The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
So by now you’ve all seen the fact that the Washington franchise in the National League is saving money by only embroidering some letters on the fronts of their uniforms.
I just showed my wife the photo, and the first thing she said was, “That’s great – but who are the Chefs?”
From what is otherwise a very interesting article on NCAA recruiting rules as they are being applied to fan pages on Facebook:
But dozens of Facebook groups are still up in plain site for current recruits, including Wall, and other top undecided basketball players such as Xavier Henry and Lance Stephenson.
I suppose the redesigned Facebook might qualify as a plain site, but I doubt that was the writer’s intent.
Incidentally, add me to the list of people who finds the NCAA’s intrusive attitude on this matter troublesome. It’s not even remotely clear what the harm might be, and as long as the page or group in question is not formally affiliated in any way with the university or its athletics program, I fail to see how the NCAA has the right to demand its termination, and the last time they got a little too big for their britches, an Ohio court put the smack down.
I’m not sure who’s doing gymnastics announcing for NBC – Al Trautwig? – but he just dropped this doozy:
Chen Yibing doing one of the most difficult things in sports: Winning when everyone thought you would.
This would be true, if everyone was high on LSD and started picking extreme longshots to win. But usually if everyone thinks you’re going to win, it’s because you’re really likely to win.
My wife has Dancing With the Stars on, and Def Leppard is performing “live” in their studios … except this is clearly the original recording of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” from Hysteria. I’m not shocked that Joe Elliott can’t hit the same high notes he could 20 years ago, but I’d be shocked if a single microphone back there was on. This is Ashlee Simpson territory – all we need is for Elliott to make some rambling, breathless apology as the show is ending. As my wife said, “If you’re not going to actually play it, why come on the show?” Good question.
So Martha Stewart is making rhubarb desserts today – a fool (for April Fool’s Day, hah) and a grunt. But she said one thing that caught my attention:
The leaves are deadly poisonous … They are toxic, oxalic acid and you can really die from it. And you notice in the fields, at the farm, the horses never go near, the chickens, nobody goes near the rhubarb.
While it’s true that rhubarb leaves are poisonous the cause isn’t oxalic acid, which is found in many foods, including cocoa, spinach, carrots, and berries. Spinach contains enough to all but wipe out the calcium found in the vegetable, because oxalic acid combines with the calcium to form calcium oxalate, an insoluble compound that can build up and form stones in the kidney or gallbladder. If oxalic acid was the only toxin at work in rhubarb leaves, it would take several pounds to kill you.
It is possible, however, that there’s a second compound at work in rhubarb leaves that works with the oxalic acid to make them toxic. One suspect is a form of anthraquinone glycoside, which is present in rhubarb roots and has been used in traditional medicine as a laxative. The anthraquinone glycoside(s) in rhubarb leaves may work in tandem with the oxalic acid to have a toxic effect, although there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence to back that up.
I have no idea why I posted this other than that I like rhubarb.
Brian Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times dropped me a note this morning to point me to the most recent twist in the Robert Irvine saga. They’ve got statements from FN and Irvine on their site; the gist is that Irvine’s contract won’t be renewed after the current season, although Dinner: Impossible will (probably?) continue with a new host.
CNN’s editing is so sloppy that in the link to an AP article on the problems posed by the apostrophe, they put the apostrophe in the wrong place:
Curse ‘o the Irish: Apostrophes (link goes to a screen cap of the screw-up)
Phil Sheridan: Phils should give Howard what he wants
Sheridan’s entire argument is as follows:
* The Phillies should lose their arbitration hearing with Ryan Howard on purpose, because…
* Fans will like it
* It will improve their relationship with Howard
I hate to trot out the old appeal to authority, but the truth is these are the words of someone who’s never worked in a baseball front office and doesn’t understand how the business works. Anyway, let’s get at the meat of his “argument:”
They win on public perception. You could do a master’s thesis in sociology on why so many sports fans get upset about the idea that a player like Howard – or Brian Westbrook, to cite another recent example – might be underpaid. Most fans, after all, could work a lifetime without earning what Howard will earn for playing baseball this year – even if he loses the hearing.
I have news for Mr. Sheridan: What fans think doesn’t matter. A GM who gives a shit what his fans think about a player’s salary is going to be out of work in fairly short order. What matters is winning. If the team wins, the fans don’t care how it came about. And paying a player more than you are required to pay him pushes you further from winning, not closer. So if you want to make the fans happy, beat Ryan Howard in arbitration and take the $3 million saved and try to put it towards the pitching problem.
Best of all, they can change the entire dynamic of their relationship with the best young power hitter they’ve ever had. Until now, for reasons ranging from the presence of Jim Thome to the Phillies’ own apparent inability to recognize Howard’s potential, they have paid very little for a lot of home runs, a rookie-of-the-year season, and an MVP season.
Yeah, again, this is what someone says when he doesn’t understand how the business works. He is correct that Howard’s pay did not match his performance during the last three years. So what? That’s the system. And there is absolutely ZERO evidence (not that Sheridan concerns himself with evidence here – the entire article is fluff) that overpaying a player at some point during his pre-arb or arb years buys you anything down the road. It doesn’t get the team a hometown discount on a long-term deal. It doesn’t make the player less likely to leave as a free agent. It just transfers money from the player budget to one player. The Cardinals gave Albert Pujols $900K in his last pre-arb year, and he still held their feet to the fire on a long-term deal twelve months later.
But here’s the worst part of all, the part that Sheridan doesn’t mention when he says, “Lose tomorrow and the Phillies make their fans happy, appease a superstar player, and set themselves up for a better relationship with him for years – all for $3 million.”
This just shows that he doesn’t get the system, because the cost is far more than $3 million.
You see, arbitration isn’t just about comparables, but it’s also about raises. If the Phillies lose their case against Howard – and they might lose anyway – then the baseline for his arbitration case next year becomes $10 million, rather than $7 million. This works against the Phillies simply because players always get raises in arbitration, even if they have awful years. (The only exceptions I know of are players who missed entire seasons and received the same salaries in the subsequent years.) Howard’s agent (Casey Close of CAA) will also be able to argue for a higher raise by looking at the raises comparable players received in percentage terms. For example, Alfonso Soriano received a 38% raise in his second year of arbitration eligibility. If Close argues for a 38% raise for Howard, then that’s $9.7 million if the Phillies win this year’s hearing but $13.8 million if the Phillies lose. The effect of a loss this year is cumulative.
No, losing an arbitration case on purpose is never a good idea, and I hope the Phillies put on a good show in a hearing where the cards are slightly stacked against them. Mr. Sheridan is going to have to show us at least one situation somewhere in baseball history where his idea didn’t come back to bite the team on the ass and leave it with a case of gangrene.
Courtesy of longtime reader Chris L. comes a link to a story in the St. Petersburg Times about Food Network star Robert Irvine, who appears to have fabricated parts of his resume and whose plans for a pair of big-time St. Petersburg restaurants are rapidly falling apart. Good work by the team that worked on this piece, although I would have liked to have seen some comments from the Food Network people (or at least the obligatory “no comment”). I’ve emailed the writer to ask if he reached anyone at FN on this topic.
Update: The article’s main writer, Ben Montgomery, told me that Food Network did not respond to his requests for comment, and that their food/dining blogger has also been trying to get a comment. You can see an update to the story related to the Princess Di wedding cake lie.
5:24 pm EST update: Ben sent me a link to a statement from a FN spokesperson over on the Mouth of Tampa Bay blog regarding Irvine. The gist seems to be that they’re distancing themselves from Irvine already.
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