With baseball’s All-Star Game taking place next Tuesday, I wanted to weave together two frequent topics in my blog (baseball, social awareness) and ask a question: why doesn’t Major League Baseball speak up more about current events overseas? For those of you keeping score at home, Venezuela has descended into near anarchy. Violence has become a […]
Longtime New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott recently wrote an article outlining his ideas for restoring baseball’s popularity. I’ve written at length on the subject, but Stu’s piece has me thinking: are we too late?
That thing I wrote about baseball earlier? Chris Rock did it better.
Michael Lewis’s 2004 book Moneyball documented a revolution in how baseball teams evaluate players. More than a decade after the book, all Major League teams use statistics like WAR, Fielding Independent Pitching and Range Factor per Game. Now, Major League Baseball wants fans to get in on the act with Statcast, Using both radar and special cameras, […]
After the Newtown, Conn. shootings in 2012, I addressed the deep despair that I felt the way I often do, by writing about it. In a post on my old blog, I wrote that the National Rifle Association should shift the debate to mental health since they wouldn’t ever countenance any restriction on firearm ownership, […]
My beloved New York Times ran an article today about Germany’s national soccer museum in Dortmund that focused on how the museum holds up a mirror to Germany itself: Any soccer fan — in fact, almost any German — will tell you that the moment the country first felt able to return with dignity to […]
I’m going off-topic today (well, not very off-topic considering how frequently I write about baseball). I couldn’t let the passing of Yogi Berra go by without discussing how he helped me make it through my ancient Greek minor in college. The scene begins 2500 years ago, when Herodotus wrote his history of the wars between […]
Fast on the heels of Major League Baseball’s Statcast, the National Football League has announced that it will start sharing data from its games as well. Next Gen Stats will use sensors embedded in players’ shoulder pads to track them on the field. Following key plays, Next Gen will break down the data into slick […]
In my last post, I discussed how age cohorts may have a major impact on the future of baseball in America. As a result, I’ve paid more attention to cohorts (Generation X, Millennials, etc.) in my daily peregrinations. Enter Count Leo Tolstoy, whose War And Peace I’ve been reading. (Yes, I’m reading a hoity-toity classic; it’s […]
When we set out to solve marketing problems, we often try modeling, as in “how would another brand solve the problem?” More often than not, I think we use sexy brands–Apple, Nike, Starbucks and so forth–because they usually get their marketing right. However, I suggest that you stop thinking about what’s sexy. After all, most marketers don’t […]