Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker

Not only Rose and Shoeless Joe have run into trouble because of gambling on baseball.  From SI in 1989:

Pete Rose and Ty Cobb are linked by more than their 4,000-plus hits and hell-for-leather styles. It is little remembered that 63 years ago Cobb—like Rose today—was embroiled in a gambling scandal that featured an alleged vendetta and complaints about a commissioner who was slow to act.

In 1926 retired pitcher Dutch Leonard told American League president Ban Johnson that near the end of the 1919 season, Leonard and Tiger teammate Cobb, along with Tris Speaker and Smokey Joe Wood of the Indians, had met beneath the stands in Detroit and reached an understanding that the Indians, who had clinched second place behind the White Sox, would lose to the Tigers the next day so that Detroit could finish third and claim a share of World Series money. Leonard said that to profit on the arrangement Cobb planned to bet $2,000 on the game, Leonard $1,500 and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each. In the end, Cleveland did lose, 9-5, but Cobb didn't get his money down in time, and only a small portion of the others' money was wagered.
Leonard was said to harbor grudges against both Cobb and Speaker—Cobb, the Tigers' player-manager, had released him in 1926, and Speaker, the Indians' player-manager, had refused to pick him up—but he did possess two incriminating letters from Cobb and Wood. In his letter Wood had written, "If we ever have another chance like this we will know enough to try to get [our bets] down early." Cobb had written, "Wood and myself are considerably disappointed in our business proposition."
The public didn't get wind of Leonard's accusations until Cobb and Speaker both retired unexpectedly after the '26 season. Johnson had allowed them to resign rather than make the affair public. But he gave Leonard's letters to commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who crossed Johnson by revealing them to the press. While fans clamored for a decision, Landis spent more than two months looking into the case. He deemed the charges rather old, and sensed the overwhelming public support for Cobb and Speaker. Uncharacteristically brushing off a number of questions that remained unanswered, Landis exonerated everyone involved.
To their dying days, Cobb, Speaker and Wood all denied any wrongdoing. But baseball had been rife with gambling early in their careers. As Woods told baseball historian Mark Alvarez in 1975, when he was asked about the scandal, "Things were so different then."

The difference, Cobb and Speaker are in the Hall of Fame, Rose and Jackson aren't.

The fictional Shoeless Joe was right:

The Inverted "W"?

The Atlantic:

New York Yankees Joba Chamberlain has a torn ligament in his elbow. This means the two most hyped pitching phenoms of the 21st century, Joba and the Washington Nationals' Stephen Strasburg, have now fallen victim to the same curse: the "Inverted W," or the "Inverted L," or whatever a particular trainer or sports physician wants to call it.

Per the website Texasleaguers.com, the inverted W is the position of a pitcher's arms as he picks up the baseball during the cocking phase of a pitch. When winding up, "the pitcher picks up both of his elbows above his shoulder," creating the inverted W. This puts a lot of strain on both the shoulder and elbow, which many baseball mechanics experts think can tear the ulnar collateral ligament, which stabilizes the elbow.

Baseball observers have taken so long to identify the inverted W because it is a relatively recent development—that is, it didn't come into being until the windup disappeared almost entirely from baseball. Go back 40 to 50 years and look at pitchers like Warren Spahn or Juan Marichal and ask, "Why is it that they could pitch 300 more innings year after year and not hurt their arms?" There are several answers to that question, but the primary one is that pitches used to throw out of a full windup, which took advantage of the momentum of their whole body to give velocity to the pitch. In recent decades, with pitchers more concerned about holding runners on base, the windup has largely gone the way of the two-dollar hot dog. The Inverted W is the result of a pitcher trying to add speed or finesse on a pitch by forcing the delivery—in other words, his arm working against his body instead of with it.

This is not something I was familiar with.  I guess pitching out of the windup should put less strain on a pitcher, since he's using all of his body to gather momentum.  I'll just go with my theory that throwing the ball really hard makes a lot of pitchers arms give out.  100 mph is really hard. 

Joe Nuxhall's Major League Debut

June 10, 1944, from Baseball-Reference:

"Probably two weeks prior to that, I was pitching against seventh, eighth and ninth graders, kids 13 and 14 years old. All of a sudden, I look up and there's Stan Musial . . ." - Joe Nuxhall, about his first game as a 15-year-old major leaguer

Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds was the youngest player to make his major league debut in the 20th Century at 15 years, 10 months, and 11 days old. He is probably also the youngest player of all time. The player once thought to hold that distinction, Fred Chapman, was recently discovered to have been Frank Chapman, a pitcher whose age was not remarkable in any way, while there are serious doubts about the true birth date of the other contender for the title, Billy Geer.
Nuxhall was actually discovered while the Reds were scouting his 34 year old father, Orville, to fill their World War II depleted roster. Instead, they liked what they saw of the younger Nuxhall, and the club signed him to a $175 per month contract after the school year ended. He spent most of his time sitting on the bench, but on June 10th, 1944, with the Reds trailing the St. Louis Cardinals 13-0, Reds skipper Bill McKechnie put Nuxhall into a game. He walked one and retired two batters before seeing future Hall of Famer Stan Musial on deck. Nuxhall then unraveled, allowing five earned runs and failing to retire another batter.
Afterwards, Nuxhall was sent to the minors and did not pitch another major league game until 1952. He spent most of his major league career with the Reds at the time when they were known as the "Redlegs". However, he missed the club's single World Series appearance of that era, as he was pitching for the Kansas City Athletics in 1961. His best year was in 1955 when he went 17-12 and played in the All-Star Game. In the 1960s, about twenty years after his big league debut, he had another pair of fine seasons, going 15-8 in 1963 and 11-4 in 1965.

Here is the boxscore from June 10, 1944.

Here is a video interview of Nuxhall reflecting on his first game, and his life in baseball.

Here is the Enquirer's obituary from November 16, 2007.

Marty and Joe began broadcasting together prior to my birth.  Joe's broadcasts were the sound of summer.  Nobody meant Cincinnati baseball more than Joe.

Upsets in NCAA Baseball Regionals

UConn and Dallas Baptist each advance to the Super Regionals.  Illinois came up just short.

Knuckleballer Dickey Leads Mets Over Braves

I forgot to mention the excellent pitching performance by R.A. Dickey on Sunday night against the Braves.  He held them to 4 hits, a walk and one earned run in 8 innings, to improve his record to 3-6.  Here's ESPN:

Dickey's knuckleball was floating and darting and fooling the Braves. He allowed just three hits through five innings and no runner got past second until McCann homered.
His knuckleball "was dancing all over the place," McCann said. "We didn't really string anything together."

There is nothing better to watch than a ballgame where a pitcher has his knuckleball working.  Every fat guy watching TV swears he would kill the thing, but the best hitters in the game can't touch it.  Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about you, Cubs Dad.

Phillies 2B Gets Win Over Reds in 19th

ESPN:

Wilson Valdez has a new career as a late-inning reliever.
Late. Really, really late.
Valdez shifted over from second base and wound up as the winning pitcher early Thursday when the Philadelphia Phillies needed 19 innings to outlast the Cincinnati Reds 5-4.In front of a dwindling crowd at Citizens Bank Park, Raul Ibanez hit a bases-loaded sacrifice fly to decide the longest major league game of the season. It ended at 1:19 a.m. local time after 6 hours, 11 minutes.
Shaving cream nestled in his beard and dripping off his ear in the locker room, Valdez wanted to keep pitching.
"I can go for three more, four more (innings). Whatever," he said.

The last position player to get a win was Brent Mayne on August 22, 2000 for the Rockies.  Before that, it was Rocky Colavito on August 25, 1968 for the Yankees.  So the Reds-Phillies four-game series becomes a de facto five-game series, and to add insult to injury, today's game is at 1:05.  I think they ought to divide last night's game into 2-nine-and-a-half inning games, since the Reds were up 4-3 in the middle of the tenth.

Why I Hate the Yankees

Joe Posnanski:

Yankees fans, though ... well, they are different. To my mind, this isn't so much because of New York as it is because the Yankees are always a good baseball team. You probably know the numbers: 27 World Series, 40 pennants, 49 playoff appearances. They have appeared in the playoffs every year but one since 1993 -- and some of the kids born in 1993 are graduating high school in the next few weeks. Even on those rare occasions when the Yankees are not great, they are not terrible. They are never hopeless. The Yankees have never lost 100 games in a season. They have lost 90 on three times since they traded for Babe Ruth. Their best player just about every decade has been an iconic player, the sort of player who adds to the glamour of pinstripes. Look at the players who have led the Yankees in Wins Above Replacement decade by decade:.

1920s: Babe Ruth
1930s: Lou Gehrig
1940s: Joe DiMaggio
1950s: Mickey Mantle
1960s: Mantle (with Roger Maris second)
1970s: Thurman Munson
1980s: Don Mattingly
1990s: Bernie Williams
2000s: Derek Jeter

Not all of these players are or will be in the Hall of Fame, but they all have their legend, and they all add a little something to the enormity of the Yankees.

Damn, those guys have been good.  But I still have memories of 1990, when the Reds won the World Series (and the Pirates won the East) and the Braves and Yankees each finished in last. That has been a long time ago, and those kids born in 1993 have seen the Reds and the Pirates lose a lot.

Were the '29 A's Better Than The '27 Yankees?

1929 Philadelphia A's




From the SI archive:

The 1927 Yankees, who won 110 games and finished 19 ahead of second-place Philadelphia, are traditionally venerated as the finest team ever assembled. In fact, according to most old-timers who played in that era, the 1927 and '28 Yankees and the 1929 and '30 Athletics matched up so closely that they were nearly equal, with the A's given the nod in fielding and pitching and the Yankees in hitting.
"I pitched against both of them, and you could flip a coin," recalls Willis Hudlin, 90, who won 157 games for the Cleveland Indians between 1926 and 1940. "They both had power and pitching. A game would be decided on who was pitching and what kind of a day he had. You could throw a dart between 'em."
In truth, the chief difference between the two teams had less to do with how they played in any given game than with where they played their home games. Many veteran baseball observers believe that the Yankees' far more exalted status in history is due largely to the fact that they played in New York, in media heaven, where the manufacture of myth and hype is a light industry. Regardless, these observers agree that those old A's were the finest baseball team to play in Philadelphia and the greatest team that almost no one remembers.
"Those A's never got the credit they deserved," says Shirley Povich, 91, the retired sports editor of The Washington Post, who covered both teams. "The A's were victims of the Yankee mystique. Perhaps the 1927 Yankees were the greatest team of all time. But if there was a close second, perhaps an equal, it was those A's. They are the most overlooked team in baseball."

I've got to say that the 1929-1931 A's don't come to mind like the 1927 Yankees or the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds do.  It is a very interesting story, and well worth the read.  Heck, a lot of people don't know the A's played in Philadelphia, let alone that they were loaded with talent.  I did learn when I went to Philadelphia that fans there remember the A's, but I suppose part of that is because the Philles were so horrible for most of the 20th century.

Shibe Park, around 1930

Photos from Baseball Fever and ExplorePAHistory

Update: My favorite part of the story:

There were celebrations in the streets of Philadelphia that night. The A's miraculous victory was the biggest story of the day. No wonder Hoover and his wife went north behind the locomotive President Washington to be on hand for Game 5.
Prohibition was still the law, and as Hoover walked across the field to Shibe's presidential box at 1 p.m., the crowd chanted, "Beer! Beer! We want beer!"

Eight Men Out

Speaking of the movie, here's the trailer.  It doesn't show the scoreboard I was talking about, but it is a reminder of a great movie.



Also, the Reds won more games that season, and would have won that Series even if the Sox were on the up-and-up. Throwing the series was just a good explanation for Sox fans as to why they lost.

Update: You can see a glimmer of crazy in Charlie Sheen in this clip.

The Boston Globe's Early 20th Century Website

In the days before radio, fans crowded Newspaper Row (a section of Washington Street downtown) to follow big games on the Globe’s scoreboard. Hundreds “watched” the Red Sox beat the New York Giants four games to three in the 1912 World Series. (photo dated Oct. 18, 1912)

Chris Marstall (h/t The Dish):

But this isn’t the first time the paper has tried a free, real-time, ad-supported product. From at least the turn of the century until the 1950s, Globe staff shuttled back and forth throughout the day from the newsroom to the street. There they wrote breaking news headlines and sports scores on four blackboards and two enormous sheets of newsprint. Behind the Globe’s windows? Ads.
Breaking news – a bank holdup, a bus accident, the death of FDR – was quickly featured on the storefront (NB: usually in 140 characters or less). The storefront even offered streaming multimedia of a kind: telegraph dispatches of boxing matches and baseball games were shouted out play by play through a pair of loudspeakers.
Different “layouts” were used. During World War II an outsized map of Europe loomed over the storefront. For Red Sox World Series appearances, a scaffold was built. Sports desk hacks stood on it to chalk up the scores for bowler-hatted crowds numbering in the hundreds.

I remember in the movie Eight Men Out where people were crowded around a big board with a diamond and scoreboard in a hotel lobby, and were "watching" the game.  It was the exact same setup as ESPN Gamecast, which I would use to track the Reds during a day game at work.  Here are pictures of the same thing in Boston.  It is interesting to think that things haven't changed that much since the invention of the telegraph, but the speed has only increased significantly.  There is no actual difference between Donald Rumsfeld's aide Tweeting that Bin Laden is dead or somebody who was in the telegraph office when news of the assassination of McKinley came in running down to the tavern and telling people.  I forget things like that sometimes.

Old Style Comes Out With Baseball Bat Bottles

Limited edition Old Style bottles (h/t Matt):

Predating even Wrigley is Old Style Beer, which first appeared in Chicago in 1902, when the N.L. franchise was known as the “Orphans.”  A half-century later, Old Style began a relationship with the team that has lasted 61 years.

Old Style bottle design

Chicago-based marketers Scott & Victor and Pabst Brewing Company today announced the launch of Old Style Beer’s campaign surrounding that partnership.  The campaign, which will hit the market early next month, is anchored around collectors’ edition bottles are designed to look like wooden baseball bats with the Cubs and Old Style logos and the phrase “Chicago’s Beer Since 1902” etched into them.
“Given the long-standing relationship between Old Style Beer and the Chicago Cubs, Old Style is in a unique position to make commentary about the team and the stadium spanning decades,” said Victor LaPorte, partner, Scott & Victor. “The baseball bat bottle design pays ultimate respect to the sport and the team, and the print campaign visually references old-school baseball cards, including insider messages that are unique to the Cubs and rewarding to their fans.”
The limited edition bottles will be on sale at select stores around Chicago and Wrigley Field area bars.

Whenever I visit Wrigley, I usually have a couple Old Style (or maybe more) and root against the Cubs.  That usually gets me through being surrounded by Cubs fans.  Of course, having a bottle to swing at them would help some, so maybe I could sneak one of these in.

Wakefield Shuts Down Cubs

ESPN:

It wasn't the Green Monster looming over left field or the Pesky Pole in right that turned out to be the toughest adjustment for the Chicago Cubs in their first visit to Fenway Park since the 1918 World Series.

It was Tim Wakefield's knuckleball.The 44-year-old Red Sox right-hander held Chicago to four hits in 6 2/3 innings to help Boston beat the Cubs 5-1 on Sunday and send them home from with another lost series. It was Wakefield's first win of the season and the 180th of his Red Sox career -- third on the franchise all-time list behind only Roger Clemens and Cy Young.

"Boy, he was really good," Boston manager Terry Francona said. "I guess it shouldn't amaze me because he's been doing that for such a long time."Making his third start of the season, this one because of injuries to John Lackey and Daisuke Matsuzaka, Wakefield (1-1) had faced the minimum number of batters when he struck out Jeff Baker with what would have been the third out of the fifth inning.

Baker reached safely when the ball got past catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia. That was just the third baserunner in the first six innings against Wakefield.

"When you're asked to do a job and you do it well -- I take a lot of pride in that," said Wakefield, who needs 12 more wins to tie Clemens and Young at 192 in a Boston uniform.

It is always cool when the knuckleball is working.  The announcers on ESPN mentioned that Wakefield, at 44, has his contract renewed annually.  If he gets on a couple of hot streaks over the next couple of years, he might be able to break the team record for all-time wins

Black-Eyed Susan Preview

Here's the lineup for today's Black-Eyed Susan:

Earlier this week, seven three-year-old fillies drew into the field for Friday's Grade 2 Black-Eyed Susan Stakes at Pimlico.  An early scratch to Art of the Hunt leaves this field with just six contenders and a much different pace situation. Below is a look at the field for Friday's Black-Eyed Susan Stakes (post time 4:46 Eastern; TV - Versus).

PP	Horse	Jockey	Trainer	ML
1	Royal Delta	J. Lezcano	W. Mott	3/1
2	Hot Summer	R. Dominguez	D. Fawkes	5/2
3	Coax Liberty	G. Gomez	J. Lawrence	8/1
4	Wyomia	J. Leparoux	C. Garrison	9/5
5	Buster's Ready	J. Velazquez	T. Pletcher	8/1
6	Love Theway Youare	J. Rosario	M. Cho	12/1
--	Art of the Hunt	--	--	SCR

A horse-by-horse preview is included with the lineup here.

Vacations

I'm figuring on travelling to Detroit and Cleveland this summer to take in ball games.  I know, why would somebody plan vacations to two of America's fastest dying cities.  I guess I just don't like crowds.  I figure I can go on the River Rouge factory tour while in Detroit, and maybe visit the Great Lakes Brewery in Cleveland.  Does anybody else have any recommendations for things to do in these fine Midwestern metropolii?  Here's a Cleveland tourism video.

Foreshadowing the Fall of Lenny Dykstra

Dead Spin reprints a profile of Lenny Dykstra from Philadelphia magazine in January 1993, it is a must-read (via Ritholtz):

"I love you, dude," he says to the bald gambler, who nods meekly in acknowledgment. Dykstra compulsively smooths out his slender spire of chips; he keeps adding to the stack like a child testing how high his building blocks will climb before gravity in­trudes.
"We're on a fucking roll, dude."
And so are we. Watching Lenny Dykstra gamble is like having an orchestra seat at a one-character David Mamet tragicomic psychodrama. You are appalled and delighted by the language and the largesse, the exposed and tortured soul. You enjoy the ride. You know it will end badly.
A dozen strangers are loitering at the entrance to the pit, watch­ing the littlest Phillie go through his off-season regimen: tossing cards to keep his arm in shape, honing hand-eye coordination by betting, smoking, stacking and drinking simultaneously. He never does nothing. After performing before tens of thousands of screaming-meemies, a handful of hushed spectators won't inhibit his hyper reverie; degenerate gamblers are in heaven when in ac­tion, and Dykstra has been known to wager on tennis and golf and dice and football and poker and the accuracy of his own expecto­rated tobacco juice.

It always struck me as odd that Lenny Dykstra was an investment advice columnist on TheStreet.com, who specialized in outside-the-money options.  It didn't seem like the right person for that strategy, especially because Lenny never came off as a brilliant guy to me.  It's sad to see a guy crash and burn, but I guess I'll take whatever lesson I can from it and try not to rubberneck too much at the smoking wreckage.

Update: I'll also excerpt the rules on baccarat, just because I didn't understand them:

The Banker is hot. The center fielder settles into a giddy super­stitious spree, talking to himself, taking short circular walks, con­tinually licking those luxurious lips like a nervous ingénue confronting a camera. Everyone knows the outcome of each hand the instant he does. No poker face, he is easier to read than a road­side billboard. In baccarat, it doesn't matter.
The rules of the game are simple. The gambler with the shoe deals two cards each to another participant (Player) and to himself (Banker). The closest to nine points wins. Tens and face cards count as zero, aces as one. A third card may be drawn, if needed. The gambler makes one decision: bet on Banker or Player. You win whatever you bet, dollar for dollar; the casino takes a five per­cent fee — vigorish — on Banker wins. In France, the game is called chemin de fer (railroad) because it moves at great speeds, money changing hands every minute, 60 or 70 times an hour. The game requires no talent at all. If you bat .400, you're a stone loser.

Harmon Killebrew, RIP

ESPN:

Harmon Killebrew, the affable, big-swinging Hall of Famer whose tape-measure home runs made him the cornerstone of the Minnesota Twins and perhaps the most popular player in the team's 51-year history, died Tuesday after battling esophageal cancer. He was 74. The Twins said Killebrew passed away peacefully at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., with his wife, Nita, and their family at his side. He announced his diagnosis just six months ago, and last week Killebrew said he was settling in for the final days of his life after doctors deemed the "awful disease" incurable.
Killebrew is 11th on baseball's all-time home run list after an exceptional 22-year career. His eight seasons with 40 or more homers still is tied for second in league history to Babe Ruth, and his uppercut swing formed the silhouette that inspired Major League Baseball's official logo.

Killebrew started his career with the Washington Senators in 1954, prior to their move to Minnesota in 1961.  He won the AL MVP in 1969.  He was ranked fifth all-time in home runs prior to the steroid era.

Milwaukee and the Braves

From the SI archive in 1998, after the Brewers switched to the National League, a look back at the Braves run in the city:

Playing in the second smallest city in the majors (pop. 725,000), they became the first National League team to draw two million fans in a season. They did it annually from '54 to '57 and came up just 29,000 short in '58. And while the Braves relied on the rest of Wisconsin, as well as Iowa, Minnesota and northern Illinois, to accomplish that, there should be no doubt as to where the wellspring of love for them lay. Back then you could walk into the best restaurants in Milwaukee—Karl Ratzsch's, Alioto's, Ray Jackson's—and always find the Braves game on the radio. In the city's multitudinous taverns there were never cries of dismay when Earl Gillespie, the voice of the Braves, reported that a fan had leaped onto County Stadium's diamond; the drinkers simply started betting on how many bases he would touch before the grounds crew hauled him down.
If you ask why the drinkers weren't at the game themselves, it was probably because they couldn't get tickets. Most of the time their best shot was to hop on a tavern's chartered bus and follow the Braves to Wrigley Field, where in those days there were always plenty of empty seats. Selig paid his most memorable visit to Chicago in 1954 when the Cubs were honoring their lumbering slugger, Hank Sauer, who concluded the festivities by dropping a fly ball to give Milwaukee the win. "The Cubs had printed up these signs that said THANKS, HANK," Selig says, "and all the Braves fans started waving them."
Nobody who took those bus trips south ever got shortchanged, but Ruthie Patzke was starting to think she might be an exception when her group dragged her to a restaurant to listen to a Milwaukee Journal sportswriter. What, Ruthie wondered, could be so interesting about some joker who'd just seen the same Braves-Cubs game they had? When the sportswriter started talking, though, Ruthie noticed that his blue suit complemented his hazel eyes. So she took the trouble to learn his name—Bob Wolf—and then she wangled an introduction, and before you knew it she and a girlfriend were at a cozy little bar having a drink with him. No night of lust followed for Bob and Ruthie; this was 1953, and they were delighted just to see each other at Wrigley the next afternoon. Thirteen months later, just before the start of the World Series, Bob and Ruthie said "I do" to a marriage that is still going strong.
The love affair between Milwaukee and the Braves looked as if it would be equally enduring. No suitor courted Elizabeth Taylor, always a league leader in marriages, as ardently as this city did its baseball heroes. It wasn't just the good-time guys such as Mathews, Bob Buhl and Lew Burdette who never had to pay for a meal and always got a free car to drive. It was all the Braves. And the bounty didn't end with T-bones and Dodges, which were no small consideration during an era in which the minimum player's salary was $7,500, and raises for journeymen were measured in pennies. The players got free gas from Wisco, free dry cleaning from Spic 'n' Span, free beer from every brewery in town. "Soap powder and produce were just about the only things that weren't delivered to our door," Burdette says. It turned out to be too good to last.
There is no single explanation why. Bad news simply begot more bad news. In the early '60s Braves management barred fans from bringing their own beer into County Stadium, hardly a valentine to a populace historically as thrifty as it is thirsty. And then the first wave of crowd pleasers started getting old and getting traded. Suddenly attendance couldn't climb above 775,000, even though the Braves continued to make every season a winning one. When the first notes of Atlanta's siren song drifted through the air, the team's owners started checking flight schedules.

My favorite part of the whole article is where it says the Braves management banned the fans from bringing in their own beer in the early '60's.  So from 1953 until the early '60's, fans could carry their own beer in the game.  No wonder they got great crowds.  There is no doubt in my mind that Milwaukee is by far the most fun city in the country.  If you want any kind of festival during the summer, they have it.  If you need an excuse to drink a beer, thy've got it.  It is also extremely friendly, and has some great cheese and sausage to go along with that beer.  If you get the chance, spend a little time there.

Ring of Thieves

What do you get when the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys and Goldman Sachs work together?  You get screwed, that's what:

In the more desirable seats at Yankee Stadium, an already pricey $10.50 draft beer will run you an eye-popping $12.60 thanks to an involuntary 20 percent "service fee" tacked on to the original price. If the sticker shock doesn’t make that brew bitter enough, consider this: Despite what you might expect, that extra $2 and change isn't going to the hustling server who sold it to you, according to a new lawsuit.
Legends Hospitality, the concessionaire co-owned by the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys, and Goldman Sachs, allegedly pockets the 20 percent service fee attached to food and drink in violation of New York law, according to a class-action lawsuit filed against the company by three Yankee Stadium servers this week. If certified as class action, the suit could involve more than a hundred servers and hundreds of thousands of dollars in claims.
At the center of the dispute is how hot dogs, sodas and other ballpark fare are served in the stadium's field-level seats, which typically cost between $100 and $350 a game. At field level, fans don't have to fetch their food and drink; they instead can place orders with servers carrying credit-card machines and get the orders ferried to their seats by food-and-drink runners.
Under this arrangement, the servers act a lot like salespeople. "They schmooze the customers, and they're trained to upsell, just like any other waitress," says the plaintiffs' lawyer, Brian Schaffer. "If somebody says, 'I want a hot dog,' they say, 'But wouldn’t you like a cold beer with that?'"
According to the suit, the menus field-level spectators find in their cupholders include this disclaimer: "A 20% service charge will be added to the listed prices. Additional gratuity is at your discretion." That phrase "additional gratuity" would seem to imply that the 20 percent is, in fact, a gratuity, but Schaffer says his clients don’t get that money. Instead, they receive a far more modest commission, between four and six percent, of their total sales for the game.

Stay classy, assholes.  It is way too appropriate that these three entities are working together in this deal.  All of them are pretentious jerkass operations used to making money hand over fist, and yet they can't get enough.  Not that I can feel too bad for the people in the expensive seats, but jeez, why jack it up 20% more?

Update: I think these three make up the sports and finance Axis of Evil.

A Season Before War

From the SI archive, Steve Rushin remembers baseball in 1941, the season before major league ballplayers joined the war effort:

In 1941, Joe DiMaggio traveled across the country by coal-fired locomotives and signed autographs with a fountain pen and stuck his arm out the window of his automobile (even in the dead of winter) before hanging a left, because his was an age before turbojet engines and ballpoints and turn signals. He played baseball in flannel pajamas, in stifling heat, and was cooled in clubhouses by an oscillating fan or a bottle of Ballantine's, kept cold in an icebox that was literally that—a block of ice in a wooden box. Co-incidentally, on the night 60 years ago that DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak ended in Cleveland, fans presented Indians manager Roger Peckinpaugh with a marvelous modern convenience: It was described, in the next day's New York Times, as an "electric refrigerator."
Ted Williams hit .406 in '41 without benefit of Palm Pilot, PlayStation or Nokia 8260. Nor did he enjoy homogenized milk, fluoridated water, central air, credit cards, fast food, TV or peace of mind. Consider: On May 15 of that year, when DiMaggio's streak began, Vichy France announced its collaboration with Nazi Germany. On July 17, the day the streak ended, the Nazis' second assault on Russia climaxed with nine million men engaged in fighting on that front. ARMY SELECTEE STARTS DRAFT OF 21-YEAR-OLDS, announced Page One of that day's edition of the Times. The Streak, meanwhile, was eulogized in Sports with but a single story.
All of which is to say—without going too Tom Brokaw on you—that '41 witnessed our greatest generation of ballplayers. True, baseball was not yet integrated, but DiMaggio and Williams alone engineered twin towers of achievement that no player has since scaled. They did so before expansion, chartered flights or steroids, when neither the ball nor the batters were juiced. In essence, these men were slapping matzoh balls off the centerfield wall with arms they developed the old-fashioned way: by signaling turns, in the dead of winter, out the window of a '39 Packard.

In this age of the all-volunteer army, it is hard for me to imagine a time when major league athletes, let alone everyday middle-class citizens, were drafted into the armed forces.  I carry around a 1943 steel penny to remind myself of a time when fighting a war meant that the general public made sacrifices.  I guess that is a time long-gone.

The Best Outfield of All-Time?

Robert Creamer made the case for the 1890's Philadelphia Phillies:

The best outfield ever to play in the big leagues was a remarkable trio that spent five seasons together, a long time as outfields go, on the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1890s, way back in baseball's Dark Ages. Before you dismiss that best-outfield claim as the raving of a hidebound antiquarian, consider the exploits of Del. Big Sam and Sliding Billy.
Del was Ed Delahanty, the leftfielder, who was named to the Hall of Fame in 1945. Delahanty, 6'1", 170 pounds, was an accomplished outfielder graceful enough to play the infield when he was needed there. He was a remarkable hitter whose lifetime average of .346 is the fourth highest of all time; only Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby and Shoeless Joe Jackson have surpassed it. Delahanty was a righthanded power hitter, a crowd pleaser. In 1893 he excited the Philadelphia fans one day by hitting two long "foul home runs" to left in the ninth before clouting a bases-clearing triple off the centerfield fence. "The tumult was kept up for such a length of time as to make it absolutely necessary for Umpire Gaffney to stop the game for a while," reported the Philadelphia Public Ledger. "The spectators acted like maniacs; they jumped and danced around, threw straw hats, coats, canes and umbrellas in the air and yelled at the top of their voices..."
One day in Chicago in 1896 Delahanty hit a home run in the first inning, singled in the third, hit another homer in the fifth and another in the seventh. When he came to bat in the ninth, the Chicago fans were shouting, "Line it out. Del! Make it four!" He responded by hitting one onto the clubhouse roof in left for his fourth home run of the game.
Big Sam was Sam Thompson, the rightfielder, who was named to the Hall of Fame in 1974. He was 6'2" and weighed 207 pounds, huge for his day. Thompson, a lefthanded hitter (lifetime average: .331), was a slugger who in the 12 seasons from 1885 through 1896 finished first, second or third in the National League 37 times in such batting categories as average, hits, doubles, triples, homers, slugging percentage, total bases and RBIs. His career total of 129 home runs was a league record that stood for 25 years. In 1887, he led Detroit to its only National League pennant, batting in 166 runs; the second man in the league had 104. Thompson had more RBIs per game in his career than any other player in big league history, including Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron—.92 per game for Big Sam, compared to .88 for the Babe and .70 for Hank. Thompson led the league's outfielders in assists one year and is credited with popularizing the one-bounce throw to home plate. Previously, outfielders had depended on infielders to relay the ball. Thompson didn't play big league baseball until he was 25 and was 31 when the great outfield came together.
Sliding Billy was Billy Hamilton, the centerfielder, who was named to the Hall of Fame in 1961. He was built like a tree stump: 5'6", 165 pounds, with thick legs. He was a lefthanded singles hitter, and his lifetime average of .344 is seventh on the alltime list. Hamilton was the fastest man in baseball in the 1890s, an outfielder with great range and a base runner who earned his nickname by making headfirst slides 70 years before Pete Rose came on the scene. He led the National League in bases on balls five times, in stolen bases seven times and seemed always to be racing across home plate. He scored 1.06 runs per game during his career, still the major league record. In 1894 he had 192 runs, another enduring record.

Unfortunately for Delahanty, he is often times remembered for dying by falling into the Niagara River while drunk, and drowning.  As Creamer notes, the 1894 Phillies had 4 outfielders hit over .400.