THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Did not know you guys got a referral if I click that and buy stuff that isn’t The Book. Will definitely be doing that a lot in the future.

I agree with the producers, the last thing ESPN needs is “another Berman” (the original gasbag).

Seriously, on a show with 5 NFL Hall of Famers or former pros, Berman does 60% of analysis. STFU Chris.

The nicknames were great, but all the song lyric references and quotes are forced.

Olberman must have the life now. Like Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reiley he essentially gets paid to say whatever he feels and piss people off. Great work if you can get it, I guess.

Tell-all excerpts, with ESPN staffers quoted on the record:

http://blogs.dailynews.com/tomhoffarth/archives/2011/05/an-entertainmen.html

The company would have Christmas parties up at some horrible place in Bristol,” says former general counsel Andy Brilliant. “A couple of them were drunken orgies.... It became like a big frat party. There were a lot of drugs being done in the bathroom. There was quite a bit of screwing going on afterward, a lot of it extramarital. But everybody went back to business the next workday.”
...
“There was screwing in the hallways,” says reporter Sal Marchiano of ESPN’s early days. “OK, maybe not in the hallways, but there were a couple of stairwell stories.... There were drugs in the building, that I knew. There was one guy who dealt pot.”
...
At one point in the ‘80s ESPN kept an apartment in New York City. “I remember [an ESPN exec] coming in and saying, ‘We gotta get rid of this apartment...because the mail boys got a couple of our secretaries hooking over there,’” says former ESPN CEO Bill Grimes. “Hooking! That’s what he said.... ‘They’re making money after work when no one’s there. It’s getting out of control.’”
...
Sexual harassment got so bad that anchor Karie Ross actually stood up in front of 200 or so people in the cafeteria and demanded that it stop. Her plea didn’t have much impact. “No fewer than fifty cases of sexual harassment were reported by women on the staff to ESPN management in the first half of the 1990s,” the authors write.

Can’t wait for the eventual HBO movie.

A Q&A with the author of the book was published yesterday:

http://thebiglead.com/index.php/2011/05/22/a-qa-with-james-andrew-miller-author-of-the-new-espn-book-those-guys-have-all-the-fun

The interview also links a podcast interview he recently did that’s on the Sports Illustrated site:

http://ht.cdn.turner.com/si/hot-clicks/audio/2011/05/18/051911.hot_clicks_anderson_miller.mp3

At least in the first link, the author comes across as perceptive enough to know the limits of what his book research tells him. For a number of questions he doesn’t venture an answer when he believes he has no basis for putting forth an opinion. I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, so I have no idea what is discussed in it.