CC Sabathia doesn’t look good in a Yankees uniform. I’m sorry, he just doesn’t. Why? He’s too fat. It’s just the reality of the situation.

Fortunately for CC, it hasn’t affected his ability to make money: witness the mammoth deal he signed with the Yankees this offseason. And don’t think for a second that the economy is clipping his ability to build a nice, modest little home in the New York area. From Walk off Walk (via The Sporting Blog).

NJMLS# 2908472
Original List Price: $15,000,000
Under Contract Date: 2/24/2009
Closed: 4/8/2009
Sale Price: $14,900,000
Transaction: CASH

And, if the numbers and letters aren’t clear enough, see: picture. This house is F’ing HUGE. It costs FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS and yet is somehow only 12,000 square feet (that’s kind of weak sauce for square footage if you ask me).

Oh, yes, and he paid cash for it. Which is always good news for those of us struggling to pay the government our taxes or to buy new pajamas so we don’t have to go totally pantsless and whatnot. But, hey, on the bright side, at least he’s pitching well.

Most of you reading this, like me, are members of the grumpy, smelly proletariat that grows larger by the day. We’re significant only in terms of the small worlds we’ve eked out for ourselves. We don’t have much money, so we don’t matter much.

ESPN would hate to see you forget this, so it’s launched a neat little Web application of despair called “Salary Crunch.” You enter your salary, and it sizes it up against the earnings of baseball players such as CC Sabathia, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark Teixeira.

Let’s give it a spin. The average annual personal income in America is $32,140. What say you, Salary Crunch?

Alex Rodriguez makes $32,140 after the following…

.04 Home Runs    .59 At-bats
.18 Hits

You will need to work 871.19 years in order to make Alex Rodriguez’s annual salary.

Whee!!! Coming soon from the fine folks at ESPN, an application that will tell you whether, two hundred years after you die, it will matter that you were ever born.

Two things that are fairly obvious about CC Sabathia:

1) Dude has great command, and can really bring it on the mound.

2) Dude is kind of rotund.

In baseball, unlike most sports, you can come in any shape and size. Hitting and pitching does not discriminate based on body type. That’s the beauty of the game.

But, now that Sabathia’s with the Yanks and the fact that he’s um, portly, will he have the most pinstripes on his Yankee jersey ever? Uni Watch raises the question:

Joba Chamberlain, for example, has at least 26 pinstripes on the front of his jersey (and presumably a similar number on the back), while the diminutive Phil Rizzuto had only about 20.

[ ... ]

It’s a trickier question than it might initially seem, full of complexity and nuance.

“You’re embarking on a new field of study here, so we have to make up our own rules and standards as we go,” he said. “For example, depending on how a jersey is tailored, the number of pinstripes at the top and at the bottom aren’t necessarily the same. Also, the space between the pinstripes has changed a bit over the years, and the pinstripes themselves are thinner today than in the old days.”

Uni Watch did some sleuthing, and stacked Sabathia’s projected stripe total against 12 large, former Yankees. He came out ahead in all contests. Congrats. I guess.

And now you know way more than you should about Yankee pinstripe uniforms.

The Jake Peavy negotiations, like most negotiations, could rightly be described as a chess match. But if the twists and turns of this seemingly endless saga were represented on a chess board, what would it look like? Here are the respective chess positions that the Braves, Cubs and Yankees have found themselves in.

Earlier this month, the Braves were attempting to work out a trade with the Padres involving Jake Peavy. The centerpiece of the Braves’ offer was their heralded shortstop, Yunel Escobar. However, Peavy decided the Braves would be considerably weaker without Escobar, and he didn’t want to be traded to a weaker team. So, remarkably, the Braves lost out on Peavy for the time being because they offered more. In other words, the Braves-Padres negotiations reached stalemate.

Chess analogy: It’s Black’s turn to move here.

Keep reading →

The Yankees are trying to get every good, available pitcher under the sun. After they scooped up CC Sabathia to the tune of seven years and $161 million, they’ve apparently got their sights on A.J. Burnett, Derek Lowe and maybe even Ben Sheets, too.

This of no matter, though. Because Ozzie Guillen has the quote of the day on the Sabathia deal:

“Wow!” gushed Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. “For $161 million I could put two teams on the field. I just want to be his agent. Heck, I just want to be his wife.”

Ozzie Guillen, for the win.

Given some of the monstrous player contracts over the past decade, the pastime of taking the figures out of context and applying them toward other things has grown popular. CC Sabathia’s new contract with the Yankees is reported to work out to $23 million a season. That’s, like … one hundred billion pennies! If you stacked all those pennies on top of one another it would stretch from the Earth to Pluto!

Nevermind, that illustration is inaccurate and boring. Let’s take an honest look at some of the modern nations with a lower annual gross domestic product (the total market value of all goods and services produced within a country over a year’s time) than CC Sabathia’s $23 million.

Saint Helena
Annual gross domestic product: $18 million
Population: 4,255

Saint Helena is one of the most isolated islands in the world. Its first procreating settlers were five slaves who escaped from a slave ship and sought refuge there. After acquiring the island territory, the British exiled Napoleon Bonaparte here because they hated him.

Tuvalu
Annual gross domestic product: $15 million
Population: 11,992

Tuvalu eats up a minuscule 26 square kilometers. Given the effects of climate change, by the end of the century it will probably be a lot less than that. They used to own an Internet domain name extension, “.tv”. Unfortunately, “tv” also stands for “television,” and they were unable to outbid Internet entrepreneurs.

Keep reading →

This morning, on MLB.com:

The [New York Post] reported on its Web site early Wednesday morning that the 2007 American League Cy Young Award winner has accepted the Yankees’ six-year, $140 million offer.

This development ought to conserve energy and ease strain on the American power grid.

Stick with me.

Over the last month and change, I’ve made a habit of scrolling past stories that speculate on Sabathia’s new team. There have been a lot of said stories, so I’ve done a lot of scrolling. Depending on the computer used, the act of scrolling down a Web page can eat up a significant chunk of system resources (for example, when scrolling, my computer’s CPU usage jumps from 8 percent to 37 percent).

A computer’s electricity demand is far from constant; the more of its resources it’s forced to employ, the more electricity it’s going to require. Given the sheer number of “Sabathia rumor” stories, I’d venture to guess that I’ve used about four cents worth of power for the sake of ignoring them.

Surely I can’t be the only one who’s been completely disinterested in stories with little to no factual merit. There might be 100,000 discerning, Internet-savvy baseball fans like myself. So if my power consumption projection is right, America will save a collective $4,000! So how are you going to use the four cents you’re saving? Me, I turned my refrigerator’s temperature all the way down. Just because I could.