Jeff Overton, VP of Business Operations for the Padres, came in and spoke to our international sports business class yesterday. Very well spoken. Nice guy. He brought in shwag and that's always nice. I have an official WBC baseball now. I think I'm gonna try to get it signed by A-Go and/or Peavy.
Anyways... Here's what I learned.
- Jeff Overton pronounces the word "league" like "lig". He doesn't have any sort of other accent or anything else. He just says "lig" when he means "league".
- Overton used to work for the White Sox and felt compelled to tell us that the White Sox were the first team in Chicago to draw 2 million fans. He also mentioned that this whole thing with Cubs fans is a recent phenomenon... Like since '84. He said that before then, nobody really cared about the Cubs. It comforts me to know that there are people in the Padres front office who like to take shots at the Cubs also.
- Major League Baseball is 30% foreign born players currently.
- Minor League Baseball is currently at 50% foreign born players.
- 40% of this year's All-Stars are foreign born.
- The Monterrey Sultans recently borrowed (will be borrowing) the Swingin' Friar. Probably for the Friar to do some swingin' missionary work with the locals. That, boys and girls, is what we in the business call double-entendre.
- The Padres are still trying to figure out how to market to Mexico. Maybe we should raid the Mexican leagues. Make sure we find the Mexi-cans and not the Mexi-can'ts.
- The Padres also want to do stuff in China.
Sorry, so light on the analysis today. Gotta get to the post office to mail out more t-shirts. I also apologize for how bad we suck at this t-shirt thing. We're slowly getting the hang of it.