Note: this post was originally published for MetsMerized. Give them a click!
How we feeling, Mets fans?
It’s true – Francisco Lindor, Mr. Smile, is officially headed to Queens. Just as the Dodgers did last offseason, and in shockingly similar fashion, the Mets have acquired a career-prime, marketable superstar to underscore new owner Steve Cohen’s stamp on the team (if that wasn’t strong enough already).
Continue reading “Mr. Smile: a Deep Dive into Francisco Lindor”
In today’s MLB, it feels like superstar players are being traded every year. Teams are looking to jumpstart a rebuild, and the best way to do that is often by trading their best player. However, how often does a team actually get a return value worthy of the superstar himself? In this study, we looked to identify potential superstars who could be traded in the future and what their ideal return package should look like.
Continue reading “To Trade or Not to Trade?”
In 127 years of Major League Baseball, 21 teams have won at least 100 games at least two years in a row. The 2018-19 New York Yankees are one of those teams. And consider this: As the decade comes to a close, no team won more games than the Yankees. They won 921 – 57 more than the team’s chief rival, the Boston Red Sox; 100 more than the San Francisco Giants. And 150 games more than the Houston Astros.
February is right around the corner. Winter is almost on its way out, and pitchers and catchers start to report to spring training in just 2 weeks. The MLB landscape, though, is far from set.
Since its creation, baseball has always served as a metaphor for our country. In the 20th Century, artists like Norman Rockwell and the creators of the film Field of Dreams used the game to contrast modern, urban obsessions with America’s simple, rural, and more grounded roots. Contemporary America is a long way from those values – and the national pastime is too. Today, baseball is more about power, data, recruiting overseas talent, and total revenue earned than playing the game the old, “right way”. These changes reflect the newer America: an appetite for speed and immediacy, emphasis on increasing power/production, utilizing immigrant labor, and profit maximization. A majority of fans may be happy with the majestic home runs and electrifying strikeouts they witnessed in the 2017 World Series. But, there are some who believe that it is baseball that has lost something fundamental about its essence.
It has been said recently that the NBA has never been stronger than it is right now, and it really is true. The NBA is all over the sports news, currently dominating the news cycle on ESPN, getting more airtime than America’s pastime, the MLB. Franchise values are skyrocketing and the league recently turned down a prospective owner who wanted to pay a billion dollars for the Kings, over $300 million more than they was valued at before the bidding war began. The league has two extremely marketable superstars in Kevin Durant and LeBron James, who by all accounts are not only phenomenal basketball players, but also good citizens.
The NBA is an interesting test case because of the idea of parity in sports. With the NBA, you can pick 8 teams at the beginning of the season and you will have a 90% chance of getting the correct champion. Don’t believe me? Check this out.
Corner Three 