FOX broadcast the Saturday afternoon Yankees-Indians game, so I got to watch some Yankees baseball on my television instead of MLB.tv, which was nice. These kinds of games are of course blacked out from MLB.tv as well as the MLB Extra Innings package you can get on most satellite and some cable systems. fair enough. But on Thursday night, I was blacked out of both the Yankees-White Sox game and the Mets-Nationals game, neither of which was being broadcast natioanally.

Several emails to MLB.tv customer service have done nothing to explain to me

1) Why this happened, or

B) if I should expect it to happen again.

According to their website, MLB.tv only has me blacked out of Phillies games, since my hometown (Bethlehem, PA) falls in their broadcast area. I live over 100 miles from New York city, and while I get some of the NYC broadcast stations, we do not get the YES network out here, not Sports NY, which does most of the Mets games, so it's not like the Yankees or Mets think of eastern PA as their broadcast area.

When I emailed MLB.tv customer service, they sent me the obligatory confirmation email, followed up by another one in which they asked me to provide more information (like my IP address, zip code, and where I was trying to watch the game from) which they said had been "previously requested". When, or by whom it had been requested, they did not say, but the remark had a distinctly snotty tone to it, like one of those teenagers who works in the computer store at the mall and gives you attitude because you don't already know the difference between DDR RAM and SODIMM.

I don't think I was supposed to respond directly to the email, but they did not provide clear instructions as to how I should furnish this information to them, so in my view, that's a failing on the part of MLB.tv as well.

They also suggested that I should make sure my "wallet preferences" were up to date and accurate. For the uninitiated, this means that I should make sure the credit card they have on file for me is accurate, though this should not matter either. For one thing, I bought the MLB.tv package for the whole year, and for another, even if I was paying for it monthly, We're still in the first month of the season, so there's no reason that I should be out of date on that front either. And besides, it's not as though the whold MLB.tv module wasn't working. I could watch the Reds game or the Padres game or the Mariners game if I so desired. Just not the Mets or Yankees.

All I know, at this point, is that I'm not supposed to be blacked out of any of these games, which I already knew, and that if I have troubles in the future, I can contact them through their website, which as it turns out, is pretty useless.

MLB.tv's product itself is pretty darn good, but on the whole, its customer service interface leaves a lot to be desired. An MLB betting man should not wager on getting a helpful response.

Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid, by John Rosengren

The word "skeptical" barely begins to describe my demeanor as I was asked to review John Rosengren's new book, Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid.


First of all, I'd never heard of its author, so how good could the book be, right? Well, I'd never heard of Michael Shapiro before I read his excellent book on the Brooklyn Dodgers a few years ago. Before I happened upon A Dirty Job in the Allentown airport last summer, I'd never heard of Christopher Moore either, and he's now my favorite author. So I didn't give that particular prejudice too much weight.


More important, the book's subtitle "The Year That Changed Baseball Forever" kind of put me on my guard. And not just because it referred to 1973, and therefore happened before I was born. I had to take the title with a grain of salt, mostly because I just read a book last year about a team that (allegedly) changed baseball, just two years before this book supposedly did the same thing, and that, frankly that was a crock. And a really boring book.


Rosengren's book is neither.


This well-written, insightful and intriguing tome relates how the events of the 1973 baseball season, and several events that unfolded around it, really did change the game, and perhaps the country, for all time. Think about it:

* You had Hank Aaron chasing babe Ruth, right down to the last day of the season, contending not only with his aging body and racist death threats, but also the ambivalence of the baseball establishment (read: Commissioner Bowie Kuhn) and the people of Atlanta, who mostly ignored him right to the end.

* Willie Mays, the once great Giants centerfielder, was linping along in his last year as a player with the Mets, who somehow managed to get to the World Series despite winning only 82 regular season games.

* Reggie Jackson was trying single-handedly to not just win the AL pennant again, but to become the superstar that we all now know him to be, and while he was at it, he was also trying to change the way players dealt with both management and the media. He succeeded at all three.

* Pete Rose (this was before he bet on baseball, we assume) collected his 2,000th career hit, won his third batting title and his only NL MVP award.

* Charlie Finley was an odd juxtaposition of both progressive and traditional baseball values. For example, he lobbied for the Designated Hitter rule, which was accepted, as a way to improve offense levels in the attandance-challenged American League. He also suggested orange baseballs for night games, though these were only used in exhibitions. At the same time, he was a world-class cheapskate, losing his players' loyalty (and ins ome cases their contracts) over comparitively trifling sums because he simply could not stand to give up a dollar if he didn't absolutely have to.

* George Steinbrenner bought the New York Yankees for a song from CBS, and despite promises to keep building ships for a living, it was not long before he started meddling...and winning.

At the same time, America was still trying to get out of the Vietnam War, and the Paris Peace Accords were signed, though it would not be the end. By the end of the year, both the President and the Vice President were forced from office over separate political scandals, though Nixon made significant inroads with both China and the Soviet Union, helped to start the DEA, the Alaska Pipeline, and signed the Endangered Species Act, before he was forced to leave.

The World Trade Center, the CN Tower in Toronto and the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Bosporous Bridge in Istanbul and the Sydney Opera House all opened. The SkyLab launches mark the next step in manned space flight and exploration. Thalidomide settlement. The Stockholm Syndrome. The American Indian Movement standoff at Wounded Knee. Roe v. Wade. The Yom Kippur War. The Arab Oil Embargo.

Tie a Yellow Ribbon was the biggest selling single of the year. Elvis: Aloha From Hawaii was seen by over one billion people, and they didn't even have YouTube. Dark Side of the Moon was released. The Miami Dolphins became the first (and still, only) team in NFL history to finish a season undefeated. Secretariat won the Triple Crown. O.J. rushed for over 2,000 yards. Bobby Riggs and his big mouth were beaten (easily) by Billie-Jean King. Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

It was a tumultuous time, you have to admit. And I hadn't even been born yet!

To his credit, Rosengren doesn't try to cover all of that stuff in his book, but he does touch on some of the bigger issues (like Watergate) and how the baseball world could never be wholly insulated from the larger culture. Steinbrenner's illegal campaign contributions to Nixon in 1972 were given special attention in the book,as was the effect of the investigation, and his eventual conviction, on his business with the Yankees). Rosengren also discusses the ways in which Steinbrenner almost immediately renegs on his promise to practice "absentee ownership" and "stick to building ships", and apparently had no shame about the way he wanted to run things. When Mike Burke, the general Manager of the team under CBS's ownership, was forced out, George simply explained that, "[he] didn't agree with everything I wanted to do, so I fired him." (p. 82)

Speaking of contentious and controversial owners, the Oakland Athletics, despite their success in 1972, were a wild bunch, and hated their cheapskate owner. "They disregarded authority with exhuberant contempt." (p. 29) Moreover, they nearly mutinied during the World Series when Finley's meddling forced secondbaseman Mike Andrews to agree to a false medical report in order to get someone else on the roster. Finley eventually forced out his manager, Dick Williams, lost his best pitcher, Catfish Hunter, and the AL MVP Reggie Jackson, once free agency took hold.

Finley's brainchild, the DH, was proposed essentially as a gimmick to improve attendance, which, it was though, would increase with increased offense. The American League in 1972 had averaged just 3.47 runs per game, 13% lower than the Senior Circuit, and almost exactly as low as the anemic 1968 season. Run scoring (and attendance) increased dramatically in 1973, and everyone was so pleased after only the first season of what was supposed to have been a three-year experiment, they decided to make the DH permanent. Hard to blame them.

With that said, I do have to take issue with Rosengren's contention that, "The experiment had improved offense, no question." Offense improved, sure, but how much did the DH have to do with it? Plenty, but not everything. The AL scored 4.28 runs per team per game in 1972, a 25% increase from the previous year, but only about half of that was due to the DH. The rest of it was due to the fact that the League as a whole just hit much better, and much more in line with historical trends. Designated hitters scored 0.58 runs per game in 1973, compared to only 0.14 runs per game by pitchers and pinch hitters in 1972, but everyone else in the American League jumped from a paltry 3.17 R/G up to a much more palateable 3.56 R/G. In short, it looks in retrospect like 1972's pitcher's paradise was just a fluke, which would likely have reverted to the mean anyway, at least to some degree.

Anyway, I'm off-topic. Back to the book.

Rosengren manages to relate some of the social and historical implications of the DH, the ways it was perceived and who actually embraced the role and succeeded at it. Ron Blomberg may have gotten his name in the record books as the first player to serve in the role, But Orlando Cepeda was the one who made the DH look like a good idea. Cha Cha was basically washed up at 35, but got a second chance in Boston in 1973 due entirely to the DH rule, and probably owes his Hall of Fame induction to it. (Rosengren mentions that Cepeda won the inaugural Outstanding DH Award in '73, though he fails to include the fact that Frank Robinson had a much better season. Baby Bull only got the award because it was started by a newspaper in New Hampshire, which is obviously in Red Sox Nation.)

The book, in fact, is really quite good. The author seems to be one of those select few people who can look at an array of information from various and sundry sources and not only see the big picture, but relate it to others as well. It seems that a lot of things really did change in 1973, and Rosengren weaves all the intricate parts of that season together for you, presenting the tapestry and explaining how it all fits, and what it all means.

How he managed to do this is beyond me. His bibliography lists over 50 different books, plus numerous websites, periodicals, audio/video sources and more than a dozen personal interviews with players and other personalities who lived the events in the book. And talk about meticulous! After the brief first chapter, every chapter has at least 29 end notes, and most have at least 60! The man obviously paid enormous attention to detail, working his butt off to verify and cite his sources.

The result is an interesting, well-researched, well-written and comprehensive work that tells the tale of a season that really did change the world of baseball forever.

Somewhere along the way I became obsessed with statistics and baseball. Ever since I was a little kid I would take the box scores for the previous days games and line by line go through each game. The sport, with its highly structured play, makes it the best candidate of all sports to be continually dissected by numbers.

Basketball players are remembered for their dunks and three pointers, football players are remembered for their amazing side stepping moves and grit, and baseball players are remembered for the number of home runs they hit and the number of players they struck out.

In a sport where getting 25 more hits over 162 games can improve your hitting from .250 to .300, making you an All Star and saving you from the minor leagues, statistics rule the sport. The entire genre of fantasy sports has become a multi-million if not billion dollar industry because of baseball.

Using the simplest of numbers a lay person can predict the second half of baseball after the All Star game. Seeing that the St. Louis Cardinals are with in 3.5 games of the Cubs may worry some, but seeing that the run differential is only +16 while the Cubs are at +102 tells fans that the Cubs are blowing a lot of teams out while the Cards are scraping by.

Looking to the American League, the same thought process can be used. In the East, Tampa Bay has shocked everyone and many would doubt their ability to maintain that lead over the Red Sox and even the Yankees, but with a run differential of +75 they are just as solid as the Red Sox who are +77. That divisional race will be interesting to watch.

Looking at the numbers is not going to stop fans from buying Yankees tickets, but will tell fans that the Rangers are not as good their record indicates. They are actually -26 which means they have weak pitching and will eventually fade away.

The numbers also give a good overview of the strength of a division. The numbers are not good in the National League West, where the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers are tied for first place with sub-.500 records. Both teams have run differentials just over even, justifying their records.

Baseball will continue to be a game of little details and little numbers, but the game itself remains popular with just about everyone. Of course the caveat is that all the numbers go out the windows once the World Series rolls around.

- Guest written by David