February 25, 2004

The New Republic gives the bad news to Oakland A’s fans; enjoy your team’s success using the Moneyball Philosophy while you can because it won’t last.  As for Toronto Blue Jay fans – forget it, your team can never compete with New York and Boston. In the non-fiction book Moneyball, author Michael Lewis looked at how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane was able to cheaply acquire certain players who performed well enough to repeatedly propel the Oakland A’s into the playoffs. The key was that because their talents such as their ability to get on base consistently have been undervalued by baseball as a whole, Beane was able to sign what turned out to be a great team on a limited budget. In an article Aaron Schatz notes that in the long run others can duplicate this method throughout baseball. The idea of focusing on base percentage, walks to strikes ratio or college pitching records is not impossible to replicate. Whatever Billy Beane does in Oakland or former associate J.P. Ricciardi can do in Toronto with a limited payroll, the Yankees or Red Sox can do better with payrolls two or three times as large. In the end Moneyball will result in certain players being paid more and others paid less but the New York Yankees will still have the highest revenues, payroll and ability to sign whomever it takes to get into the playoffs. Revenue sharing anybody? 10:35:31 PM

Business 2.0 magazine looks at the similarities between Recording Industry of America’s lawsuits against file sharers and the SCO Group’s campaign to force companies to purchase licenses for the Linux operating system which they claim infringes on its intellectual property. 10:14:37 PM

Gearbits reports that there has been a mass outage for users of the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 dual-tuner digital video recorder and cable box earlier this week. Since February 29th is coming up a leap year bug is believed to be the cause. In the comments one user stated they had no problems and another stated the problem lasted for one day. Previous discussions about the DVR have varied about its usability, especially compared to TiVos. 10:14:24 PM

For the staff of Adbusters. I’m Jewish so you can put a mark next to my name, or better yet a yellow star. Screw off. 10:14:03 PM