King,

You skipped a couple of points about Fenway Park that help to justify it having the highest ticket prices. It has the smallest seating capacity in baseball and it is the oldest and one of the most beautiful ball parks. Personally, even with those ticket prices it is on a very short list of parks that I plan to see a game at if I am ever in town during the season.

I bet that this historical/atmosphere advantage plays a big role in keeping the ticket prices high (as it does for Wrigley Field).

Finally, I agree with the arguments concerning tax payer supported ball parks and stadiums, but I am not sure they are relevant with Fenway. I am not a Boston local, so I very well could have missed something, but I don't believe that Fenway has had any tax payer paid renovation.

It is "Jenna Fischer", not "Jenna Fisher". And there is a missing quotation mark at the end of the quote from Pam about Jim helping with wedding planning.

King,

I don't understand why you want to use the 3.5 at bats per nine innings factor. Why not just use the pitchers actual number of at bats along with his actual number of innings pitched to scale things?

Of course there are problems with this because of fractions of innings, and pitchers being more likely to get pulled if they are coming up to bat soon. Even with these problems, it seems like it would be more accurate to use actual numbers than a fudge factor.

It does make the calculation a little more complicated, but really it only involves pulling a couple more columns of data into your calculation.

I hate the DH, and decry the lack of bunting and baserunning skills displayed by pitchers in recent years. But, from T-Ball to the majors, don't pitchers only have but one league to hit in...the MLB National? If so, then rating how effective pitchers are at the plate is an odd statistic, if only because it applies to so few players.

In every game I ever played in Little League through high school the pitchers batted. Maybe that varies regionally. Or maybe it has changed in the past 10-15 years. But I think that pitchers still get to hit quite a bit while learning the game.

George,

I think that you are being a bit harsh. The World Cup games are in Germany, and so of course they won't be live in prime-time.

There is at least one replay of each game on ESPN2 or ESPN Classic. Maybe it would be nice if more of those replays were in prime-time, but I am sure they get better ratings with baseball than soccer re-runs.

Program your DVR/VCR to record some World Cup action if you have to work 9-5.

Wasn't Germany's goal in stoppage time as well? I remember it as happening in the first minute of stoppage time, but I may have that mixed up.

Scott,

If the job market were static, than using the percentage of men 18-25 in college (or better yet the percentage that graduate by 25 or 30), might make sense. Unfortunately, the job market is not static. Good paying jobs that require less than a 2-year college degree are disappearing. To me the key point comes about halfway through the link above "While it's possible to debate whether men's college attendance is increasing fast enough to keep up with economic changes, it's simply inaccurate to imply that men are disappearing from college campuses or that they are doing worse than they were 10 or 20 years ago." (http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=378705)

These authors haven't probed the question of whether enough men are getting a college education, but I think that is a key question. Granted, I don't think this is a crisis for white males, it is certainly an area for concern.

jergans, when I saw your subject I was afraid that you beat me to my nit, but luckily for me you did not ;).

King, you wrote:

There had been six winning seasons in the last 29 and three postseason appearances since V-E Day, with, famously, none of those going as far as the World Series.

While the bit about V-E day rolls nicely, it has a technical problem. V-E day was in May 1945 (and V-J Day was in August 1945). The Cubs lost to the Tigers in the World Series in 1945, which by my math is after V-E Day. They also had early playoff exits in 1984, 1989, and 1998 before Baker brought them to the playoffs in 2003.

So maybe you need to change "since V-E Day" to "since Truman's first term" or something, though that is a bit lacking.

King, have you looked at the inter-league plays stats? According to http://sports.aol.com/mlb/story/_a/interleague-play-favors-al-once-again/20060626162209990001 , the AL is a combined 103-64 against the NL. Is the AL really that much better than the NL, or is it due to matchups? Or is it just a statistical aberration? The unbalanced inter-league play can obviously lead to scheduling imbalance, but it seems like the overall league records would be a reasonable measure of league strength.

I don't follow baseball that closely this early in the season and I was trying to figure out this morning how the Twins weren't making up any ground. Of course the problem is that they haven't been playing the Tigers or the White Sox, partially due to inter-league play.

The Twins will get their chance to make up games when they start playing in their division again, but unfortunately there is no way they will stay this hot. The division just looks too tough.