"As the head of the Society for American Baseball Research’s Business of Baseball Committee and a writer for Baseball Prospectus, he may well have known more about baseball’s economy than any other independent expert. What distinguished him, though, was not just the breadth and depth of his knowledge, but his integrity and his generosity, two traits that are unfortunately rare in my field.
...Pappas was one of those most influential in exposing the lies of Bud Selig and his fellow owners. In the winter of 2001—02, with baseball ownership tirelessly denigrating the game and lying to the government, the public, and the players about its supposed financial problems, Pappas published “The Numbers.” It was a devastating series of articles in which he methodically exposed the accounting chicanery behind Selig’s farcical claims that MLB lost more than $500 million in 2001.
Pappas detailed the reasons why stadiums are foolish investments for cities, and showed how teams use such tricks as paper tax losses and the sale of their broadcasting rights to parent media companies to systematically understate profits in their attempts to get on the public dole.
Parsing the language of the last collective bargaining agreement,he made clear how its
willing to portray the lords of baseball as patrons of the arts
and the players as greedy, ungrateful fiends. But there are many less than there once were,and hints of critical inquiry at times creep into the voices of
If it were only a matter of having exposed deception or having provided others with the tools to do so themselves, Pappas’s legacy would be impressive enough. But not only did he help others to find and value truth — he expected others to do the same. Lines from “The Numbers” have stuck with me any time I’ve ever written about the business of baseball:
“Apparently in the hermetically sealed world inhabited by the Commissioner and his minions,
‘Good journalism’ means uncritically accepting MLB’s insistence that it has publicly disclosed all relevant information concerning its finances, even though MLB doesn’t act like an industry on the brink of financial ruin […]
Pappas provided a moral context for journalists to follow, and was not shy about holding them to it. What he understood was that if baseball is really the American game, the way in which it is run
Baseball blog. I agree with Doug Pappas that any writer meeting the Commissioner’s standards of good journalism should be fired. Not affiliated with XM.
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