Back in the pre-sabermetrics era.

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Didn’t see this one coming.

From a general business perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The Pirates and the the Penguins compete with each other for corporate dollars, even though their seasons don’t really overlap. (Unless the Penguins go deep into the playoffs, which they have the past two years.) Together, they would create a pretty solid force in the city — not as strong as the 10,000 lb gorilla Steelers, but much stronger than they are individually. And that’s before you even account for any synergies that this deal could create.

But here’s the problem: through trial and error, or maybe blind luck, Bob Nutting — the current owner — has picked the right people to run the team. The reason he didn’t for the first twelve years he was in charge was that he doesn’t really understand baseball, and neither did his CEO, Kevin McClatchy. So when they had GMs that were doing their jobs really poorly (Cam Bonifay, Dave Littlefield), they gave them the benefit of the doubt, and held on way too long.

But now the Pirates are in the right hands. Frank Coonelly, the current CEO, understands the value of sabermetrics, has been willing to spend a lot of money on amateur acquisitions, and probably holds some real political sway with MLB, given that he used to be one the top executives in the league office. The current GM, Neal Huntington, has had a smart strategy from day one and hasn’t veered from it. Whether he’s executing it perfectly is open for some debate, but I know all of us Pirates fans are much happier with the process now than we were a few years ago.

The last thing the Pirates need right now is another owner that doesn’t understand baseball, who may want his own people to run the team, and may need to go through his own trial and error process. And it pains me to say that — aside from being the ultimate hero of my childhood, Mario has also been a fantastic owner for the Penguins, bringing them from bankruptcy court to back-to-back finals appearances, a Stanley Cup championship, and a new arena this coming fall.

So I’m very conflicted. Emotionally, it’s the coolest idea I’ve ever heard. Rationally, it doesn’t really add up.

I’ll add that I don’t think Bob Nutting has been as miserable an owner as most people think. If Nutting and McClatchy hadn’t come in, it’s very possible the Pirates would be playing in Portland, or Washington, or Charlotte, or who knows where. If he has one fatal flaw, it’s that he’s hired the wrong people, and trusted them way too much. But he’s got the right people now, and I have no doubt that the Pirates will spend what they need to if they’re close to contention in a couple of years.

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Some thoughts on the Marlins situation.

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I don’t know if I’m going to get an iPad. I’m an iPhone power user — it’s with me constantly, and it’s turned into my go to reading device for Google Reader, books, and just about everything else. So I don’t really know where the iPad would fit into my life. (I’ll probably get one for my parents eventually, since they’re going to need a way to read the New York Times when there’s no more print version in a few years.)

But the one thing that really got me excited today was MLBAM’s demo of their new app (video is below). The MLB At Bat iPhone app has a baby version of MLB.tv, and is still something that’s cooler to show your friends than to actually use. The screen is too small, the phone gets too hot, and the quality on 3G isn’t great.

But what MLB showed off today could be the best version of Gameday and MLB.tv that BAM has developed so far — even better than the desktop experience.

For one thing, this is a pretty full-featured version of both. Some of the features we saw in the demo, and/or listed on MLB’s official release:

• Real-time highlights and stats. The highlight viewer we saw in the demo looks awesome.
• Game archives on demand, which the iPhone app only has going back a day or two.
• Easily accessible player cards. Although I’ll add that the player cards on the iPhone app are pretty terrible, so hopefully they’ll be better on this app.
• Condensed games and Gameday Audio — no surprise there.
• DVR, like on the desktop and iPhone apps.
• The real killer app, which was lacking on the iPhone: multi-game view. I use this obsessively on the desktop version, so if I do ever get an iPad, this would be a big reason.

The biggest problem with the desktop version is that it’s a lean-forward experience. This is a lean-back experience, with multi-touch, on a fairly big screen. The next step is MLB.tv on your television, with the iPhone serving as a remote.

Tough to call it a big winner without actually using it, but I’m betting that this app will be awesome.

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Courtesy of Engadget. And Steve Jobs. More Later.

Some surprises at the top, not many at the bottom. (Unless you really like Steve Phillips.)

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When will the free agent market finally rebound?

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Piracy — specifically people streaming games that are supposed to be behind a pay wall — is already an issue for the NFL, boxing, UFC, and any other sport that charges a lot of money to watch their events. My dad, who is in his 60s and doesn’t know how to type, has figured out that he can watch every Steelers game and PPV fight for free if he checks enough shady streaming sites.

How do sports leagues deal with this? Remember, paid streaming is supposed to be a huge business for sports leagues in the next ten years, perhaps even big enough to replace some of the television deals that will inevitably get smaller or disappear as that business changes. MLB.tv is already a very popular product, and MLBAM is pushing it out in as many places as possible.

They need to use the Apple model of media: lower the price to the point where it’s easier to buy it than to pirate it. Watching Steelers games on justin.tv streams is annoying; the quality sucks, it goes in and out a lot, and half the time it gets shut down in the middle of the game once the NFL cops find it. But the NFL’s legal streaming package (which is only available to DirecTV subscribers, or people in Manhattan that can’t get DirecTV, such as myself) is prohibitively expensive — about $400, which comes out to $50 per game when you consider that half of the Steelers’ games are usually on in New York anyway. So we deal with the terrible service, and use NFL.com radio as a backup.

Compare that price to the other services we buy: NHL Center Ice, which is about $150, and MLB Extra Innings, which I believe went up to $200 last year. In other words, we would pay $50 less for both the NHL and MLB than we would for 8 Steelers games. If it was our only option, we’d probably do it — the Steelers are religion, after all. But it’s not our only option — we can watch those 8 games for free, albeit in a suboptimal way.

All the sports leagues, and ESPN for that matter, need to take note of this. Piracy is only going to become more prevalent in the coming years, as the quality and quantity improve. If you want to charge for your games, you need to recognize that you’re charging for convenience, not the games themselves, and it also helps to have value-add features like those you’ll find on MLB.tv (i.e. multiple games at once, highlights from other games, etc). Otherwise, you might as well give it away and pray the advertising dollars will be there.

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Another way to phrase it would be, “What happens when nobody is reading physical newspapers, and sports are no longer guaranteed a disproportionate amount of space in people’s daily reading?”

But even while physical newspapers still exist, it’s becoming too expensive for companies to fly their reporters around the country to report on their beats in person. Teams are worried this (Mark Cuban writes about it all the time), and rightfully so; lots of newspapers have already cut their first-hand sports coverage, especially for NHL teams.

In LA, the local papers almost never send their beat writers to Kings road games anymore. So the team actually hired one of the LADN’s beat reporters to cover the games for the team’s web site. That works, in some senses. But it’s still an entirely different dynamic; whereas people used to discover the Kings in the local paper, because it was always there in front of them, now they’ll need to seek the team out, and that puts the Kings on the same plane as just about any other form of local entertainment.

Yes, sites like SB Nation will help fill this void — I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point where you can’t find coverage of your local team. But it may never be the same. Sports has had an incredible setup for the past hundred plus years; relative to their size and scope, they received a hugely disproportionate share of newspapers’ space and resources. The question is, was it more of a supply or a demand issue? Did newspapers cover sports because it was easy and fun and filled lots of pages, or was there actual consumer demand for sports news? And did it at some point become a self-fulfilling cycle — i.e. did people become more interested in sports because it was in the newspaper, and therefore demanded more sports coverage?

This is an incredibly important issue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a major topic of conversation over the next couple years, particularly in regards to the NHL and NBA. But even for MLB and the NFL, it’s something to pay attention to — there are a lot of casual fans who could drop off if the information isn’t put in front of them everyday. I’m not sure there’s really a solution either — sports leagues and teams might simply have to become like any other marketer, and, like anybody else, they’ll either execute well and continue to succeed, or fall into the abyss.

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Let’s play guess-the-projected-FIP, using the Bill James projections on FanGraphs:

3.67, 3.77, 3.84, 4.05, 4.21, 4.23

In order, that’s Rich Harden, Andy Pettitte, John Lackey, Brad Penny, Randy Wolf, and Carl Pavano. All of these guys have already signed for 2010 (or in Pavano’s case, accepted arbitration).

Now how about this group:

3.60, 3.67, 4.22, 4.39, 4.56, 4.59, 4.60, 4.70

These are some of the unsigned guys still on the market: Erik Bedard, Pedro Martinez, Joel Pineiro, Doug Davis, Jon Garland, Brett Myers, Jarrod Washburn, and Jason Marquis. Some good, some bad, mostly just a lot of adequacy in this group.

And then there are these two:

3.25, 3.72

That’s Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee. I would bet the under on Lee’s projection, and the fans on FG overwhelmingly agree. These guys are obviously the two best pitchers that will move this offseason. But there’s also this guy:

3.32

Any guesses? That’s a pretty robust projection, right up there with Halladay, Zack Greinke (3.31), Johan Santana (3.42), C.C. Sabathia (3.44), and a bunch of relievers. He’s also a future Hall of Famer, which you would think would make him less under the radar.

Yeah, it’s John Smoltz. The guy who put up a 3.87 FIP and 3.84 xFIP in what was considered a pretty crappy season. Sure, he’s had injury problems the last two years. And whether it was just blind luck or not, he did flame out pretty quickly in the AL East.

But I don’t think there’s any question that he’s the best pitcher left on the market. If he’s healthy, he might even be this year’s best free agent pitcher, period. For NL teams that expect to contend, here’s your lottery ticket.

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