Baseball On My Brain

I’m inconsistent as it gets with magazines. First of all, I get a lot of them, which leads to the problem. I do my darndest to read them when I get them, and make use of whatever I can as soon as possible. The rest finds its way to the recycling bin.

Needless to say I’m a bit behind on USA Today Sports Weekly — but I wanted to call your attention to two things:

In case you missed it, Bud Selig got a contract extension as the Commissioner of Major League Baseball through 2012. Under Selig, MLB revenue has grown from $1.6 billion in 1992 to a record $6.1 billion in 2007. (Yes, you read those numbers right.)

What concerns me is Bud’s statement at the Winter Meetings: “I will make this prediction to you: by the time I leave, you won’t recognize this sport. It’s going to be that much more popular and we’ll have branched out into so many other things.”

Just what the heck does that first sentence mean?

I get that baseball is now playing on a global field and that it’s embracing technology at breakneck speed. But for Selig to suggest that we won’t recognize baseball gives me just a bit of discomfort. Time will tell just what Bud’s prediction may come to mean.

There’s a good article about the success of the four teams added to MLB in the 1990s. Quick…name them. Interesting to note that none of the four have a franchise record above .500, yet there are three World Series titles in the group, and a fourth played for the Series last year. Each has a different story to tell and this article give a good snapshot of all of them.

Now that I got that out of the way, I’ve got to take the recycling out.