Couple of things — first, Baseball Prospectus 2004 edition is available for pre-sale at Barnes and Noble online (Amazon has a bad listing, don’t buy there — seriously, they’ve listed the wrong publisher and price, I don’t know what they’re going to do about everyone who ordered already). We’re in the top ten best-sellers, which is amazing. Last I looked we were at #7, directly ahead of the annoying Dr. Phil, Laura and… wait for it… Pete Rose.
Anyway, it’s a shocking $12.36 — twelve dollars and change! — and I did some nice work on this, and have great faith in my cohorts, though I haven’t gotten to see what the final product looks like yet. Plus, this year’s edition includes the background influence of Dave here, so you should see some extra prospect-y goodness. When we shopped for publishers one of the things we wanted was to lower the cover price severely to make it more affordable, and we got it. Seriously, for $12, that’s an insanely good deal.
And I’m not kidding about that, either: we authors make
diddly
——-
squat
in profits from the book, and for the investment of time we might as well donate the money to charity. I know there are many out there that think BP sold out, but I wouldn’t sell out for so little money.
I was thrilled when I got to join BP a couple of years ago and work with some of the best baseball minds out there. And after some initial struggles, I think I’m a much better writer and baseball thinker for having done it. There’s a quote from SportsNight I love:
“If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.”
That’s been BP for me.
Second, Officially Endorsed Reader Aditya Sood emailed us with a possible use for Kevin Jarvis: harvest his tendons for other pitchers. You heard it here first.
Third, what the hell?
I mean seriously, what the hell?
Let’s say for argument’s sake that I go out and buy a used Lexus, for no reason. It turns out to be a lemon: the Toyota robots were watching Tron (mmmm…) and cheering for the MCP, or whatever. I paid $35,000 for the piece of crap, and that money’s lost whether I drive it or not. I need a car that’ll get me around, though, and I have a couple choices I think might meet my needs: the Leone, an inexpensive car that might be decent or really suck, or the Volvo, which is expensive but will do what I need.
Now, it doesn’t matter what I do with the Lexus: that money’s gone no matter what happens. If I only had $50k to start, I’m going to roll the dice on the Leone. If I had $100k, I might go with the Volvo. What to do with the Lexus, though? It has no value but I’ve just wasted $35k on it.
My inclination is to have it crushed into a cube for $50 and leave it in the garage as a constant reminder to myself to make better decisions.
But no! Someone comes to me and says “Hey, I’ll take that Lexus off your hands. What I’ll give you is a Yugo worth $5,000, it’s got a few issues, and a Pontiac Fiero, new paint job, worth $7,000 easy, and this classic Vespa, worth $10,000, it’s been in a couple of accidents and you can really only identify it by looking at the nameplate, which I’ll give you in a separate envelope…. and these 12 barrels of toxic waste worth $12,000 easily to your local terrorist cell.”
Is that a good deal for me?
Fourth, I’ve been snowed-and-iced in here at Haus Zumsteg (in a remote location where the county doesn’t care enough to sand and the hills are killer), and I’m currently finishing the last beer in the house. If anyone wants to airdrop me a 12-pack of Redhook ESB, I would really appreciate it. Otherwise I’m cutting tequila with Squirt (which is, side note, deeeelish) and I’m really more of a beer drinker.