Peter Pasquarelli

I was listening to the radio today. It was the pre-game for ESPN's Sunday night baseball. They had Peter Pasquarelli on there. He's an idiot.

Today is the anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game in the big leagues. They asked Pasquarelli about how there are less African-Americans in the big leagues these days. He listed two things in particular. The first was that there are more opportunities for African Americans who are into athletics. Presumably he means that a lot of folks are playing football and basketball instead of baseball. Ok, that sounds fine. But his next point is that this is caused by it being too expensive for "inner city" families to go to a professional baseball game, and that MLB needs to do something about that.

Huh? Baseball is by far the most affordable professional sport. Bleacher tickets at a baseball game are way cheaper than anything at an NFL or NBA game. For example, I could get tickets for the A's - Angels game on Tuesday night for $9. If afford ability of professional sports game was in any way correlated to African American participation at the professional level of the same sport (and doesn't this seem like the kind of statement that would get Don Imus fired, if he hadn't already been fired) then clearly African Americans would be over-represented in baseball.

Next up, they actually talked about the Padres-Dodgers game. They asked Pasquarelli about the excellent Padres bullpen. He went off about how good Clay Meredith was and how "the computers" in Boston screwed up big time when they traded him away. This is so classic. "Old school" baseball guys love to deride Theo Epstein's version of Moneyball in Boston -- even though it broke The Curse. Anything negative that happens to the Red Sox is caused by their over-reliance on sabremetric analysis. Damn numbers! Damn computers! Damn Epstein! Damn World Series rings! Oh wait...