and assorted other fantasies and delusions scavenged from the county dump of red-blooded One-Hundred-Percent America….
_
But Amy K. Nelson is interested in his character. Here are the complex-ish parts: he’s a white ballplayer who is friendly with his Latino teammates and speaks fluent Spanish—having grown up poor in Florida. He does charitable works “with no publicity,” except for the publicity that comes from letting that fact be known to a reporter profiling him for the biggest sports-media outlet in the country. And…well, no, that’s it. He has nice manners.
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Did I mention he hits baseballs hard? Being a sports fan, and a baseball fan in particular, means you are emotionally invested in a certain aspect of the lives and successes of people who have been rewarded, with tremendous amounts of money and fame, for doing (and being) what they did (and were) as 14-year-olds…
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Screwing around with guns in front of a national reporter, while a case of manslaughter or worse was hanging over his ballclub, was a piss-poor cognitive decision. Some leagues would find a way to discipline a player reckless and self-centered enough to do that. But Scott seems hell-bent on becoming the Carrie Prejean of baseball, and it won’t do the Orioles any good to help him along the way.
And the inestimable Charles P. Pierce, discussing the same article about the same ballplayer:
Leaving aside the learned disquisitions on constitutional law — “Godly principles”? James Madison just chugged a whole bottle of Madeira in the Beyond. — This Blog was most struck by this passage:
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“Most of Scott’s childhood friends are in prison, he says, or in the military; he would have been a Marine sniper had baseball not panned out. But it did.”
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Wait. Hold on a minute.
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Luke Scott “would’ve been” a Marine sniper, but he got too good at baseball to try out for the job? This Blog calls horse-hockey here. Assuming Scott is marksman enough to make the grade, if he wanted to be a Marine sniper, he would be a Marine sniper. He decided he preferred to play baseball for a living. Period. This Blog is not aware of any rule in the Corps reading to the effect that: “An applicant shall be denied entry to the Corps, and shall not be considered for specialized duty, if said applicant can hit .267 lifetime.”
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The barstools, alas, are full of guys who would’ve joined the military if it wasn’t for etc. etc. etc. And, if you’re going to run a quote like this, you should really get a statement from the Tillman family.
Click through to the links for much more excellence, including talk about actual baseball.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
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When President Obama finds out what the government of the United States has been doing in his name, there’s going to be hell to pay.
.
.
Cacti
“One of baseball’s most complex characters” sounds an awful lot like any old meathead American jock, who used stuff “drama queers” into lockers and snap “band geeks” in the ass with towels in the showers.
arguingwithsignposts
I’m glad for this OT, because I can blogwhore about this great little bit of Will Rogers I just found. We need a Will Rogers today, and a Woody Guthrie too.
Perhaps our austeritarians could listen to the man.
Comrade Javamanphil
I had no idea that starting the 1988 season 0-22 would be a highlight of being an Orioles fan in the last 25 years. Jesus.
gnomedad
A climate writer discusses the value of hippie-punching:
merrinc
Heh. That was quite amusing, Anne Laurie. Thanks for sharing. I chuckled throughout but especially at this:
JCT
@merrinc: And be sure they are loaded and the safety is off — that way it’s much more exciting when your toddler gets ahold of it.
Martin
Had I not dedicated myself to a career in the public sector, I would have been a time-traveling ninja superhero, going forward and back in time to right wrongs stealthily and with poor lip/voice synchronization. Alas, that never happened because I got trapped by this pension and lack of cost of living salary increases. But I bet you guys are vastly more impressed with me now that you know my alternate career for the greater good.
lamh34
Man, I talk mad shit ’bout Sasha Fierce (Beyonce’), but I ain’t mad at her for all that damn dancing in this video, in heels no less!!
this connected to FLOTUS Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative?
OFFICIAL HD Let’s Move! “Move Your Body” Music Video with Beyoncé
I’m tired from looking at the damn video
SST
Pierce’s latest post on the NFL shenanigans is also great. Highlights for Plutocrats is a nickname that should stick for the WSJ.
Sentient Puddle
If anyone here has a PS3, you’ve probably been well aware of the network outages recently. Well, you also need to be re-securing the hell out of anything that might share the same email address right the fuck now, as Sony has said that the network breach was pretty much worst case. And watch those credit cards for the same reason.
This has been a PSA from your local gamer dork.
Little Boots
baseball? this is a game of your people?
Xecky Gilchrist
Is he the same Scocca who used to write Funny Paper?
That was a hoot.
Citizen_X
What kind of idiot stuffs a fucking loaded pistol in the sofa cushions? He’s gonna pull a Plaxico Burress with that shit.
Jebediah
@Martin:
I am quite impressed. It’s rather tragic for all of us that you got trapped in your current career; in my head I am compiling a short list of wrongs you might have righted. The first thing that comes to mind – using your ninja stealth powers, and your ninja powers of not getting grossed out, certain fuckwits’ fathers are suddenly wearing condoms at just the right time…
Elisabeth
Luke Scott is the same fuckhead who thinks it is appropriate to throw banana chips at his Dominican teammate (Pie) and tell him when he’s acting like a “savage.” Douche.
Martin
@Jebediah: Yes, I think quite a lot of good could have come to the world by finding all the douchebags in the world, going back 9 months before they were born and just kicking dad in the junk repeatedly with my ninja skills, and then robbing them blind (which I would give to Planned Parenthood on the off chance that mom really wanted to abort the little shit but couldn’t scavenge up the cash). Scrambles up the nature and the nurture just enough that at worst, we’d have a different flavor of douchebag, and at best a decent human being. Law of statistics should yield a notably better world.
AkaDad
Pro Sports: The business that can legally price-gouge their customers with $20 parking, $7 beer, and $5 hot dogs, so that people who play a game for a living can “earn” multi-million dollar salaries.
On top of that you get to pay for the stadiums with your taxes and have the pleasure of hearing how athletes are being disrespected when management only offers 9 million a year instead of the 14 million they deserve.
Nice racket if you can afford one.
HG Hay
The world has turned day-glo, but not day-glo enough. RIP Miss Poly Styrene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSrOJ1ig6tI&feature=related
Corner Stone
Man, thank FSM Luke is no longer with the Astros. Good job Drayton
The Thin Black Duke
Sigh.
Sports really is the opiate of the masses.
In a world that made sense, Scott would be a) in jail, b) in the army cleaning latrines, c) in a Mickey D’s spitting on the Big Macs, or d) all of the above.
Unfortunately, because Life Ain’t Fair and he can hit baseballs really hard, the majority of the people Scott encounters will a) write him big, big paychecks, b) ask for his autograph, c) laugh at his dumb ugly racist unfunny jokes, or d) all of the above.
By the immortal rules of Jockstrap Culture, Luke Scott is a “role model”.
Sigh. I don’t think those words mean what they think it means.
Linnaeus
Well, as soon as Corey Hart’s off of the DL, I’m dropping Scott from my fantasy team.
Joseph Nobles
“Throwing banana chips at my buddy” isn’t code for anything, is it?
Leah in Tejas
Was Ted Nugent his sperm daddy? This idiocy has to run in families.
Omnes Omnibus
@Joseph Nobles: You could make it be.
soonergrunt
Yup.
Wilson Heath
Jebus, isn’t it obvious enough how he’s overplaying the white hick thing? Florida? Uh huh. Right.
Dude’s a frickin’ Cuban.
Unless he can get the doctor who delivered him, the Mohel who brissed him, and the newspaper staffer who took in his birth announcement to all come forward and verify that his story is real, I’m afraid that there are serious questions about the country of “Luke”‘s birth.
The Thin Black Duke
@AkaDad:
Problem is, the hustle only works if the fan is willing to be hustled. And unfortunately, the majority of fans out there can’t wait to bend over.
I haven’t gone to a sports arena in years because I refuse to get gouged by corporate rip-off artists that are gonna ruthlessly overcharge me on tickets, jerseys, beer, hot dogs and whatever else they can stamp a team logo on.
Ironically enough, although owners and athletes have a long, bitter and adversarial relationship, there’s one thing that they do have in common: they really really don’t like the fans very much.
They’re predators and the fans are cash cows.
opie jeanne
@Elisabeth: He’s hitting just a scratch above the Mendoza line so why would anyone want to listen to anything he has to say.
He should take to heart the comments of Crash Davis: “Oh, hey, and another thing, Meat. You don’t know shit, all right?”
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@gnomedad:
A depressing look at the state of environmentalism and climate change campaigns in this country. It’s almost to the point of unvarnished failure now, as fucking depressing as that is, and way too large a part of it being the absolute slavish contrarianism from conservatives that somehow convinced Independents that the Dems, the environmentalists, et al. were the REAL super psycho partisan intractable ideologues that needed to be suppressed. And now…well, we’re pretty much fucked without a way out now.
TooManyJens
I’m not sure why this isn’t getting as much traction as the Wisconsin recalls are, and I don’t remember seeing it discussed here, but Michigan activists are gearing up for an effort to recall Rick Snyder.
Dream On
When all hope is lost…
our Seattle Mariners will be there.
slag
@The Thin Black Duke: All true.
Amanda in the South Bay
Oh, so yet another right wing tough guy who happens to be both dumb and evil, and who just happens to have less military experience than this transsexual woman who is going to have her testicles removed Friday morning.
Par for the course for today’s conservatism!
New Yorker
Occasionally, you find an intelligent/interesting character in pro sports. C.J. Wilson of the Texas Rangers immediately comes to mind.
But most of them are dumbass jocks. You’re lucky if they’re friendly dumbass jocks. I’m about as interested in Luke Scott’s opinions of the president as I am in Jenny McCarthy’s opinions on austism.
Shut up and start hitting, Luke. You’re fucking up one of my fantasy teams.
opie jeanne
Geez. I went and read the first article, and it’s pretty good. However, I can tell you that The Angels organization wouldn’t put up with Luke Scott for long, they’d bench him until they could trade him just like they did Guillen when they were a week away from getting into the playoffs and Guillen was our Big Bat.
A lot of fans* do not like cheaters on their own team, either, despite Tom Scocca’s apologia for cheering for the idiots on his team. Of course you don’t always know who the bad guys are, duh! but how do you cheer for a cheater, or a totally vile person who happens to play for your team?
*Maybe I should qualify that with the word “knowledgable”.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
hockey-football, some basketball.
i gave up on baseball when the writers and some portion of the fans couldn’t get their heads around the notion that ball players would take any substance they could get their hands on, possibly in very large quantities, if the pay off was in 6 7 8 or 9 figures.
further saddening me, was the insistence that somehow that isn’t how they used to do it. ballplayers may have done it for less back then, in relative terms, but the alternatives sucked far worse. not to mention you had to be white to even play.
then if i get enough drinks in, i begin to speculate whether or not the black sox were only remarkable because they got caught, and wondering if, on a day by day basis, they weren’t augmenting their salaries with any number of betting schemes.
high priced beer and hot dogs and even ticket prices aren’t the result of player salaries, those prices are a result of a marketplace independent entirely from the marketplace for athletic and sports specific skill, talent, and physical characteristics. they are paid that well, because they are amongst the best at what they do, and because they are amongst the best, they are able to influence the outcomes, which means money to a lot of people.
would folks prefer the owners ran the leagues like plantations? paying the best ball players 60k, because look at them, they don’t deserve any more than that. folks don’t realize it, but that is what they are saying. even when it comes to a pure asshole like luke scott apparently is.
FuriousGiorge
@opie jeanne: Almost all of that is a big giant steaming load of crap, basically. The Angels would not bench someone who could OPS 900 (not that Luke Scott can do that consistently, but this is the O’s and what Scott can do is pretty much good enough) for comments they made to a reporter about shit that did not relate in any way to the team. And fans generally either do not give a shit about so-called cheaters who play for their own team, or actively make excuses for them. Because that is what sports fans do.
opie jeanne
@Dream On: Safeco is a really great venue. I like going to games there, and the Mariners fans don’t hassle us too much.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@gnomedad:
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
And the more I follow the link arounds on the whole Nisbet clusterfuck, the misinterpretations abounding and yet how his ‘core message’ is essentially swallowed, the more it becomes clear that we really are irreparably fucked as far as climate and environmental issues. Truthiness prevails, we’re all crazy climate change kooks who really just want to rob the country blind, and nothing is ever going to penetrate that veil of ignorance now that it’s solidified and metastasized. I mean…seriously…he adds in the fucking entire lobbying budget of corps like GE and BP on the Environmentalists side of the campaign spending deal? And yet this is somehow the same kind of ‘brave, new step forward’ in the discussion on this? A scold about how enviros all were super hyper partisan and the only way to to change things is to fucking beg the energy corps to try and be more efficient while they totally fucking rape the fucking earth?
Yeah, I’m so fucking proud to be a fucking American these days. :/
Roger Moore
@Amanda in the South Bay:
And Saturday morning, you’ll still have more balls than Luke Scott.
Roger Moore
@New Yorker:
Doug Glanville is another who springs to mind. He’s the rare athlete who was able to write an interesting book about his sports experience without a ghostwriter. He lacks Jim Brosnan’s literary talent, but he’s a keen observer and well worth reading.
Punchy
Markakis and Adam Jones are sooooo much better than this fuckstain. O’s are habitual doormats b/c their owner is a scumbag cheapskate, but I have to believe having openly racist fuckstains like Scott on the pine cant be good for team chemistry. I’m sure throwing banana chips at a dark-skinned person he calls a savage has no dog-whistle racist overtones whatsoever.
Perhaps it’s past time that one of the Glocks stuffed in his barcalounger misfires through his hammy. Twice.
AkaDad
I didn’t realize plantation workers made 60k a year.
How about rookies earn 100k and add 100k every year until it maxes out at 1 million?
Then add performance incentives and not pay full salaries when they’re injured.
For fucks sakes, these people play a game for a living. When I was a paperboy I was more productive.
Origuy
The thing is, minor-league players don’t get half that. They’re eating McDonalds and staying with fans while hoping for the big break. The MLPA has struck I don’t know how many times, but never tried to raise the minimum salary for minor leaguers.
Roger Moore
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
The best way of pointing out that there’s no connection between salaries and ticket/concessions/parking prices is to consider college sports. Big time college programs still charge a lot for those things even though they aren’t paying their players squat. Why? Because they can, and they aren’t going to turn down the money. High prices enable teams to pay the players a lot, but low salaries wouldn’t prevent the teams from charging as much as they can.
opie jeanne
@AkaDad: Minimum wage in the majors is $400k-ish.
patroclus
He’s only hitting .240 with just 5 rbi’s. I’m not impressed by this latest product out of T. Boone Pickens University.
opie jeanne
@Roger Moore: Thank you. Amen.
I like baseball. No, I love baseball. I have loved baseball since 1957, when I was 7 and my town finally got a major league team.
I’m watching a game right now on my computer, Oakland A’s and Anaheim Angels, and if you want to point to a major villain in baseball regarding prices there is also MLB. That organization has done plenty to drive the prices up.
Bourjos just hit his second triple of the game!
Omnes Omnibus
@Amanda in the South Bay: Congratulations, good luck, best wishes, or whatever the appropriate expression of wishing you well on your journey happens to be.
opie jeanne
@patroclus: I read that he was hitting .217.
The Thin Black Duke
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
Bottom line, although quite a few jocks can be first-class assholes, I respect what they do, because what they’re doing ain’t easy.
Anybody who believes otherwise, I dare them to stand in front of a guy who’s throwing a 98 mile an hour fastball at you. Or stand calmly in a collapsing pocket as a bunch of big strong angry men are trying to tear your head off. Or take a charge from LeBron James.
No, I don’t begrudge professional athletes making big bucks. It only pisses me off when a jockstrap-wearing idiot equates what he’s doing to a working-class hero with three kids making minimum wage.
Besides, as Chris Rock observed, “Shaquille O’Neal might be rich, but the white man signing his checks is wealthy“. Yeah, Shaq is better paid than most, but he’s still working for a living.
And that’s the difference between owners and athletes.
AkaDad
@opie jeanne:
To put that in perspective, it’s more than double what the POTUS makes.
mk3872
I love the coded racism, don’t you?
See, if Scott calls Obama a “dumb n—–“, then he’ll lose his job.
So, instead, just say that the president must be born in Kenya or some place other than this holy bastion of white supremacy, namely, the U.S. of friggin’ A.
Omnes Omnibus
@AkaDad: And how much does Angelina Jolie make per film? How much does a hedge fund manager make? The athlete and the actress are entertainers. They provide something of value to the public. Clearly, there is a market for what they do. Why shouldn’t they get a good chunk of the money? Should the owners keep it? Should there be price controls? the average life expectancy of a pro football player is about age 50 (IIRC). The average career length is about three years.
joeyess
Luke Scott sounds an awful lot like the Ted Nugent of baseball. All talk and no walk. Hit the damn ball and shut your mouth, Scott. The last thing this country needs is another chairborne ranger.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, I get what you are saying, but as someone who isn’t a big sports fan…well, the application of pro-unionism and woot free market has always bothered me when its been applied to pro sports and pop culture celebrities.
Anyways, I’m sure the average life expectancy of a baseball player is much higher than a football player, and I find it hard to sympathize in this recession plagued world with people who make ginormous sums of money.
Roger Moore
@AkaDad:
When you were a paperboy, you delivered papers to at most a couple of hundred people per day. Baseball players provide entertainment for tens of thousands of in-person fans and millions of TV viewers every day. The ~1200 players on MLB rosters provide the core value of a multi-billion dollar industry. I’d much rather that the bulk of that money went to them than to the owners, which is what would happen if you arbitrarily limited their salaries without changing prices, or to ticket scalpers, which is what would happen if you tried to decree lower ticket prices.
@Origuy:
That’s only true of the guys in the low minors. Minor league veterans at AAA make good money, even if it’s still not close to the major league minimum. And even the scrubs in the low minors are still making better money than they would in most jobs straight out of high school. The teams may be practicing false economy- the teams would benefit by making sure their players had good housing and were eating healthy food- but they’re scarcely paying starvation wages.
opie jeanne
@AkaDad: I’m aware of that; I think the POTUS is grossly underpaid.
Do you worry that George Clooney makes more than the POTUS?
Don’t we like to compare the compensation of CEO’s compared to what the average employee of his company is paid, as well as how outrageously that gap has widened in recent years?
I think you have to put pro athletes and their compensation in the same category as any other entertainer, movie star,and recording artist, etc.
There are a few prima donnas in baseball who are grossly overpaid, thanks mainly to the way ESPN and FOX inflate their imaginary value, and thanks to agents like Scott Borass.
Torii Hunter just caught the last out. I’m happy.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Roger Moore:
And even if the guys in the low minors aren’t getting paid a big salary, many of them get nifty signing bonuses.
Martin
@The Thin Black Duke:
Yeah, it’s tough all over. Cops and firefighters, doctors and nurses, construction workers, hell, even little old white collar me has had to deal with someone in my office with a gun and more than a few people that made credible threats against me. Nobody’s job is as hard as a pro athletes.
And in college I was pushing 90 MPH fastballs at people – for fun, and facing the same. I suffered 4 concussions in college and paid for the privilege – and would do it all again in a heartbeat.
Lots and lots of people have challenging jobs. Fine, pay pro athletes 4x what most of us make due to the sport shortening their career by that length and give them the mother of all lifetime health plans to deal with the longterm effects of the game, but let’s not pretend that Kobe’s life is any harder than the guys replacing roofs in Alabama in August. Kobe earns what he does because pro sports is an artificially constrained market relative to the demand, which means that they can rape the living shit out of the fans and because there’s no marginal value for the guy that missed the last slot on the team.
opie jeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you. You and Roger Moore said it better than I did.
The Thin Black Duke
@Omnes Omnibus:
Exactly.
And unlike writers or actors or directors, a football player’s career rarely spans decades. It’s a miracle if his career lasts longer than five years.
For example, Morgan Freeman is still keeping busy. On the other hand, Bo Jackson wasn’t so lucky.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Sports thread? Open thread?
Ryan Giggs scores the first against Schalke 04, making him the oldest goal scorer ever in Champions League play.
Schalke 04 0-2 Manchester United
arguingwithsignposts
@The Thin Black Duke:
Seriously? You’re going to make that argument? Have random baseball/basketball/football player get out and work in a fucking coal mine for a few days and get back to me. Or stand in front of 30-40 elementary school students and educate them and then get back to us with that dumbass argument. Athletes are overpaid. So are the owners. When we start valuing things that are of value, instead of people who keep our minds numbed, then we’ll advance as a society.
kideni
@HG Hay: Oh, Cancer! Up Yours! First Sarah Jane Smith, now Poly Styrene. What ’70s feminist icon are we going to lose next? And by the by, Poly had just put out a new album, which sounds great (free listen here , it’s called Generation Indigo)
AkaDad
A lot of people bitch about CEO salaries. I’m just doing the same with entertainers. If people don’t mind being price-gouged, there’s nothing I can do about it except to remind you that you’re suckers. :D
SST
@arguingwithsignposts: The fact that they’re overpaid doesn’t negate the fact that lots and lots of people try to do sports and can’t do it at the professional level. It’s an uneven comparison to other professions. Teaching is difficult (I imagine, given that I haven’t taught).
But if you put me in a classroom, I could make an attempt to teach. If it went badly, the results would still be less obvious than if you or anyone else here played pro sports. Believe me, you (and
millionsbillions of other people) would fail far more quickly and noticeably trying to return a 140 mph serve than would that number of people in a classroom or a coal mine.FWIW, I agree that athletes are overcompensated, at least relative to the rest of society. But that $ is coming from billionaires, at least in baseball, football and basketball. And hundreds of millions of people can’t play pro sports b/c they aren’t good enough.
Snayke
I can’t stand CPP, but otherwise he makes a very good point here.
MikeJ
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I will never get used to that Mancunian accent.
amk
Way too much money is floating around ballgames, man. Way too much. No wonder fuckwads with too much money are considered as life gurus. Bring back the gladiators. At least, they will be fucking dead at the end of the game.
PeakVT
There are lots of jobs where people work hard, but the work isn’t miserable, soul-grinding work. Professional athletes clearly have the former type of job.
Joel
pet peeve: the word “utilize”.
hate it with a passion.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@MikeJ:
I’ve got no problem with their accents. Now some of the Scots accents…It took me a while listening to Celtic games on Sirius to pick up what they were saying…And Sir Alex’s accent, wherever in Scotland that’s from…Fuck me! Two or three views of video clips to figure him out.
Snayke
When we start valuing things that are of value, instead of people who keep our minds numbed, then we’ll advance as a society.
Oh, horseshit. Entertainment is now keeping our minds numbed? We’ve had entertainment since the dawn of time. I’d say civilization has done a few things here and there that weren’t interrupted by entertainment.
Roger Moore
@AkaDad:
You can bitch about player salaries, but they’re clearly based on more rational calculations than CEO salaries are. We have a good idea about the dollar value to a team of an additional win, and about the number of additional wins a star player can add. That gives a solid estimate of the value of a star player to his team, and one that seems to be in reasonable agreement with what teams are willing to pay free agents. And AFAIK, no baseball player has ever stacked the player compensation committee with his cronies in an attempt to get an outrageous salary.
You can plausibly argue about how much money our society decides to devote to sports and other forms of entertainment. That certainly has a bearing on entertainers’ salaries. But given the size of the entertainment industry, I think it’s unreasonable to complain about how much of the money goes to the actual entertainers rather than the money people.
amk
@Snayke: Ever heard of the city of pompeii and the ‘entertainment’ culture that blewup that city ?
SST
@Roger Moore: Chone Figgins would like a word.
Gary Matthews, Jr. too.
The Thin Black Duke
@arguingwithsignposts:
Sure, coal miners and schoolteachers are grossly underpaid, no argument there. It’s wrong, it’s shameful and it’s ultimately detrimental to our society.
Now please explain to me how making professional athletes work for slave wages corrects this inequity. In an industry that generates billions of fucking dollars, it’s rare to see a situation where the workers are getting paid wages commensurate to their abilities and the income they produce.
And anybody who doesn’t think football isn’t goddamned dangerous is full of shit. All that money they’re making now is going to be paying for their hospital bills later.
Oh wait, this is your cue where you’re gonna say, “It’s their choice.” Yeah, and since the majority of these players are coming from poor working-class backgrounds, maybe it was the only choice they had.
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t piss me off. What pisses me off is when people always bitch about “overpaid jocks” and never talk about “overpaid owners”. It’d be nice to put a salary cap on the wages of a CEO for a change.
Martin
@SST:
Still bullshit. The size of the market for pro athletes is completely inelastic. There’s 30 MLB teams. Assuming each team can support 2 shortstops, the US supports a grand total of 60 pro shortstops. Drop down to minor league teams and you get maybe a couple hundred more. If there were 500 guys that could perform within 10% of Derek Jeter’s performance, they wouldn’t make it in pro sports not because they suck but because the market is artificially constrained. And that market is sufficiently constrained that there are thousands of guys that won’t even pursue that path because the likelihood of making an actual career out of it is so damn small. If pro sports were treated like any other job in this country, there’s be room for a lot more people based on them bringing a marketable level of performance, so you can’t rush off and blame the players too much for either succeeding or failing – the market was massively rigged either in or out of their favor.
Consider that the minimum salary for MLB is $400K per year. That’s base pay. That’s what those 60 shortstops earn or better. That 61st best player is earning $2150/mo base pay in AAA ball. Pro athletes are where they are not only because they’re skilled, but they were willing to risk playing the game for $25K+ per year in the hopes of being lucky enough to make $400K+. If the pay for most jobs were like that, with just a handful earning you a decent wage you wouldn’t find too many people that could cut it in those professions either.
andy
Since it’s an open thread, check it out: Single fucking Payer bitchez:
http://www.wcax.com/story/14518224/vt-senate-approves-single-payer-plan
arguingwithsignposts
@The Thin Black Duke:
Who’s saying that? I’m saying they’re ALL overpaid. I’m rooting for the NFL players in their standoff, but I realize it’s a totally fucked system. In a world with its priorities straight, none of these people would be making NEAR what they’re making now – owners or players. They’d be doing shit that makes a difference. And that goes for fucking hedge fund managers too, and Angelina Jolie.
amk
@The Thin Black Duke: If the mass weren’t so stupid with their hard earned money, there wouldn’t be any overpaid jocks nor overpaid owners.
Martin
@Roger Moore:
Again, only because the competition to the team’s income is tightly controlled. A corporate CEO never knows if another company will spring up and take their sales – it’s a much more open market. However, there’s 100% certainty that Cincinnati will not have another MLB team move in to siphon revenue off of the Reds.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@AkaDad:
ok, now in the dream world where you get to decide how much a person’s “work” is worth. and i would argue, that since so many are willing to write for free, no writer of any sort should ever be paid. but that is your call.
so, guy makes 100k and up, sounds like a decent wage, right? so you field a team for 5-10 mill in payroll(baseball, to stay on point)the league, the teams are still generating billions. the people who make the equipment, who broadcast the games, et al, money everywhere, let alone the cash cow that is organized gambling legal and otherwise…
how are you going to keep the players from taking the cash on the side? they can, may, and probably do do it now, but in many cases, if you are making possibly 10-100mil or more in a career, how much are you gonna risk all that for? its got to be pretty hefty, cost prohibitive you might say, if you are considering corrupting the game for fun and profit.
ncaa is proof you can’t surround people with money, and expect them to play for love. the cages may be gilded, but sports, even the ones where some players make millions, are often a trap, and a trap at an early age.
ask a kid who plays high school football, even though he doesn’t love it, maybe even hates it, but knows that his dad’s job is with the coach’s brother in law, and the family’s place to stay is owned by a big booster, and he is the meal ticket literally and figuratively for them all, if he feels like its a plantation.
the players get a taste eventually, but nothing like what they have already produced for others, by the time its legal to cash in themselves.
if you don’t like the business of athletics, that is fine. don’t blame the players as they have little influence on the institutional structure from about age 15 on up.
Joel
@The Thin Black Duke: this, for what it’s worth.
The Thin Black Duke
@amk:
True.
As I wrote earlier, fans deserve all the abuse they get. But it’s not the athletes that are ripping people off.
It’s the owners.
Roger Moore
@SST:
There’s an old saying that it’s not the price of stars that bankrupts a team but the price of mediocrity. Mid-tier free agents like Figgins tend to be overpriced relative to their real value. That’s because teams tend to pay players for what they have done rather than what they can reasonably be expected to do. That works better for stars, who are more likely to become free agents with plenty of good years ahead of them, than for journeymen, who tend to become free agents only when they’re on the down-side of their careers. Still, if you look at average free agent salaries rather than specific cases, the numbers seem to come out OK.
piratedan
@The Thin Black Duke: i know, I have this ongoing argument on one of the blogs I frequent for my favorite football team. These guys keep telling me that without the owners, there is no game. Namely, they control the means of production and because they take all the risks they should reap all the benefits. I counter with what are the players then, if not the product itself and the labor. The owners don’t develop these guys, they are developed through collegiate athletics (its own scam, but that rant is for another day) then they pay them to entertain us in stadiums that are most often built with taxpayer money. Upon which point I’m called a something something and told that I don’t understand American business because no industry pays labor this well. I then end up countering that these guys are in the entertainment industry and movie stars, actors, authors and musical acts all get paid more than the people behind the scenes. Then I get mumble mumble they’re NOT really the same and why do I wanna support those overpaid primadonnas anyway and have to counter with why in the hell are you in the pocket of a guy who charges you twenty bucks to park your car and charge you 6 bucks for a crappy hot dog and 8 bucks for watered down beer after you’ve dropped 15 large on season ticket licenses? Then it usually devolves into pissing contests about manliness and questioning one’s fandom.
Darkrose
@Roger Moore:
I’m reading Glanville’s book now, and really enjoying it, especially because it’s a look at the system from the POV of someone who was never going to be a household name. He’s not a great writer, as you said, but he’s engaging and funny.
The Thin Black Duke
@arguingwithsignposts:
Hey, not for nothing, but Angelina Jolie does what she gets well paid to do, and people walk away with a smile on their face.
To be honest, I don’t have any problems with the people in the entertainment industry getting the big bucks. Value is dictated by what the audience is willing to pay, and if you genuinely feel as though you’re getting your money’s worth, no problem. Seriously, how do you quantify a Neil Young concert or a film by Stephen Soderburgh or a Georgia O’Keefe painting?
However, what the fuck does a hedge fund manager do, other than play games with other people’s money?
Martin
@The Thin Black Duke:
Any other industry would see that there is billions of fucking dollars and you’d have competitors move in. Are there enough fans willing to pay half of what the Yankees charge per ticket to watch a team that is 90% as good? There’d be competition for those players and salaries would drop and even out. And don’t tell me the market isn’t there – college sports is every bit as big as pro to watch players that haven’t yet made it.
blondie
This from a CNN “Political Ticker” article about a raucous town hall meeting for Rep. Webster (R) from FL:
Where was this when the Republicans were doing it????? Sigh, your liberal media at work I guess.
Joel
@The Thin Black Duke: Are fans “abused” and do they deserve it? I mean, are they any more abused than people who spend premium prices on the performing arts? Last I checked, Broadway tickets went for $80 minimum, and that’s for the off-days. You could even make the case for movie theaters, symphonies, etc. etc. Hell, you could make the case for wasteful spending about someone who pays an internet provider boatloads of money on a monthly basis so that they can blog on the internet.
Joel
@Martin: Riffing off my last post, there are dozens of theaters in Manhattan alone! So why pay premiums for tickets to Broadway?
piratedan
@blondie: they were in stealth mode because no one noticed them leaving the buses they had been shipped in on…. no agenda to see here, no talking point notes to reference. No employees from health insurance companies in the crowd, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
SST
@Martin: I typed out an entire multi-paragraphed response to that before I realized that it actually supported what you were arguing.
So, I pretty much agree. One of the first things I said in the previous post was that it’s an uneven comparison to other professions. I still think, if anything more so b/c of your post. Because of the way that the sports work, making shitloads of money is only the future for a very select few. That said, lots of people do play the game in their profession and still aren’t as good. The sports do, to some degree, support people less skilled than the ATP top 10 (I’m thinking about coaches, tutors, people who work at clubs, etc.) So yeah, I pretty much agree that the money distribution makes sports different than other professions. But there is some support for people who aren’t as good. Not as much of a market as there is in other professions, but still.
arguingwithsignposts
@The Thin Black Duke:
How do you quantify a firefighter saving a child from a burning building, or a teacher instructing someone how to do algebra, or a coal miner risking his/her life to keep your lights on?
Really, we value the wrong things. Period. Full. Stop.
The Thin Black Duke
@Martin:
Unfortunately, what we’re seeing more often in college sports are athletes leaving early to “turn pro” because that’s where the money is.
Usually, most of these guys ain’t ready for primetime.
But, then again, why should you bust your ass for free?
SST
@Roger Moore: Nah, I agreed with your overall point. I was just dicking on Figgins b/c I’ve never thought much of him, even when he was on the Angels. Sometimes signings don’t work out. This tends to be true even more often when your GM doesn’t believe in OBP.
Martin
@Joel: But there’s no external constraining function to limit the number of Broadway theaters, and as new shows are developed, there’s nothing preventing off-Broadway theaters from hosting top productions and charging top dollar. If there’s demand enough to pay $1000 for a top show, then you’re going to see new production pop up at $250 a seat and on down until a theater is unable to cover their costs.
Go ahead and try and introduce a new MLB team and see how far you get. Shit, try and introduce a new AA team and see how far you get.
Jebediah
@Omnes Omnibus:
One of my undergrad econ professors had recently written a paper about pro sports. His conclusion was don’t be fooled by the absolute size of the player’s salaries. Based on what the owners make, and the percentage of it that is passed on to the players, it was the closest thing to slavery he had seen. A little hyperbolicious but the point stands.
Personally, I think people confuse playing sports professionally with the experience of playing in school or playing pick-up games. I have never been a pro athlete (if you ever saw my attempts at bike racing – well, it’s just better you didn’t…) but I have no doubt there is a whole world of difference…
sorry for any incoherence. Tomorrow is melanoma/lymph node surgery and I am starting to get a little nervous….
Amanda in the South Bay
@Jebediah:
I’m sorry, but that reeks of the same kind of argument people make who say 250K a year isn’t rich-you know, those articles posted like every month here that say that rich people don’t feel rich?
AkaDad
I’m normally a pro-union, pro-worker kind of guy. I wasn’t giving the owners a free pass. I do realize the price-gouging goes to salaries and profits.
People get upset when other industries price-gouge their customers, but the entertainment industry doesn’t get the same kind of outrage.
I’m just trying to be consistent when it comes to screwing people.
piratedan
@Jebediah: for most of us its taking a pastime, be it youthful or otherwise and turning it into an art form (of sorts). Fans are created because of those of us that have played, sang, acted, written and know just how tough it is to do and marvel that these folks can do it so well.
SST
Also, to add on to one of my other posts, I think it’s hard to compare different sports in this way. For baseball, football and such, I’m more receptive to the argument that the rigged market destroys any prospect of tiered skill levels.
For other sports, and I’m thinking about tennis because I played it, I think that argument is less true. People who teach tennis at clubs and in other places play every day. Many of them are excellent players. That said, none of them will ever beat Djokovic or Nadal. They aren’t good enough. And sure, that’s in part b/c Nadal and other top players hit thousands of shots every day in practice, but pros and semi-pros can also play every day and never take a game off people in the top 25 b/c people in the top 25 are outrageously good.
The Thin Black Duke
@arguingwithsignposts:
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t remember saying that schoolteachers, firemen, EMTs, and coal miners weren’t underpaid.
However, using your logic, it’ll be better once artists, dancers, musicians and all of those other silly creatures in the entertainment industry are paid like shit.
Well, don’t worry, the Republicans are doing their demonic best to disembowel whatever is left of the Arts, so it won’t be long now.
SST
@Martin: Do you think that’s less true for individual sports? Like tennis or golf?
Dual Exhaust Toaster
In other news only 2600 fans showed up to watch the Pirates-Nationals game the other day but adding in all the people flying overhead or driving through they pegged it at 12000 something. Maybe they’d get a better crowd playing at a base in the Middle East.
arguingwithsignposts
@The Thin Black Duke:
Again, who’s saying that? But goddamn, who’s more essential? I’d be happy with $1 movie tickets and the cheap seats at a stadium. Oh, wait, there aren’t any because the MOTU have gently fucked us over and added that nice marketing veneer to explain those $7 beers.
Artists, dancers, and most musicians don’t make shit near what the athletes do. That’s a straw man.
Again, value what’s valuable, and then we can talk.
Jebediah
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It might reek, but without players, there is no game, and the owners would have fuck-all. Call me a marxist or whatever, but the players (aka workers) should get a bigger share of what they produce, and I don’t care what the size of the resulting salary is. There is some interesting discussion here tonight about why the pro sports market is structured the way it is, but whatever the reason, it is what it is. Owners are raking in giga-bucks on the labor of the players. The players should get more of it. Why would you want Capital to keep more of the loot?
ETA: Fuck Luke Scott
Yutsano
@andy: That’s it. I’m transferring to Andover and buying a cute little cottage in southern Vermont.
The Thin Black Duke
@arguingwithsignposts:
You’re accusing me of using a straw man?
That’s funny, considering the majority of athletes doing their jobs aren’t making the big bucks that the elite players like the LeBrons, the Bradys, or the A-Rods. It’s like saying every guy with a SAG card is getting George Clooney money. Actually, it’s an useful device the owners use to distract the fans. Believe me, if the jocks were getting paid Wally World wages, the beer would still be overpriced.
Again, the reason minimum wage is ridiculously low isn’t Angelina Jolie’s fault. The reason schoolteachers are being laid off isn’t Kobe Bryant’s fault. The reason coal miners are working in monstrously unsafe conditions isn’t Lady Gaga’s fault.
It’s the fault of the owners, and the owners are rich white men who buy compliant politicians to ensure that they get to keep as much of their money as possible.
And entertainers are useful strawmen, that’s all. Adding it up, the money these artists make is microscopic compared to what our corporate overloads steal from Americans every day. Killing NPR won’t save a single teacher’s job.
Straw man? That’s really funny. I know who our real enemies are.
Do You?
Martin
@SST: Yes, for the most part. The number of tournaments and the number of entrants to tournaments is limited. The tour controls that. They have a monopoly on broadcast rights. They artificially constrain the market.
Not all sports are as bad. Motor racing, as an example, is slightly more open as there isn’t one governing body. The FIA has NASCAR as competition, or IRL, etc. but they don’t open the market very far, but there are more opportunities to expand the supply of positions as demand for the sport and as the number of top athletes expands.
And that’s basically my metric – if the number of fans grows then the market should grow as a result. For the most part, it doesn’t. Instead it funnels more and more money into the same teams and that distorts labor prices because the number of players should be expanding with the demand for the sport, but it isn’t. Remember the OPEC embargo? When you constrain the supply to the market independent of demand, prices go crazy. DeBeers? Pro sports is employing the same market manipulation. Pretending that salaries in that market are rational is insane. It’s like Trump declaring himself more capable than everyone else because his parents chose him, and not all the rest of us to leave their fortune to.
arguingwithsignposts
@The Thin Black Duke:
Who the fuck brought up NPR? Did you even read what I wrote? I’m all for the workers getting what they can, but the system is fucked in general. So, yeah, play your stupid fucking game. Let’s pay athletes hundreds of thousands while we pay coal miners/teachers/firefighters in the 5 figures.
Value what’s valuable, and get back to me. Standing in front of a 98 mph fastball ain’t it.
Jebediah
@The Thin Black Duke:
And in most every industry, that has been working very well for them. Maybe someday they will squeeze too hard and it will backfire, but I’m not too optimistic.
Lysana
@Amanda in the South Bay:
HEH. You’re like an ex of mine who has shrapnel in her from her time in Grenada. Permanently fucked over by metal detectors, all woman, and more military service than the armchair jockeys who’d call her a man because she was born with a Y chromosome.
Congrats on the orchi, by the by. Other trans women I know are dead happy when they get theirs done finally.
Lysana
@arguingwithsignposts:
High-falutin’ hipster shit like this makes you sound like you keep your nose so high in the air you’ll drown in a stiff rain.
Martin
@The Thin Black Duke:
We really need to put some numbers here. Not critiquing your statement.
SAG scale for TV is $2600 per week (some actors are on year-round projects, but not many). It’s $1400 per week for broadway (these are much more likely to be year-round). MLB minimum is $400K per year.
Yutsano
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I missed this on first read-through, but WOOT DA HOOT!! How long is your recovery time and will you have a laptop in the hospital to keep in touch?
Spaghetti Lee
I love baseball on an emotional level, and even though it’s full of pricks like Scott, I ain’t gonna stop watching. Hell, Ozzie Guillen is my team’s manager. Maybe that makes me a sucker. My “out”, I guess, is that I don’t need to see the White Sox to enjoy myself. I’m happy with minor league, college, even high school ball. Just being at the ballpark makes me happy.
arguingwithsignposts
@Lysana: speaking as someone who’s flipped burgers at a McD’s, you can read whatever you want into that statement.
ETA: No, wait, fuck that shit. My parents worked blue collar jobs their entire lives. My step-father got screwed out of his pension when dipshits in the oil industry decided they didn’t need employees and they could outsource to a bunch of fucktard contractors.
And my mom worked over 30 years in a “non-profit” hospital that tried to do the same thing.
So, you know what, take that hipster shit and stick it up your ass.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Martin:
You can’t start a new MLB team, for the very good reason that it’s their league and they get to make the rules.
However, *nothing* is stopping you from creating a new sports league and trying to compete with MLB. Not a single damned thing. Remember the USFL? That’s exactly what that was. It flopped, because people preferred the product they already were getting.
Or, you could start an independent baseball league. The St. Paul Saints have done pretty well at that. They’re not enormously successful, and don’t generate revenues within two orders of magnitude of the Twins, but they play over in St. Paul.
Guess what? Even *with* the existence of a cheaper alternative, baseball fans in the Twin Cities have expressed an overwhelming preference for the MLB product.
Ultimately, your argument that the market is artificially constrained is a crock of shit. Overwhelmingly, the largest “constraint” is that fans like what they are getting, no matter how much they grumble about the prices. That’s not an artificial constraint; it’s the basic principles of the market at work.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Martin:
Of course, you’re not comparing apples to apples. The proper comparison for major league salaries isn’t the actor making scale. The proper comparison is to the 800-1000 highest paid actors in the world. If you want to make an accurate comparison to the guys who are working for scale, you should probably look to minor league ball. Of course, when you add together all minor league players, you’ll find that you’re still looking at a smaller, more elite population. There are fewer than 20,000 people in the world (a lot fewer) who get paid to play baseball. Out of all of the people in many countries who play the game, you are, roughly speaking, looking at the best 0.01% of them. Now go to any activity that is done for money, and figure out how much money the top 1/10,000th gets paid.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Not really. A few of them get nifty signing bonuses. A bonus over $1 million is limited to the first round of the draft, a few guys that dropped because owners thought they’d ask for too much, and about 8-10 Latin American kids a year. There are a lot of drafted players who sign for a bonus less than $10,000.
stormhit
@arguingwithsignposts:
Your ideal world sounds really fucking grim and boring, and I want no part of it.
arguingwithsignposts
@stormhit: FWIW, the current world the GOP is considering sounds even worse, so fuck you too.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@AkaDad:
How am I being price gouged? I look at the prices, and decide if I’m going to get enough entertainment value to justify paying that price. Very clearly, you don’t get enough entertainment value out of it, so you don’t pay it. That’s fine. When the Tigers are in town, I usually find that it’s worth $15-$20 to go to one of the games. I don’t buy the concessions, because I don’t derive enough value from them. Other people might, but I generally eat before I get to the game.
However, there is something most people, even most fans, don’t know about MLB. Unlike any other entertainment venue I know of, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BRING YOUR OWN FOOD AND BEVERAGES. Much of my childhood was spent going to Phillies and Tigers games with my whole family and a picnic basket carrying dinner. You generally can’t do that any longer, but only because there are enough other fans there that there’s nowhere to put your picnic basket. I usually bring at least a Thermos of water, and sometimes a couple of snacks. If you bring it in a bag, the security guards at the entrance will look through it, see that you have nothing but your own food, and wave you through.
That’s quite a policy for people who are price gouging. That’s really only a term that has meaning for goods that people need and have to buy in a situation in which the market is really artificially constrained, not the fake “constraints” Martin is going on about. That doesn’t apply here. Nobody needs to go to a baseball game. We all can evaluate the price, and decide whether or not it’s worth it to us to go. Whether it’s worth it for you to pay that price to go, as it clearly isn’t, is completely and utterly irrelevant to whether or not those of us who do get sufficient value.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@arguingwithsignposts:
You don’t. It should be noted, though, that how much these people get paid really has nothing to do with how much sports players get paid. There’s no reason whatsoever that athletes could continue to receive the salaries that they do and all of these others could also get raises.
I don’t even mean that in the sense that we could hang the CEOs from lampposts and divvy up the money they’ve been getting, as appealing as that sounds. When I buy a ticket to a game, that money doesn’t disappear. It just means that the team has it instead of me. Nothing is stopping them from deciding to improve the lot of teachers and firefighters.
The measure of whether or not an activity makes it harder to pay someone else well isn’t the money paid. It’s the resources consumed to create and deliver the product. You could slash the salaries of all athletes by a factor of ten, and it wouldn’t change the resources that it takes to put the game on. The amount of wealth available to pay teachers and firefighters with hasn’t changed one iota. It’s still there.
Jebediah
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Don’t forget The Donald’s role in causing that flop.
prufrock
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
That isn’t even the biggest flaw in his argument. Martin is under the assumption that people will be just as willing to watch a team that is 90% as good as what they are currently getting, if it’s cheaper. If this were true, then why aren’t AAA games attended in much greater numbers? The players are probably even better than 90% as good as their major league counterparts. However, they don’t. Let’s look at the numbers.
In 2010, just 14.3 million fans attended games at all AAA parks. By way of comparison, the top four MLB teams drew more than this. This isn’t because the teams are located in podunk towns. Several are located in cities that already support NFL or NBA franchises.
No, they are small time because people will pay money (in this case a lot of money) to see the best. This is even true within the big time leagues themselves. You go to the arena to see LeBron. You don’t go to see T.J. Ford.
Captain Howdy
I love Charles Pierce but I call horse-hockey on his specific criticism. The fact that Scott says he would have been in the Marines if baseball hadn’t panned out sounds honest enough, and it doesn’t contradict the fact that Scott was stating a preference for pro baseball over the military. There’s no there there, Chaz.
WereBear
@Amanda in the South Bay: I know there isn’t a card for that, so I’ll just wish you a fast recovery. And Jebediah too.
At such times, I always remember I’m living in an era with anesthetic, and it is grand.
New Yorker
Oh Jesus, are we really doing this argument again?
If you don’t like that half-wits like Luke Scott get paid millions to hit a little ball far, don’t watch the games on TV and don’t buy tickets. Problem solved.
At least Luke Scott didn’t get paid millions to destroy the world economy and then get bailed out by the government after doing so. In the annals of people who don’t deserve their millions, pro athletes are way, waaaaay behind the Dick Fulds, Chuck Princes, and Stan O’Neals of the world.
The Swiss Army Knife of Visual Effects
Captain Howdy, that’s bull. Pierce was deriding, and rightfully so, Scott’s claim that he would have been a Marine SNIPER, the best of the best. Qualifying to be a sniper is frakking hard. And yes, if Scott had that kind of talent and dedication that gets you through sniper training, he’d be a sniper right now, baseball be damned. Cause you know, we are in three wars right now. There’s no f**king excuse for the chairborne rangers — and that’s just what Scott is.
Surly Duff
@arguingwithsignposts:
With the fewest zeros in the salary as possible.
Paul in KY
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: The Black Sox were that way because Charlie Cominsky was royally screwing them. Sitting a pitcher with 29 wins for about a month, because you don’t want to pay the clause in his contract where he gets extra money for 30 wins. Shit like that.
Paul in KY
@Jebediah: Best wishes on your surgery.
cynickal
I would have joined the military, except I grew up in it and felt that it would be like moving back in with my parents if I did.
The military would have been an easy choice since most of the schools I went to
trainedtaught to the ASVAB and vocational skills needed to join.Heck, most of the vets I know joined to get some skill training, the GI Bill and out of grinding poverty.
Texas Dem
Changing the subject, I hope all of you saw Lawrence O’Donnell scorch Trump and NBC Entertainment. Was so damned good I feel like lighting up a cigarette, and I don’t smoke.
Jebediah
@WereBear:
@Paul in KY:
Thank you both and yes, thank god for anesthesia (and Vicodin!)
I am back home, surgery went well, and my oncological surgeon (who I am told by my wife’s oncologist is the best melanoma guy in Los Angeles) though that the lymph nodes he STOLE from me (I was still using them!) looked clean, although it will be the lab results (due Tuesday) that will tell for sure. But I am feeling pretty good right now.
Paul in KY
@Jebediah: Great! Happy to hear that.