Why not just look at how much the team paid per base advanced? Here's what I get for the 2006 Yankees:

                                  $ / Game         $ / TB

• Johnny Damon     $80,246.91     $41,806.96
• Jason Giambi    $126,102.29     $70,394.45
• Derek Jeter     $127,160.49     $65,058.86
• Hideki Matsui    $80,246.91     $48,148.15
• Jorge Posada     $74,074.07     $46,255.86
• Alex Rodriguez  $133,831.65     $68,930.01
• Gary Sheffield   $66,396.12     $38.080.13

I'm using salary data from USA Today, adjusting for games played, and dividing by total bases. For the games played adjustment, I divide the salary by 162 and multiply by GP, to give dollars paid for games played. I'm ignoring dollars paid while injured or benched.

It doesn't look to me like A-Rod is terribly overpaid. If the average ticket price is $25 at Yankee Stadium, then they have to sell 5,353 tickets to pay A-Rod's salary, or 27,522 tickets to pay for all seven of their $10-million-plus players. Not too bad in a stadium that seats 57,500 and regularly sells out.

Compare this to the New York Rangers having to sell about 16,500 tickets out of Madison Square Garden's 17,500 seats to pay for their top 7 players. And I just don't think Jaromir Jagr gets butts in seats like A-Rod does.

-Moonbat

Jeff -

According to FAR 121.437, you need an ATP rating to act as pilot-in-command of a scheduled airline flight, but you can be a first officer (of a two-man crew) with a commercial plus instrument rating. FAR 135.243 says the same thing for on-demand carriers, when the flight has 10 or more passenger seats. So these 300 hour commercial pilots are stuck as first officers until they build enough time and training to get their ATP. But it's still a good deal since the airline is paying for their time while they work on their ATP.

I've never understood what the fuss is really about. Can someone explain it to me?

I've heard that it is unfair to the other players. But I don't think sports are supposed to be fair. If Player A is simply a better athlete than Player B, how is that fair? How is it ever fair to go to the World Series and lose?

I've also heard that we have to oppose this sort of behavior, because otherwise we're teaching our children that this is the right way to compete in the world. But if that were the case, why do we lionize other behavior that we would be desperately unhappy to see our kids emulate? Who would want to see a Little League player keep pitching on a bloody ankle, like Curt Schilling did? What kind of parent would be unconflicted on hearing that their child plans to become a professional hockey defenseman or football linebacker, or god forbid, a boxer?

And what exactly is a drug, anyway? Suppose it were discovered that hERG channel blockers could improve athletic performance by improving cardiac efficiency. (Unlikely, but bear with me.) Naringin, which is a hERG channel blocker, would then presumably be classified as a "performance enhancing substance." But naringin is found naturally in grapefruit juice. Would drinking 20 glasses of grapefruit juice before a game then be considered doping? If so, how do we know that Babe Ruth didn't drink a lot of grapefruit juice, which might have gone unremarked-on at the time? If it were later discovered that Babe Ruth did drink a lot of grapefruit juice, which we now consider a performance enhancing substance, would we have to take away his home run record?

Or suppose it was discovered that you could permanently increase your metabolically-produced HGH levels by hanging upside down in a cave in Tibet for two weeks. Would this be OK because it isn't a substance? What if the HGH levels for players on the Tibet plan exceeded the amount found in players taking injections? Is it the act of injecting something, not the chemical itself, that is bad? If so, what about a player who gets an injected flu shot, which prevents him from missing 20 games because of the flu bug he failed to catch - surely a major boost to his performance?

Or is it only synthetic drugs that get us upset? And if we don't like synthetic drugs, what about the protein shakes that bodybuilders use, which are full of synthetic chemicals? How is HGH a drug but myosin is not?

So I just don't get it. If a player wants to use HGH, steroids etc. as part of their training regimen, I just don't see why we should get so upset about it. Here's hoping someone can clue me in, because I seem to be out in left field on this one.

These aren't supposed to be brain teasers. Here's what Liebermanized song titles should really look like:

Stairway to Paradise

Another Brick in the Building

All Along the Water Tower

Paler Shade of White

Motel California

Me and Billy McGee

Blowin' in the Breeze

and my personal favorite:

Ziggy Moonbat

So the evangelicals have now realized that they will be out of power soon, hmm? And maybe it would be nice if they could co-opt the Democratic Party as well?

The problem is - for every evangelical vote gained by pandering to the evangelical agenda, the Dems would lose two or three mainstream American votes. Most Americans are no longer willing to put up with the corrupt evangelical cancer in our policymaking. This will become evident in November.

That is, unless the Dems exercise their great talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Like, for example, by pandering to evangelicals.

-Moonbat