The Yankees played their final game at Yankee Stadium last month, but the House that Ruth Built wasn't expected to be officially closed for business until a charity concert scheduled for November. In hindsight, the Yanks decided nothing could top their on-field ceremony and Derek Jeter's speech to the crowd. From the New York Daily News:

"The Yankees were considering having a charitable event at Yankee Stadium," Jason Zillo, the team's media relations director, said in a statement Tuesday. "However, the Yankees realize that the final event at Yankee Stadium should be a baseball game, which in fact took place on Sept. 21, 2008."

[...] Among the rumored performers at the November event were Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Jay-Z and Billy Joel, although the entertainers had not given solid commitments and might not have been available.

If the Yankees hadn't missed the playoffs, I'm guessing the event would still be on -- a concert with Springsteen, McCartney, Jay-Z and Billy Joel would have made for a hell of a World Series celebration, no? Obviously, it wasn't meant to be. Rest assured that while the Yanks decided to pull the plug they're not jilting the Baseball Assistance Team, the charity originally expected to benefit from the event -- in lieu of ticket sales, the team will make a $500,000 donation.

Millionaire ESPN scribe Rick Reilly -- and likely plenty of others -- think so. Signal To Noise caught this exchange on PTI yesterday:

The Four-Letter's $3 million a year poaching, Rick Reilly, subbed for Tony Kornheiser on PTI yesterday, via satellite from Denver with Michael Wilbon in-studio in D.C., and parroted what I'm fairly sure may be a common impulse among a certain segment of sportswriters regarding the current state of the baseball playoffs: he stated his preference for a Red Sox-Dodgers World Series, proclaiming the Tampa Bay Rays "bad for baseball."

S2N draws that out into distinctions -- whether it's bad for baseball, or bad for the business of baseball. Those are the correct distinctions to make. But it doesn't make Rick Reilly right.

Over the long term, I find it hard to believe a team like the Rays, so consistently horrible at baseball, going worst-to-first in the course of a single year is bad for baseball. If anything, it co-opts one of the things that has made the NFL so popular -- the supposed parity that allows any team, no matter how destitute, to go all Rising Phoenix in one year. This is a good thing for baseball. It creates hope. Sports fans like to have hope.

International Pastime looks at baseball's influence outside the U.S.

You've probably noticed over the last few years there have been a lot more players in MLB with names that are hard to pronounce, or just sound dirty. Yes, Japan is quickly becoming the new Latin America as just about every team these days is adding a Japanese player to their roster.

It's hard to blame them for it, as guys like Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hideki Matsui, and Akinori Iwamura are proving themselves to be pretty good players. It's also nice to have a Kosuke Fukudome around for a fan base to blame for everything.

Of course, on the flip side of this equation is Japan. Due to the amount of Japanese players crossing the Pacific for the honor of facing off against John Lannan and the Washington Nationals, it's leaving the Japanese league a little thin. Which is why they've decided to implement a new policy in hopes of keeping players from leaving the island.

An executive committee representing Japan's 12 professional baseball teams have agreed to introduce a ban on players returning to Japanese baseball after turning down rookie draft nominations in Japan and signing with overseas pro teams.

Poor Nationals fans. Now, after the 2008 season, the supposed enthusiasm promised at the season's inception -- and the way the new Nationals Park was supposed enliven the D.C. baseball consciousness -- hasn't really done anything of the sort. Instead, fans seem depressed, the park rarely filled up, and the first night of the season, when Ryan Zimmerman hit a raucous walk-off home run, is a distant memory.

What's worse? Even those disillusioned Nats fans, the ones driven toward brazen capitalism and ticket scalping -- even they can't catch a break. They can't ditch their tickets:

Mark Menard, co-owner of the 18th Amendment bar on Pennsylvania Avenue SE, bought season tickets partly so he could give them away to his best customers. When the stadium opened, he had lots of eager takers. But as the season wore on, he says, it got harder and harder to hand off the tickets. "I could not unload to my bar customers who lived literally 10 blocks from the stadium," he says. "Since June, it was painful trying to get rid of them."

There are a few more examples of people not being willing to even take tickets for free, which, though probably exaggerated, is still telling. When you combine a young franchise, a starless team, and an ingrained crosstown team, you get the 2008 Nationals. It should turn around, but not until the team is actually worth watching. Until then, they'll be invisible.

We've known for a while that Major League Baseball was following in the footsteps of the NBA, NFL and NHL by taking the plunge into buying their own cable channel. The channel is expected to be available by next season, and unlike all the hoops you may have to jump through to get the offerings put forth by some of the other leagues, MLB has gone through great lengths to ensure the average fan will have easy access.

Consider this: the New York Times reports that the MLB Network will have 50 million subscribers from Day 1. The NFL Network, on the other hand, debuted with just 12 million subscribers in 2003 and took three whole years to build their base to 41 million subscribers.

Baseball fans who are excited about the network will probably want to read that entire NY Times article, which details the progress MLB is making in building its $54 million studio and offers some details about the programming, which will include a flagship "MLB Tonight" show that airs nightly from 7pm to 1am offering live updates and highlights.

If done correctly, "MLB Tonight" could easily top ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" in terms of being the must-watch show for fans, especially considering it'll have control of two robotic cameras installed in each stadium, theoretically giving viewers a different angle for highlights not found anywhere else. But what will the network show the other 18 hours a day?

From the Windup is FanHouse's daily, extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime. Will Brinson may check in from time to time to mock his own gambling "prowess". He will tag these posts "Gamble On". He is doing that because he's bitter he didn't think of the Zeppelin play on words when he named his NFL picks column.

This is our last chance to gamble on baseball until *shudder* April 2009. So what follows is me pretending that I have $10,000.00 and how I'm going to waste invest it all on MLB playoff bets. (Please be advised that this is by no means intelligent wagering advice like you might find elsewhere; this is the somewhat belligerent advice of an addicted lunatic flailing to get to .500 on the NFL season.)

For starters -- all lines courtesy of BoDog by the way -- we need to pick our World Series winner. Personally, I don't like the Cubs. Something or another about not winning for a few hundred years just scares me off, and that's creepy, because I love a good loser.

After weighing his options, Brian Cashman decided to return to the Yankees, agreeing to a three-year extension on Tuesday. From the New York Times:

"I know I've said it before, but it's an incredible opportunity and honor to hold the title of general manager for the New York Yankees," Cashman said in a statement. "With it comes a great responsibility to ownership, the people who wear the uniform and our fan base. I've got a job to finish here. That's the bottom line.

"I consider coming off a season where we didn't reach the playoffs for the first time since 1993 as a personal challenge. I've never been one to run from a challenge, and I look forward to having the chance to go after this thing again."

I can't say I'm terribly surprised. The Yankees are the only team Cashman has ever been with, and leaving now, on the eve of opening the new stadium, would have been a difficult decision. Plus, it's not like the Yankees aren't making it worth his while -- Newsday reports that his new contract is "in the vicinity of three years and $6 million."

It strikes me that a general manager that has overseen a team with a huge payroll that is only one slip-up away from a second colossal September collapse is not a guy that should have great job security. If that were true, Omar Minaya should be awfully worried right now. Luckily for him, the Mets must feel differently, because sources have indicated to ESPN that the Wilpons are giving their GM a four-year extension.

If tonight's scores hold (the Mets are winning, the Brewers and Phillies are losing as of this writing), the Mets will go into tomorrow 1 1/2 games behind the Phillies in the NL East and two games ahead of the Brewers for the wild card. A playoff spot is nice, but is it enough? With their bullpen as bad as it is, it's hard to take the seriously as contenders in the NL this year and it's likely that the only reason they'll make the playoffs at all is because of Milwaukee's massive collapse.

To get an idea of the kind of work Minaya's done with the Mets, check out their page at Cot's MLB Contracts. Their highest pald players are Johan Santana and Carlos Beltran. That's not bad work, but the guys right behind them are Carlos Delgado, Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou, and Orlando Hernandez. They're spending $54.5 million on those four players. Minaya's plan of attack with the Mets is to throw money at things and see if it works out. Apparently, that's good for a four-year extension. I'm in the wrong line of work.

There comes a point when being hard-headed stops being useful and starts being stupid. After locking heads with Scott Boras on second overall draft pick Pedro Alvarez's contract for over a month, someone either in the Pirates' offices or in the Alvarez camp realized that refusing to budge was going to keep Alvarez from playing this fall and set his development back a full year. Accordingly, the two sides agreed to a revised deal last night that will get Alvarez into the Pirates' system as soon as possible.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the deal isn't much different from the originally signed $6 million bonus for a minor league contract beyond the fact that it's now a major league deal, which puts Alvarez immediately on the 40-man roster. The bonus is $6.35 million, but it's payable over four years instead of being immediately due. In the end, it's hard to say one side benefited more than the other.

It's likely that a lot of people will be unhappy with the Pirates because negotiating this deal after the deadline sets quite a precedent for Boras in the future, but the Pirates can't be concerned with that. I mean, have you seen the Pirates play lately? They're terrible. They need all the help they can get and a player of Pedro Alvarez's quality certainly qualifies as "help."

There is one simple rule that every chief executive in history, be it a student council president, the President of the United States, or the commissioner of baseball, needs to follow. You cannot make everyone happy. There are some decisions that need to be made that are not easy and will make some people upset. This is part of the job. Somehow, Bud Selig missed that part of training. After taking a ton of flak from Astros fans and players alike for moving two home games to Milwaukee in Hurricane Ike's wake, Bud apologized today in the Houston Chronicle.

"I recognized the advantage the Cubs would have in playing in such close proximity to Chicago, and had there been a better option, I would have taken it," Selig wrote in the ad on page C16 of the Sports section.

"All of us involved in the decision regret the frustration the Astros and their fans felt about playing two games in Milwaukee."

There wasn't really a choice Selig could've made that would've made everyone happy. Owner Drayton McLane was slow to postpone the games in Houston for fear of losing the gate, while other, closer big league parks were already occupied on the Sunday and Monday the games needed to be played. Playing in Milwaukee wasn't the best option, but it wasn't the worst either. That would've been squeezing three games into two days after the season ended while the Astros fought for a playoff spot against the Iowa Cubs. The Astros had a right to be mad, but they need to move past this. Selig made a decision and needs to stand by it. His pandering to Houston fans with a weak non-apology is only making things worse.