Columns

ELDEN | Is This Real Life, Is This Just Fantasy?

By |

Most of the people close to me either don’t know or only have a marginal understanding of what I do in my spare time. My friends and family know that I am obsessed with baseball, but that’s about all they know. When I was in sixth grade, I created a fantasy baseball league with friends, teachers and family members and continued this into seventh grade. After that year, I realized I was putting much more energy and time into the fantasy league than my opponents, who mostly consisted of casual baseball fans. Soon after, I joined an online simulation league played through the Strat-O-Matic simulation program.

Columns

ELDEN | The Joey Bosa Debacle

By |

For the San Diego Chargers, no offseason is too quiet. Even if they have a mundane season, the team still finds a way to stay relevant in the offseason, but usually not for the right reasons. The Chargers finished last season with four wins, leaving them ahead of only the Tennessee Titans and Cleveland Browns. The team’s franchise quarterback Philip Rivers is entering into his 13th season at the age of 34 and begins the first year of a four-year extension. Age has not impacted Rivers’s play too drastically, though, as he put together a stellar season in 2015-16 by racking up the second most yards and the 12th most touchdowns of any quarterback in the league.

Columns

ELDEN | Should ESPN Have Fired Curt Schilling?

By |

Curt Schilling was a phenomenal athlete. He threw more than 3,000 innings, was a six-time all-star, a World Series MVP in 2001 and made over 100 million dollars over the course of his career. He finished sixth in Hall of Fame voting this January, capturing 52.3 percent of the vote. At worst, he is a very good player who had a very long and successful career as a pitcher. No one would argue that he wasn’t talented, or that he wasn’t knowledgeable about the sport.

Columns

ELDEN | The Curious Case of Matt Bush

By |

Weaver, Verlander and Drew were all projected to go higher in the draft, but would have been significantly more expensive. Ownership decided that it wasn’t in the budget to draft a more expensive player, and requested for the front office to make the most cost-effective selection.

Columns

ELDEN | Foul Play: A Not So Glamorous Lifestyle

By |

It is widely assumed that professional athletes live glamorous lives and make excessive amounts of money. This is especially true within baseball, where major league players have inflated salaries because of their strong union representation, guaranteed contracts and that major league teams will have no salary caps. The average salary for a major league baseball player is just north of $4 million a season. At any time, there are 750 players in the major leagues, making a minimum of $500,000. To put that in perspective, the worst major league baseball player makes almost ten times the median family income in the United States.