The Longest Month

by Doug Silversten

I hate March. Always have. It is the worst month of the year. It is a simple case of process of elimination that brings me to this conclusion.

April through September: Clearly the preferred half of the year. During these months, we get to bask in the glorious six-month stretch we call "The Baseball Season." Day in and day out, there is baseball. Other than the painful 3-day break in July for the All-Star game, we never need to go more than one day without a meaningful baseball game. Nothing could be finer.

October: The anti-March. Probably the best month of the year. Baseball playoff month is so important, that all major events in your life need to be postponed. As my lovely wife early explained, I even insisted that my wedding not be held in October, especially late October, to prevent a possible overlap with a critical game. I am proud that I have my priorities in order.

November: Not the greatest month, as you realize there are a cold 5 months ahead. Bartlett Giamatti was right:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come out, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

However, if you are anything like me, the first few days are almost a relief. No fantasy team to worry about. No sweating out close playoff games. You almost need a week off. Plus, discussing and arguing over the MLB awards are nice little ways to pass a few weeks.

December: Your interest slowly turns to the NFL. Not even remotely comparable to baseball, but a nice little sport that helps kill time between baseball seasons. Plus the holidays are nice, and everything slows down in December. A nice little month.

January: Elimination playoff games in any sport are always fun and easy to watch. Hell, put on a badminton elimination match and I'll probably watch. The NFL provides a solid month of elimination playoff games. Too bad they are only on weekends.

February: Pitchers and catchers! Spring training begins! Baseball is finally on the horizon. The local newspapers finally have daily articles covering your team. You are so ravenous for baseball, any baseball, that you don't mind reading the plethora of "daily profile" articles.

March: Enough with these damn profile articles already!! It’s painful. Last week it was Julio Franco's day and the NY Times in-depth reporting came up with this brilliant line:

Franco's day always begins like this. He eats the first of five, sometimes six, meals before the sun has finished blazing over the horizon. Sometimes he adds vegetables, like bell peppers or spinach, to his egg whites or he substitutes a scooped-out bagel (he prefers cinnamon raisin) for the oatmeal.

What the hell? Enough! March sucks. It's a tease. Meaningful baseball is so close you can taste...instead you are reading about what Julio Franco is tasting. Ugh, and it's only March 6th. Still 26 days to go.

Doug Silversten's column appears alternate Mondays

Yankees Suck, But We Knew That Already

Leave it to the Yankees organization and George to do something totally obnoxious and unnecessary. Look George, we know you don't like the WBC. We get the point. Now shut up and just deal with it. Is this really necessary:

Even before a pitch was thrown Saturday, the New York Yankees apologized to their fans.

The Yankees displayed a sign by the customer service booth on the main concourse, explaining it wasn't their fault Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Damon and Bernie Williams had departed for the World Baseball Classic.

"Thank you for expressing your concerns," the sign stated. "We are sorry that certain players will not be present for portions of spring training. These players have elected to participate in the World Baseball Classic. The World Baseball Classic is an event sanctioned by the commissioner of Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association. The New York Yankees did not vote to support this event. Any comments you have regarding the World Baseball Classic should be directed to the commissioner of Major League Baseball or the Major League Baseball Players Association."

God, do I hate the Yankees.

Malcolm Gladwell on Baseball

I've never been a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan. The Tipping Pointwas OK, but I never really bought into many of the arguments in Blink. However, we are on the same page when it comes to the major problem in our favorite sport as Gladwell discusses in Part II of his e-mail interview with Bill Simmons:

It came after the Blue Jays (my team) won the second of their World Series titles. Economic reality hit, and they basically stopped trying to compete at the top level, and I wondered to myself: Why do I care so much about a sport where some teams have $200 million to spend and some teams have $20 million to spend? I know, I know -- as Rob Neyer and others point out -- that there is no necessary correlation between payroll and success. It is possible, as "Moneyball" reminds us, to win with less by being smarter. But the point is not that if you have more money than someone else you automatically win more games. The point is that if you have more money that someone else you're playing a different game than they are. Wal-mart is not competing against mom-and-pop corner stores. They're in a different business. And it isn't fun, at the end of the day, to watch a mom-and-pop compete against Wal-mart. It's painful and pointless.

I loved "Moneyball." I thought it was one of the best books of the past decade. I think it should be taught in psychology classes and business schools as a treatise on the subtle effects of bias on expert decision-making. But do you think that Billy Beane, for a moment, wouldn't trade his situation with Theo Epstein or Cashman? To me, the hard cap in football -- and, to a lesser extent, the soft cap in basketball -- are what makes those sports so interesting. It's what makes them sports. Contests where one player has significantly more resources than another are not sports. They are marketplaces. To root for the Yankees or the Red Sox is the functional equivalent of rooting for Microsoft or General Electric. No thanks."