THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Well, maybe he doesn’t want money, but he *does* want a season ticket.

I don’t think he asked for it in perpetuity, did he?

In any case, if he’s going to be part of a MLB logo campaign that MLB will have, and he acts as a “spokesperson”, giving him 20,000$ worth of tickets is pretty reasonable.

Here’s the choice:
MLB: “Ladies and gentlemen… and sportswriters… welcome.  We are proud to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the MLB logo.  The logo will now take your questions.”

Media: “{cricket}”

MLB: “Thank you.  Now, please, ask your editors to run the full interview, and any other sidebar you can think of.”

***

Or, the obvious one.  $20K of tickets seems fine to me.

Well, yeah, I agree, $20K in tickets seems cheap if MLB wants the publicity.

But I’m just sayin’.  It sounds like MLB would have been happier if this guy never said anything, and, since he wants a season ticket, his hands are only 90% clean, not 100% clean.

Lucas dug up more dirt on the story in a column yesterday:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=lukas/081118

Harmon Killebrew and designer Jerry Dior have competing stories of the logo creation. Dior has details of where he was, how he did it, and even provides a coworker as corroboration for his side.

Killebrew’s story is, well, less believable:

“I was in the commissioner’s office one day in the late 1960s. I can’t remember the specifics, but I think it had something to do with a litho they were doing for the National Kidney Foundation. Anyway, I walked through the back part of the office, and there was a man sitting at a table. He had a photograph of me in a hitting position, and he had one of those grease pencils that you see at a newspaper, and he was marking that thing up. I said, ‘What are you doing with that?’ and he said they were going to make a new Major League Baseball logo.”

In other words, “At some point I saw some guy with my picture drawing something he said was some type of new logo.”

Later in the article, Lucas reveals another logo was designed based on Killebrew that wasn’t the MLB one.

I do think Killebrew has good intentions in his claim. It’s just that human memory is a lot more fallible than we would like to believe, and the guy with corroborated details seems more believable.

In an old magazine a few years ago, ESPN said that Killebrew was the man in the picture as part of a trivia thing. Looking at this picture, it’s hard to say that the silhouette is not at least similar to Killebrew.

http://a1259.g.akamai.net/f/1259/5586/1d/images.art.com/images/-/Harmon-Killebrew-Photograph-C10105949.jpeg

Although, he does have an extremely “boring” upper body in his stance. There’s nothing particular unique about it-- it could be a thousand other guys if it’s based on anyone at all-- so no one can say definitively that it is him by showing us how similar the stances are.