This week, Nick wondered aloud what the Washington Nationals would look like, if only they had spent some money to retain former prospects like Brandon Phillips, Jason Bay or Javier Vasquez, instead of trading them for more affordable pieces.

But it was Melissa, a frequent Umpbump commenter, who caught my attention with this seemingly innocent line:

Now that (The Nationals) have a new stadium and are operating in a bigger market they should have the resources to keep their own talent….

That comment reminded me that, last we checked, the Nationals weren’t selling many tickets to games at the new stadium.  But, now that the weather has warmed up, they must be drawing better, right?

In a word, no.

So far this year, the Nats are averaging 30,347 fans per game, in a park that holds 41,888. This season, they’ve sold 18,000 season tickets, an increase of 3,000 since the team moved from Montreal to D.C. But the Nationals had a season-ticket base of about 22,500 in their first season at RFK in 2005, meaning the club has lost the equivalent of 4,500 season ticket holders since then.

What lessons can we learn from this? First of all, that new stadiums aren’t the draw that they used to be. When Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992, spectators packed the park. Orioles’ attendance, routinely below 25,000 at Memorial Stadium, soared above 40,000 at the new park and remained there for nine seasons. Cleveland’s Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) opened in 1994 and had a run of 455 consecutive sellouts. But the thrill of new, retro ballparks is gone. The Nationals are learning the hard way that it now takes more than just a new stadium to attract fans. It takes … drumroll please … a competitive team. Or Barry Bonds.

What does this mean for the Nationals? I think it casts real doubt on the assertion that Washington’s new stadium will lead to increased resources. Moreover, since the Orioles control the TV broadcasting rights to all of theNationals’ games, Washington seems like a longshot to achieve big-market status anytime soon – if ever.

I’m not an economist, but I think the Nats’ situation can be boiled down to this catch-22: The fans won’t show up unless the team improves, and the team can’t afford better players unless the fans show up.

So if Washington is going to win, they’re going to have to do it the hard way – the small market way. I think it’s time for Stan Kasten to buy himself a copy of Moneyball.

Here at UmpBump, he have something of a love-hate relationship with the “MSM.” (I even feel conflicted about using that acronym, hence the quotes.) It goes something like this:

Joe Posanski: love.

Jay Mariotti: hate.

You get the idea.

But a few weeks ago, when Murray Chass was pushed out by the New York Times, we here at UmpBump decided to say nothing. We actually [gulp] felt kinda sorta bad for the guy, almost. (Then he went and said how he hated bloggers because we had no qualifications, and in fact, “our wives could go on and do it if they wanted to.” I would pay good money to know what Mrs. Chass had to say about that quip.)

But now, a journalist I truly admire is being bought out by his ever-contracting newspaper. Gordon Edes is leaving the Boston Globe. For a good while now, Edes has been the best baseball writer at said paper. Edes’ byline always stopped me cold: “READ ME,” it commanded, and I willingly and happily obeyed. So upon hearing the news that Gordon was leaving, I promptly lost all hope for the Globe’s sports section, which, whatever else you may say about it now, inspired me to get into the baseball writing business when I was just a young lass reading the work of Edes, Peter Gammons, Will McDonough, pre-TV Bob Ryan, and pre-bitterness Dan Shaughnessy. Fellow Globie Jackie MacMullan, whose great interviews made her sports column a must-read, also took the buyout earlier this month, as did senior basketball writer Peter May (who is leaving in the middle of the Celtics playoff run, no less), making this an especially low time for the once-vaunted sports page. (The only good that could possibly come of this: a promotion for the talented and deserving Amalie Benjamin. Will this happen? Maybe. That is, if the Globe can’t find some other white-haired Irish-American dude to promote over her.)

But at least readers of Edes will not be totally forsaken; rumor has it that he’ll be joining Yahoo! Sports, which has been gaining ground on ESPN.com and is clearly looking to sustain that trend.

Welcome to the series of tubes, Gordon! We are glad to have you. As for the Globe…well, I suppose the good men of Gloucester need something to wrap their fish in.

As some of you may know, I tend to cover most of the technological news that come out of the MLB offices, and some of you may remember our coverage of the failed DirecTV-Extra Innings exclusive deal.

Many saw the deal as a greedy money-grab since it would shut-out a good chunk of baseball fans that had paid a hefty price to subscribe to the Extra Innings package via their Cable and Dish services. Back then, the argument put forth by MLB Advance Media was in the form of MLB.TV, an online-relative to the Extra Innings package, which was supposed to serve as a substitute.

What MLB didn’t realize was that, though the service worked, at $89, it was an expensive indulgence that delivered sub par quality that still managed to shun fans that didn’t want to watch baseball on their laptops, or couldn’t due to the need for broadband internet access.

Enter 2008. With more people going online at faster speeds, TV on the web has exploded, and with a few years under its belt, MLB’s online experience is finally coming around to becoming the alternative Bud Selig and his new media henchmen wanted to ram down our throats last year. And they’ve got the numbers to prove it, 1.7 million live streams on Opening Day, to be exact.

The biggest difference this year is the software the system uses to stream the games. Microsoft’s Silverlight is a newcomer to the web, but it proves as a credible competitor to Adobe’s Flash system. The user interface behaves much like Apple’s newest incarnation of OS X or Windows Vista in the sense that there are fancy screens that shrink in size as you navigate from one panel to the next, without having to refresh the page or interrupt the broadcast. And it works well on both Macs and PCs.

The transition from broadcast to commercials is still choppy (the service blocks out ads by placing a generic graphic) and during one game, they forgot to flip the switch as the graphic was stuck for a good 15-20 minutes, or about one and a half innings.

Another significant difference is the fact that you can now watch FOX Saturday baseball games that are not scheduled for your area. As some of you know, FOX has the right to broadcast the “Game of the week” except that FOX sliced the broadcast by region, showing “games” of the week instead.

I’m not an expert on TV deals, but I’m guessing something in the language of the contract prevented MLB.TV from broadcasting any FOX Saturday games, forcing me to watch the Braves or Marlins (National League, and I live in Atlanta) when I wanted to watch White Sox - Cubs.

Now, however, it seems the language changed in favor of allowing out-of-market FOX “Game of the Week” games on MLB.TV (the language on the press release simply reads, “All 2,430 out-of-market games in the regular season will be available live on both MLB.TV and MLB.TV Premium.”) And what’s more, because of the source of the TV streams, we don’t get to listen to or watch the broadcast signal coming from the studios. Yes, that’s right, no Jeanne Zealsko!

–

Edit: As Nick points out in the comments, this is not entirely true. Saturday games will be available on mlb.tv up until May 17th, which is when FOX’s exclusivity clause kicks in, and thus, the games are blacked out.

From mlb.tv’s homepage: • National Live Blackout (Regular Season): Due to Major League Baseball national exclusivities, each Saturday until 7:00 PM EST (beginning May 17, 2008 and continuing for remaining Saturdays during the regular season) and each Sunday night (for games that begin after 5:00 PM EST), all scheduled webcasts of games played within such time period will be blacked out.  –

And what’s so premium about this already posh luxury? Well, like last year, there are two tiers of service, regular and premium. For $89.95 a year you get access to a 400k stream, which is typical good quality web video. But this year, if you pony up $119,95, you get a choice of 800k streams, or 1.2 Mb “NextDef,” “TV quality” streams (either way, you get access to MLB Game Day audio for all games).

Don’t get too excited, though, even though the stream is bigger, and the quality is greater, it isn’t really the same as watching the game on a TV.

Of course, all this could be moot if the cable industry gets away with killing net neutrality (and screwing us all over), but for now, it works, and it gets a nod from me.

They tried to play baseball in Cleveland on Monday and — surprise, surprise — it snowed.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, like all newspapers, is fascinated with weather. And they’re milking the story for all it’s worth.

On Monday, Alejandro introduced you to the Plain Dealer’s new flash-based video game, “Snowball!“

That game was lame.

But the Plain Dealer’s latest feature, a time-lapse video of the grounds crew fighting to keep the Prog field in playing shape, is pretty cool. So cool, that it has earned the official Umpbump seal of approval.
See, technology isn’t all bad.

So Kyle Lohse finally found a job, landing with the Cardinals at 1-year, 4.25 million, plus incentives.

I think it is safe to say that in NO WAY is this fair market value for a pitcher of Lohse’s abilities and background, not in an offseason when Carlos Silva extracted a 4-year, $48 million deal from the Mariners, and just one year after Adam Eaton got a 3-year, $28 million contract from the Phillies and Jeff Suppan got 4 years, $42 million from the Brewers.

To find a comparable deal, you’d have to go back a long time. In 1998, for example, the Texas Rangers signed 30-year-old starting pitcher Mark Clark to 2-year, $9.3 million dollar deal after Clark had given an extremely Lohse-like performance the year before, going 9-14 with a 4.84 ERA for the Cubs.

Of course, that deal was widely panned at the time, and didn’t work out very well for either the Rangers or Mark Clark (who was out of baseball after the contract), but the point is that it was more than TEN YEARS AGO, when baseball had far less money than it does now, that a Kyle Lohse-like pitcher was given less than $5 million a year.

So basically, this deal is a huge steal for the Cardinals. In the best case scenario, Lohse pitches well, saves the bullpen for half a season, and then the Cards can flip him to a contender at the deadline, getting one or two good prospects after having paid Lohse less than the typical signing bonus of a first rounder.

In the worst case scenario, if Lohse sucks or gets injured, the Cardinals will only be out 4.25 million bucks, which in this day and age is the kind of spare change major league teams can find in their clubhouse couches. The Cards wouldn’t even have to buy out Lohse’s option year, because they didn’t even give him an option year. And keep in mind, Kyle Lohse has never been on the disabled list for a even a single day in his whole career.

In fact, Justin Inaz over at “On Baseball…and the Reds” breaks down the numbers and shows that Kyle Lohse is probably worth about the same as Carlos Silva, and that in an ideal contract both pitchers should have gotten about around $7 or $8 million per year for a 3-year deal.

So given that the Cardinals seem to be paying Lohse a little over half of what he should be worth, at almost no risk, and may very well be able to flip him for prospects, why is Cardinals GM John Mozeliak so down about the signing? In fact, he actually laments to the AP reporter,

“If it were a perfect world, we wouldn’t have had to go down this path. But it’s not and we’re going to need someone to pitch every fifth day.”

And how the heck can we explain how Lohse lasted so long on the free agent market without getting a better deal?

I think part of the answer has to be Scott Boras. With messy, high profile breakups between Boras and players like A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, and Kenny Rogers hitting the newswires this offseason, and now Boras’s failure to get reasonable contracts for actually semi-valuable major leaguers like Jeff Weaver, Corey Patterson, and Lohse, we may be seeing a decline and fall of the once-mighty Boras Empire. It seems as if both teams and players may be tiring of Boras’s negotiating style, and while teams may still be willing to talk to Boras when it comes to signing superstars, they simply don’t want to deal with the bother when it comes to the mediocre players.

Another reason may be a glut of amazing young talent this year, as Sarah discussed in a recent post. But I think there is something else in this case, something that has to do with Kyle Lohse in particular. The USS Mariner and East Windup Chronicle have supported the theory that this offseason baseball front offices have suddenly discovered the sabermetric idea of “replacement level” players, who can deliver almost the same performance as the lower tier of major leaguers at a vastly reduced cost, but I have a really hard time buying that argument. While certainly there are a *few* GMs around the game that have embraced some sabermetric ideas, there are plenty of counterexamples of GMs who seem just as enamored of big names and veteran experience as ever.

No, I think what is going on here is that GMs are looking at the same old thing they have always been looking at, which is so-called intangibles. Kyle Lohse has long had a reputation as an selfish underachiever, going back to his Minnesota days, and the fact that he went with Scott Boras as his agent despite being a fifth-starter type only added to this reputation. I don’t think all that many GMs were looking too closely at Kyle Lohse’s actual numbers or his marginal value over a “replacement level” player. They were just considering his reputation as a guy who simply doesn’t have the right “makeup” to make the most of his talent, a guy who isn’t a “winner” or simply doesn’t have enough “heart,” and decided that that simply wasn’t the type of guy they wanted to be bringing into their clubhouse, regardless of the cost.

It would be nice to think that we are finally getting to an era when pretty much all GMs all around the game are finally coming to terms with spreadsheets and new statistics and are willing to break down numbers in a systematic way to evaluate players more rationally. But I don’t think we are quite there yet. I mean, this is an offseason in which JP Riccardi, a one-time disciple of Billy Beane who has long been touted as one of the more stats-friendly GMs in the majors signed David Eckstein to be his starting shortstop because he thought he needed to be bringing more “gamers” into his clubhouse.

I think that, ironically, the more statheads raise a hue and cry about how overrated a player is, the more attractive many GMs actually find that player. Because in their minds, if a player is outperforming what you would expect, that is not evidence of a routine statistical anomaly or a small sample size but actually just additional proof that that player has “heart,” “grit,” or “intangibles,” and that he is a “gamer” or “just knows how to win.”

Kyle Lohse is the opposite, a player who has consistently underperformed expectations, which I think goes far toward explaining why most teams wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole this winter, and why even the Cardinals are left feeling icky after signing him, despite the fact that they will probably be getting tremendous value out of the deal.

Professional baseball players are selfish. Everybody knows it. They’re greedy, money grubbing douchebags.

Except, for most of this offseason, they weren’t.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

This winter, Troy Tulowitzki, Matt Holliday, Robinson Cano, Brad Hawpe, Manny Corpas and a few others signed contracts that locked them up through their arbitration-eligible years. They left money on the table (possibly) in exchange for financial security. Nobody wants to go year to year.

Mike Lowell gave the Boston Red Sox a hometown discount. So did Curt Schilling. And the latter even promised to lose weight!

Alex Rodriguez negotiated his contract with the Yankees himself (with the aid of Warren Buffett), pushing aside Scott Boras and signing for millions less than many speculated he might get.

Kenny Rogers flat out fired Boras. Garry Sheffield called the super agent a “bad person.”

Manny Ramirez showed up to camp in great shape and told the media that he wanted to play until he was 50 and that he wanted to retire a Red Sox.

It all seemed too good to be true. Maybe it was.
Lately, the era of good feelings has come to a screetching halt.

First, Schilling announced that he wanted to have surgery, but the Red Sox wouldn’t let him.

Then Ramirez, fresh off his “I want to stay in Boston” speech, hired Boras as his new agent. Not that hiring Boras is a guarantee that Ramirez will sign elsewhere — but it’s certainly not encouraging.

This week, Jonathan Papelbon said he wants $900,000 — the same amount Ryan Howard got in his third year. The implication, as always: they can pay now or somebody else will get the chance to pay later.

Also, Prince Fielder and Cole Hamels got all bent out of shape when their teams renewed their contracts. Both players felt like they got jipped. Hamels called his $500,000 contract a “low blow.” Here’s what Fielder had to say about his $670,000 deal:

“I’m not happy about it at all,” Fielder said. “The fact I’ve had to be renewed two years in a row, I’m not happy about it because there’s a lot of guys who have the same amount of time that I do who have done a lot less and are getting paid a lot more.

“But my time is going to come. It’s going to come quick, too.”

Them there’s fightin’ words.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Tampa Bay CF B.J. Upton said all the right things after his contract was renewed by the Rays this week. Upton will make $10,000 less than he made in 2007, despite hitting .300-24-82 with 22 steals last year. But he says the slight won’t affect his play.

Upton’s tact notwithstanding, the last few weeks represented a bit of turbulance in the otherwise smooth sailing relationship between the players and management. What will the future hold? Your guess is as good as mine.

So I come home after a long day at work and sit down to one of my many benign guilty pleasures: flipping through the day’s catalogs. Tonight, we’ve got a good haul: LL Bean, J Crew, and Red Envelope. Browsing through this last, which specializes in expensive shit you don’t need (a.k.a., “gifts”), I noticed some expensive shit I actually might have wanted, if it weren’t so expensive:

This pen, which is “crafted from authentic stadium-seat wood from America’s most famous and beloved stadiums,” available in Yankee Stadium (royal blue), Wrigley Field (dark green), Fenway Park (dark blue), Dodger Stadium (Dodger blue) and Busch Stadium (gray).

And these cuff links, “crafted of salvaged seats from America’s most famous and beloved stadiums,” available in Yankee Stadium (royal blue), Wrigley Field (dark green), Fenway Park (dark blue), Dodger Stadium (Dodger blue), RFK Stadium (orange), Busch Stadium (gray), Tiger Stadium (dark green), Comiskey Park (light green), or Shea Stadium (orange).

It’s not that I’m shocked at three-digit price tags for office supplies or glorified buttons. No, what has my knickers in a twist is that while all of the pens are in the $170 to $190 (for Yankee Stadium) range, the Fenway Park pen is a whopping $250. Likewise, all of the cuff links are priced at $150—except, again, for the Fenway Park links, which are $230. Clearly, they think the most rabid fans in the game can be counted on to pony up more dough. Well, Mr. Director of Sales, the Fenway Faithful may pay more for tickets than other fans do, but we’re not stupid, and we’re not made of money. I might have bought my boyfriend $150 cuff links made of Fenway Park, but I ain’t shelling out 230 clams for those puppies. You just priced yourself out of a sale.

This member of Red Sox Nation will be saving her pennies for StubHub.

After whining themselves into the DirecTV deal, Cable suddenly forgot what team it’s playing for.

The technology landscape has changed dramatically since last year’s ill-fated DirecTV-Extra Innings exclusive deal; more and more people have migrated to the web to watch TV shows and download movies, something that’s been traditionally and intrinsically tied to the Television and the cable or satellite set top box.

Ironically, the Extra Innings deal would’ve forced subscribers to switch to the MLB.TV service, where they’d be able to watch most games from their computers at home or work. But due to huge fan outcry and a brief intervention by Congress, MLB New Media Goons, aka, MLB’s Advance Media arm decided to let Cable into the deal.

This time around, however, it’s Cable that’s about to screw us all over. And this time, I doubt there’s anything Selig or his henchmen can do to stop it.

From the AP:

NEW YORK - Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

As you all remember, Time Warner is part of that group of affiliates that own and operate In Demand, the system that distributes the MLB Extra Innings package to cable subscribers.

And this new pricing structure that they’re testing for broadband access will undoubtedly add a premium to the luxurious price that those of us who watch TV programming online (IE, baseball games through MLB.TV) already pay.

And what’s the reasoning, you ask?

Now, let’s see — that pricing structure would be really bad news for any Web entity selling downloadable movies and TV shows. Customers of cable company broadband might think twice if the download would bust them through to the next tier of service, forcing them to pay more.

And, hmm, who is most threatened by Web entities selling movies and TV shows? Why — that would be cable companies! How coincidental! By making downloadable video more expensive, cable companies might convince customers to just watch cable TV or get a movie on cable’s pay-per-view. Amazing how that works, huh?

Sure, that this becomes the norm is only speculative, but the Net Neutrality issue has been brewing for a while, with Cable leading the charge that we ought to have a tiered system to pay for broadband.

And so, the fact that Networks are enticing people to watch TV online, and not to mention, the big push for online movie rentals, oh and of course, music downloads, will make broadband internet service providers (IE, Cable) only think of pulling schemes like Time Warner’s out of their digital rear ends.

“For a guy who took (the job as Acting Commissioner of MLB) in Sept. 9, 1992, and I told my wife it was two-to-four months — 14 years later … I think that will be enough. There’s no question, because there are other things I really would like to do.” - Bud Selig, April 24, 2003

“My contract is going to be over (in 2009). I’m going to be 75 years of age. I want to teach — I’ve already had some great offers — and want to write a book,” - Bud Selig, December 29, 2006

Those were the words spoken by Commissioner Bud Selig on two separate occasions regarding his intentions not to renew his contract - the first quote pertains to the one that was set to expire in 2006, and the other statement was in regards to his current one, which was to end in 2009.

And yet, here I am, typing this post to talk about today’s announcement that the owners of the 30 MLB teams have given Bud Selig an additional 3-year extension beyond 2009. Did I expect it? Based on Selig’s comment back in December of 2006 (above), and the fact that he sat across from the U.S. Congress just two days ago answering questions about who was responsible for the illegal use of PEDs in baseball, I suppose I was a bit surprised. But in retrospect, none of us really should be.

I don’t think it’s being overtly cynical or shocking to say that there is a big difference between what the fans of baseball want and what the owners of the teams we root for want. Generally speaking, the fans want to be able to cheer for a winning team that’s likable without sacrificing their kids’ college savings. The owners (again, generally speaking) want to maximize the financial success of their teams, and fielding a winning team is a component of this quest for profitability.

And they want the guy who had let them reach this point of financial success to stay in office until the day he dies. Or until the enterprise becomes unprofitable. And that guy is Bud Selig.

For all the talk we do about how PEDs are ruining the game of baseball, we the fans are spending more and more of our money each year to follow our favorite teams. We’re sending mixed signals. The owners of the teams aren’t reading our op-ed pieces in the local papers lambasting the tarnished state of the national pastime. They look at quarterly revenue reports and projections to determine how well the team is doing. If these reports look healthy (and boy, do they ever), they’re happy. And honestly, I don’t blame them.

Let’s face it, you and I may not be, but baseball owners are businessmen. Aside from the Steinbrenner Brothers, pretty much every owner made their own money to purchase the team in the first place. They don’t think like we do and we can’t expect them to. There are far too many of us fans to make sure that each and everyone is happy. But a good place to see if enough of us are happy are in the revenue and attendance figures - and both achieved record highs ($6.1 billion and 79.5 million attendees, respectively) in 2007.

So what reason did they have to not offer Selig an extension? Because he presided over the steroid era and did nothing even though it appears he knew about the problem long before he acknowledged it? Well, so did the owners. Because the price of tickets have grown astronomically over the last ten years? To the owners, that’s a good thing. As long as Major League Baseball remains a lucrative business, they’re going to want Bud Selig in office.

And Bud Selig is going to want to stay as long as he gets Vlad Guerrero money.

Looking for some last minute gift ideas for the baseball lover on your list? Any of these is sure to please!

Books!

Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Dawidoff. This handsome hardcover anthology contains all the classics of baseball writing plus some unexpected, lesser known gems. Authors include John Updike, Gay Talese, Ring Lardner, Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, W.C. Heinz, Don Delillo, even Stephen King.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. An instant classic when it was first published, it’s a must-own for any true fan. This is the book that made Bill James into a household name and Billy Beane into an icon. And it introduced to the masses the false notion that Kevin Youkilis is Greek.

Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong, from Baseball Prospectus. This book is perfect for the stat-geek on your list. Even seamheads who fear math will enjoy it (as I can attest from personal experience). Nevermind that it came out a few years ago; the questions it considers are evergreen.

DVDs!

Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. My favorite baseball movie of all time, and one of my favorite movies, period. Love, sex, and baseball! What a charming combination. Plus, one of the great opening monologues in cinema, one of the all-time great angry rants in cinema, and a raft of classic one liners.

Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns. Though this documentary now feels a bit dated–it runs through 1994, and stops short of the strike that year–it’s still a classic, taking viewers from the origins of baseball in the 1840s to the modern era. What better way to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s?

Major League, starring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, and Wesley Snipes. You’ve got Wild Thing, Willie Mays Hayes, and Rene Russo’s firs-ever movie role. The “Wild Thing” edition includes some cool extras that enhance this cult classic, including interviews with the directors, takes from real ballplayers, and the ending that could have been.

Random Stuff!

Wooden Circa Baseball Game: This desktop game is half baseball, half pinball, all fun! (Okay, I made that up about the “all fun” part. I’ve never played, so I wouldn’t really know. But I’ve seen it in a bunch of catalogs and it does seem like it might be fun! Or at least, like it would be temporary, Christmas-morning fun, before it ends up collecting dust at the back of some closet. Ten years down the line, it would make a pretty good yard sale item, too.)

Norman Rockwell Baseball Puzzle: Who isn’t a sucker for a good puzzle? Rockwell and baseball go together like PB and J. Besides, it will give you and the fam something to do between meals.

Official Gear: Why not get your fan some official MLB gear from his or her favorite team? Aside from the usual player jerseys and team caps, you can get shot glasses, golf towels, lamps, tee-shirts, bathrobes, bobbleheads,  memorabilia, fleeces, jackets, and jewelry. You name the tchotchke, they’ve got it. And they’ll stamp a logo on it and sell it to you.

But what makes the best stocking stuffer? Why, TICKETS! Or, you know, an all-expenses-paid trip to spring training. Okay okay, tickets are fine. Yeesh, sorry.