Daily Archives: June 22, 2009

George Price…one of my heroes and one of the best The New Yorker ever had.

According to ESPN, Don Fehr will step down as the head of the MLBPA. Fehr’s long, productive, and largely successful run has been marred by the union’s handling of the recent performance-enhancing drugs scandals. 

A fabulously bright man, Fehr was in charge during the union’s fattest days. He played a large roll in the baseball player’s union becoming the strongest in all of professional sports. The man has a lot of wins under his belt. In the end, however, the steroids issue must have swallowed him up. Fehr and company failed their consituency in not destroying those pesky tests from ’03, proving once again that arrogance trumps smarts every time. I don’t mean to be flip. Fehr deserves, and will surely receive, a more thorough evaluation in the coming days. He was a pivotal figure.

Bud Selig should jern Fehr out the front door, don’t you think?

Variety reports that Sony Pictures has pulled the plug on Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Moneyball (thanks to Rob Neyer for the link).

Even in the climate of heightened studio caution, the turnaround news on “Moneyball” is surprising given that the project had reached the equivalent of third base. It was just 96 hours before the participants were ready to take the field, following three months of prep and with camera tests completed and cast and budget in place.

…Aside from actors like Pitt and Demetri Martin, Soderbergh is using real ballplayers — such as former A’s Scott Hatteberg and David Justice — as actors, and he also has shot interviews with such ballplayers as Beane’s former Mets teammates Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry. Those vignettes would be interspersed in the film.While Soderbergh is confident his take will work visually, Columbia brass had doubts on a film that costs north of $50 million. That is reasonable for a studio-funded pic that includes the discounted salary of a global star like Pitt, but baseball films traditionally don’t fare well on the global playing field.

This is a shame but not a surprise. Back in the summer of 2003, I interviewed Michael Lewis and we talked about how difficult it would be to make Moneyball into a movie:

Bronx Banter: Have you sold the movie rights to “Moneyball” yet?

Michael Lewis: I didn’t have much hope that anyone would buy them. Because I can’t really see how you could make it into a movie—a good movie, anyway. What happens is, if somebody bought it for the movies, you’d have to create some sort of female role. They would just have to. You just have to twist so much. Having seen “Liar’s Poker” get bought for a lot of money, and then completely mangled in the creation of the script, and eventually never getting made. If they can’t make that, I can’t imagine how they can make this. There have been, oddly enough, some feelers from people who say they want to buy the rights. A lot of things sell, that shouldn’t sell, accidentally. That might happen, but I’d be really surprised if it ever became a movie.

Today’s news is powered by . . . animals interrupting sporting events:

• CC Sabathia exited yesterday’s game in the 2nd inning with tightness in his bicep.  He’s day-to-day.
• A.J. Burnett regrets how he left the Marlins:

It’s easy to remember the bad, the way his career ended here in 2005. The Marlins had just lost 5-3 to Atlanta with a week left in the season when Burnett lambasted his manager, Jack McKeon, the coaches and his teammates, saying, “We played scared. We managed scared. We coached scared.” . . .

“It’s depressing around here,” he said at the time. “It’s like they expect us to mess up. And when we do, they chew us out. There is no positive, nothing, around here for anybody.”

The next day he was suspended for the rest of the season. Instead of letting him make his last start, the Marlins called up a rookie to make his major-league debut: Josh Johnson. Before Burnett left, he told the rookie pitcher to “give ’em hell,” Johnson remembers.

More than three years later, Burnett and Johnson found themselves back in the storyline, as they faced each other at Land Shark Stadium, Burnett now with the Yankees, pitching here for the first time since he set fire to every bridge on the way out – an ending he now regrets.

“I shouldn’t have said what I said,” Burnett said after taking the loss in Saturday’s 2-1 game. “I don’t think about the ending. I remember that they gave me my start. . . . I was young and I’ve grown up a lot since then.”

• Burnett’s suspension is reduced by 17%!:

Yankees pitcher A.J. Burnett’s suspension for throwing high and tight to Texas’ Nelson Cruz has been reduced to five games from six.

Manager Joe Girardi said Sunday before New York played the Florida Marlins that the suspension began immediately and will push back the right-hander’s next start to Saturday against the Mets.

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