MLB’s Uniform Fiasco Is About More Than See-Through Pants

The Dairy Daddies are just the latest in a long line of lower-league baseball teams that shirk traditional names in favor of more eye-catching identities. Pinpointing the origins of the trend is difficult — you could trace it all the way back to the late 1800s, when a team called the Dudes existed in Pensacola, Fla. — but the recent surge of sillin... See more

On their own, these avoidable incidents would be forgotten like the thousands of other ejections or calls that have come and gone. But together, they paint a portrait of an umpire who’s played a major role in establishing his own villainous reputation.

“I think he’s stuck in, like, a time warp, you know,” Mets broadcaster and former pitcher Ron Darl... See more

“Imagine if you owned the Lakers or the Yankees, and put all the emphasis on the team brand—but kept reducing the pay to actual players.”

the nearly unanimous opinion of everyone involved in the game — its leaders, its players, tournament organizers, sponsors, media executives, coaches — is that professional tennis is broken, a structural mess that exhausts its players, cannibalizes its business with dueling events and exists in a constant state of civil war among its alphabet soup o... See more

**Note:** Box score - speaking about my experience recording stats at baseball games with my dadJacobs argues that “strangely enough, baseball was better when we knew less about the most effective way to play it.” In Jacobs’s view, when everyone knows the most efficient way to play the game, the game as a whole loses its color and variety. 

Thus, as the cable-tv-dominated status quo crumbles, pro sports will develop a new playbook, centered around better telling player stories. Players will also have more opportunity to tell and sell these stories themselves, direct-to-consumer:

It was right for the Baltimore Orioles in the 70s and the A’s in the early 2000’s to optimize their team strategies and tactics as they did. Moreover, it is right (meaning rational and in keeping with the competitive nature of the sport) for all other teams to do so. It is not, however, good for baseball that they do so, or so Jacobs and others who... See more

So, is Jacobs right to say that baseball was better when we knew less about it? And here we are at the crux of the issue from another angle: how is the goodness of the game measured and accounted for? Or, more to the point, can the goodness of the game be measured? If not, then in what would the goodness of the game consist? And, an equally interes... See more