Moving On

It has been almost four years since I started this blog here on Blogger.com. In recent years, my web presence has been scattered across several different locations. There was Baseball1.com (The Baseball Archive), which I created during the spring of 1995... my effort to cope with a baseball strike that didn't seem close to ending. In the 2000s I launched SeanLahman.com, a site to promote my books (and myself, I guess). And then this blog, a few years later, when I needed an outlet for writing outside of the newspaper I was working for, my freelance magazine work, and my scattered book projects.

I was in California in December, doing a fellowship at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, when I got an email telling me my baseball website was down. A quick check revealed that the site had been hacked. While I have no way of knowing whether it was someone with malicious intent or just an opportunist who found a hole in my security, the vandal wrecked the joint. I had backups, but rebuilding it was going to be a huge chore.

My baseball site was born in the earliest days of the web. There were no off-the-shelf content management systems. There weren't even any WYSIWYG editors. I built hundred of pages by hand in Windows Notepad, crafting a site that at it's peak got over a million page views a month.

But the site languished. When I became editor of the baseball encyclopedia, I stopped making daily updates, and pretty soon those days of inactivity turned into weeks, and then into months and years. The site still draws a ton of traffic even though some of the content is horribly out of date.

But the hacking was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to tackle the task I'd put off for too long, pruning those outdated pages from the site, bringing the good stuff back out into the light, and putting everything into a nicer looking and easier to manage package using WordPress.

And now those three sites are merged into one: my blog, my archive of baseball reference content, and my book/author site. There all under one roof now at http://baseball1.com. I hope that those of you who have visited any of my satellite websites will find everything you're looking for at this new site, and hopefully even find something new.

If you're following this blog in an RSS reader, please follow my new feed at http://baseball1.com/feed/.

There will be no more posts or updates at http://seanlahman.blogspot.com/

A Video History of Every Book Ever Written

Fun video from the Wall Street Journal.

Imperial Bedrooms

Esquire has published an excerpt of the new novel by Bret Easton Ellis, a sequel to his classic Less Than Zero.

Sunshine

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

-- Louis Brandeis, from his 1914 book "Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It"

As relevant today as when he wrote it.

Investigative Journalism

Filmmaker Errol Morris, in his commencement address at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism last weekend.

I have often wondered why we need the phrase investigative journalism. Isn’t all journalism supposed to be investigative? Isn’t journalism without an investigative element little more than gossip? And isn’t there enough gossip around already?

I became involved in one investigation after another – even on occasion working as an actual private detective. (And yes, journalists are detectives, and vice versa, as well.)

But despite the job descriptions – filmmaker, detective, journalist – the enterprise that I was involved in was always similar. Asking questions: What is going on here? What does this mean? What really happened?

Other journalists have expressed similar thoughts to me over the years. Recently, I interviewed Josiah Thompson, an ex-Kierkegaard scholar at Haverford and Yale, who became obsessed by the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. He quit his job in philosophy and wrote an exceptional work of journalism, Six Seconds in Dallas. And subsequently became a private detective. But it all started with his puzzlement over details – details that didn’t make sense. To me, he is the quintessential journalist-investigator.

The World At Your Fingertips

In his classic book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams imagined a reference source that would serve as "the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom." Could Google be fulfilling that vision?

I ask not because of the ubiquitous role that their search engine plays in everyday life, but because of their efforts to put books, magazines, and newspapers online and make them freely accessible.

Just this week, they've gone live with the entire archives of Popular Science... every page from 137 years of the magazine. It's fascinating to see how the publication chronicled the work of the Wright brothers, the beginning of the personal computer era, or even less mainstream advances such as the 1933 robot cow.

In November 2008, I wrote about Google's efforts to put the photographic archives of Life Magazine online, including thousands of images that had never been published before. They also have the entire run of Baseball Digest. You can either browse through it issue by issue, or run a search query to find articles that interest you. With the touch of a button, I found a 1977 article about Cesar Geronimo, one of my favorite players when I was a kid.

Of course, Google also has undertaken the task of scanning thousands of older books that are out of print. Books like the Reach Baseball guides or Walter Camp's football books from the turn of the century are a valuable resource for researchers, but often too rare to be affordable and too fragile to be put into circulation at the libraries that own them.

Google has also worked with publishers to put the full text of more recent books online, turning your computer into a virtual library. You can click right now and not only start reading great books like Moneyball, The Numbers Game, and When Pride Still Mattered -- but you can search through the text to read what each author has to say about a particular subject.

Other publishers have put their archives online. Some, like the New York Times, ask you to pay for that access, while others, like Time Magazine, offer it for free. But Google is making quantum leaps with their work. There has never been so much information so readily available, and the body of published material online is only going to grow.

Baseball Historians Get Their own Hall of Fame

From my friend Alan Schwarz of the New York Times...

For almost 40 years, the Society for American Baseball Research has painstakingly unearthed and saluted the accomplishments of long-forgotten contributors to the game. Now it will honor the stars of its own: by creating, in effect, the Baseball Historian Hall of Fame.

SABR announced on Monday the inaugural class of winners of its new Henry Chadwick Award -– (fittingly) nine people whose work is far better known, even among casual fans, than most realize.

Among them are Lawrence Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times, and Bill James, whose Baseball Abstract series shaped a whole generation of curious fans. But I was particularly heartened to see two other names on that inaugural list: David Neft and Pete Palmer.

Neft put together the first real baseball encyclopedia, which was released in 1969. Baseball writers dubbed it "Big Mac" because it was published by Macmillan and because it contained almost 2500 pages. Neft led a team that painstakingly reconstructed the historical record by computerizing the day-by-day records of every man who had played in the majors. It was groundbreaking work. Today, we take for granted the minute detail of baseball's record at our fingertips. No other institution of human existence is so well documented. Neft went on to found his own company and publish annual encyclopedias for baseball, football, and basketball that stood as the gold standard in their respective fields. In football, Neft once again reconstructed the game's early history. The NFL did not keep any statistics before 1932, so Neft and his team slogged through old newspaper stories and built the historical record one game at at time, eventually publishing the first football encyclopedia that contained any player statistics in 1978.

I've never met David Neft, but his work influenced me in profound ways. I bought a copy of his Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball in 1985, picked it up at a used book store for a couple of dollars, and for the first time immersed myself deeply in the game's history. Much of what I know about the teams and the players came from the countless hours I spent flipping through that book, and my first attempts at building a baseball database used that dog-earred book as the primary source. That book also prompted my fascination with the sports reference genre, and over the years I have accumulated a large collection of sports encyclopedias, several hundred, many of which bear his name.

I was also very glad to see Pete Palmer's name among the inaugural nine. I had the great pleasure of meeting and working with Pete when I was with Total Sports, but his work had a profound impact on me long before that. I still remember the day when I stumbled across his book The Hidden Game of Baseball at a local bookstore in 1984 (written with John Thorn). I was 16, and in those days before Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the "sports section" of the bookstore consisted of about 15 titles. You think you know everything when you're 16, but as I skimmed through the first few pages, I felt the world change, and suddenly I was looking at the game I loved in a very different way. More than any of the concepts that Palmer wrote about, just the idea that there were other people who gave deep thought to analyzing the game and making sense of the numbers... it opened a whole new world for me.

Hidden Game was the bible for statistical analysis, and a few years later I carried that book with me to college, where I tracked down all of the old books and articles in the bibliography. That book unlocked the world of baseball research for me and invited me into a great fraternity of like minded folks.

Neither Pete Palmer or David Neft will be enshrined in Cooperstown, but this is the next best thing. They deserve the highest praise, along with the seven other inductees. I'm not only happy for them to receive this honor, but proud that we as a group could honor them.

Happy Birthday Ickey

One of my favorite players of all-time, Ickey Woods turns 44 today. His touchdown celebration captivated the nation, but folks forget he scored 15 touchdowns as a rookie and led the league with a 5.3 yard rushing average in 1988, helping to lead the Bengals to Super Bowl XXIII.



The clip above is from the 1988 AFC Championship game. It was the first of two touchdown runs by Woods en route to a 21-10 win.

Pat Metheny on Kenny G

When you do something for a living, you have a certain skill set that lets you appreciate the quality of your colleagues' work. A reporter can read a story by another reporter and appreciate the legwork that went into the investigation, or the ability to find an interesting angle in an otherwise mundane story. Filmmakers see nuances in the work of other directors that are lost on the rest of us. They can tell the difference between someone who's great and someone who's just faking their way through it.

With my fellow writers, I've found that much of our conversation centers around great examples of strong writing that we've found... whether it's a new book, or a magazine article, or a lost nugget we've dug out of a musty archive. We usually just ignore bad writing. There's usually no reason to bother commetning on it.

All too often, there's someone whose lack of talent doesn;t stop them from being a commercial success. It's a sad truth in the publishing world that most books don't sell more than a few thousand copies, but a television personality or syndicated radio host can use his platform to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a poorly written, poorly researched collection of paragraphs. That's just the way it is -- not just in the book business but in business overall. We grumble about it amongst ourselves and keep plugging away.

Occasionaly, one of these examples reaches a point where someone needs to speak out, because it's undeserved success attacks the credibility of its genre. Comedian Joe Rogan felt obliged to speak out against what he felt was plagarism by fellow comic Carlos Mencia, because "no one defended the integrity of this great art form."


And then there's this. Jazz musician Pat Metheny -- winner of 17 Grammy Awards -- was asked what he thought of saxaphonist Kenny G. He gave a scathing 1500 word response, which included a criticism of Kenny G's basic musical abilities, his knowledge of the genre, and his artistic choices. Here's a small sampling.

I first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with Jeff Lorber when they opened a concert for my band. My impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like Grover Washington or David Sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. He had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - Lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music.

But he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the key moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again). The other main thing I noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, played horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.

It gets much, much better...

Art Without a Frame

Think you could be a scout? If I sent you coach's videotape from a high school football game in, say 1980, would you be able to tell me which quarterback went on to be a star in the NFL and which never even made it as a college player? There's no sound, the uniforms don't provide any insight, and neither kids puts up statistics that would reveal his future stardom.

I ask this question a lot. I ask casual fans. I ask writers. I ask pro coaches and personnel guys. What's most fascinating is that the closer I get to guys that actually have to make these kinds of decisions, the less likely they are to say "yes."

It's a question that interested me as I began to work on my football book, which came out last summer. I wanted to challenged the conventional wisdom about who the great football players of all time were. If Dick Butkus is the greatest linebacker of all-time, then it ought to be obvious to anyone who watches film of his games. Maybe film doesn't exist, or doesn't tell the full story. Fair enough, but then you at least ought to be able to give me some reasons why a player was so good. Tell me what it is about Red Grange that made him stand out. Explain why Jim Otto was the best lineman of his day.

It's a question that transcends sports. We learn about great works of art in the same way. Why is the Mona Lisa a great painting? What makes "Citizen Kane" one of the most important American films? If I think it's boring, am I just too unsophisticated to understand what I'm seeing?

All of these questions point toward the same issue? To what degree is "greatness" a measure of collective opinion and to what degree is "greatness" inherent. If you watch Citizen Kane for the first time tonight, will its greatness be obvious? Or is its greatness more about familiarity? Is it great because "people" have always said it was great.

I'm not the first to raise this question. In fact, it's one of the oldest epistomological debates. Is beauty a measurable fact (as Gottfried Leibniz asserted), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

In the spring of 2007, Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten wanted to probe that ageless question in a modern setting. He convinced Grammy award winning classical violinist Joshua Bell to play at the entrance of a Washington D.C. subway station, posing as a run of the mill street performer. Bell isn't as recognizable as, say Brad Pitt, but he was a child prodigy who has, at the age of 39, becmone an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. His 2003 CD Romance of the Violin sold more than five million copies and remained at the top of classical music charts for 54 weeks. Bell's instrument was a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin, for which he had paid more than four million dollars. He played Carnegie Hall at 14. He has played for Kings and Queens. The cheap seats for one of his concerts go for around $100. Would folks walking past think he was just another busker, or would they recognize and appreciate the quality of Bell's performance?

Violinist Joshua Bell playing at the L'Enfant Plaza subway station
in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. Bell is at far left.
Full video available at Washington Post website.

Weingarten started by posing the question to Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

Slatkin was wrong.

Bell played for 45 minutes and more than a thousand people passed by. Just seven stopped to listen. The vast majority of folks didn't react at all to one of the world's greatest musicians playing a few feet away from them.

Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to music. Weingarten also interviewed one of the leading experts in the world of art.

Mark Leithauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king or pope or Medici ever did1. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. "Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for the article.

Thoughts on Health Care

After my daughter spent a month in the hospital this spring, I have a whole new perspective on the debate raging over health care reform.

A fascinating new study helps to illustrate, the urgent need to move away from the for-profit health insurance model. According to a joint study by Harvard University and Ohio State University, sixty percent of US bankruptcies in 2007 were driven by medical bills. What's really alarming is that 75% of those folks had health insurance.

"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.

And why is that? Because if you do get sick and need significant treatment, odds are your policy will simply get cancelled. According to the report, a quarter of people lose their insurance coverage immediately when they suffer a disabling illness, and another quarter lose it within the first year. Insurance companies (or employers who offer their own plans) save money by dropping you if you're too expensive.

Critics of reform scream about the possibility of rationing health care under a single-payer system, but the reality is that we already have rationing. Insurance companies protect their profits by dropping folks who need expensive care, or putting artificial limits on how many days you can spend in the hospital, how many times you can visit a doctor, or even annual caps on how much they'll spend for your care. All of those things that the Fox News crowd warn us could happen under "Obama Care" are exactly the things we have right now.

Vincent and Theo

This article originally appeared in the March 2005 issue of "Overlooked Gems."

Several films have been made about the life of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and most people know the broad strokes of his life’s story. Robert Altman’s 1990 film “Vincent and Theo” goes beneath the surface of a man who became a pop culture icon and probes the complex issues. Altman avoids the easy clichés of the tortured artist, focusing on the two bitter realities of the painter’s life: Vincent Van Gogh was tremendously passionate about his work, and nobody wanted to buy it. 

The film opens in 1987, where one of his most well known paintings is on the auction block. As the bids rise quickly into millions of pounds, the image shifts to a destitute Van Gogh a hundred years earlier, a young man desperate to escape the misery of his own life. Tim Roth brings a fresh perspective to the role of Van Gogh, revealing a man who is tormented by his lack of success in life, personally as much as professionally. 

Kirk Douglas portrayed Van Gogh in the more popular biopic, “Lust for Life,” but in that 1956 film, the artist’s principal influence was fellow painter Paul Gaugin. In that version of the story, Gaugin overshadowed Van Gogh in many ways, and it’s not surprising that Anthony Quinn won a Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal. In Altman’s version, Van Gogh’s mentor and chief supporter is his brother, Theo, a Parisian art dealer.

Theo (played by Paul Rhys) recognized his brother’s talent, encouraged him to pursue his art, helped him to meet and collaborate with the top painters of his day, but in the end, was unable to help his brother. He could never sell any of his paintings, couldn’t help him escape the self-destructive behavior of his personal life, and ultimately, couldn’t help him overcome the mental illness that led to his suicide. 

The relationship between the brothers is the core of the film. Both struggle desperately for their own measure of fulfillment, and both are raging at their own failures. In each other, they find both solace and support, but neither can help the other to overcome the obstacles that doom them to lives of unhappiness. 

As with all of Altman’s films, “Vincent and Theo” is about characters, not plot. It’s not a story of the events of their lives so much as it is an account of who these two brothers were and how they saw the world. One of the great achievements here is how Altman and cinematographer Jean Lépine show us the world the way that Van Gogh saw it. We see the mundane scenes of his life that we recognize from his paintings... his bedroom, the café at night, the church, even the countryside. It’s one thing to know the facts of a person’s life; it’s another thing altogether to feel as if you’ve inhabited his world. 

This film received only a limited theatrical release, and as of this writing has never been available on DVD. [Editor's note: the film was finally released on DVD in August 2005.] It received no award nominations and remains largely unknown, save for the occasional airing on cable television. It was a breakthrough performance for Roth, and one of the best films in Altman’s fifty-year career. Most significantly, it is a fascinating portrait of a complex and contradictory genius... and his brother the painter.

New Photos of First MLB Game in Canada

On their web site, the Archives of the city of Montreal recently posted a collection of color photos from the first home game of the Montreal Expos. That game took place on April 14, 1969, and it was the first Major League Baseball game played outside of the United States The images capture some of the game's greats, including Maury Wills, Rusty Staub, and Curt Flood. I like the photo above, which shows (from left to right) Expos manager Gene Mauch and Cardinals' players Bill White and Joe Torre. A quick look at the Retrosheet website shows that after the Expos jumped to an early 6-0 lead, the Cards came back with seven runs in the fourth inning, capped by Torre's two-run homer. The Expos tied the game on a wild pitch in the bottom of the fourth, and took the lead on an RBI single by relief pitcher Dan McGinn in the 7th, winning 8-7.

Most of the photos are from batting practice and the pregame cermonies. There are some great shots of Jarry Park, which was just supposed to be a temporary home but served as the Expos home until 1977. The text at the site is in French and the folks from the city archives haven't correctly identified some of the players in their photo captions, but the images are fantastic.

Update: I heard from Mario Robert, head of the archives, who read this blog post and accepted my offer to help identify some of the Cardinal players in the photos. Although he wasn't at that inaugural game, Mario told me an all too familiar tale of he and his schoolmates secretly listening to the game on a tranistor radio during class.

Radio Friday

Back on the radio, Friday from 7-8 pm on WHAM-1180 with Bob Matthews Bob and I will be discussing the current baseball season, and the greatest players of all time at each position. We'll also be taking phone calls.

Is 50-50 good?

I heard two different sports radio hosts last week make the proclamation that taking a quarterback in the first round was a 50-50 proposition. One went down the list of the guys taken in the last ten years and figured that 8-10 of the 18 players on the list were busts. Another looked at all of the quarterbacks taken number one overall and came to the same conclusion.

It's an exercise I've engaged in myself, but it misses the main point. Even if you take the 50-50 measure as gospel, how does that compare to draft choices at other positions?

To answer that question, I looked at all of the first round draft choices from 1979-2003 -- a twenty-five year period that excludes guys who are too young to pass judgment on, and here's what I found.

1) The overall success rate for first round picks is 59 percent. That's how many of the players drafted went on to spend at least five season as a starter. Thirty-seven percent of the first-round picks went to at least one Pro Bowl.

2) Running backs are the riskiest pick, but they're boom or bust. Only 41% of them taken in the first round spend five seasons as a starter -- the lowest for any position. However, the highest percentage of them go on to become Pro Bowl players.

3) Quarterbacks are boom or bust, too. Fifty percent don't make it, but you've got a better chance of getting a superstar at quarterback than any other position. Forty percent go on to become Pro Bowl players. What's more, eight percent of QBs taken in the first round go on to the Hall of Fame, and that number's deflated when you consider that there were at least three HOF-caliber QBs active last year (Favre, Manning, Brady).

4) Teams use more picks on defensive linemen than any other position. Over the 25 year period, they accounted for 21.3% of all first round picks -- even though they only account for 3 or 4 of the 22 starting positions. The success rate for them (62% 5-year starters, 32% Pro bowlers) isn't much better than average, suggesting that teams make more reaches at these positions than any other.

5) Teams use fewer picks on offensive linemen, even though they are by far the safest pick. Seventy percent of them become five-years starters, by far the highest total for any position. It's 72% for guards, 70% for centers, and 69% for tackles. Only 17% of first round picks are used on offensive linemen, even though they account for almost a quarter of the starters.

6) Defensive tackles are also overlooked. Seventy percent become starters, and 43 percent of the DTs taken in the first round end up going to at least one Pro Bowl.

7) Kickers and punters shouldn't go in the first round. Two teams have used a first round pick on them in the past 25 years. The Raiders selected kicker Sebastian Janikowski in 2000, and the Saints tabbed punter Russell Erxleben in 1979. Neither guy ever went to a Pro Bowl, which seems like the bare minimum you can ask for a kicker taken in the first round. (I hate to play the "who else could they have picked" game, but Erxleben went two spots ahead of Hall of Fame tight end Kellen Winslow, and Janikowski went two spots ahead of RB Shaun Alexander.)

Here's the raw data:

    Percentage by Position    Total
    ProBowl  5+ St    HOF     Picks
OL   37.9    70.2     3.2      124
LB   38.8    66.3     2.5       80
TE   39.1    65.2     4.3       23
DL   31.8    62.3     1.3      154 
DB   38.9    61.1     2.8      108
WR   35.0    52.5     2.5       80
QB   40.0    50.0     8.0       50
RB   41.6    40.6     3.0      101
K/P   0.0     0.0     0.0        2

Tot  37.2    59.0     2.9      722

I think it's important to point out that this is not predictive data... it doesn't mean that every team should take an offensive linemen, because there are never going to be 32 linemen worthy of being drafted in the first round. This is historical data that should serve to provide some parameters for what constitutes success. Thirty percent of O-Linemen are busts, fifty percent of quarterbacks, and sixty percent of running backs. Let the buyer beware.

Athletes and Taxes

It's income tax day across America, and if it's not your favorite day of the year, just be thankful you're not a professional athlete. A recent article in the LA Times explains that 20 of the 24 states with major league franchises (the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball) have laws that require visiting athletes to pay state income tax for each game they play there. Kevin Baxter of the Los Angeles Times took an in-depth look at the issue.

Considering that top-level athletes in football, basketball, hockey and baseball now make an annual average salary of $2.9 million, that means big bucks for states such as California. Home to 15 major professional teams, the state raked in $102 million in taxes from visiting athletes in 2006-07, the last year for which records are available.

Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies will play in 16 different states this year, plus the District of Columbia and the Canadian province of Ontario. How'd you like to be the accountant in charge of that tax return?

"The book's like this big," says Angels' pitcher Darren Oliver, holding his thumb and index finger a couple of inches apart, says of the tax documents he filed this year. Each April, he pays a small army of accountants to file more than a hundred pages of returns -- and sometimes checks -- to as many as a dozen states and one province in Canada, covering taxes on income he earned on the road.

Award Winner

Word came earlier this week that my book, The Pro Football Historical Abstract, has won the Nelson Ross Award. It's presented annually by the Professional Football Researchers' Association for "outstanding achievement in pro football research and historiography." I'm grateful and humbled by the honor, particularly since it comes from a group of dedicated folks who really know their stuff.

Why Million Dollar Athletes Go Broke

Warren Buffett is good at managing his money. So is Bill Gates, apparently, and so is Mike Bloomberg.

You know who's not great at managing their money? Guys who leave college to play pro sports.

Sports Illustrated has a great piece this week about how and why these guys who sign million dollar contracts almost always end up broke. We've all read the anecdotes. Just this year, ex-Broncos running back Travis Henry was jailed for failure to pay child support. Panthers receiver Mushin Muhammad put his house up for sale after being sued for outstanding credit card debts. Saints running back Deuce McAllister filed for bankruptcy protection for the Mississipi based car dealership he owns.

In his article, Pablo Torres goes beyond the random stories and compiles some hard data:

• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
  
• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.
  
• Numerous retired MLB players have been similarly ruined, and the current economic crisis is taking a toll on some active players as well.
  

Torres documents scores of Major league players who have lost their savings or had their assets frozen because of fraudulent investment gurus like Bernie Madoff and Robert Allen Stanford. But it's not just the big crooks who come after the athletes. These athletes fall prey to "advisors" that come recommended by friends, many of whom are completely unqualified. According to the NFL Players Association, at least 78 players lost a total of more than $42 million between 1999 and 2002 because they trusted money to financial advisers with questionable backgrounds.

Aside from shaky investments, what are the other reasons why most pro athletes end up broke? Some of it is just lavish spending. Young kids with little impulse control suddenly have more money than they ever imagined. They buy cars and Rolex watches and spend $20,000 on a big night out at a nightclub. Many of them find it hard to say no to friends and family members who want to share in the newfound prosperity.

But Torres relates a story told by Raghib "Rocket" Ismail, who described a conversation he had with Panthers' owner Jerry Richardson, a former NFL player turned succesful businessman. "What's the most dangerous thing that could happen to us financially?" he asked. "Without blinking an eye," Ismail recalls, "Mr. Richardson said, 'Divorce.'"

In a survey reported by the financial-services firm Rothstein Kass in December, more than 80% of the 178 athletes polled—each with a minimum net worth of $5 million and two thirds under the age of 30—said they were "concerned about being involved in unjust lawsuits and/or divorce proceedings." By common estimates among athletes and agents, the divorce rate for pro athletes ranges from 60% to 80%. In divorce proceedings, of course, husbands routinely lose half of their net worth. But for athletes there is an aggravating factor: when the divorce happens. Most splits occur in retirement, when the player's peak earnings period is long over and making a comparable living is virtually impossible. Such timing is no accident.

It's a great piece, and I think it helps to explain why, in an era when guys can earn hundreds of millions of dollars in their careers, none of them ever end up on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.

The Difference Between Bloggers and Journalists

Newspapers are dying.  The closing of the Rocky Mountain News last week was a sign of how bad things have gotten in the business.  I spent five years writing for the New York Sun before they stopped printing last September, and like it or not, many other and bigger papers will suffer the same fate.  The current economy doesn't help, but the root cause of the problem is a business model that just doesn't work any more.  Paper and ink dailies just don't make sense.

But I firmly believe that journalism is still vitally important, and that there will continue to be a market for good writing, good reporting, and that inquisitive drive to chase down a story.  Too many bloggers are just guys that stay at home and spout their opinions. There's a role for that, I suppose, just like there's a role for local sports radio call-in shows.  But we need people like Selena Roberts who will travel across the country to ask questions.  We need folks like Alan Schwarz who'll pursue a story that nobody else is giving a voice to.  We need writers like Jeff Pearlman, who will do the leg work to tell a story that gives depth and context to current events.

Pearlman filed a story for Sports Illustrated today, a kind of sidebar to the tragic story of three friends who presumably drowned in a boating accident over the weekend, two of whom were active NFL players.  He recalled a story that hadn't made it into his book about the 1986 Mets, where one of that team's young pitchers had been involved in a similar incident.

Over the past few days, as news outlets relay the saga of the four athletes recently lost in the waters off of Clearwater, Fla., a handful of people have found themselves sent back through time, to a nightmare eerily similar in geography and circumstance to the one of present day.

On Feb. 28, 2009, two NFL veterans, Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith, along with former University of South Florida players Will Bleakley and Nick Schuyler, were anchored 38 miles offshore, fishing, when rough waters capsized their 21-foot boat.

On Oct. 30, 1983, three Red Sox minor leaguers, [Tony] Latham, John Mitchell and Scott Skripko, along with Mark Zastrowmy, a native Floridian and owner of the boat, were roughly 10 miles offshore, fishing, when rough waters capsized their 17-foot boat.

In 2009 three of the men were apparently lost, while the fourth, Schuyler, survived by holding on to the side of the boat for more than 30 hours.

In 1983 two of the men, Latham and Zastrowmy, were lost. Skripko, an outfielder, survived by holding on to a cooler for 20 hours, while Mitchell, a pitcher, survived by holding on to a bucket for 22 hours.

It's a gripping story in it's own right, but it helps to bring the tragedy of this weekend's events into sharper focus.  Pealrman goes a step further at his own website, talking about how the events in Florida this weekend jogged his memory about that incident 25 years ago, and how he did the research to build that into a story.  Starting with just the name of one person, he worked the phones until he tracked down the players involved and their surviving relatives.  He describes each of the steps he took to go from the kernel of an idea to a fully-formed story.

STEP 8: I again turn to Nexis, and look up people named “Latham” in Robersonville, N.C. Forty-three names pop up. I call the first, ask if she’s related to a Tony Latham who played baseball. “I wish,” she says. “I could use the money.” I call the second. An older woman answers. “My name is Jeff Pearlman,” I say, “and I write for Sports Illustrated’s website. I am looking for anyone related to a baseball player named Tony Latham.”

“Well,” says the woman, “I don’t know a Tony Latham—but Anthony Latham was my son.”

We proceed to speak for 30 minutes (or so). She is a wonderful interview—sad and reflective, good memory. She gives me the number of her second-oldest daughter, Vickie, who I call shortly thereafter. She, too, is excellent—and even provides photos.

In the span of, oh, an hour, I’ve gone from having nothing about Tony Latham, to having his entire life story.

Pearlman is a great writer, and he reminds us why good reporters will always find an outlet, even if (when) newspapers disappear completely.  At the end of the day, it's not about the medium.  It's about telling compelling stories.

Twenty Years Ago Today

It all started with this... Pete Rose being summoned to New York by the Commissioner in February 1989. It was the public's first inkling of the story that would dominate the rest of the year.