Some links for you. Only one of them contains a virus that sets your Windows shutdown sound as "THESE MONSTERS ARE STACKED", but I'm not telling you which one.
In a Ken Rosenthal story about Bud Selig, the Giants, A's, and territorial rights, there was this little tidbit:
The Giants, projecting a payroll of about $130 million next season, will need to draw at least 3.2 million to break even, one source said. The team, which drew nearly 3.4 million last season coming off its first World Series title, cannot afford much slippage.
I really wish I knew more about the economics of baseball to either thumb my nose at this or accept it. My instinct is that year-to-year profits and losses are just a part of a team's fiscal health. The real money is in the franchise's value. From the same article:
Baseball purchased the Montreal Expos for $120 million in 2002, then sold the team for $450 million four years later to a group that relocated the franchise to Washington, DC, and renamed it the Nationals.
Yeah. Something like that.
From a New York Times article on the Cubs hiring Dale Sveum:
Take heart, Cub fans: Sveum’s news conference took one observer back to 1985, when a baseball lifer of similar stature was introduced as the San Francisco Giants’ new manager. Word of Roger Craig’s hiring had leaked out days earlier, and the reaction was hardly enthusiastic: Why this aging, recycled retread when fresh blood was so desperately needed?Craig, like Sveum, was a tall, solid guy, physically imposing, with a no-nonsense self-assurance that won over a skeptical room within an hour. He came across as a confident leader who knew what he wanted and how to achieve it. "Humm Baby" was his mantra, and while nobody knew exactly what it meant, the slogan seemed to underscore everything the Giants did in reaching the playoffs in Craig’s second year as their manager and the World Series in his fourth.
It's worth a link because it was the most random ending to a Dale Sveum article I've ever read.
Missing baseball? At least there's an exhibition on Thanksgiving:
the San Francisco Giants visit the Baltimore Ravens in the nightcap (8:20 p.m., NFL Network).
That makes me fantasize about a world in which a scoreless baseball game could end in a tie. It would save so much danged time, and the Giants probably would have gone 85-47-30, which might have let them sneak into the playoffs. It also makes me think that a good nickname for Ray Lewis would have been "The San Francisco Giants' Offense." Total missed opportunity there.
From the Wall Street Journal, a breakdown of how legitimate or lame a franchise's list of retired numbers is, with each league's hall of fame serving as the cutoff point. The Giants grade out at the top of MLB, though I'd trade that for the number 22 going away for good. Call me a sucker.
McCovey Chronicles headline from two years ago for perspective: Giants out on Bay, Holliday -- Is that a bad thing? Huh. That's right. Jason Bay. Man, what a crapstorm that would have been.