Here comes the only sure thing in town this week: Whatever happens in Vegas will land on this web site. How the business and convention center missed that line for its ad campaign is baffling.
LAS VEGAS – The business of baseball is in full bloom. Better than that, Major League Baseball is very profitable. Actually, profitable is the wrong word. The folks from MLB were seen at the lobby bar at The Bellagio lighting cigars with $50 bills. Walk up to anyone not employed by MLB this week and most sentences are peppered with the phrase, “… they made 6.6 billion dollars last year!”Things are going so well for MLB that they took over the posh hotel The Bellagio for its annual meetings.
Yet MLB.com, the burgeoning web site and veritable clearing house for the league, the players union and the 30 teams, decided to lay off one of its writers last week. Yeah, even though Commissioner Bud Selig and his staff get together in his suite for a nightly “money fight,” MLB decided to eliminate some jobs.
Never mind that MLB is set to launch its own television network on Jan. 1, that $6.6 billion just ain’t getting it done.
Incidentally, the one writer MLB laid off wrote about the team that just won the World Series. Times must be really tough if a $6.6 billion industry is cutting a guy from its championship team.
It’s not just MLB either. Gannett, the newspaper chain that owns USA Today as well as local papers the Wilmington News Journal and Camden Courier Post just announced significant layoffs. At Camden that meant two of the guys that wrote about the World Series-winning ballclub were sent away with a gift card and a severance package. The paper’s Eagles’ writer was let go days before the football team played in their biggest game of the season.
The strange thing about all of this isn’t that the economy is bad, because that very much is a factor in these moves. The wacky part is that in 2007 the News Journal had a profit margin over 25 percent, while the Courier Post limped in at nearly 10 percent.
Think the auto industry wouldn’t take numbers like that?
So last week we had the big three automakers sitting before Congress to ask for $700 billion. If they didn’t get it, the execs warned the lawmakers, they just might have to lay off some workers. Meanwhile, flush companies like newspapers and the National Pastime just don’t get it.
Needless to say the gallows humor is in full force at the Winter Meetings. Every few minutes or so the scribes walk past one another and ask about one another’s employment status on the hour.
“It’s a blood bath,” one veteran baseball writer said.
Phillies stuff
Ruben Amaro Jr. and his gang are in meetings all Monday morning and won’t meet with the Philadelphia contingent until 4:30 p.m. local time. Meanwhile, reports are the negotiations with pitcher Jamie Moyer are not going very well. The big hang up appears to be over money, a development Amaro described as “disappointing.”
Moyer just completed a two-year $9.5 million deal with the Phillies and led the team in wins in ’08 and would have been in line for a hefty raise had the team offered him arbitration.
There is a little story from The Daily News about the Phils "talking" about outfielder and top draft pick Delmon Young. Another rumor is a little more interesting that kind of involves the Phillies…
Apparently MLB wants to have day-games in the World Series after the weather-based debacles of Games 3 and 5 at Citizens Bank Park last October. MLB pitched the idea to broadcast rights older Fox, who balked at the idea initially until a compromise, reportedly, was struck.
Yes, it appears as if there will be a daytime World Series game in 2009. The start time: 5 p.m. in the east.
That’s a day game?
Comings and goings…
The Mets met with record-breaking closer Francisco Rodriguez last night and plan to meet with “every available closer” this week in Vegas. … The Tigers and Rangers made the first trade of the week when Texas shipped catcher Gerald Laird to Detroit for right-handed pitching prospects, Guillermo Moscoso and Carlos Melo.
As of this writing, Greg Maddux is holding his retirement press-conference about 30 yards in front of me… check back around 4 or so with another update.