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Spring training has arrived, and for the first time since 1998, a team other than the New York Yankees will have the highest payroll in Major League Baseball—the Los Angeles Dodgers, at $217,200,000.
Nick Traverse looks at the New York Yankees’ payroll, and considers whether the Los Angeles Dodgers’s investment will pay off: http://nyr.kr/11SCJDW
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The Steroid Era, Continued
When A-Rod was first linked to performance-enhancing drugs, they were relics of a bygone “steroid era.” Ian Crouch says it’s not so this time: http://nyr.kr/XQw5WM
In 2009, A-Rod insisted that he had:
kept clean ever since [the years 2001-2003, the period during which he admitted to using banned substances], framing his drug use as part of “a loosey-goosey era,” a bygone period of lawlessness that was long behind not just him, but the entire sport of baseball. His confession was comforting, as these dances of abject apology can sometimes be, in that it marked the “steroid era” as being something that had happened—and had ended.
We’re not there yet. It is the youngest names in the New Times report that are the most troubling, because they seem to confirm what should have been clear: that the scourge of the “steroid era” spans several generations, right up to the current one.
Photograph by Jim McIsaac/Getty.
(Source: newyorker.com)
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The Bill and Henry James Election
Adam Gopnik on the problem of chance in baseball playoffs and elections, and how we will look back upon the next three weeks in the future:
What is true of sports narratives is yet truer, and yet still less accepted, of elections. The Bill James revolution has come to politics and polling now …but not, one might say, the Henry James revolution that ought to go with it, where we stand in awe of how chance events can seem in retrospect like fated certainties…
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On this day in 1914, George Herman (Babe) Ruth made his début in Major League Baseball as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Sold to the Yankees in 1919, Ruth went on to become an American icon, shattering records with his unprecedented hitting prowess and helping catapult baseball into its place as the national pastime. Throughout his twenty-one-year career, Ruth’s physical skills, personal charm, and occasionally reckless behavior made him a subject of public obsession. Click-through for some scenes from the Bambino’s life, on and off the field: http://nyr.kr/L8If7R
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How do you keep a pitcher like Michael Pineda healthy? http://nyr.kr/JjAsXa
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"The day he met Paley is still vivid in Steinbrenner’s mind. “He had his face turned away from me, and he said, ‘I understand you’re here to buy the Yankees, or to make a proposal.’ I was scared shitless. I said, ‘Yes, sir, I am.’ He said, ‘I like that “sir.” ’ I said, ‘Well, that’s the way I’ve been brought up.’ He said, ‘I know where you’ve been to school, and I know all about you.’ He had a full bio. He said, ‘Tell me, do you want to give me Chinese paper for this team?’ I said, ‘Sir, I don’t know what Chinese paper is.’ He says, ‘It’s just plain paper that you can’t take to the bank.’ I said, ‘No, sir, I’m here with cash. I got as many of my friends as I could to put up the money to come in.’ He turned around—it was the first time I saw him face to face. He says, ‘You got a deal.’ I almost died. I could’ve fainted right there."
— George Steinbrenner, to John Cassidy, in his 2002 piece
