Around the age of nine, I was looking to make some extra scratch. I’d just come off a failed scheme of trying to sell superballs made out of play doh – they were more ornamental than bouncy, mainly because play doh don’t bounce. For my new business venture, I decided to gut a bunch of my Sports Illustrated for Kids magazines so I could sell the individual glossy pictures of the athletes. I went at the books with a pair of scissors cutting out all the mid-nineties stars and pasting their likenesses onto construction paper – I was destined to be as lucrative as say the person(s) who patented play doh or the 1000 sheet assortment pack of construction paper.

I sold one. And only because my mom, like most women in the early 90′s, had a real live thing for Andre Agassi.

Why am I telling you about this misadventure in childhood capitalism? (Especially, since I was obviously destined for such lucrativeness later in life.) I wanted to convey how hard it’s going to be to break the news about Andre’s hair weave to my mom. It’d be easier for everyone involved if she watched 60 Minutes last night and had already been shattered by this coming out.

Now that the hidden truth behind Andre’s scalp has been Couric’d, those of you who are going to need to cope by remembering Agassi’s coif in its age of innocence, I suggest the antidote that is his commercial work from the early 90′s. I’ve embedded my Top-5 Agassi pitch moments from the 90′s below – surprise, they’re all for Nike and the Canon Rebel. Apologies if the few ads where he appears with a shaved head in the mid-90s are too much for some to bear.

“Image is Everything”

The Rules of Golf

Agassi’s Rock n’ Roll Tennis Camp

Change?

Agassi vs. Sampras, Street Tennis

Special consideration to The Wade Blog, check out their Top-10 Agassi Commercials here.

Tweet This Post

Depressed about the prevailing of evil last night? Suggesting cockamamie like: the Phillies should have pulled Pedro with an 0-2 count on Matsui in third? Well, it gets worse.

Before you go into your no-good Yankee-loving boss’s office and try to shatter him by asserting that rooting for that organization lowers him as a businessman, you should unfortunately know that the Yankees haven’t been operating under the commonly failed business practices that some of us assumed all along.

David Goldman, of CNNMoney.com and loyal Red Sox fan, reluctantly reports this morning that the Yankees ran one of the most efficient operations in the league this year:

Adding up the dollars and cents. Applying a Society of Baseball Research metric, the Yankees were actually more efficient with their payroll this past season than were the hapless cross-town Mets, Cleveland Indians and basement-dwelling Washington Nationals.

The World Champs were only slightly less thrifty with their salaries than the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros, and Kansas City Royals, all of whom missed the playoffs.

By those calculations, the Yankees paid $3.2 million per “marginal victory.” That’s nearly twice as efficient as the Mets, who only won 70 games despite their $149 million payroll and paid $5.8 million per marginal victory.

In addition, a rough estimate of the team’s revenue in 2009 shows the Yankees cashed in on their success more than any other team. Multiply the number of people coming to games by the average ticket price ($73),and the Yankees took in about $270 million this season, or $69 million more than they shelled out for their payroll.

Sigh. However, if you’re a New Yorker and a Yankee hater – the pinnacle of the unbiased majority in this debate, right? – take solace in an undeniable fact. What primarily helped the Yankees develop this business model are the ticket, food, and merch sales contained within that billion dollar stadium. And, if the stadium doesn’t get built, the Yankees wouldn’t be able to leverage the astronomical price mark up of those items. And if the government subsidies for the stadium that came down don’t, then the stadium don’t get built. Whether you’re a Yankee fan or not, if you’re a New Yorker you’re unwillingly paying down that grant money, and in turn fueling the stadium funds that helped pay player salaries and the luxury taxes attached to those salaries.

And, as Goldman points out, it’s a sad reality and it’s working – but on paper, in no less evil of a fashion than before.

Yankees got their money’s worth (CNN)

Tweet This Post

SportsRadioInterviews.com posted the skinny from Joe Girardi’s interview with Mike Francesca on WFAN today. Couple of intriguing thoughts swirling around in the manager’s well-bic’d noggin approaching game time – he’d be willing to throw Mariano for 45 pitches and isn’t ruling out bringing him in in the seventh inning.

From Sports Radio Interviews, on Mariano coming in the 7^th inning:

“Well yeah you are going to think about that. I mean you think about if you can get him to throw one pitch per batter we could start him too.

Mariano threw 39 pitches and got two innings worth of outs in Game 2, but as Tom Verducci pointed out on SI.com, that was a rare feat:

It was the most pitches he has thrown in a game in two years. Of the 74 times Rivera has pitched in the postseason since he became a closer, he has thrown more than 39 pitches only two times, and both were in potential clinchers: the epic 48-pitch outing in 2003 ALCS Game 7, and the 40 pitches in the Yankees’ ill-fated 2004 ALCS Game 4.

Frankly, for once, I’d like to see it come down to who’s coming up – like say, Utley, Howard, Werth in the top of the seventh? For example, Purist Bleed Pinstripes posted an interesting analysis on Facebook of why Mariano, the best reliever on the team, should have been brought in to face Hunter, Guerrero and Morales in Game 5 of the ALCS. And as an aside, Mo went 2+ in that 13-inning affair that was Game 2 of the ALCS. How great if Chase Utley slithers out of the dugout to face Rivera tonight prior to the beer being shut down? (You then see veins start to exponentially appear on Girardi’s well bic’d temples with every foul ball.)

Only a few hours till we’ll know which way this goes. Personally, I’m just trying to get the word out on this so that whatever he does we can hopefully second guess the guy tomorrow. Enjoy the game, keep it going Phillies!

Tweet This Post

I know it ended two days ago – possibly, when this guy finally crossed the finish line – but I had to follow up on Edward Norton’s running of the New York City Marathon – for I haven’t been this enthused about Norton since the first time I saw the final scene in Primal Fear.

I posted on Friday that Norton was running in his first ever marathon to raise money for Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust in East Africa. According to Ecorazzi, that little initiative raised $763,000 – with Norton pulling in over 300 K himself! He even brought these dudes – actual Maasai he met while on an excursion to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro – over from Africa to run the race with him.

That picture and the boku charity dollars don’t fully encapsulate Norton’s marathon badass however; he also murdered the course. 40-year-old Norton finished the 26.2 mile race in 3 hours 48 minutes and 1 second. That’s a sub 9 minute (about 8:42 by my estimation) pace. According to Eonline, that made him the top celebrity finisher this year.

Finally, not to be overlooked, he also realized one other marathon goal…

Note: Palin came in at 3:59:36 when she ran the 2005 Humpy’s Marathon in Anchorage, AK

Tweet This Post