I’m a bit busy at the moment, and don’t even have time to handle the smallest of updates. Will catch up in a few days.
That thing in Boston last night. Holy crap!

Remember these? There was a series of kids’ comic books in 2001 that were given away at the ballpark. Kind of amusing now looking back at it in 2008 that all four players had their name tied to steroids in some way. On top of that, the images on the book look pretty roided up. Yeah, I know, its artistic license for the superhero theme of the comic book, but still.

• Alex Rodriguez was the least connected, just a supposed rumor by Jose Canseco.
• Pudge was named in Canseco’s first book, then got noticably skinnier after that.
• Rafael Palmeiro apparently lied to Congress about using, got busted, career ended in disgrace.
• Ken Caminiti. Well, he died of a drug overdose

Was looking through some old entries on my site, and saw that picture. Does anyone actually still have all of those?

I have a pair of tickets for Thursday’s game which I cannot use.
Was wondering if anyone wanted them. They’re in Section 325, Row 14, Seats 20 & 21 (end of the row).
I’m looking for $16 for the pair. If you’re interested, please email me.

Last week I was interviewed by someone from the Dallas Morning News about my attendance at baseball games. Early in 2007 I did an article about attendance and the team’s record. It included a graph, and the fellow from the DMN liked this, hence how we got to talking. The interview ended up with me generally griping that it’s too bloody expensive to go to a ton of games, unless you’re part of what a friend of mine calls “the boob job and cocaine crowd”.

This article is out in today’s Dallas Morning News paper, and is actually the lead story on the front page of the newspaper. The angle of the piece is “Why is attendance so bad?” I had a lot more to say in the interview than what was used, but that’s fine – I know how newspaper interviews go. You say about 200 times more than what is actually used. They seemed to like my quote about “It costs $28 before you even buy your ticket”. I did have a lot more to say about several other things to the DMN guy. The rest of this article is pretty much what I talked about.

I also had a lot to say about the 7PM start times. I hate them. Given that the article does say I live 33 miles from the ballpark, you have to consider my route to the Ballpark. I get done with work at 6PM, and for me to leave work at 6, drive through that nightmare that is rush hour traffic downtown, get out to the ballpark, park my car, walk to the stadium, get through to my seat, and IF I AM LUCKY I will be in my seat for first pitch. One other thing I said in the article that I was hopeful would make it in was that given how expensive these games are to attend, I want to see the whole darn thing. The 7PM start times make that near impossible for me, and I don’t want to run around like a chicken with my head cut off just to MAYBE make it there in time. If I can’t see the whole game, the heck with it, I’m staying home.

This is hindered by one major change in 2008. Parking. The team has screwed up the cash parking really good. Given that I used to go to so many games for over a decade, I knew all the good parking tricks.

That is the 2008 Parking map. The dirty little secret was that you used to be able to park with cash parking lot A. This was the best place to park, provided you got to the game about an hour ahead of time. If you got there too close, it would have been filled up, and you’d get stuck. But Lot A was the way to go for cash parking. Not anymore, it’s been replaced with all voucher parking (meaning the common guy is blocked). In 2007, they did add a new lot, it is “Lot M”. That actually wasn’t too bad in terms of walking. I didn’t mind that so much. Not as close as “Lot A”, mind you, but not too bad. But in a brilliant maneuver, AFTER JUST ONE YEAR OF USE, it was deemed too nice of a lot, and also taken away from cash parking (per the map I’m showing here). That leaves cash parking all the way out behind the darned Siemens building. ANother really stupid move – take away parking for an OFFICE BUILDING. Brilliant maneuver. There is “Lot H”, which is not all that bad in terms of walk to the park. It’s a bit longer than I’d prefer, but it’s hell of a lot better than the N, I, or G lots. Forget the H & F lots – I will never park there. Just ain’t happening. I don’t want to have to park, and THEN TAKE A BUS. Anyway, “Lot H”, isn’t so bad, but the problem is getting out. You’re essentially trapped there, and when I parked there opening day it took A FRIGGIN HOUR AND A HALF just to get to Route 30. It’s not so bad now that the season has started, but you have to leave the ballpark THE SECOND the game is over to make that a viable exit. If you don’t (meaning use the bathroom, visit the gift shop), it will then take you 45 minutes to an hour to get to Rt 30, because all the other cards have clogged the roads in front of you. So yeah, Parking was SERIOUSLY screwed up in 2008, and that too has contributed to my not enjoying going out there anymore. It also contributes to the feeling that there’s nothing to do out by the ballpark. There really isn’t, but when you feel you have to get in your car immediately to keep yourself from spending the better part of an hour just getting to the highway, you don’t WANT to stay there. You want to get out as fast as possible.

The biggest thing I seem to think that baseball teams have in their mindset is that they view the price of the ticket as the ultimate cost to attending a game. It is not. Not even close. The Rangers are right though in that the majority of their tickets are moderately priced. With all the deals and packages out there, it’s not that hard to get a decently priced ticket. But understand this, Mr. Hicks/Nolan Ryan/Chuck Morgan/this year’s guy who is supposed to increase ticket sales… THE COST OF TICKETS IS NOT THE PROBLEM – It’s all the other bloody costs associated with the the entire Major League Baseball experience. As the article pointed out, it costs $28 for me to just get to the park. You buy the cheapest decent seat to sit behind home plate up top, and it costs $16. That makes it $44 for one game, and that’s assuming you go by yourself, and don’t buy anything at the park. Here’s a list of costs..

• Ticket – $15.00 (in upper deck behind home plate, or $19 for things like Yankees/Red Sox) – but this is a wildly variable number. $15 is the low end of the spectrum. Yes, I know there are $6 seats, but nobody REALLY wishes to sit there, you sit there out of cost only)
• Gas – $16.00 (for me, I know this varies for people, but it’s a real cost now)
• Parking – $12.00
• Large Soda – $5.50
• Hot Dog – $4.50
• Beer – $6.50 (could be $6.25 or $6.75, I forget which right this minute)
• Program – $5 (although it can be $3 if you use the coupon on your parking stub)
• Fitted Baseball Cap – $32.50 (yeah, there are cheaper ones, but the quality is nowhere as good)

That’s just one of each of these things. Bring more people, and that cost rises exponentially. I know the “All You can Eat Seats” are an attempt to address the food cost issue, and that is a good deal, but for those of us who are already of uh, “portly build”, it’s actually embarrassing. “Oh look, the fat guy is in the All you can eat seats – I wonder how many hot dogs and nachos he’ll pound down?” So no, I don’t use this option. I also know you don’t buy a cap every time you go, but one thing that gets talked about a lot when cost of baseball games are brought up is the “family experience”. If you bring a couple of kids, and you can only go once or twice a year, then yeah, “stuff to buy” is a viable cost, too.

So yeah, with gas at $4 a gallon, and milk at roughly the same price, with everything else going up because of rising fuel costs, the $5 Racetrack gas gard is a nice idea, but it’s like spitting in a swimming pool. It disappears immediately, and doesn’t have any true lasting impact. To cover my gas going to one game, there would have to be four people coming out, and that’s a lot of extra cost.

Yeah, I’m a bit angry about all of this. Because I now feel both priced out of the game, and squeezed out due to the mess that parking has become. Don’t get me wrong, when I’m out there, and actually in my seat, I still love going to MLB games. But all the crap that surrounds getting me to my seat makes it impossible to enjoy it as much as I used to.

What would solve this for me? High Speed rail to the ballpark. I was hoping that when Jerrylandâ„¢ moved in next door, we might get some sort of light rail option out to the area. No such luck. When I grew up in Philly, I averaged a TON of games – on the order of 30 or so a year. The reason was cost. With a GOOD mass transit system, all you had to do was get on ANY bus in the entire system, and somewhere they would connect to either the Subway or the High Speed elevated train. The El would connect to the Subway, and you took the Subway in Philly to the end of the line. Get off the subway, and you were RIGHT THERE. No parking, no gas, no fuss. At my peak, I went to 45 games a year – almost all of them on mass transit. That would knock out a massive cost of attendance, and would allow me to go to more games. Yes. Guaranteed – put in light rail, and my attendance would go way the heck back up. But noooo. The City of Arlington had to get all pissy about paying for Dart, so there’s no option there at all.

The article talks about my “church commitment”. For the record, my church is building a new building, and we’re currently in the “raising funds” part of that procedure. I went and took the cost list above and averaged it out via my personal spending habits at Rangers games, and worked it to be roughly $50 a game. I multiplied that by the number of games per year, and decided I’d rather give that money to Jesus Christ and the church than to Tom Hicks and the Texas Rangers. Its’ going to serve a far better purpose bringing people to Jesus, than bringing people to the Ballpark. While I’m enough of a baseball fan that I can’t go completely cold turkey and not go to any, my average of about 20-25 games has dropped to a projected attendance of six this year. I have just two more games I plan on going to this year. For the 2008, 2009, & 2010 seasons, my “Texas Rangers” money is going to my church so we can build a new facility. We’re an Anglican church, and if you’re in the Garland/Mesquite/Rowlett area, come visit us, we’d love to have you.

To sum up, yes I am donating a huge amount of money from what used to be my Texas Rangers “budget to my church. But even if I was not, I still would have not attended as many games due to all the other problems I’ve detailed above. Major League Baseball is always saying how “good” things are, and how much money the overall sport is making. Of course it is, they’re making it on the backs of the peons who love the game, and are being totally squeezed out due to mostly cost. I know I am.

UPDATE: There was a photographer out at my office on Friday from the Dallas Morning News and took some pictures of me. That did not get used in the article, but I was able to get a copy of the picture that was submitted for the article. Had it been used, this picture would have been in the article:

There’s been a lot of talk about Hank Blalock this year. Injured and off the field for the most part. Had a switch to first, and a not completely voluntary switch back to third while he was hurt. His second half stats have been not that good the last several years he’s been on the field.

It feels, by reading all the local writers, that it’s a foregone conclusion the Rangers will not pick up his option for 2009. Whether the team lets him walk, or trades him, I think most people feel he won’t be here.

What do you think?

Was not Josh Hamilton’s home runs. It was these guys in the back of the bleachers. :)

After beating the Atlanta Braves today, we head back out on the road for more Interleague play. We’re about to hear a lot about how the Rangers were the “Washington Senators II” during the time they played in DC. As I’ve pointed out a few times, the Rangers are NOT the second Senators. They’re the third team with that moniker (technically the fourth, but more on that in a bit). Most people will tell you the Minnesota Twins were the original Senators, and when they moved out of DC, the Rangers franchise became the second. All of this completely ignores the real original Washington Senators, who played from 1891-1899. While I admit, it wasn’t a major team in the overall scheme of things, it did exist for about a decade. I guess it’s not sexy enough to bring this up, which is why we never hear it.

As long as I’m totally nitpicking here, the 1890’s Washington Senators wasn’t the original Washington Nationals, either. There was a team that played one year – 1884 as the Washington Nationals. But that’s seriously obscure, and since that was a completely different league, I’m not counting them as the first.

To sum this up, I wonder if this will be brought up, too. When the Montreal Expos franchise moved to DC and took on the moniker of the Nationals, they wanted to use the old red “W” cap that our franchise used to wear. Since the Senators team moved here, Tom Hicks still owns the legal rights to the “Washington Senators” name, which includes logos, uniforms, etc.. The Nationals franchise had to pay Hicks money to let them use the cap. Gotta love THAT. Baseball is now feeding off of itself in terms of places it wants to make money. :)

In the last few days, the Mariners have fired their GM, fired their Manager, and there’s been a lot of talk about them dumping a bunch of players, and they have the worst record in baseball after being tagged by many to win the division. I think this image is appropriate. :)

There’s a site I frequent quite often, it’s called “The Biz of Baseball” run by a fellow by the name of Maury Brown. If you are interested in the business dealings of the sport, it’s an invaluable site (even if you’re not interested, it’s just good reading). Anyway, in December of 2006, they ran an article called “32 Voices on the State of the Game“. It was an article with a sort of free flowing stream of consciousness from several completely different viewpoints. It was quite compelling. Well, they’ve done it again.
Out today is the next installment, entitled “The State of Major League Baseball 2008“. The odd thing (to me) about this entry is that I was asked to contribute to this new article. That was mind boggling to me, as I consider myself a small fry when it comes to things like this. But Maury persisted, said I was someone he definitely wanted a “a new voice that was a fan perspective”. So I sat down and wrote. If you’re familiar with this site, you know I can tend to “go off” on tangents, and just get mad at stuff. That’s kind of what I did in my piece. So check out the new article, not because I am in it, but because there’s a lot of good thoughts in there.
I still feel a bit “tingly” to be in the same piece with some heavyweights and big names like Chuck Armstrong (President, Seattle Mariners), Jerry Crasnick (ESPN Author), Jeff Erickson (Rotowire), Brent Gambill (Producer, XM Satellite Radio’s MLB Channel), Jeff Passan (Yahoo), and of course Ken Rosenthal (from everywhere). Thanks Maury!

Edit: After getting permission from Maury, here’s my piece from the full article.
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (1 Timothy 6:10)
I’ll start off with a theft from Will Carroll. It comes from the first Voices entry of this series.
“Saying what’s right and wrong with the game is an exercise in hubris and futility.”
Will’s right. It’s hard to have a good, honest list as to what is right and what is wrong that covers everything, which everyone can agree with. Even if you could make the list, would you want to? The flaws are what make the game. Baseball is a confusing game to “figure out”. You think you have a handle on how it should be done, and then find out that you don’t. But as humans, we tend to complain about things first. Most of the complaints you hear about about baseball are “too expensive” or “steroids”.
The bigger complaint is about money, though. There’s lawsuits about statistics (who owns the numbers), so much advertising that the head spins, a cost of parking and gas that is more than tickets in some places, and the price of concessions? Ha! Heck, the mlb minimum salary ($390,000) is so far out of whack with the “real” minimum wage ($12,168, assuming 40 hr work week) that it’s mind boggling how far removed from reality MLB seems to be when you talk about money. Everything is about the “Baby Ruth Home Run Challenge”, or the “DHL Pregame show”, or the “Monster.com All Star ballot”, to things like whatever the name of the Giants park is this week, and all that. You could take up the space that all 30 of us are using to talk about corporate naming issues. Heck, I saw a McDonald’s logo ON THE PITCHER’S MOUND in PNC Park when looking at it in Google Maps. My kid’s bobbleheads have half a dozen logos on them, nothing can get out there without being sponsored. I’m surprised there aren’t some sort of logo inside the men’s urinals in the bathrooms – or on the hot dogs themselves! We have so much money floating around the game that if baseball gave a religious tithe like Jesus commanded, we could probably do away with a lot of poverty in places. Don’t even get me started on the extortion of cities that is building new stadiums.
On top of the things with money, then there are the things that are just confusing. For example, MLB made a major stink recently about how games are “too long”, and they want to shave some time off. I think I read where the average time is longer by a matter of single digit seconds. Not minutes, but seconds. So what comes out at the same time? The note that we will have instant replay for home run balls, and for balls by the foul pole. They make a major deal about games being too long, then add a time suck like instant replay. Want the games to move faster? Call the bloody strike zone the way it is defined in the rule book. There’s several rules that are already on the books that if actually ENFORCED would make the games go faster. Man, that’s just perplexing.
A lot is made of the fact that it’s a game meant for kids, but so many ancillary things around the game are things we have to “explain” to kids is a major hassle. As the parent of a three year old, I’m enjoying teaching my kid that a home run is not just when they “run” around the bases – they have to hit the ball over the fence. If I had to get into why Barry Bonds looks like a horse, or why she keeps hearing the words “performance enhancing”, I don’t know if I’d try to get my kid into baseball. There’s so much business around the game, that it almost doesn’t feel like it’s for “kids” anymore. We’re teaching kids to get ahead, get the biggest signing bonus there is, you’ll “strike it rich with Scott Boras”, etc, etc, etc.. That’s why I’m enjoying Josh Hamilton now. A man who has discovered God, and is not afraid to show it. Good for him. Oh, he’s not the only one, but he is a local one to me, so I hear about him the most. When you hear so much bad about the sport all the time in the media, it’s nice to hear something nice like that.
What is The state of baseball? The state of “baseball” is fine, despite all the negativity above. The sport is too good to kill, but if you’re reading the website this article will appear on, you probably know this already. The most vitriolic complainer will still love sitting out at the park watching the game. Baseball will sometimes go and do something very nice – like the recent Negro League player draft at the recent MLB draft. I enjoyed that moment a lot. So yeah, there’s good there, but there’s SO MUCH negative it feels that it’s hard to find the good (outside the actual game itself).
P.S. I would like the return of scheduled doubleheaders – heck, give me a tripleheader!

OK, Michael Young is at 22. I wonder how much longer until the Dallas Morning News creates this series of graphics. You guys remember this?

Funny thing about that graphic is that when the DMN was doing that, they pre-made the graphics up to like 32 or something like that, and they were all just sitting on their server. If you found out the actual URL for the file, you could manually see the ones beyond 28. Was amusing to me at the time to see how far they thought the streak would go. :)