MLB out to ruin baseball again

Hooray, time for a sports blog! I recently heard some rather disturbing news that Major League Baseball is considering a move to "realign" all teams in the sport. According to the report from "a top official", the 6 divisions would be done away with completely and only the 2 leagues with 16 teams each would remain. The top 8 teams with the best record from each league would then make the playoffs. On paper this makes a lot of sense. In most recent history for instance, the top team in the National League West would make the playoffs with a sub .500 record while a team in the National League East would miss out on the playoffs with a 90+ win season simply because they play in a better division. So this would essentially eliminate the wildcard and all the shenanigans that go along with it. Great.

Ok, where this plan is not so good is in the details. For the plan to executed, one National League team would have to jump to the American League side since there are currently 16 National League teams and only 14 American League teams. This is a relic of the last "realignment" that changed the amount of divisions from 2 to 3 and added the wild card with the Milwaukee Brewers jumping from the American League to the National League for some reason leaving the NL Central with 6 teams (only division with 6 teams) and the AL West with 4 teams (only division with 4 teams). So obviously the solution is to just move the Brewers back to the American League where they belong, right? Well, no. In MLB's infinite wisdom, they have allegedly proposed moving the Astros from the National League to the American League to incite some sort of rivalry between them and the Rangers.

This is dumb for a multitude of reasons. Bear in mind that the following opinions are those of an Astros fan and are thereby biased as such. First off, I believe that the Astros have been selected for realignment simply because they are absolutely miserable right now*. They are dead last in almost every stat in baseball and also have the worst record in all of baseball. So I think the MLB's thinking was along the lines of "who the hell cares what happens to the Astros". Well, for starters, I do. A lot of people do. This is not some pitiful franchise that has never accomplished anything like the, pardon my rudeness, Milwaulkee Brewers. The Brewers' only pennant was in 1982 when they were an American League team. It only makes sense to move a team that has a League Championship back to the league they won that championship in. It would be equally stupid to move the Astros, a team that has a National League Championship, into a league where that would essentially mean nothing. This is really the most no-brainer part of my argument.

My second point of contention is that the American League has the Designated Hitter. The DH is an abomination to baseball. Always has been, always will be. I enjoy watching the National League brand of the sport where all 9 players on the field have to take an at-bat. The strategy and "small-ball", boring as some may say, are really what make the sport great for me. I don't really have much else to add here other than to reiterate how much the DH sucks and is ruining baseball.

Lastly, it has been said that an Astros and Texas Rangers rivalry would be good for the region. I couldn't disagree more. While it is generally good fun when the Astros and Rangers play each other during the regular season, the proposed rivalry could never top the current rivalry the Astros currently have with the St. Louis Cardinals. In the glory days of the Astros in 2003-2005, the Cardinals played a large part in the Astros getting to their first NLCS and finally winning it the next year. Everyone is always going to remember the shot that Albert Pujols hit off of Brad Lidge with 2 outs in the top of the 9th inning of game 5 of the NLCS that would have sent the Astros to their first World Series in team history. All the history is already there. You simply can’t create rivals by switching teams around the league. They are made on the field of play.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is for me to just vent a little about the current ideas being pondered by Major League Baseball. MLB, if nothing else, is great at coming up with ideas for solving problems that don’t really exist. If you don't believe me, just look at the dumb All-Star game. Their best bet is to just leave well-enough alone and stop tinkering with is otherwise a great sport.

*Don't even get me started on how pathetic the Astros are this season. I don't even want to talk about it.

Summer Time!

Wow, June 1st already. The year is really flying by. Feels like it was just yesterday when I was stranded outside the Mezz at 4am on New Year's Eve. Now summer is here and, as usual, it is absolutely God awful hot outside. This year is a little unique in the fact that, here in Houston, we have had almost zero rain. April and May are generally the months where we get the giant storms of the century that knock power out and prevent me from playing xbox and blogging. Summer time also means the return of the dreaded hurricane season. I only say dreaded because you would absolutely not believe the hype it gets in the media around here when the season starts. Every year it is the same "how to be prepared for the apocalyptic storm that is surely going to kill everything and everyone that you have ever loved ever." Is it too much to ask the media to spin up the wheels on the fear machine only when there is a reasonable likelihood of being hit by one of these storms? Yes? *sigh*.

And, of course, there is the annual report out of Colorado State University (who, by the way, has never been hit by a hurricane) who predicts, every year, that the upcoming season will be the most horrifying and intense season that dwarfs even the most terrifying nightmares that mankind has ever had. This news, without fail, always drives up the prices of gas at the pump due to the speculation that some oil refineries might be knocked offline for a few days because of a storm. What a beautiful twisted system we have.

It is kind of funny that today, the first day of hurricane season, there happens to be a "disturbance" in the area of the Atlantic Ocean near Florida which means that news stations across the country have coverage similar to this:



Then, after a few months of little to no activity usually around August, the Colorado State people will inevitably revise their outlook downward for the current hurricane season and the news stations will be all like:



Must be nice to be able to make predictions year after year that end up having to be "revised" and still have people hanging on your every word because you were right "that one time."

At any rate, I generally enjoy Hurricane season for what it is. Sure, they can be devastating storms that cause tremendous amounts of loss of property and life, but at the same time I can't help but look at them in awe for what they are. So, with that in mind, here are a couple links to keep you apprised of the 2011 Hurricane Season. None of these links have scare coverage or anything like that, just raw information, which is great if you just want to know some information about a particular hurricane. So before you panic when a hurricane does form, crack open a beer first and check out some of these links before you start looting and pillaging your neighborhood. Enjoy!

National Hurricane Center: The National Weather Service page about both the Atlantic and Pacific active hurricanes.

TropicWX: A no frills weather map site with satellite, radar, infrared ocean temps, time-lapse animations and much more.

StormPulse: Great hurricane tracking site that shows the possible future path of a hurricane based on several different models.

Economics: A Commentary

I am a person who pretends to know a great bit about a large number of topics. The economy just so happens to be one I actually know a little bit about. In that spirit, I would like to offer a few explanations why the economy appears to be in the crap-hole situation that it is.

I will be using GE as an example. If I was on CNBC, I suppose I would have to disclose that I am a GE stockholder. Be that as it may, I am only using it as an example because I have a more intimate knowledge of it than I do of any others.

The company's stock has taken quite a nose dive over the past 6 months. From a high $38, the price has slid nearly 70% to around $12 where it currently resides. Much of this can be attributed to the global slowdown of the economy, which as we know as caused many large companies to go under recently.

There is something a bit strange about how GE has fallen so much more than the indexes that track it. Take the Q4 earnings report which was just released last Friday. The company reported earnings of $3.7 billion dollars on revenue of $46.2 billion for Q4 2008, meeting analysts expectations. The news sent GE's stock prices down 10% for the day, probably because the headlines of all the articles published about it were to the effect of "GE profit down 46%".

Now, granted, profit for Q4 2008 was 46% less than Q4 2007. But is that really the headline that should have been published? In a time where large companies are struggling to turn ANY profit at all, the headline for earning $3.7 billion in profit over three months is that profits are down? I suppose $15 billion a year in profit just isn't what it used to be anymore.

But yes, we all know that the media thrives on "ZOMG EVERYBODY PANIC, EARNINGS DOWN 46%" headlines because, quite frankly, that is what sells. No body gives a damn when people say things like, "Hey, things are pretty ok".

People on the internet, namely the Google Finance forums, will point out that the reason the stock continues to be in the crapper is because it is basically a "glorified financial stock". The logic being that since GE generates nearly 50% of its profit from it's financial arm and the fact that most of the banks out there right now are having a really hard time that the company will soon be bankrupt. Yes, I said BANKRUPT. A company with nearly $200 BILLION dollars in revenue last year will soon be out of money completely, according to the folks on the internet. Go ahead and check out the comments if you don't believe me.

The fact still remains that while GE's financial arm did see a considerably smaller profit than it did in previous quarters, it still managed to make a profit of $1 billion dollars. Again, chump change, I know.

I guess the point I was trying to get at throughout this entire post is that spreading of fear is one of the biggest reasons many big ticket stocks are in the crapper. I am a strong believer that if the article headlines were spun in a more positive light, there might not be as much panic as there is right now. I am not saying it is not time to panic. I understand that the market is very complex and everyone has a reason for doing everything. It just seems to me that people are more inclined to tell you the sky is falling in order to get you to drive down a stock price in order for them to pick up bargains.

I know I am no economist and you should take everything I say with a grain of sand. But it just seems that people are paying more attention to headlines and crap that gets said on internet forums instead of actually looking at what is being reported.