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Great point, this. Neither winning nor losing on the field make any direct contribution to revenues or the bottom line. There is some assumption that a winning team makes more money than a losing team, but the 2005 Chicago Cubs finished 79-83, good for fourth place in the league and drawing almost 3.1 million fans; the next season, 2006, they landed in last place with a 66-96 record, and their attendance went up over 3.1 million. Winning and losing can contribute to more bottom line success, but not always.

Sounds like you're daring me to enlighten you! Good thing we're not talking in a bar right now! 😉😂 Ah, jk, pal. I don't mean socialism in the classical Marxist sense relative to the divisive Marxist language you used, obviously. But there are numerous socialist tendencies in the way Baseball, and all professional sports to similar degrees, are run: revenue redistribution from rich to poor teams; competitive aid for losing teams such as drafts and free agent compensation; strict controls governing the acquisition of playing talent; teams not allowed to fail out of the league through incompetence or mismanagement; and, of course, league-wide controls in place intended to prevent the best teams from breaking away from a desired competitive balance. Plus in Baseball, they are legally allowed to pick which owners can even participate in the league, and can bar others from starting their own teams to come in and compete with established teams, or at least earning the right to come in and participate through good performance. Contrast this with European soccer, which is a truly free market enterprise: teams have free reign to spend as much as they want to acquire talent; teams earn promotion to and relegation from top leagues based strictly on on-pitch performance; no market size-based revenue sharing to ensure any kind of competitive balance on the pitch or among the boardrooms; and if a team is incompetent or terrible, they are simply allowed to fold their business, or "wind up" as they like to say in Jolly Old. I do not prefer the European soccer model, necessarily, but American sports leagues are far more socialist in practice, and the things that you advocate to strictly limit the ability of teams to break away from the pack, in the service of protecting bad and incompetent teams' position on the field and within the league itself, are part and parcel of that.

I was thinking more Russian lives lost in the invasion, although I suppose that could comport with your comment as well.

I guess "intrigued" is the best I ever felt about it as well, but I knew I was never going to like it because not only do I enjoy the mystique of separate leagues, I also prefer as much competitive balance as possible. I actually did not mind 1996 at all, just after both 14-team leagues broke into three divisions and before interleague play. Even though the divisions had an unequal number of teams (5-5-4), teams would play 13 games against their own division, and either 12 or 13 against the remaining nine or ten teams. It was the last gasp of the balanced schedule.

I don't know, would they? I was thinking only about the apparent goal, not the details about how to get there.

A quick glance at b-ref suggests that leagues had a similar divisional schedule setup.

Yeah, I figured you'd have no real answer to that. 😉

"[T]he inclusion of a Russian entry in this year's Contest would bring the competition into disrepute." Perfectly, aptly put.

WHY IS JONATHAN LANDAY YELLING AT US! But seriously, folks: If ground forces lose so much momentum in taking Ukraine that they conclude the cost in time and lives would be too high to continue thusly, what do you think is the next logical step Russia would take? I have a guess ...

That's exactly how the 154-game season came about: 22 games apiece against seven other teams. It was put in place in 1904; before that, seasons were 140 games, which was twenty games apiece against seven teams. Only World War I led to any change to that construct (1918: 126 games [18x7]; 1919: 140 games.) They also managed to maintain 162-game balance, in a way, during the two-division 12-team leagues: 18 games against five teams in your own division (90 games total), 12 games against six teams in the other division (72). Interleague play has completely blown up any hope of balancing a schedule, or of playing every team in baseball to achieve proper and true balance. BUT: if they ever were to go to 4x4 leagues with no interleague play (lol), they could hit 162 very logically by scheduling 18 games against three teams in your own division (54 games), and nine against the 12 teams in the other three divisions (36 times three = 108). Easy peasy math. But again, they would never dream of abandoning The Abomination That Is Interleague Play. Would they?

Maybe about ten or fifteen years or so ago, on the old board—which at the time was probably two-thirds Bush conservatives—the subject of The Bombs came up. People on both sides generally agreed that dropping the bombs saved American lives and ended the war earlier. I chimed in that it not only saved American lives, it also saved perhaps who knows how many Japanese civilian lives—half a million, a million, maybe more, who knows. Predictably, many posters were genuinely offended by my comment and I got roasted for it. Who cares how many Jap lives it saved? No one cares about Jap lives. They were the enemy, for chrissakes! The object is to kill as many enemies as possible! Are you not even American? What the hell is wrong with you? You know, comments along those lines. I was pretty shocked back then at the blowback because it seemed like a pretty innocuous observation. But, some people simply can't brook certain ideas, I guess.

I was implying the willful destruction of the publicly-funded postal system from the inside by elements who would profit from starting a far more expensive private-enterpirse postal business in its ashes. But, sure, this too.

Not saying it's not possible. In the fog of early war, especially, anything is possible, and I'm sure we'll hear more about this, at least until an even more horrific video pops up. But whether it was a Russian tank running over a Ukrainian civilian driver, or a Ukrainian tank heading off a Ukrainian quisling car bomb driver, we can both agree than had Russia not invaded Ukraine, this would not have happened.

Hmmmm ... perhaps there is a private enterprise solution to the problem of unreliable postal service? 🙄

I could see an unvetted video commenter saying that.

It makes me chuckle every time I see someone suggest reducing the schedule to 154 games, specifically, as though that were the one and only magic number written on the tablet that was handed down to Baseball Moses from Baseball Yahweh. Other than history, what makes 154 such a magic number? Why not 156 or 152? I'm not actually pitching a bitch about this—I just find it genuinely amusing that this is the magic number everyone always brings up. To me, this makes sense only to people who actually attended games at Ebbets Field. Personally, I like 162 games. I'd rather have more baseball than less. Hell, I'd be up for expanding the schedule to 168 games! How fun would that be? But I do agree with you that, perhaps after expansion, they will probably end up reducing the regular season schedule (although I wouldn't doubt if they brought it down to 144 or even 140 so they could clear the entire month of September plus October for an expanded playoffs of all best-of-seven series involving 16 teams). Given how revenue in the sport has moved from primarily gameday receipts in the east-of-the-Mississippi 16-team universe to multiple league-wide revenue streams split among all 30 teams, the business imperative for every team to host as many as 81 home games has been dramatically reduced.

So, you want socialism. Do we have that straight?

Anti-car at that moment. 😢 Just fucking horrific.

So, “kih-yeev”? I can hear that in my head being said out loud.

Isn’t one of the underlying ideas for expanding the playoffs suppressing the need to spend in order to make the playoffs? It’s easier to fund a team to make the playoffs as a wild card with 85 wins than to fund a 95-win division champ.

Oh, wait, that’s right, stuff is still happening at home! How soon before the red hat media ecosphere hammers Biden for slipping the pick in hoping it goes unnoticed while everyone is concentrating on news of impending world war?

They’ve been pushing the “keev” pronunciation over “kee-ev” for at least a decade now. I think it actually closer to “kee-eve”.

This is a bona fide war crime caught on camera. Not for the faint of heart. 😭 And yet, the world must see this.

Chinny chin chin redux. This one was especially tricky, in that they tried something new to stump you. Wordle 251 6/6 ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ 🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I sold WMT to cover a loss in HFC, which an ex-advisor put me in eight years ago and I’d been too lazy to be concerned about it until it went underwater a couple years ago. HFC is oil so I’ve been waiting for it to break even to dump it. It shot up since January to a chart high and I sold it last week to take a small loss (still up a bit after in eight years of dividends and adjusting for inflation). Since I sold it HFC has tanked by a third in just a week. Glad to finally shake it off. I also sold off maybe a quarter of my position in VOO on Tuesday for a minor loss (dips I’d been buying the last few months) to further balance the WMT profit, then injected maybe a quarter of that back in VOOV and VOOG on Wednesday. I’d been thinking lately of diversifying that, too.