I botched scheduling this link to roll out yesterday, but that shouldn’t stop you from checking it out today. Doug Kopf is an employee at Baseball Info Solutions and guy who bought me booze in Chicago. Seems like a smart guy, to boot. Looking forward to reading more of his posts.
Do it. Do it.
Goalie fight! Not much of one, but a goalie fight regardless.
Jake passes along this pretty sweet video of Jim Caple catching R.A. Dickey in Mariners’ camp a couple years ago. Dickey talks about his art and physics, and we see reasonably close-up of video of the Dickey face. Watch this.
The Wilpons’ lawyers are accusing trustee Irving Picard of trying to “strong-arm” them by leaking misleading information to the press. Is this interesting yet? People are throwing around terms like “extortion,” so there’s that.
“There’s nothing on the list that’s unusual.” – Kathryn Kotula, senior investigative food scientist at consultant Investigative Food Sciences, possessor of one of the world’s great titles. Via Josh.
Samuel Beckett used to chauffeur a young Andre the Giant to and from school. They talked about cricket. Awesome. Via Josh R.
I was going to write about the movie Groundhog Day today because it is Groundhog Day, but then Jonah Keri passed along this link. It’s Stephen Tobolowsky himself — Needlenose Ned, Ned the head, Werner Brandis — with his reflections on the movie. Turns out Mr. Tobolowsky, a TedQuarters favorite, has a pretty strong internet presence, with columns like this one at Moviefone.com and on his podcast and Twitter.
I joined Dave Gershman on the Beyond the BoxScore podcast last night. We talked about the Mets and sandwiches. Incidentally, I have enjoyed doing a couple of podcasts lately and I’m available for all your podcasting needs. Just email me at tberg@sny.tv. Also, I can talk about more than the Mets and sandwiches. As in: Taco Bell.
Good read from the Times, though I suspect some of the reaction to it is overblown. Maybe I’m reading this through SNY-colored glasses, but I’m not entirely sure where the smoking gun is here. We knew already the Wilpons had lots of money invested with Madoff and this provides a ton of details about those investments. But if they recommended their employees also invest money with Madoff, why does that imply they were in on the scheme?
We’ve read that the Wilpons, through withdrawn interest over a long time, netted something like $40 million on an investment in the half-billion dollar range. Is that a big enough haul for billionaires (or at least people who thought at the time they were billionaires) to essentially rob their own employees? What’s the motivation there?
Seems way more likely that the Wilpons were just epically duped by Madoff. And while I’d like to think I’d be a little more skeptical of a guy claiming to return 18 percent on my giant investment, Madoff managed to steal $65 billion dollars, so he was probably a pretty convincing huckster.
Tedquarters 