We're heading to the UK this evening, so I will not likely be blogging much over the next couple of weeks. Maybe I'll get a chance to write from London or Scotland like I did from Paris, but I wouldn't count on it. If you find that you can't live without regular updates from my blog... well that's just sad, but here is another way to get the same amount of wisdom and insight as you'll generally find here.
In case you're curious, here's a map of where we're going to be. Cheerio!
Every year, baseball writers around North America vote on which retired ball players, coaches, and managers will be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The voters have rules to follow, since you only want the best of the best in the Hall. But not all of the rules make sense, and there are some unwritten rules which are just ridiculous.
There seem to be some voters for whom precedent is extremely important. For example, no player has ever been inducted with more than 98% of the vote. When Cal Ripken became eligible, there was no doubt that he belonged in the Hall – every baseball fan (and writer) knew this. But some writers purposely did not vote for Ripken because they felt that if they did vote for him, the vote might have been more than 98%. The baffling logic is that if Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and George Brett didn't get 99%, then Cal Ripken shouldn't either.
One of the rules that has always confused me is that only a certain number of people can be inducted in a single year. Why? What is the point of limiting the number of inductees? Maybe there's a good reason for such a rule, but I don't see it. But that rule is responsible for this one: there have been people voted in after several years of eligibility because they didn't get enough votes in their first couple of years. This means that some voters did not vote for player X one year, but did the next. What changed? The player in question has been retired for years anyway, his numbers didn't change, the "intangibles" and "leadership" (and all those other weasel words that they use on players whose stats may not stack up as well as others) didn't change, so why was he not worthy last year but he is now? The voters' reasoning on this is a direct result of the rule limiting the number of inductees: player X does deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, but maybe he deserves it slightly less than some other potential inductees. So we'll vote for those other players (unless of course we think they might get more than 98% of the vote) this year, and then vote for player X next year.
I don't get it. The Hall of Fame is not an ordered list of players. If someone deserves to be there, vote for him. If he gets 100% of the vote, well good for him, but it doesn't mean that he's better than Ruth or Cobb. If there's no limit on how many can get inducted in one year, then whether someone gets in on the first ballot or the third is irrelevant, so just vote for who deserves to be there and be done with it. Who knows - maybe in another ten or twenty years when the dinosaur writers of the "old boys club" have all retired, some younger writers with less of an agenda might clean up the voting process a little bit and get rid of these insane unwritten rules.
I've written before about stability in the NLL, since teams relocate more often than a Waterloo co-op student. The trend continues. After five years of low attendance in San Jose, the Stealth are moving to Everett, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. As much as I want to see this succeed, I just can't.
The successful teams in the NLL are all downtown – Colorado, Philadelphia, Toronto, Calgary, Buffalo, even Rochester. Of course, New York proves that this isn't always going to work, but the last time the NLL tried to move a team into a suburb of a major city (Chicaco), that team folded after two seasons because of low attendance, and Seattle is smaller than Chicago and has no lacrosse history that I know of. It's fairly close to BC, which has lots of lacrosse history, so that could help.
I think the naming of the team could have a big effect. Having the team called the Everett whatevers will not help convince people that this is a big-time league (and quite honestly, having a team in Rochester doesn't help with that either). All the press releases I've seen about this move specifically say that the team is moving to Everett, not Seattle, so I doubt it will be called the Seattle whatevers. If it's called the Washington whatevers, I think that will help, but regardless of the name, unless tons of Vancouver people make the drive down, I don't see this team lasting more than a year, maybe two.
What is it about Sidney Crosby that he can't buy respect? Seems that either hockey fans love him or hate him. But those who hate him don't seem to be saying "I respect that he's a great player but I don't like him", or "I don't like this particular aspect of his game" or whatever, it's more like they think he's overrated and simply not that great a player. I don't understand this.
In his four NHL seasons, he's been named to the All-Star game three times, won the Art Ross (most points), Lester B. Pearson (best player as voted by his peers), and Hart (MVP) trophies, and he's only 21 years old. According to Wikipedia, he's the youngest player in NHL history to:
Most importantly, he took the Penguins from worst team in the league to Stanley Cup contenders in three years and Stanley Cup champs in four. Sure, he didn't do it alone, Messrs. Malkin and Fleury helped, among others, but the acquisition of Crosby by the Penguins turned that team around in a big hurry. He's been called a whiner, but so was Gretzky when he was young, and if that's the worst thing you can say about a hockey player, that's not bad.
People can have whatever opinion about Crosby that they want. Is he the best player in the league? Probably not, I think Ovechkin has him beat there. It could be argued that given Evgeni Malkin, he's not even the best player on his own team. But given the stats above, I don't understand how anyone can question that he's one of the top five.
Note: the picture was stolen from nhLOL.blogspot.com.
I got an email from Jim Balsillie's MakeItSeven.ca group today, asking me to send an email to Gary Bettman asking him why he's against having another NHL team in Southern Ontario. While I applaud the content of the message, did anyone from the MakeItSeven camp really think this through? Great idea guys, let's show Mr. Bettman the error of his ways by flooding his inbox with tens of thousands of identical form emails. That's bound to convince him to think about the issue objectively.
I disagree with Gary Bettman on this issue, but he's no idiot. Trust me, Bettman knows about the MakeItSeven thing and he knows that there are many thousands of people in Southern Ontario signed up for it. Spamming him is going to do nothing but piss him off.
I came up with the idea for this chart today at lunch, when I suggested that Nicky have a nap in the afternoon and he looked at me like I had three heads. My friend Lynda, on the other hand, thought it was a great idea. The whole chart idea comes from a very funny blog called GraphJam.
In order to renew my license plate sticker, I needed to get a Drive Clean test. The car in question is a 2004 Sunfire, which I bought brand new in July of 2004 and now has about 152,000 km on it. Here are the results:
| ASM 2525* | ||
| Test | Limit | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| HC ppm | 66 | 6 |
| CO % | 0.37 | 0.00 |
| NO ppm | 505 | 0 |
| Curb Idle | ||
| Test | Limit | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| HC ppm | 150 | 5 |
| CO % | 0.70 | 0.00 |
* – whatever that means
If these numbers were ten times worse than they are, my car still would have passed the test. And yet thousands of busses and trucks that spew out vast quantities of thick black smoke (and travel more kilometers in a day than I do in a week, even with my 165 km/day commute) don't need this test. I wrote about this once before, and unfortunately, the questions raised in that post remain unanswered.
Gary Bettman says that the fact that he's opposing Jim Balsillie's attempt to purchase the Phoenix Coyotes is not in any way personal. Seeing as this is the third time that Balsillie has attempted to buy an NHL franchise and Bettman has prevented it every time, this is a little hard to believe. Jim Kelley wrote the other day about the number of NHL franchise owners that have been in prison over the last few years, including "Boots" Del Biaggio, who borrowed money from Nashville Predators owner Craig Leipold to buy the Predators. Let me say that another way – Del Biaggio borrowed money from Leipold to buy a team owned by Leipold. Then it turned out that the remainder of the money Boots claimed to have didn't exist. Even after Del Biaggio declared bankruptcy (and headed to prison for fraud), Bettman blocked Balsillie's attempt to buy him out. And Bettman himself chose Del Biaggio over Balsillie. Balsillie has zillions of dollars, loves hockey, and most importantly he wants to be an NHL owner. Is he not the kind of guy that Bettman should be trying to get as an owner? Why is there even a question here?
Having said that, I do understand the NHL's position on the movement thing. If an owner can up and move a franchise without the league's permission, this sets a dangerous precedent for other leagues. What if Balsillie's wife was from Timmins? What if Joe Zillionaire buys the Detroit Red Wings or the Dallas Cowboys and decides to move them to Butte, Montana? Or northern Saskatchewan? The league needs to have a say in where its teams are and if they can be moved.
Having said that, I don't understand why Bettman refuses to take a team that has lost money every year for fourteen years (some say they've lost over $350 million in that time) and move it to a hotbed of hockey. He says it's not a Canada vs. U.S. thing, but he certainly didn't try this hard to keep a team in Winnipeg or Quebec City. Perhaps it could negatively impact the Buffalo Sabres, but anyone who thinks it would reduce the Leafs' profits by one penny is delusional. To my knowledge, Bettman hasn't even investigated the possibility to see how, or if, Buffalo would be impacted.
But here's the question that I haven't heard Bettman answer: even if Balsillie is wrong and the team doesn't succeed in Hamilton, would the franchise lose any more money than it would by staying in Phoenix?
