He also was fond of skewering the annual study by Team Marketing Report about the "average" cost of attending a game for a family of four. Does a family of four really have to eat its dinner at the ballpark and buy two programs and two souvenir hats every time it goes to a game? he would ask, reasonably, before providing more realistic figures.
He wrote for Baseball Prospectus -- which has made his author's archive free to read -- and for his own Web site, Doug's Business of Baseball Pages, which featured a must-read weblog.
Pappas also chaired the Business of Baseball Committee at SABR, which ran an obituary for him on its Web site, and he did pro bono legal work for the organization.
His other passion was traveling and photographing backroads America, as evidenced by the other side of his Web site. He was vacationing in Big Bend National Park in Texas when he died.
Do yourself a favor and browse around the links above if you're unfamiliar with his work. I would argue that if you haven't read Pappas' eight-part series "The Numbers," written from December 2001 through April 2002 as the last labor negotiation began to heat up, then you have no business discussing the business of baseball. You're simply uninformed.
Those of us who love baseball had a watchdog in Pappas, someone to let us know about the damage being done to the game by those running it. I hope someone with anything like his smarts, insight and writing ability can take over that role, but that's asking a lot. He'll be sorely missed.
You probably came to this column expecting to read about basketball and hockey playoffs as usual, but I thought those could wait a day. Coverage of Pappas' passing has been nonexistent in the mainstream press. He was too good to go unmentioned.
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King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. Visit his column archive.
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