As we wind down the MLB season, it’s time for the annual
deluge of “owners don’t know what they’re doing” retrospectives.
We think nothing could be further from the truth and our reasoning
is in Chapter 8: Owners and General Managers are Inept. We
address a few things that are bound to contribute to the fun, even if you disagree (and we can't imagine why you would).
Yes, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth’s contract to the
Yankees. Yes, the Falcons traded Favre to
the Packers after only one year. And
yes, the Yankees will pay more in luxury tax this year than the entire Astros
payroll. [We dispel the Ruth and Favre
stories; Maury Brown of BizOfBaseball ably handled the Astros case just
recently in a rebuttal at Forbes.]
We also dispel the statistically misguided myth that somehow if the Yankees
spend twice as much as another team that wins just as many games, then the Yankees
must be more than twice as dumb as anybody in baseball.
So it goes like this…Oh wait… That’s why we wrote the book! So that you would all have plenty of time and more depth on the myth than you are typically offered in the blogosphere (and surely in the Twitterverse).
So it goes like this…Oh wait… That’s why we wrote the book! So that you would all have plenty of time and more depth on the myth than you are typically offered in the blogosphere (and surely in the Twitterverse).
So, as you catch yourself offering some variant on the following Frank Kostanza rant from
Seinfeld, remember that you could have read the book and learned that ineptness
had nothing to do with it.
"What the hell did you trade Jay Buhner for? He had 30 home runs, over 100 RBIs last year! He's got a rocket for an arm...You don't know what the hell you're doing."
"What the hell did you trade Jay Buhner for? He had 30 home runs, over 100 RBIs last year! He's got a rocket for an arm...You don't know what the hell you're doing."
