Wander Franco is now a rich man. The alt-right suffers a courtroom loss but the mission lives on. Also: Dylan, Will Smith, cancel culture, and even MORE Vonnegut
I assume that memoir was from the Dodgers’ Will Smith and not the Braves’ Will Smith, since that cheating girlfriend experience left him with all sorts of mental problems when pitching
I work for a gambling affiliate media company. What we point out in our content about those “risk-free first bet” promos is that sportsbooks aren’t handling our free money. What they’re essentially offering is a “mulligan.” You still have to risk your own real money. If you lose your first qualifying bet, they’ll give you site credit equal to the value of that bet or in this particular case $600, whichever is lesser. That’s just site credit, not actual money, though. You do get a “second chance” to place a wager of that value, but none of that value becomes real cash unless you use it to place successful bet(s). Barring that situation, the book wins. All that information is in the conditions and terms of the offer but in my experience few people click/tap through to read those, so, hence the content I make.
On Wander Franco, consider the upside and downside of refusing this long term contract offer. The downside would be he is a flash in the pan and never gets a big payday. The upside is he might get ~$400M instead of ~$200M. While the upside is far more likely, it seems to me it's also of limited benefit. Once you have $200M, does an extra $200M even help you that much?
While I can't too loudly criticize Franco for taking the money, I sort of feel like the union has a responsibility to the players to make sure they understand that they're helping the owners more than they realize, and that every player who signs one of these deals puts more pressure on other players not to aim for free agency. Certainly this does little for player empowerment in baseball, but that doesn't seem to be a thing of late outside the NBA.
And that aside, I look at deals like this and wonder why every team isn't doing this with its top level and even second level rookies. Which is to say, I don't get why the Mets never lock up any of their young players, and why Aaron Judge had continued to not be offered any sort of contract by the Yankees. From the side of management, these days seem like a no-brainer, and yet...
And sure enough, Herman Melville WAS born in NYC. The things we learn from the bard of Hibbing.
Wishing everyone a happy Turkey Day weekend, which this year leads into Hanukkah. As such, my wife and I are skipping the family get-together tomorrow in favor of a get-together with the same exact people on Sunday, and hosting a "friendsgiving" shabbos dinner Friday night. No turkey, since my wife does not like turkey, but stuffing and cornmeal pudding and potatoes and string beans, and more importantly good company.
I'm too young to remember Bill Virdon as a player. As a manager, I kept hearing stories that when he played he was the only one - or one of very few - who wore glasses on the field. But with Reggie Jackson, Greg Luzinski, and others, that didn't seem at all odd to the 10 year old dlf.
Apples and oranges, but every time I see a young player get criticized for an extension I think of Ian Desmond, who bet on himself by turning down a (team-friendly) extension from the Nats ... and lost the bet. He was older, but I don't think he came out ahead on that.
It used to be that young players had to subsidize the vets' contract extensions - and it feels like that is about to come back around the other way.
You also have to consider the time value of money for Wander. Invested intelligently, he could end up with way more in the bank than if he waited for the free agency payoff. At worst he should about break even. If you assume he could make double in free agency, his early year earnings should double in 8 or 9 years if he does nothing but throw big chucks of it into a Vanguard whole market index fund.
Honestly, I think we are underselling the risk to Wander Franco to not get the big money. He still has six years of team control. That's a lot of time in ACL, UCL and rotator cuff years. All those things can be repaired but you lose a year and a half in what is basically a (1+x%)^n equation. Throw in the possibility of a lockout taking away part of another year of service time and he's looking at the possibility of having only 2 years of compound earnings growth through arbitration instead of 4, if arbitration even still exists at that point because again, new CBA.
I think the view that the "first bet free" stuff is casinos looking to rope people in and get them addicted to sports betting is largely nonsense. The "first bet free" stuff is ordinary marketing, looking to get potential customers in something new to use website A over website B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I. These websites aren't looking for addicts. Addicts are a headache. Sometimes they sue, claiming that the casino enticed them to keep betting knowing they were addicted, for example, as I'm sure you know. These websites are looking for the casual bettor who likes to throw disposable income on games without any of the mathematics that allows the very few to determine those infrequent instances where a bet is favorable, risking $110 or more to win $100. That's it.
Sure, getting new people to bet may result in a minority of these new customers becoming addicted. Does that mean that overwhelming majority of people who aren't addicted to gambling should be barred from this kind of entertainment?
Craig, is your argument that sports gambling should remain illegal (or like how it was pre-2018), or just that the incessant advertising and the influx of gambling talk into sports media is the real problem?
With regards to the Dollar Tree price increase - has anyone bothered to comment on the proliferation of these "dollar stores" in the past decade or so, and WHY they've become so common? I doubt it's because people actually *prefer* buying cheap knockoffs of household items....
At this rate, we'll be lucky if the rotation isn't Charlie Brown and the guys Bugs Bunny replaced in that cartoon. And even Charlie Brown might not want to deal with this crap.
Around 1980, International Paper commissioned a series of essays by people of note to appear in two-page ads. Called "The Power of the Printed Word", they covered things like enjoying Classic literature (by Steve Allen), writing a business letter (Malcom Forbes), and improving your vocabulary (Tony Randall).
Kurt Vonnegut contributed "How to Write with Style":
I assume that memoir was from the Dodgers’ Will Smith and not the Braves’ Will Smith, since that cheating girlfriend experience left him with all sorts of mental problems when pitching
I work for a gambling affiliate media company. What we point out in our content about those “risk-free first bet” promos is that sportsbooks aren’t handling our free money. What they’re essentially offering is a “mulligan.” You still have to risk your own real money. If you lose your first qualifying bet, they’ll give you site credit equal to the value of that bet or in this particular case $600, whichever is lesser. That’s just site credit, not actual money, though. You do get a “second chance” to place a wager of that value, but none of that value becomes real cash unless you use it to place successful bet(s). Barring that situation, the book wins. All that information is in the conditions and terms of the offer but in my experience few people click/tap through to read those, so, hence the content I make.
On Wander Franco, consider the upside and downside of refusing this long term contract offer. The downside would be he is a flash in the pan and never gets a big payday. The upside is he might get ~$400M instead of ~$200M. While the upside is far more likely, it seems to me it's also of limited benefit. Once you have $200M, does an extra $200M even help you that much?
While I can't too loudly criticize Franco for taking the money, I sort of feel like the union has a responsibility to the players to make sure they understand that they're helping the owners more than they realize, and that every player who signs one of these deals puts more pressure on other players not to aim for free agency. Certainly this does little for player empowerment in baseball, but that doesn't seem to be a thing of late outside the NBA.
And that aside, I look at deals like this and wonder why every team isn't doing this with its top level and even second level rookies. Which is to say, I don't get why the Mets never lock up any of their young players, and why Aaron Judge had continued to not be offered any sort of contract by the Yankees. From the side of management, these days seem like a no-brainer, and yet...
And sure enough, Herman Melville WAS born in NYC. The things we learn from the bard of Hibbing.
Wishing everyone a happy Turkey Day weekend, which this year leads into Hanukkah. As such, my wife and I are skipping the family get-together tomorrow in favor of a get-together with the same exact people on Sunday, and hosting a "friendsgiving" shabbos dinner Friday night. No turkey, since my wife does not like turkey, but stuffing and cornmeal pudding and potatoes and string beans, and more importantly good company.
I'm too young to remember Bill Virdon as a player. As a manager, I kept hearing stories that when he played he was the only one - or one of very few - who wore glasses on the field. But with Reggie Jackson, Greg Luzinski, and others, that didn't seem at all odd to the 10 year old dlf.
Apples and oranges, but every time I see a young player get criticized for an extension I think of Ian Desmond, who bet on himself by turning down a (team-friendly) extension from the Nats ... and lost the bet. He was older, but I don't think he came out ahead on that.
It used to be that young players had to subsidize the vets' contract extensions - and it feels like that is about to come back around the other way.
You also have to consider the time value of money for Wander. Invested intelligently, he could end up with way more in the bank than if he waited for the free agency payoff. At worst he should about break even. If you assume he could make double in free agency, his early year earnings should double in 8 or 9 years if he does nothing but throw big chucks of it into a Vanguard whole market index fund.
Honestly, I think we are underselling the risk to Wander Franco to not get the big money. He still has six years of team control. That's a lot of time in ACL, UCL and rotator cuff years. All those things can be repaired but you lose a year and a half in what is basically a (1+x%)^n equation. Throw in the possibility of a lockout taking away part of another year of service time and he's looking at the possibility of having only 2 years of compound earnings growth through arbitration instead of 4, if arbitration even still exists at that point because again, new CBA.
Gonna be irrationally mad at the baseball universe all weekend for not getting Virdon to 1000 managerial wins.
I think the view that the "first bet free" stuff is casinos looking to rope people in and get them addicted to sports betting is largely nonsense. The "first bet free" stuff is ordinary marketing, looking to get potential customers in something new to use website A over website B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I. These websites aren't looking for addicts. Addicts are a headache. Sometimes they sue, claiming that the casino enticed them to keep betting knowing they were addicted, for example, as I'm sure you know. These websites are looking for the casual bettor who likes to throw disposable income on games without any of the mathematics that allows the very few to determine those infrequent instances where a bet is favorable, risking $110 or more to win $100. That's it.
Sure, getting new people to bet may result in a minority of these new customers becoming addicted. Does that mean that overwhelming majority of people who aren't addicted to gambling should be barred from this kind of entertainment?
Craig, is your argument that sports gambling should remain illegal (or like how it was pre-2018), or just that the incessant advertising and the influx of gambling talk into sports media is the real problem?
With regards to the Dollar Tree price increase - has anyone bothered to comment on the proliferation of these "dollar stores" in the past decade or so, and WHY they've become so common? I doubt it's because people actually *prefer* buying cheap knockoffs of household items....
UGH.
From ESPN: New York Mets owner Steve Cohen calls out Steven Matz's agent for 'unprofessional behavior'
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32705676/new-york-mets-owner-steve-cohen-calls-steven-matz-agent-unprofessional-behavior
At this rate, we'll be lucky if the rotation isn't Charlie Brown and the guys Bugs Bunny replaced in that cartoon. And even Charlie Brown might not want to deal with this crap.
A bit of Vonnegut I'll bet you haven't read:
Around 1980, International Paper commissioned a series of essays by people of note to appear in two-page ads. Called "The Power of the Printed Word", they covered things like enjoying Classic literature (by Steve Allen), writing a business letter (Malcom Forbes), and improving your vocabulary (Tony Randall).
Kurt Vonnegut contributed "How to Write with Style":
https://i0.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/7977944264_d5d9a0218f_k-1.jpg?fit=1200%2C814&ssl=1