Dodger Blues

So I had a friend who had a bottle of wine. It was a really good bottle of wine, and whenever we talked to him about drinking it, he'd say, no, I'm saving it for a special occasion. So he'd put the special bottle of wine back on the rack, and go out and overpay for a Fetzer chardonnay or something, and drink that, or he wouldn't drink it, but he'd buy it and have it and decide that since he had that and he'd already paid for it, he should open it and leave the bottle of good wine be for the moment.

Mind you, this anecdote is completely fictional, and I'm not sure how to end it: either he dies and never gets to drink the wine, or he finally does open it after years and years and it's turned into paint thinner. The choice there is really up to Frank McCourt - it depends whether he fires Ned Colletti before he breaks down and plays the kids full time, or lets him stick around while the Andy LaRoches of the world rot on the vine. The early returns - signing Pierre, signing Jones, not setting Garciaparra on fire, paying any attention at all to what Jeff Kent says, and now trading for Casey Blake - are not promising.

And the Blake trade may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Hidden under the guise of "Going For It", Colletti picked up a 35-year old corner guy having a career season and erected yet another roadblock in front of one of his most valuable assets. This is not new; he did the same to James Loney, to Andre Ethier, to Matt Kemp, to Chad Billingsley. All have seen their prospect status, and thus their value to the team, take at least temporary hits as a result.

Even in the eminently winnable NL West, it's time to sell off or sit the overpaid, underachieving vets and play the kids. You get no points for not trading the prospects if you never do anything with the prospects; the whole point is that you maximize their value one way or the other. If you've got a hole at third base and you have a good third base prospect, say, LaRoche, you play him to maximize his volume. If you're not going to play him because you've got an aging, fragile veteran you have an irrational attachment to, then you trade him while other teams still perceive him as having upside. You don't bench him, you don't yo-yo him, you don't make him look bad and thus less appealing to potential trade partners - you find a way to get the maximum for him. So I'd bench or dump the Nomars, the Andruws, the same-old same-olds, and see what the kids can do. You can have Pierre and Jones and Garciaparra and Kent; I'll take Ethier and Kemp and LaRoche and Hu and the over.

Because frankly, the kids are better. The kids are cheaper. The kids are more likely to win.

And if you don't do something with them now, they're not going to be worth anything to you when you need them.

Another Thought On Favre

A lot of the argument against Brett Favre coming back is that he might somehow "taint his legacy" by doing so.

Bullcrap.

For all that sportswriters love to trot the same tired examples out, our enduring memory of Willie Mays involves Vic Wertz, not a Mets uniform. With Montana it has nothing to do with the Chiefs; with Steve Carlton nobody thinks of him as a Twin. "Legacy" is forged long before an athlete gets to try to "hang on too long", and it is cast and cooled in the minds and memories of fans. No matter how many past-their-prime games these guys play in, it is their primes that we will in fact remember, and cherish, and reminisce over.

The real issue is whether the Packers should hold their season hostage to a guy who, even now, can't say with 100% certainty that he wants to come back and play. And that's a business and professional decision, one that legacy does not and will not enter into.

Ever.

Just to Pick On Billy Wagner Again...

...was anyone else surprised to hear that his shoulder injury was a muscle spasm? Normally he only has those from the neck up*.

*Cheap jokes about injuring himself by patting himself on the back will also be accepted.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

Bearing in mind that Joe Blanton was, depending on how you sliced it, the third-to-fifth best pitcher available on the trade market (behind Sabathia and a healthy Harden, in the mix with Bedard and Burnett, probably ahead of an aging Maddux and a Petco mirage Wolf), the trade the Phillies made to get him was a little disturbing from both sides.

From the Phillies' side, it's a "that's all?" deal. While Blanton's stock was high going into the season, he's pitched poorly this year in front of a great defense in a pitchers' park. As a replacement for the self-perforating Adam Eaton, he's an upgrade; as a response to the big pitching acquisitions in the NL Central, he's not cause to break out the schnapps and sauerbraten.

The A's, in return, got three prospects from the Phils, including the #s 2 and 4 guys in the system. (Billy Beane is apparently too smart to take Greg Golson, curse the luck.) Mind you, those guys (Cardenas and Outman) are characterized by Keith Law as a decent second baseman and a LOOGY, at best. That's not a huge haul, and it doesn't say much for the Phillies' system that these guys were near the top of it.

In the end, the trade makes some sense. Blanton will pitch better and longer than Eaton, saving the Phils' bullpen and hopefully not digging them early holes every game he starts. The A's got more prospects for a guy whose value had cratered, and who was easily replaceable with one of the armada of arms Beane had stockpiled in AAA. But at the same time, it's almost cringeworthy that this was all the A's* got for pre-season hot item Blanton, that it was the best the Phils could offer, and that it was an appropriate haul.

*There are a lot of folks questioning why Beane sold 40% of his rotation with his team still theoretically in contention. The answer is, of course, that they're not. Too many black holes in the lineup, too many games to make up on the Angels, and Beane recognized this and moved fast while his trading chits still had maximum value. I know you're not supposed to give up on the year while you're within shouting distance of a playoff spot, but at the same time, there's shouting distance and then there's fading into the distance, and that's what the A's were doing. Beane just recognized it faster than, say, your average Bavasi would.

Was in New England This WEEIkend...

...and spent some time listening to the legendary WEEI*.

• Number of callers who couldn't pronounce Jonathan Papelbon's name, even after being repeatedly corrected by the host: 1
• Number of callers who wanted to throw Jed Lowrie in the Harbor after he hit into a double play against the Angels: 15
• Number of hosts still upset that Terry Francona didn't play John Olerud more in 2005: 1
• Number of callers who wanted Terry Francona's head for leaving Josh Beckett in to pitch the 7th inning: 4
• Number of times Chuck from Saugus said that Manny is a "winnah": 6
• Number of times Don from the Cape said that Manny is a bum who needs to go: 6
• Number of callers proposing the Sox trade Kevin Youkilis to Atlanta for Mark Teixeira, regardless of whether this makes any sense for the Braves: 3
• Number of callers who insisted that Tampa's All-Star catcher Dioner Navarro (traded away in 2004 as the prize of the Randy Johnson deal) was, and I quote, "a guy the Yankees didn't want": 1
  
• Number of times other hosts essentially called Glen Ordway an idiot: 9

*All estimates completely made up.

It Is Somehow Fitting...

...that were it not for a late-inning meltdown by carpetbagging uber-mouth Billy Wagner, the NL would have won last night. In the unlikely event that the Phillies do make it to the World Series, one gets the feeling they will probably take up a team-wide collection to send a bunch of large men with cricket bats to visit Wagner at Shea.

Second stop, Dan Uggla's house. Brad Lidge, they can take care of on their own.

All-Star Gamery

I'm not watching the game tonight - I'm crashing deadline on a novel, and have yet another road trip coming up in two days - but I did watch the pregame festivities whilst cooking and eating dinner. Now, I freely admit to being a sentimental gorp when it comes to baseball, but there were some moments there - Willie McCovey hoisting himself out of his chair to acknowledge the thunderous cheers of the fans, Kevin Youkilis grinning to himself at the mandatory booing he received as he ran out to his position, Manny Ramirez enthusiastically embracing Ryan Braun, the roars from the crowd for Reggie and Whitey Ford and Yogi as he grinned from radar-dish ear to radar-dish ear - that were magic.

And most of all, when the camera just sat there on Willie Mays, watching him drink it all in.

It put such a big goddamned smile on my face, I didn't even mind when Tim McCarver started talking about how the NL's big strength was in batting average, or how he conveniently forgot George Sherrill was an All-Star, or generally was Tim McCarver.

Tonight? Not the point. Let him enjoy the game in his own way.

Me, I got to see Robin Roberts, whom I didn't know was still alive. And Maz. And Ernie Banks telling the National Leaguers to get off their asses and win one, already.

And Willie.

With Apologies to Matt Forbeck...

When I was a kid, there was a commercial for Nestle's Tollhouse Cookies that featured a kid named Timmy (or Tommy, or Toby, or something like that) announcing very loudly that he was leaving home. "I'm leaving," he'd say, and go down a few stairs the knapsack on his back bulging with, well, I don't want to think about what that kid thought was appropriate running-away-from-home material. "I'm going." Walk a few more steps. You get the idea.

Mom, of course, was having none of it. Instead, she just baked delicious chocolate chip cookies, and little Teddy, or whatever his name was, announced that maybe he could stick around for a while before stuffing his piehole with delicious chocolate chip goodness.

He wasn't really running away, you see.

He just wanted to be told that he was loved.

Which brings me to Brett Favre, who recently stirred the collective soul of Cheesehead Nation like it was cheap fondue minus the kirsch by announcing that, no, he wasn't retiring after all, and if the Packers weren't going to let him come back, they should be gentlemen and release him so he could go play somewhere else that wanted him and loved him and would make him tollhouse cookies. Or something like that.

Now, I'm not usually on the ownership side when it comes to the NFL, and with good reason. They have the sweetest of sweetheart labor deals, they treat their workforce like Kleenex, they make obscene profits and yet cry poor to suck up untold millions of government money for publicly funded stadia, and they have the unutterable gall to have inflicted the "personal seat license" on the sports-viewing public. And yet, in this instance, I have to side with the Packers, 'cause as a sports fan, I really don't feel comfortable enabling Brett Favre's codependency issues.

It's not like he hasn't done this before. He's dragged out the old "I may retire, I may not" song and dance for each of the last few offseasons, and let's face it, some of those on-seasons were pretty off. Each time, he waited until the public outcry reached critical mass before going, aww, shucks, I guess I will play again if'n y'all want me to.

Once, it's charming. Twice, it's shtick. Three times, it's calculated theater. And this?

Well, he retired. Made a big deal out of retiring. And then in March, he let the Packers know that he wanted to un-retire. The Packers, by all accounts, bought into it enthusiastically. They told Aaron Rodgers that, once again, they'd rather be just friends. They prepped the announcement. They were ready to fly the top brass down to Mississippi to sign the deal.

And Favre backed out at the last minute. At which point, the Pack sensibly said "screw this noise" and set about constructing a roster suited to the talents of the quarterback they were sure would be there, Aaron Rodgers. They had to; they had no other choice if they wanted to field a competitive team this year. All the while, someone kept up a steady drumbeat of "Brett may want back in" rumors to the media. Someone kept the story alive, even after Favre himself had backed out when they offered him the team on a silver platter.

Which brings us to now. The team has moved on without him. Lambeau Field has not burned down, fallen over and sunk into the swamp in a goth-like stupor over missing Favre's manly presence. Wisconsin has not gone up in flames without him. The cheese industry has not collapsed, the foam cheese hat industry seems to be doing fine, and they're finding other things to protest in Madison.

In other words, no tollhouse cookies. Which, I think, is precisely why Favre let loose with this latest round, the guilt-trip demand to be released so he could find a new team - most likely the Bears or Vikings - to play with, and in the process no doubt incite something of a bidding war, a media frenzy, and, most importantly, a "we love Brett-fest".

To which the Packers, sensibly, said "Hooey." Why on earth would they want to do this? They've already bent over backwards - damaging their relationship with their putative quarterback and delaying their roster construction - to cater to Favre this year. They have absolutely no incentive to release him, potentially playing hob with their salary cap and strengthening a divisional rival. Indeed, as long as he remains a viable NFL quarterback, the best place for him to be is under there control...and at home.

Because no matter if he might be better than Rodgers this year, those curves are going to intersect irrevocably very soon, and the longer they riff on "Brett might come back", the more chance the Packers have of falling into post-Bonds Giantville. Because they don't do Favre any favors by playing this game - sooner or later, the body isn't going to be able to hack it any more, and the retirement will be forcible and real. The sooner #4 gets used to life beyond football, the healthier it's likely to be. And because it is absolutely and utterly unfair to the rest of the team to hold them and their fortunes hostage to whether or not Brett Favre is feeling sufficiently loved.

Favre has gotten a free pass on a lot of behavior that would have gotten him slammed were he anyone and anywhere else. The magic aura of Bringing A Title Back to Titletown makes the excuse for a multitude of sins - undercutting his coaches and GMs, careless ball handling, sandbagging his teammates when he didn't get the high-profile personnel adds he wanted, his gift-wrapping of the sacks record for Michael Strahan. He has undeniably been a great player, one of the greatest ever. But he's not that player any more, and the act has worn thin.

Enjoy retirement, #4. You're still loved. But from now on, it should only be from afar.

Playing Soccer in Brasil

I can now honestly say I have left a piece of myself in this country. It's on the floor in the left-hand corner over by the far goal.

Tonight was my last night in Brasil following EIRPG and the followup book signing in Rio. My host, the estimable co-founder of Devir and all-around gent, suggested that I might enjoy playing in his pickup indoor soccer game, a Wednesay night fixture. I said yes.

Now, the last time I played soccer regularly was in middle school. I was in training for the Elkins Park Middle School team after spending a year on the JV, but broke my foot playing tackle football with Larry Garcia and couldn't play that fall. That was it for my soccer career; I'd mostly played fullback because I couldn't outrun a constipated porcupine but had a definite knack for booting the ball downfield on those rare occasions when I made contact.

Best guess is that it must have been fifteen years since the last time I actually played soccer for more than three minutes at a shot. There was some intramural stuff at Wesleyan, and a few pickup games, and...well, that was a lot of scotch and road trips ago. These days I look like Moomintroll on my good days and Barbapappa on my bad ones, and I'm about as ready to take the field as John Kruk.

So what the hell am I doing stepping onto the (indoor) pitch with Brasilians. You know, the most soccer-crazy people on the planet? When I walked down Ipanema beach, I did not see scads of scantily clad bikini babes. I saw dozens of circles of guys all playing hacky sack with soccer balls.

Indoor soccer, incidentally, is a whole different animal. It's five on five, in a room about the size of an immature high school gym. The place we played was the Paulista FC, which sensibly had a snack bar where you could get beer and caipirinhas after the game. There was a balcony overlooking the play space, guarded by a net, where kids were kicking a ball back and worth while we played. Once the ball squirted out of the net and landed on the field, and hilarity ensued.

The game was a family and friends affair. Cousins, brothers in law, you get the idea - these guys have been playing together for ages and love doing it. They were very welcoming to the new guy, even if I'd completely lost my instinct for positioning, and very supportive on those rare occasions when I did something right. General consensus was that for a fat old American who hadn't played in forever, I did all right. For the record, though, my left foot is completely gone. As in my one left-footed shot on goal looked like a Tim Wakefield fastball.

The players ranged from early twenties to sixty or so. People swapped in and out when they felt like it. The game moved fast, but not at breakneck pace - at least, not often. Douglas, my host, turned out to be an astonishingly good keeper, making several Tony Meola-level saves while wearing a shirt that could only be described as "unusual." As the evening wore on, I got a bit of my sense of things back - OK, this guy is going to go curl in front of the net, mark that guy because he's going to head for the corner, try to control the ball without catching it in the face - and some of the instincts woke up. One guy jokingly dedicated a goal to me; I think they were amused when I made a play. Mind you, most of my plays were on defense. I'm much better at crashing into someone and separating them forcibly from the ball than any other aspect of the game, including "running", "kicking", "inbounds" or "falling over clutching my knee in pretend agony in hopes of drawing a yellow card for my opponent".

Afterwards, I got a few questions. Had I played before? Did I like it? (They thought I was lying when I said yes). Would I sign a contract (hastily scribbled on a napkin - they'll be paying me in beer. I signed.) And then farewells and out into the night, even as my calves started reminding me that I'm going to be on airplanes for sixteen hours tomorrow.

But still. I played soccer in Brasil.

Going Quiet For a Week

I'll be traveling to Sao Paulo to guest at EIRPG XVI this week, which means that the only sport I'm likely to be up on until my return is futbol. With that in mind, things may be post-light for a while.

Quick Thoughts...

Nice to see the Cincinnati Reds are continuing their proud tradition of charming, sociable ownership. Marge Schott's canine-themed insanity and Nazi fetish were one thing, though; Carl Lindner's funding of terrorist paramilitaries in violation of US law is entirely another. Yes, I understand that paying off the local strongman can be perceived as simply the price of doing business, but all things considered, it still doesn't exactly look good.

As loathsome as it is to see carpetbagging Clay Bennett and his deeply unpleasant cohorts write a check to avoid their legal obligations - and let's face it, that's what just happened - I can't help but think that the city probably got the better end of the deal. $45M straight up versus two lame-duck years of a franchise Bennett would have no interest in promoting or maintaining in Seattle; I'll take the check, please. Now the next step is making sure the city doesn't spend it on "stadium improvements" for the "right" to have someone pay the NBA $300M to plunk down a vat-grown Sonics replacement. At which point, of course, they will immediately start lobbying for a new arena.

Hmm. Baron Davis opts out on Monday, agrees to a complicated new deal on Tuesday. Clearly there was no tampering involved. Memo to David Stern: if you want to move your league's image away from the sort of hanky-panky represented by Tim Donaghy, this is not the way to go about it.

So Bill Simmons compared the feeling of having the C's and Red Sox be champions in the same year to a Lionel Richie song? Seriously? Can we stop even pretending this guy is anything other than what he is: a dork? And I say this as a man who actually owns a Lionel Richie album, on vinyl.

ZOMG T3H RAYZ0RZ

Or, in other words, everyone's suddenly discovered the Tampa Bay Flatfish.

I'll give full credit to the folks like Jayson Stark who were on to the Rays before the season started, but even so, the sudden attention paid to them is a bit overwhelming. Look, these guys are good. They've been getting good for a while, and it doesn't take the fact that they're magically in first place to anoint them as Suddenly Very Interesting. Frankly, it's a wonder it took them this long to get good - you keep on drafting high, and unless your name is Bidwill or Sterling, your team is going to get better in a hurry - though former GM Chuck LaMar's no-trade clause may have had something to do with that.

Still, it's been coming for a while. Even with the setbacks - Baldelli's mitochondria, Gomes' shoulder, Jackson's wildness, Guzman's growth spurt - they've assembled a stunning collection of young talent that's been doing it for a while now. It's just that they finally added the last few pieces they needed - a back end of the bullpen, a good defense up the middle, a third starter who allowed them to move J.P. Howell to the bullpen - and voila, a good team.

Next up, all the yammering about how since they're so young, they can't hold up under pennant race pressure. Because, you know, Jacoby Ellsbury and Joba Chamberlain just completely folded last year.

*sigh*

On All-Star Selections

I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with Joe Sheehan, of Baseball Prospectus.

Mr. Sheehan's take on the All-Star game is that the starters at each position should be the established, demonstrated best at their positions, as demonstrated over several years. No flashes in the pan for him, no first-half wonders, no good guys who've kicked it into overdrive, no nuthin'. Just the proven best, even if their performance this year isn't quite up to the level of some other guys who are hitting the bejesus out of the ball this time around.

It's an interesting take, and one with a lot to recommend it. On the other hand, there's something to it that doesn't quite jibe for me. Maybe it's the underlying notion of wait your turn, the spectacle of All Star Game voting as some sort of vast Confucian meritocracy where you can only advance through proper forms and examinations and the timely deaths of those ahead of you.

And that, to me, isn't what the All-Star Game is about. Yes, I want the best at every position, but at the same time I want the game to reflect some of the magic and unpredictability of baseball itself. I want to see the guys having that one magical year get rewarded because they've already rewarded us, as fans, by doing things we never would have expected them to do. I want to see the career year guy have his moment in the sun on the big stage, so he can tell his grandkids that he was there with the A-Rods and Pujolses and, for that one night, he absolutely belonged there.

This, then, is where the game of baseball and the sport of baseball intersect and conflict. The sport dictates the cold-hearted calculation of who'll give your side the best chance to win. The game suggests a blunter edge to Occam's Razor; which players' inclusion will make the game most enjoyable to watch for both on-field and off-field reasons?

For all the immense benefits of sophisticated performance metrics, there remains a cloak of myth and legend that must remain wrapped around the game for it to maintain its appeal. By all means, let's get better player evaluation metrics in place. Let's get to a place where rosters are built more efficiently, where worthy players get a shot based on merit, where we have fewer young arms shredded by ignorance and the insane desire for gumption. But let's not lose sight of the fact that there are times when it's the least likely guys, the Howard Ehmkes and Sandy Amoroses and Marty Bystroms of the world that give the game it's most memorable moments, its deepest and truest magic.

So by all means, let's run the best guys out there for the All-Star Game. But let's save a few spots for the guys having magical years, for those roman candle careers that are just as much a part of the game, for the unlikely faces we're cheering even harder for because familiarity with the Jeff Kents of the world does breed that little bit of, if not contempt, then at least ennui.

So maybe he shouldn't start, but let's save a place for Ryan Ludwick on the bench, and let him get an inning in. Save a spot in the American League pen for George Sherrill, because he's living the dream to the fullest and doing it as well as could be imagined. Maybe twenty years from now, scholars of the game will look at the Ludwick vs Sherrill AB in the archives of the sport and wonder what the hell those guys were doing there, but right now, we understand. We know. And we'll cheer, no matter how it comes out.

Interesting

In his take on the Ed Wade/Shawn Chacon situation, ken Rosenthal made reference to Wade's supposedly well-known temper.

When Wade was in Philadelphia, he was generally portrayed as a sort of mild-mannered bumbler, and the temper was nowhere in evidence in the local media coverage.

It's just interesting, that's all.

Blucher!

Terry Bradshaw admitted using steroids while playing for the mid-70's Pittsburgh Steelers, a team with more pharmacological issues than a retirement complex in Boca.

And horse steroids are in the news, with Big Brown's owner getting suspended and his trainer vowing to get his horses off drugs.

There's a joke in there somewhere, but I'm not the one to make it.

Asteroid Power

The NBA draft is losing its appeal, I think in large part because once you get past the top few picks, nobody knows who these guys are. The relentless marketing machine of NCAA basketball has narrowed the spotlight to a very few players, which means that the vast majority are unknown to rooters outside their teams' conferences. Throw in the mandatory Obscure European Player Picks(TM) that spangle the first round - guys we won't be seeing in the league for years while they hone their games in Spain or Croatia or France - and the interest, apart from macabre "how far will he fall" stuff, fades after the big names are gone early.

Or to put it another way, I have no idea who Marreese Speights is. My wife attends NC State, and J.J. Hickson barely registered on my radar. The first I heard of Kosta Kofous was watching OSU dismantle their opponent in the NIT semifinals. And Sergei Ibaka? Nicolas Batum? These are not names that people eagerly speculate about. They don't quicken the pulse of the casual fan, or even the semi-serious one. And so it's a question of where do the big stars go, followed by "how far will this guy I actually heard of" fall. Making it worse is the disconnect between the college and pro games, the near certainty that guys who excelled on the college level are no-hopers in the pros (Paging J.J. Redick, J.J. Redick pick up the white courtesy phone) and there's no reason to watch. The guys who are going somewhere are guys you never heard of; the guys you heard of are mostly staying home. And after the fifth or sixth pick the star power is gone.

Punch Drunk Love

We don't know what exactly set Shawn Chacon off tonight, though his version of the story he gives us a pretty good idea. GM Ed Wade and manager Cecil Cooper wanted to talk to Chacon in private, and he didn't want to. Wade then began yelling, which Chacon didn't take kindly to. Eventually, when Wade wouldn't stop, Chacon went all Kimbo Slice on his boss, eventually throwing him to the floor and jumping on top of him in best Squared Circle fashion.

This will no doubt make for great sports column fodder for days, no doubt heavy on the moralizing. It doesn't take an ethical genius on the level of Spinoza to come down against grabbing your boss by the neck, even if he has in fact asked you into an annoying meeting. Then someone else will do something stupid, most likely either Ozzie Guillen or Manny Ramirez, and we'll forget all about this.

Which, of course, leaves me wondering. What on earth could Ed Wade, described as a bit of a milquetoast in his days in Philly, have said to set Chacon off like that. What drove Chacon, who if memory serves, had no reputation as a hothead or troublemaker, react so wildly. I'm sure we'll have explanations soon enough, but in the meantime the possibilities and speculation are endless

Though if I really had to lay odds, I'd say Wade told Chacon that even if he were an aging middle reliever, there's no way Wade would sign him.

One Used Pie, Half Off

If I'm going to sell something on eBay, I don't write in the item description that it's old, ugly, worthless, and painted chartreuse.

If' I'm trying to sell my house, I don't talk about the weird smells in the basement, the fact that a tribe of cannibal squirrels have carved out a generations-old fiefdom in the attic, and the AC gets cranking with a noise like an arthritic dimetrodon.

If I'm trying to sell my car, I don't run it through axle-deep mud before taking display photographs of it. I don't park it in the bad part of town with fifty bucks on the front seat, and I don't leave a bag of fish tacos in the trunk for a week during the summer.

It's bad business.

Why, then, do the Cubs insist on treating their tradeable assets this way? They're a good team, but not a perfect one, and their best hope of patching their few remaining holes is by flipping their tradable assets for something useful. Felix Pie. Matt Murton. Rich Hill. All of these were coveted assets at one point. All three have been buried by the Cubs, devaluing what they might possibly bring back, an approach that makes no sense whatsoever.

It's good for someone else, of course. Someone else might get Pie for pennies on the dollar, and help him harness his prodigious skills. Someone might get Hill on the cheap, and uncover the pitcher who was fifth in the NL in strikeouts last year. And Murton, well, Cleveland could probably use him right about now.

But they won't pay much to get him.

Notes in a Minaya Key

It has been suggested elsewhere, most notably at ESPN.com by Rob Neyer, that Willie Randolph got his dead fish wrapped in newspaper at 12:15 local time, fairly standard for a post-night-game whacking. This, then, is putative proof that the fact that it hit the East Coast after everyone except infomercial fans had gone to bed is not evidence that the Mets weren't trying to get cute with things.

To quote the late Graham Chapman, that's as may be but it's still a frog.

at best, this argument suggests that the firing was a hastily thought out panic move. Surely an organization in the New York market should be aware of the perception certain to surround a 3:15 AM pink slip. Even if that wasn't the intention, the PR director should have been able to say "Whoah, guys, this is going to look bad. Can we wait until morning?" The fact that they didn't means that either the PR guys weren't consulted or they were overruled on their own turf, which just makes this look even more like management-by-overreactive-spasm.

Look, willie Randolph should never have been allowed to get on that plane with his job intact. If they knew they were going to fire him, they could have shown the grace of doing so before the trip started, saving him the aggravation and embarrassment. If they weren't going to fire him, what the hell could possibly have happened in that first game - a game that the Mets won, remember - to change Omar's decision?

Besides, it was a road trip, it was the West Coast - a great time and place to make a clean break and let the interim guy get a running start. But they bungled that, too, fumbling away any advantage that could have been wrung out of the situation. Ultimately, all the way this was handled did was reinforce the image of Mets-as-bumblers, and make the stone-faced Willie Randolph a sympathetic figure - surely not what was intended.

So, I'll cut Omar slack on the 3:15 thing, but not on the rest of it. Any way you slice it, the way the firing was handled stinks. You just don't handle your people that way, not if you want to continue to attract good people. You don't deliberately bring controversy onto your organization, you don't put yourself in a position where you look worse than you need to, and you don't put the organization on the hook for the ridiculous fees that come with changing transcontinental plane tickets on short notice. The best thing Minaya and the Mets can do now is admit that they bungled it and move on. The second best thing they can do is to get the hell out of Jerry Manuel's way for the rest of the season while avoiding the temptation to trade Fernando Martinez for a quick fix.

I Am John McLaren of Clan McLaren, And I Am Immortal

Then again, maybe not.

It’s the silly season for managers, the time when GMs of fading teams recall the adage “you don’t have to outrun the wolf if you can throw someone out of the sleigh”. Managerial firings several purposes. If a GM’s feeling the heat, he can throw the manager overboard to distract attention from his performance. If the team is a no-hoper, then the shift in managers might distract fan attention away from the dismal, Willie Bloomquist-flavored product on the field. And if the team is underperforming, swapping out managers might actually jump-start the team by adding a little motivation, or replacing the last guy’s lousy player usage patterns with better ones.

(For all you anti-sabermetrics folks out there “player usage pattern” is a fancy way of saying “who plays and where”. It’s all very mathy, you know.)
There were three casualties this week, a rather high body count for in-season. Willie Randolph went first, and one can’t help but feel that Omar Minaya did it as a panic move to save his own job. Ordinarily, this would be a classic “shake up the underperformers” firing, except for two things: One, Jerry Manuel’s managing style is a lot like Willie’s, and two, there’s not a lot of shaking up that can be done on this team. There was no depth before injuries hit, and now, well, the bench talent is beyond risible. You can’t threaten to sit guys down unless their proposed replacements would be replacement level for the New Orleans Zephyrs. The Mets can’t afford to shake things up by, say, sitting Jose Reyes, not when the alternative is running Damion Easley out there day after day. No, the only reason this move was made was to buy Omar Minaya a little time for his expensive, aging bats and thin rotation to find themselves before the hammer comes down again.

John McLaren, on the other hand, was a no-hoper filing. In theory the Mariners were supposed to be contenders this year, but that’s a non-starter. By now, this team wouldn’t voom if you put four million volts through it, and changing the guy who writes the lineup card isn’t going to do much to change that. A new manager can’t catch the ball for Raul Ibanez, can’t move Jarrod Washburn’s fastballs off Broadway, can’t magically inject 300 points of OPS into Kenji Jojima’s line. Mind you, McLaren didn’t exactly cover himself with glory. The game I attended at Safeco featured Willie the Wonder Bloomquist batting second, and Miguel Cairo at first base – think about that for a minute. Miguel Cairo, light-hitting second baseman, at first base –which is like taking six outs, wrapping them up with a nice frilly bow, and mailing it to the other team with a card asking if they’ll be Howard Lincoln’s valentine. McLaren’s ouster, like that of his boss, was designed to tell the fan base “we’re making changes. Really, we are. Pay no attention to the washed-up catcher behind the curtain.” They’re not going to be good the rest of the way, but hey, at least they’ll be different.

And then there’s John Gibbons. This is a combo platter. I won’t go out there and say that J.P. Ricciardi’s bizarre anti-Adam Dunn rant inspired the firing, but stranger and less suspicious things have happened in Diebold voting machines. Ricciardi certainly needed a story to take the public’s eye off his refusal to consider adding exactly the sort of power bat the Jays desperately need, and replacing Gibbons with franchise hero Gaston certainly did the trick. For another, he can’t trade the players. They’re not that good. There’s nobody on that team who’s got obvious upside, and they’re all playing…all right. A little above average. If Ricciardi were a fantasy baseball manager, he’d be the sort who comes in seventh out of ten every year because he stocks his roster with guys who do a little bit of everything and nothing really well. The fact that they don’t have a particular outstanding skill means that there’s no room for obvious and huge immediate improvement. It also means that none of their players, excuse the Roy Halladay, are particularly appealing on the trade market. They’ve got little to offer, which means they’ll get little back, which means there’s little point to making a trade. So the only thing that can be shaken up is the manager’s seat, which is why John Gibbons is now scrounging cardboard boxes from around the Jays’ clubhouse to put his bobblehead collection in.

The problem with firings like that, however, is that they’re widely recognized as the last act of a desperate GM. There are no more excuses and no more sacrificial lambs. They built these teams, they put their guy in the dugout, and they made the midseason move that some would say matters. If they can’t put together a winning team after doing that, the logic then suggests that they may have been the real problem.

And that’s when John Gibbons calls up J.P. Ricciardi and asks if he needs to borrow any cardboard boxes.

The Great Blog Controversy of Ought-Eight

There are times when it really is better not to seek quite so avidly after The Last Word. Consider, for example, Buzz Bissinger. After his histrionic meltdown on Will Leitch over the evils of blogging, Bissinger had made a series of carefully worded, genuine-seeming retractions that indicated that perhaps he'd figured out that tarring all blogs with the same brush was a bit hasty. He even said nice things about a couple of them. Detente broke out. Bloggers came out of their basements and stared in wide wonder at the sun and the daily newspaper in the driveway. Old-school newspaper reporters dared see what this "googly" thing those damn kids down at the water cooler were talking about might be. Dogs and cats lived together.

Until Mr. Bissinger decided he needed the last word, and hoo boy, was it a doozy. In so many words, he suggested while a few single-topic blogs are all right, the general nature of blogginess is such that, had they known about it, the founding fathers would have never included Freedom of Speech in the Constitution.

Because, let's face it, the fact that they like to use naughty words on Kissing Suzy Kolber is the sort of thing that, if left unchecked, could destroy our society, allow the British to take us back over, and lead to moral turpitude of some degree or other.

With that in mind, I think it's worth looking at what Mr. Bissinger thinks he's saying, and then seeing if those arguments hold water.

For example, he says that while a few single topic blogs are useful and factual, the vast majority are evil, mean, and snarky. Now, I for one was unaware that good writing had to be restricted to a single topic, or that it had to be "useful" to be of quality. I occasionally enjoy writing that is "fun", "amusing", or even "thought-provoking" without necessarily being "informative" all the time. If informative is the only measure of value, then, yes, many blogs fail on that particular score. On the other hand, I don't know anyone besides Buzz Bissinger who reads blogs strictly for the factoid content. I read FJM because it amuses the hell out of me. I read The Anomalist because it provides great idea stimulus for my fiction writing. I read Joe Posnanski's blog because the guy can make words laugh, cry, and sing, often at the same time. I read Rob Neyer's blog over at ESPN.com in the vain hope of someday seeing Sportsthodoxy mentioned there. And so it goes. "Informative" is just one particular wavelength in the blogging spectrum, and setting it up as the only measure of quality is rigging the table, a rhetorical cheapshot. Or, to misquote Eddie Izzard, "If you don't have a flag, then by these rules I just made up, I win."

Furthermore, Bissinger's argument doesn't even hold water when applied to his own particular medium. Let's look at print periodicals, shall we? The last time I checked, not all of them were entirely informative. The National Enquirer, for one. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, for another. You get the idea. Other print mags have been known to be full of misinformation, disinformation, wild speculation, political partisanship, unfounded editorializing, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, none of which is strictly "informative" (unless you're in touch with your inner Duelmaster, of course). The goofiness of an US magazine, however, does not detract one iota from the value of Discover; the fact that Asimov's prints mostly fiction in no way affects the merit of US News and World Report.

Or, to put it another way, just because some blogs suck - and a great many blogs do in fact wallow in innuendo, bad spelling, and uninformed cheapshottery - doesn't mean most or all blogs suck.

Next up is the accusation that blogs are mean-spirited, vicious slimepits where the worst of humanity gathers to fling mud at unsuspecting victims. To that, all a rational human being can say is, "Well, some of them, sure." Some bloggers do enjoy tearing down sports figures, using ad hominems, printing damaging rumors, and generally acting like a thirteen year old with his first copy of Playboy. (Print edition, of course.) Then again, anyone watching the coverage of our election cycle may be able to postulate that a lack of civility from commentators is hardly restricted to the blogging rabble. Bill Plaschke's hatchet job on Paul DePodesta out in Los Angeles - for God's sake, he even resorted to schoolyard namecalling, or have we all forgotten "Google Boy"? - was at least as mean-spirited as anything ever to run on Fire Joe Morgan, while being less funny, worse written, and less coherently composed. If you're going to condemn blogs for this, then the blame needs to get spread equally to other media, or the charge becomes baseless.

Then there's the suggestion that the community that gathers and posts comments on a blog is the blogger's responsibility, and that the commenting rabble's rudeness, crudeness, and lewdness is the blogger's fault. If that's the case, then someone needs to explain to me the level of venom and idiocy found in the comments sections on blogs like Jayson Stark's over at ESPN.com, or Ken Rosenthal's at Fox Sports. Surely Jayson isn't posting pictures of David Wright in a hot tub with a trio of scantily clad hotties. You can't say that Peter Gammons is quoting W.A.S.P. lyrics verbatim on his blog. But both of them, and many others, gather a community of commenters that is poisonously vicious, vituperative, and as profane as anything you'd find on a "basement" blogger's site.

So those three arguments, the big ones, don't hold water. What, then, is Bissinger going on about? I think there are a couple of things going on here. For one, he's completely missing the point of blogs, and holding them up to an absolute standard: blogs vs. New York Times/Boston Globe/Pulitzer Prize Committee. Which, grammar aside, is arrant nonsense. The point of blogging is for folks to put their thoughts and ideas out where people can read them, or not. Their nature is to be compositional, not factual. The fact that some are reliable sources of information is a tribute to the particular bloggers who compose on those sites; their success is theirs alone, and not part of a greater mandate that bloggerdom should be compelled to uphold.

For another, he's bought into the sad stereotype that blogs and bloggers are homogenous, that they're all the creation of socially inept nerds who work in comics stores and live in their parents' basement. This is, again, lousy logic. Judging the whole by the worst examples would get you thrown out of any freshman rhetoric course on the grounds that it's complete hooey. The other is just a tired ad hominem, thrown out there to rile up the yammering classes so that they go after the red flag ("Hey! I live on the third floor, thank you!") and not the dodgy premise Bissinger presents.

As an aside, I find the "nerds in basement" trope to be the worst sort of jock-sniffing. Sportswriters are not jocks, but they're the closest thing to jocks in the writing community, and they're jealous of that fact. They may not be able to play the game, but they get to hang out with and talk to the guys who do, and that confers coolness-by-proximity on them. Declaring that all bloggers wear fake Vulcan earswhen posting is nothing more than schoolyard bullying, and the reflexive "I actually TALK to the athletes" that follows demonstrates how insecure they really are in that role. Better yet, watch that old Warner Brothers cartoon with the bulldog and his yappy sidekick a few times. You'll get the idea.

Hell, my house doesn't even HAVE a basement.

Third, Bissinger posits a false dichotomy between blogs and "real journalism". When Pat Jordan posts on Deadspin and Baseball Analysts, when Paul DePodesta starts a blog, when venerable publications like Premiere go online only, there is no "us versus them" any more. We're all writers, some writing for pay, some simply to express our thoughts on the things that we care about, our words appearing in whatever format we can get them into. And the market will win out in the end. For-pay writers who can't cut it will no doubt find their material unread. Bloggers whose work holds particular appeal will find ways to monetize their efforts. The lines are blurred and disappearing. Bissinger is standing sentry on a dotted line that's already fading.

Yeah, some blogs suck, including quite possibly this one. It doesn't matter. They bring their creators joy, which is what they're all about. Holding them up to any other standard, particularly ones as artificial as those Bissinger postulates, is just plain silly. And meanwhile, the real winners are readers, whose options as to good writing are increasing every day.

If I'm a Young GM Candidate...

...I move heaven and earth to try to get the Seattle Mariners job.

Yes, the last place, worst-in-the-majors, my-God-they-still-play-baseball here Mariners.

Because all the pieces are there for a turnaround, and with that turnaround the next GM is going to be a hero. (Unless, of course, the next GM is Steve Phillips, in which case the lahars coming down off Mt. Rainier might be seen as a more appealing alternative.)

Consider that the team has money, great gobs of it. Plus, ownership is willing to let other people spend it, an important distinction from spending it themselves. One nets you the 2004 Red Sox, the other gets you the Ed Whitson-era Yankees.

Consider also that the worst of the Bavasi-era contracts, Richie Sexson's subluxation of financial sanity, is about to go *poof* as the team kicks him to the curb. Even if they decide not to, his contract still wraps up at the end of the year. So, too, do the overpriced deals given to Raul "Fire Bad!" Ibanez and Jose Vidro. That's a lot of money coming off the books. In 2009, Batista and Washburn are done. Even if a bunch of that money goes to, say, resigning Erik Bedard, that's still a whole lot of money for the new GM to play with.

Consider also that the Mariners are so bad that whoever comes in next will likely have carte blanche to do anything he needs to. There's no move that could be made that any fan could really muster an argument against, unless it's switching J.J. Putz to handling a server station for garlic fries. That means it's finally safe to jettison Eckstein manque Willie Bloomquist. The team is so terrible with him that there's no longer an argument that can be made for keeping him. Even the shopworn "fan favorite" line can go now - fans' favorites are players who win games. And very, very few people on that roster are helping the Mariners win games.

Then there are the kids. With Bavasi gone and the somewhat eccentric lineup management of John McLaren shortly to follow, the new guy can mandate that they play the kids. And by kids we're talking monster prospects like Jeff Clement and Wladimir Balientin, guys who've gotten their feet went and experienced their growing pains, and who are now looking ready to step up bigtime. Just allowing them on the field regularly will be an improvement on the Ibanez-riffic Ancient Mariners, and they're only going to get better as they play more. The same can't be said of usual substitution faves like Miguel Cairo. This team almost can't help getting better.

Plus, the possibility exists to take over the town again, and fast. Consider the other sports options in Seattle. The Seahawks are poised for a down cycle. The Sonics are either leaving or litigating. UW football is, at best, meh. All of which means that even modest improvement will make the Mariners the toast of the town, and the man who engineered the almost-inevitable revival the toastiest.

Are there downsides? Sure. If there weren't, Bavasi would still have his job and the team wouldn't be in last place. There are still long-term contracts tied to overrated players, ones that will *cough cough Kenji Jojima* continue to haunt the team *cough cough Carlos Silva* for the next few years. The roster is mostly old, slow, and allergic to catching the baseball. Ichiro Suzuki clearly no longer has his heart in playing for this team, and it may not start winning soon enough to re-light his fire. Putz is injured, there's the looming spectre of free agency for Bedard, and the middle infield combo of Lopez and Betancourt seems to be regressing annually. That's a lot to overcome.

But with the advantages the Mariners have - money, the ability to blow the deadwood out the door, kids on the way - they seem like a good bet to overcome it.

And to make their next GM look very, very good.

When New Yorkers Say Nice Things About the Phillies, Run For It.

I love the Phillies. They are, bar none, the most exciting team to watch in the National League this year. When that offense gets going, forget it - they're going to mash, and mash, and mash. They play good defense, they've got cannon arms in right and center, their bullpen has been mostly lights out (excuse Tom Gordon of late), and their starting pitching has been at the very least, consistent. New York sports talk radio hosts are talking about them as a potential World Series team, and mentioning about how they could be about to go run and hide in the weaker-than-expected AL East.

But I can't help thinking they're not quite that good.

They feast on mediocre pitching. At the plate, their approach is Red Sox/Yankees lite. Be patient, wear out the other team's starters, and then beat the living hell out of the soft underbelly of the bullpen. It's a great strategy...if you can maintain it. The problem is, against good pitching, the Phillies can't. They get behind, and they press, and they chase, and they strike out a lot instead. Take another look at last year's playoff loss to the Rockies and you'll see it. And if they get to the playoffs, they're going to see good pitching. Maybe against the Cubs, maybe against the Diamondbacks with Haren and Webb and Johnson. The point is, they'll run up against it, and their weakness at the plate will be exposed. At the same time, their starting pitching is mediocre, and as Joe Sheehan at BP pointed out, their bullpen can't possibly be this good all year long. And their starting pitching just isn't that good. The Manny Ramirezes of the world salivate at the thought of standing in against guys like Kyle Kendrick and Adam Eaton in October, soft-tossers who can be waited out until they're forced to throw their sub-optimal fastballs right down Broadway.

And Broadway is often one swing of the bat from Lansdowne Street.

So I'll enjoy watching the Phillies this year. But I don't think they're going to win it all, more's the pity.

Gone, Willie, Gone

3:15 AM is not when you get fired.

3:15 is when the secret police come pounding on the door, the dogs barking to let you know there's no way out. It's when the phone rings and it's always real bad news, the call coming from a hospital or the side of the road. It's when cheating lovers try to sneak in the back door, listening for floorboard creaks as they make their way in dread to the darkened stairs.

It's not when you fire the manager of a baseball team, particularly not a team that just flew out west, just won its game, just went through yet another round of "is the manager going to get fired?" questions. If the Mets thought they could downplay the whole thing by waiting until the team was out of New York and most WFAN listeners were asleep before lowering the boom on Willie Randolph, well, that's the sort of thinking that would have worked in 1974. These days, not so much.

Did Randolph deserve to get fired? Probably. His team wasn't responding to him and the talented players weren't playing up to their potential. But you can't blame Willie for a thin bench, for a roster constructed of aging and injury-prone veterans without adequate replacements waiting for their inevitable breakdowns, for the annual Billy Wagner finger-point-and-melt-down. If he'd gotten more from Jose Reyes, Randolph probably wouldn't be in this position right now. If he hadn't had to try to get more from Endy Chavez, Marlon Anderson, and suchlike, if his roster hadn't been constructed that losing Ryan Church was actually a major blow, then he probably wouldn't be in this position now, either.

All of which means that Omar Minaya has used his last bullet. He's out of cover, and the next body to hit the floor will be his. And if Jerry Manuel doesn't somehow take this mismatched collection of parts and start winning immediately, then the call will go out on the airwaves for his head, too.

Math, Sporting News Style

If the Bulls select Derrick Rose, it could be the first step in fulfilling the NBA's dream scenario of its three most exciting individual stars - Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade - in its three biggest markets - Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.
-NBA writer Sam Smith

Except, of course, that Kobe is already in LA, so this scenario would be the second step. Or maybe the third.

I'll leave uncommented the notion that the NBA wants to actively steer certain players to certain markets, which must be heartening to fans in cities that are not LA, Chicago, or New York.

Dodgers Trade for Angel Berroa

That's Rob Neyer over on the left.

I'll just let that one sink in for a moment.

Or, to put it another way, someone actually wanted Angel Berroa. As in, gave up more than a bag of casaba melons and two Bob Stinson-model bats to get him.

Somewhere, Rob Neyer & the Poz & Rany Jazayerli are doing their own little recreation of the "celebratory Ewok village dance" from Return of the Jedi. You know, the original one, before George Lucas re-cut it and added new and exciting CGI completely unrelated to the plot. Jub jub.

Of all the indictments that can potentially be made of the Coletti regime, this may be the one that even Bill Plaschke can't defend, the thing that ten years from now still causes the readership of Dodger Thoughts to go into apoplectic shock. Yes, I know that Berroa won the RoY award, back in the day. So did Ted Sizemore, and I don't think you want him on your team now, either. Actually, at this point Sizemore is probably better at going to his left than Berroa, and he's definitely got more stick.

The worst part, though, is not that the Dodgers acquired Berroa. The worst part is that they actually paid something for him, and on top of that they're paying his full salary. If Coletti can't convince someone to open their wallet, even for beer money, to help get Angel Berroa off their roster, then he's got worse negotiating skills than Neville Chamberlain.

But hey, it's good news for the Diamondbacks.

Deadspin Loses Chief Spinner

So Will Leitch is hanging up the blog, moving out of his parents' basement, and getting a "real" journalism job.

Buzz Bissinger either feels very stupid right now, or is preparing a marriage proposal.

In Other Sports News...

...the convicted steroid dealer who'd named NFL names has been found shot dead in his home, along with his sometime girlfriend. The fact that an anonymous caller suggested the dead man's father call the Plano, TX police would seem to provide some indication that this wasn't, say, a gun-cleaning accident.

Somehow, this makes the gum-flapping over Rafael Palmeiro look very, very silly.

Smoltz

A shredded shoulder's not easy to come back from when you're 21, let alone 41. I don't think we'll be seeing him scowling down off the mound again.

Baseball: Hearts and Minds

There is much squawking about how we're losing a generation of baseball fans because the sport is A) on too late at night B) not attracting African-American athletes and C) not football.

Here, then, is my thought on how baseball can stop that yammering, attract a wider youth demographic, and increase its popularity.

Attract More African-American Players/Northern Players
A broader, more diverse talent base within the US means more fans of those players within the US. While baseball has by far the most ethnically diverse makeup of any of the major sports, the conventional wisdom is that the sport has lost its grip on inner-city African-American kids. Furthermore, kids from northern climes don't get to play year-round like their peers in southern California, Florida, and Texas. So entire regions of the country don't have their own favorite sons to root for, dampening involvement.

The question, then, is how to get these athletes playing baseball. The answer is...

More College Baseball Scholarships
One of the reasons cited for baseball's losing ground to basketball and football in competition for African-American athletes is that there are a whole lot more football and basketball scholarships to hand out, relatively speaking, than baseball ones. Football has 85. Baseball has 13.5 per team, and they're divvied up in fractions and slices amongst the entire team. Simply put, it makes more economic sense for a two-sport athlete to choose college football or basketball.

So, there need to be more scholarships. More scholarships = more athletes on scholarship = more chances to develop kids who haven't been playing in traveling teams since they were six, or who can't afford school on a partial scholarship. The problem there is simple: football and basketball get the big perks because they're the big revenue sports. The trick, then, is to turn baseball into a big revenue sport so that it can support more scholarships. To do that, baseball needs to...

Make the Draft Matter
The NFL really didn't cement its stranglehold on the US until it made the draft An Event. It provided a shot of football in the offseason, got fans talking about their teams throughout a larger chunk of the year, and provided a talking point and a ray of hope for fans of the Arizona Cardinals (and other sad-sack franchises). Not coincidentally, this also amped national interest in the college game, as NFL fans started paying attention to whom their teams might draft.
This was done in part by making picks tradeable, in part by encouraging the development of the Kipergentsia, and in part by hyping the kids.

Hype the kids, and the fans will want to see the kids. If more people want to watch the kids, that's more money that the NCAA can demand for college baseball rights and more paying customers in seats. More money means more scholarships to offer, which means more of the top kids playing college baseball.

It is, I think, no coincidence that this year we've heard more about the MLB amateur draft than ever before. That it got a two-page spread in The Sporting News, and a ton of Keith Law-flavored coverage over at ESPN.com. That people who normally wouldn't know a super-regional from Krypto the Super-dog know who Justin Smoak and Buster Posey are. The men who run baseball are not stupid. They know where this path leads, and they're actively encouraging it. And, as a fan, I say more power to 'em.

Why does it always have to be apocalyptic?

"CAN SID THE KID SAVE HOCKEY?"

Err, no. Even if he were the greatest player ever, he'd still have to play against someone, still need challengers and nemeses and opponents so that the game was worth watching. And by setting up this artificial crisis - hockey's doing quite well since the strike, thank you, with higher TV ratings and attendance - the sensationalist wing of the sports media sets Crosby, and hockey, up for failure if he's not utterly transcendent this first time on the national stage. Oh my God, he didn't score nine goals in the first three minutes, he must be a failure. Oh my God, the Penguins are getting stomped by a better, more experienced team, in much the same way the Rockies got stomped by the Red Sox? Call the riot police, Crosby's career is in ruins and the NHL is in flames.

It's ridiculous, inappropriate, and wrong, and it cannibalizes the very product that sportswriters should be celebrating. Crosby is a transcendent talent; the story ought to be about his showing off his skills in prime time and playing up all the other marketable aspects of this series, not a contrived doomsday scenario. And if they shout "hockey is dead!" enough times with nonsense like this, well, someone might start to believe them...which would then put a whole bunch of sportswriters out of work.

I'm not suggesting that journalists need to be senseless pollyannas. But if they love and respect the sports they're covering, they need to recognize the potential effect of the stories they choose to promulgate, and to think about, just maybe, not making it apocalypse now, every time.

The Poz Played Civ!

Who knew?

Tampa Bay is the new black

Listening to Bernie Miklasz, Cardinals beat reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on Baseball Prospectus Radio, I was struck by something very odd. Miklasz held up the fact that the Cardinals had been competitive with the !Devil Rays as proof that the team was pretty good.

Think about that one for a minute. "Competitive with Tampa Bay".

As good as the Rays' young players are, and as well as they're doing so far this year, and as much as I'd like to see the guys I've been watching in Durham do well, it's still a mighty slender reed to support the proof that your team's not doing it with smoke and Wellemeyers.

And one that, I think, has never been uttered before.

17th Game

Part of the noise swirling around the opening up of the NFL labor agreement is what looks suspiciously like a trial balloon about adding a 17th game to the NFL season.

It is, I think, a bad idea. Too many teams already limp into the playoffs utterly brutalized by injuries. Too many teams clinch early, sit their stars and cheat the fans of the top-dollar tickets they've paid for. Too many late season games are already played in awful conditions, and sooner or later someone's going to freeze to death in the cheap seats in Buffalo. You get the idea.

And yet, it will likely happen, without a parallel reduction in pointless exhibition games (because the owners get to charge full price for those), because there's money to be made. I don't think we'll just see 17, though. We'll see 18, the better to "balance" the schedule. This will of course drive the Super Bowl and playoffs even later into winter, but fewer players have gotten frostbite than have collapsed from heatstroke, so there you go.

There are lots of things to get hammered out before this becomes an actuality. Do player salaries negotiated for a 16 game season go up proportionally? (Not if the owners have anything to say about it.) Will this get done in conjunction with a salary slotting system for rookies? (Not if the agents have anything to say about it, though why the NFLPA doesn't act against something that takes money away from its active members is beyond me.) There are more where that came from. But in the end, there's too much money for them to walk away from it.

At least, until the family of that fansicle in Orchard Park decides to sue.

But Who Will Save The Children?

Buried on ESPN.com is this little tidbit, a story about a trainer named David Jacobs who's singing like a bird about distributing steroids and HGH (1000 packages each of steroids and HGH every month) to NFL players. For his crime, he's got three years probation, and the story's well off the front page. Compare that to the foofaraw around every baseball-related steroids rumor, to the jail time being doled out for others' offenses, to the sanctimonious chest-beating over how steroids in baseball are destroying America's youth, and to the much greater attention being paid to whether Bill Belichick had injured players practicing when they shouldn'ta oughta done that. Oh, and let's not forget the much stiffer sentences going around to other steroidally linked felons, shall we?

It doesn't fly. If you're going to go after steroids in sports, go after steroids in all sports. If you're going to get the Senate involved in a football cheating scandal, how about the one that involves teams other than New England - the one that comes with syringes? If you care about kids emulating athletes by taking steroids, how about the ones who gain the most by bulking up and raging out? To do anything otherwise is shameful pandering, and either an abandonment of those cute roid-rippled kids everyone's supposedly so concerned about or an admission that they were just a convenient excuse to get some screen time.

Look, I understand why baseball takes it harder for steroids stuff than any other sport, the same way it gets slammed harder for pretty much anything. It's the sport of nostalgia and the pastoral dream, Norman Rockwell and black and white reels. It's the sport that actually made history in this country, the game that immigrants could latch onto, the game that put breaking the color bar on the front page, the game that we somehow associate with better things. And so when any scandal touches it, it taints it proportionally more, because we expect more of baseball. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we subconsciously expect our football players to be 'roided up behemoths because we don't want nostalgia or inspiration from football, we want big hits. It's a game where "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying" is repeated with a knowing smile and not disgust. NASCAR had a guy careening around the track at 200 miles an hour while coked to the gills on heroin, and top teams' crew chiefs are routinely snagged for violating race rules, but everyone just grins at that because, hell, NASCAR's a little outlaw and you can't blame a fella for trying to get an edge. (How exactly NASCAR is "outlaw" with corporate logos plastered all over every inch of car, driver, crew, and often track is beyond me, but that's what they tell me.)

The difference is that, to be blunt, we don't expect better of the NFL, or NASCAR, or the NBA. We do expect better of baseball, whether we should or not. And when we don't get it, we're that much more disappointed.

But that still doesn't exculpate the same media outlets who tap-danced on forged Mitchell Report leaks for days from staying on top of the Jacobs story. Not if they want to claim the moral high ground over those non-professional blogger types, and not if they ever want a steroid story on baseball to be taken seriously again.

Observed Watching the Mariners at Safeco...

...in the company of the estimable Derek Zumsteg of USS Mariner: You can actually hear Raul Ibanez grunt "Grrr! Fire bad!" as he chugs around left field. I had never actually seen an outfielder faceplant into the fence chasing a ball on the ground before, but Ibanez managed it.

Any time Willie Bloomquist is possibly not the worst player in your starting lineup, you're in trouble.

Extra! Extra!

Random question # 36 - why on earth does someone make sure to leak the winners of all of the NBA's major awards? Doesn't that sandbag whatever drama is left in their bestowal, not to mention killing discussion/speculation that would garner the NBA more column inches?

Silly, really...

Mudcat on a Hot Tin Roof

I took my dad to see the Carolina Mudcats/West Tenn Diamond Jaxxxxxxx game at Five County Stadium last night. It was a great game, filled with multiple comebacks, fantastic defensive plays, and the ever-amusing antics of Muddy the Mudcat. That being said, a couple of things stood out.

• Brett Sinkbeil has added a couple of ticks to his fastball, getting up to 97 on the stadium gun. That being said, he kept on getting it up in the zone, and got pounded as a result. One got the feeling the Mudcats were leaving him out there just to get innings, because West Tenn figured him out early and often.
• Uber-prospect Cameron Maybin looked good, with a sharp batting eye. He took three walks in the game, and came *this* close to a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth. Unfortunately, after that he started hacking, and ended up striking out.
• I have never before seen a game where one team's DH - West Tenn's Prentice Redman (think about that for a minute. Prentice Redman, Designated Hitter) had a .221 BA coming into the game, and was by far the better option of the two. Carolina's Kris Harvey was at .101 when the game started, and went down from there. What's the .100 line called? Sub-Mendoza? The Uecker Line? A demotion High-A Jupiter?
• Top to botton, the Mudcats' lineup was one of the weakest I've ever seen. Mendoza city, if you know what I mean. It didn't help that the West Tenn started was a junkballer, barely touching 90 on the gun but getting them to tap out weakly to short more often than not. Carolina went up hacking early and often, and through four innings, they'd seen all of forty pitches.
• Sinkbeil also seemed to have a weird little hesitation in his delivery. Someone who knows more about pitching than I could probably comment on it.

Bonjour, Karma

I can think of two reason the Flyers were able to take out the Canadiens so easily.

1-Martin Biron > Carey Price.
2-The way Montreal fans rioted over their first-round win over Boston. Come on, people, these are the motherloving Canadiens. Celebrating a first-round win like that (complete with setting vehicles on fire) is like Yankees fans storming the field after taking two of three from Kansas City. OK, maybe Baltimore, but still.

The lesson is very clear. If you act like you've won it all too soon, Fate will tell you that you've won as much as you're going to.

Au revoir, les Habitants.

Hawks Win, Force Game Six

There are several reasons I'd love the Atlanta Hawks to take out the Boston Celtics in their upcoming game 7.

• Because if I'm anything, I'm a Sixers fan, and thus always want the Celtics to lose.
• Because it will put an end to those endless "record number of wins improvement!" stories and pre-fab coronations we've been hearing for months now. Yes, add a bunch of All-star talent and your team generally gets better. This is not a surprise.
• Because every reporter and analyst in the world picked the Celtics in 4. 3, if possible.
• And because it will put a very dull stick in Bill Simmons' eye. Simmons, who has been treating this particular agglomeration of green-clad mercenaries like he's 14 and they're his private porn stash, suffered an epic meltdown in print when his beloved Patriots gakked away the Super Bowl. To have it happen twice in one sports calendar year, well, the only comparison would be the "Dog Whisperer" episode of South Park, where Cartman gets firmly, repeatedly put in his place.

I don't think it's likely to happen, but damn, it would be sweet if it did.

Roger that Rogering, Roger

As Lester Munson over at ESPN.com pointed out, the Roger Clemens - Mindy McCready foofaraw is unlikely to have any actual effect on Clemens' lawsuit against Brian MacNamee. What it serves as is a first barrage across the decks of the HMS Rocket, sweeping the rigging and warning him that if the suit continues, MacNamee and his lawyers are going to unleash every bit of dirt they know, and whatever "damage" MacNamee might have done to Clemens' reputation in the Mitchell Report is going to look Inch-High Private Eye standing next to Godzilla.

Lost in all this is how desperately sad Mindy McCready's story is. At best, she's being portrayed as a publicity-crazed train wreck who's unleashed this to help promote her upcoming reality show. Then again, this is a woman who has suffered repeated abuse, addiction, suicide attempts, and God knows what else, and who now is being hounded by the media over whether or not she went for a ride on the Rocket when she was 15. That's not a life I'd wish on anyone, brief Nashville stardom or not, and you can probably trace a lot of it back to folks making the sorts of decisions that put her in a known ballplayers' bar when she was all of 15. Or, as we like to call it around here, in tenth grade.

Frankly, I don't care about Clemens' marital indiscretions. Those are between him and his wife. But I can't see how his involvement in this particular train wreck does him any credit. HGH or no HGH, steroids or no steroids, it doesn't matter if they waited until McCready was "legal" before getting it on - it's all pretty damn creepy, and for this if nothing else, Clemens ought to be ashamed.

Costas, Bloggers, and Buzz

Once again, the Pos says it best.

Go (To Indianapolis) Blue!

On today's Baseball Show on ESPN Radio, proud Michigan alum Steve Phillips waxed rhapsodic over fellow Wolverine Nate McLouth of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He went so far as to tell us - twice, practically verbatim - an anecdote about how Cubs manager Lou Piniella was impressed that McLouth could hit not only the low fastball, but the high fastball as well. (No word from Sweet Lou as to whether McLouth could hit breaking stuff, but one thing at a time here, fellas.)

Phillips then went on to talk about how McLouth had really turned things around, recovering from a period when he got sent down to the minors and refused to report to AAA. It's a great story, except that it was Chris Duffy who refused to report, not McLouth.

Oops.

That being said, things do seem to be looking up around Pittsburgh these days. The willingness to eat Matt Morris' bloated contract - and once can only assume that since-departed GM Dave Littlefield acquired Morris and his paycheck as a titanic screw-you to his inevitable successor - demonstrates that the team is not going to suck up losses simply because they want the most expensive guys on the field. Sure, John VanBenschoten might suck like a tornado, but there's the chance that he might not, which is worth finding out. You already know what you're going to get from Matt Morris, and none of it would have been good.

So kudos to the new team in Pittsburgh for showing that they're actually interested in winning for a change, and kudos for starting to develop some actual players. Most of the current roster is tweeners, guys who should get flipped as soon as they acquire some trade value, but credit the new regime with holding onto them until they acquire some value, and not panicking and signing the Kenny Loftons of the world in order to win 74 games instead of 72. For the first time in a long time, it looks like there's a plan in Pittsburgh, and in the NL Central, that might make them winners sooner than you'd think.

A Last Thought on the NFL Draft (and the leadup to thereof)

This week's Sporting News contained something like four mock drafts. Three of them had the Dolphins - who had been publicly negotiating with Michigan tackle Chris Long for weeks, and who signed him earlier in the week - picking Virginia defensive end Chris Long. This included the mock draft done by the correspondents who cover the teams for TSN, who theoretically ought to know better.

Out of those four drafts, two had the Eagles picking the same guy at 19, presumably on the "well, one of these guys might get it right" theory. The Patriots, who are well known for trading down, are apparently taking some combination of Ryan Clady, Sedrick Ellis, Dan Connor or Mike Jenkins at 7. At 5, the Chiefs will go with Matt Ryan. Or Chris Williams. Or Vernon Gholston. Or....

And then, there's the Mel Kiper Jr. "magician's force". Kiper is on mock draft #19 or so over at ESPN.com, which means that somewhere along the line he probably got a few picks right, which he will crow about, and a whole lot of picks wrong, which he will never mention. Every player comment he makes has a big positive at the beginning for future quotability, and a caveat at the end so if the guy turns out to be a bust, he can quote that bit and still seem prescient. It's a no-lose situation for Kiper - he never gets called on anything and can provide endless "evidence" backing up his work in hindsight.

Bear in mind also that not a single one of these mock drafts - not the four in TSN, not the dozens up at ESPN and SI and God knows where else - allows for trades, which, of course, Happen In The Real World Where This Is Supposed To Be Taking Place. Knowing that these start, therefore, from a position of guaranteed inaccuracy, shouldn't they therefore start to lose a teensy part of their appeal? At a certain point, it all becomes wankery, the sports equivalent of the AFI's 100 Best Movie Montages list.

And the guys who thought the Eagles would take Gosder Cherilus at 19? Idiots.

Let Me Get This Straight

When baseball players refuse to talk to Sen. George Mitchell about steroid use and refuse to name names of players they think might be juicing, they're selfish and wrongheaded, on the side of the cheaters and the villains.

When basketball player Josh Howard mentions that he knows lots of NBA players occasionally indulge in ye old wacky tobaccky, he's castigated by Fred Coleman for throwing other players under the proverbial bus. (Note: That bus is running late; Pedro Martinez is still scraping Grady Little out of the tire treads.)

So, to repeat, if you play a major sport and you know that your peers are indulging in an illegal substance, you will get slammed for either coming forward or not coming forward. Bear that in mind, would you?

Mo', Mo', Mo'

When I was a kid and I actually followed the Philadelphia 76ers, Mo Cheeks was my favorite player. Sure, Dr. J had the incredible moves (and hair), Darryl Dawkins brought the Chocolate Thunder, and 6'9" pasty beanpole Bobby Jones attempted to wrest the nickname "Secretary of Defense" unsuccessfully away from Garry Maddox. (The sneaker place I used to go to had a poster of Jones, in a suit, posed sitting on a desk in what was supposed to be a government office and holding a basketball like it was about to explode. The caption was "Secretary of Defense", which tells you everything you need to know about Jones' offensive game.) He was a pass-first point guard who had a great moustache and loved chocolate chip cookies. He was a fourth-round pick on a team loaded with stars, a little guy (relatively speaking) in a forest of redwoods around Moses Malone.
I lost interest in the NBA a few years after Mo retired. The Sixers made the disastrous Roy Hinson trade and lost about 90% of my fandom; the endless circus around "will they trade Allen Iverson?" took the rest. Meanwhile, Mr. Cheeks eventually surfaced as the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, a talented bunch of knuckleheads who seemed completely opposite Cheeks' own playing style. He didn't do particularly well coaching them, not that they seemed terribly coachable, and so when he was hired to coach the Sixers in the dying spasms of the Billy King era, my only thought was "Oh, no." Mo didn't look like a terribly good coach at that point, and I was loath to see another one of my childhood favorites (see Bowa, Larry) impale himself on a poorly managed franchise and impossible fan expectations. After all, Julius Erving wasn't coming through that door. Lionel Hollins wasn't coming through that door. Even Caldwell Jones wasn't coming through that door, just Andre Iguodala and a bunch of "almosts", guys like Kyle "Not the New Bobby Jones" Korver and Sam "The Haitian Sensation" Dalembert who were just good enough to show flashes, and not good enough to do anything consistently.

So I thought Cheeks was doomed, though I didn't pay much attention. I figured the roster of tweener talents and Billy King's oddball GMing style would deliver a fatal blow. The occasional SportsCenter highlights I saw were generally slanted toward whoever the Sixers were playing; there was a lot of posterization in those.

And all of a sudden, they're up 2-1 on the Pistons in the playoffs. The franchise that was hopeless, under a coach beloved in the city but best known for helping a scared little girl sing the national anthem, was in the playoffs. Was taking it to the favored Pistons. Was winning.

It is highly likely that the Sixers lose the next three in a row. Highly likely their season ends there, that tonight's win was their high water mark. It doesn't matter. Thank you, Mo Cheeks, for proving me wrong.

Dear Hank Steinbrenner...

...please keep messing with your GM. Poking Brian Cashman over the use of Joba Chamberlain, the fact that Johann Santana is a Met, and suchlike merely increases the probability that one of these days, the Yankees' GM is going to quit.

And if Cashman quits, one of the most appealing jobs available will be GM of the Philadelphia Phillies. Pat Gillick is stepping down after the 2008 season, concluding a run that can only be described as "better than Ed Wade's", leaving behind a team with a thin farm system but a killer infield and one of the largest media markets in the US all to itself. The elements for extended success are there, as is the opportunity.

As is the absence...of Hank.

Doubting Thomas

Frank Thomas is not the sort of guy you want to bench, because he's generally a pain in the ass when his ass is on the pine. Unless they benched him, the Blue Jays would have been on the hook for his option next year. So, they took the excuse of his slow start to dump him, and any yammering about "playing the kids" is transparent hooey. Rod Barajas is neither a kid nor a hitter (designated or otherwise), and running him out there as the Big Hurt's successor in the DH role is a lot like shunting in Lawrence Gowan after Dennis DeYoung on keyboards for Styx. Who's Lawrence Gowan, you say? Exactly.
Afterwards, it took about fifteen seconds for the A's to pick Thomas up. This is a no-risk move for Oakland. Toronto is playing most of his salary, so if Thomas really has lost it, Oakland's only on the hook for a little over $300K. If he really has lost it, the A's can cut Thomas without taking much of a hit. If he hasn't, and he bounces back, they suddenly have either a great trading chit, or a solid DH to help fuel an unlikely run at contention.
Of course, there's one last potential twist here. With the Yankees looking old and mortal, the Tigers and Indians scuffling, and the AL playoff picture wide open, this was the year the Blue Jays could seriously think about sneaking in. Their pitching - Burnett in a contract year, Halladay steady as always, and good young arms backing them up - is playoff-caliber. Their offense, on the other hand...not so much. And if at the deadline, the Jays are short one bat and Thomas is mashing in Oakland, that may be what finally puts a stake through the heart of the J.P. Ricciardi regime.

Yet Another Reason to Hate NFL Pre-Draft Coverage

From TSN's draft preview of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

1st paragraph: "They have an abundance of quarterbacks, so there's a good chance they'll dangle one as trade bait."

2nd paragraph: "The Bucs don't need another quarterback but may take one anyway."

Draft pick list: "Round 2: QB Joe Flacco, Delaware"

Also, within the bulk of the writeup, TSN suggests that the Bucs will be looking at:
Oklahoma WR Malcolm Kelly
Michigan State WR Devin Thomas
South Florida CB Mike Jenkins
Oregon RB Jonathan Stewart
Central Florida RB Kevin Smith

None of those guys show up in the mock draft listings below.

In other words, "They won't take a QB. Or they might. Or they will. And they'll probably draft some guys who played college football."

*sigh*

Mel Kiper Jr. what hast thou wrought?

Quick Hits

Isaiah Thomas fired as coach of Knicks - Surprising at least three members of the Thomas family, and absolutely no one else. Now, if Donnie Walsh really wants to make this perfect, he re-hires Larry Brown, who agrees to work for league minimum (work with me on this, it's a fantasy sequence here) and takes the Knicks to the playoffs.

Philly back in the swing of things - A game against the Mets is decided when the ump misses the call on a tag on Jose Reyes at the plate. A game against the Cavaliers is decided when the refs nail the Sixers with a phantom call with 0.2 seconds left. And the first game of the Flyers-Caps series is decided on a goal that's scored after on the Flyers goes down with a condition best described as "every man reading this just clenched in sympathy". It's good to see the universe is in midseason form.

NFL announces next year's schedule - ESPN tries very hard to convince people that this is important and newsworthy, devoting endless hours of radio time to the implications thereof. Not mentioned is that it is, after all, a schedule. You know, that thing you lose twice during the first two days of the conference and have an Outlook calendar to remind you of? Word is that next year ESPN is going to broadcast two days of the repainting of the NFL league offices, and that Mel Kiper Jr's going to offer up a week's worth of analysis of the color choices.

NFL draft next week - And the buzz is strangely low, compared to the last few years. Either the relentless campaign by various sportswriting types to tear down this year's draft class, or Kiper's Kool-Aid isn't quite working anymore.

Matt Ryan, QB, Boston College - He's a franchise quarterback. He's going to go #3. No, wait, he's going to go #8. No, wait, he might slide. No, the Ravens will trade up to get him. No, wait...look. Ryan's a good quarterback, and as a BC alum, I think it's great that there's finally discussion of a BC player as a draft prospect who isn't a 346-pound pulling guard from Needham, Mass. But he was good, not great, in an emphatically weak ACC last year, he threw clunkers in the Eagles' two biggest games (5 INTs in two losses to inferior squads Florida State and Maryland) and as much as I enjoyed watching the guy in the burgundy and gold, I'm not entirely certain he's going to dominate at the next level. Here's hoping I'm proved wrong.

Royals in First Place! - Look at Brian Bannister and squint real hard and you may see Mark Gubicza. Wait, is that a good thing?

On Behalf of Maury Brown...

...and the families of children afflicted with autism everywhere, I humbly offer you this.

Interview, Part Deux

Five for Writing with Will Carroll is up over at Snowbird Gothic. Check it out!

Quick Hits

Former Vikings DE Carl Eller goes nuts on cops after a police stop for DUI - Apparently Eller laid out a couple of cops after being tased, to which I can say I only hope Officers Staubach and Jaworski are all right.

Tulsa newspaper breaks the story Monday that Oklahoma State is preparing an offer for Kansas coach Bill Self, who happens to have a game to coach that night - more proof that T. Boone Pickens can buy everything except class, and maybe timing. At least wait until the day after the championship game to go stalking one of the coaches involved. Otherwise, people might get the crazy idea that college athletics were about money.

Rays put OF Cliff Floyd on DL - Is there anyone out there surprised by this? Anyone?

Olympic torch extinguished in France, diverted in San Francisco as protestors decry Chinese foreign policy - Residents of Darfur and Tibet are, by all accounts, unimpressed. Also, kind of busy.

Penn State football player kicked off team for threatening fellow student with a knife - At which point JoePa took the offending player out and replaced him with someone who'd threaten fellow students with something old-fashioned and proven, like a flint axe or an atlatl.

NHL playoffs begin - And the four teams that didn't make the cut are the only ones who can figure out what channel they're being broadcast on.

Red Sox get championship rings in moving ceremony at Fenway Park - Five minutes later Bill James was using statistical analysis to compare them to the Yankee rings of the late 90s, Theo Epstein had traded his to Florida for a couple of 2003 rings and a 1997 setting to be named later, and Sully from Saugus had called in to WEEI to say that the rings freakin' sucked.

San Francisco Giants look to be historically bad - Four words: Bengie Molina, cleanup hitter. Four more words: Missing Barry, ain't ya?

NFL draft approaches - On the bright side, it will keep Mel Kiper Jr. from talking about baseball for a little while.

UCLA denies reports that two basketball players are going pro - Left unchallenged is the assertion that Kevin Love looks like a really tall version of Justin Timberlake. Or maybe Kevin Federline.

UNC deals with fallout of Final Four loss - Chapel Hill is in shock and denial. Meanwhile, other ACC coaches propose new rule whereby league refs are actually allowed to call fouls on Duke and Carolina players, the better to prepare them for the occasional non-league road game. Very occasional.

Royals crush Yankees - File this one under "it's April".

Final Foredom

I'm glad this was the Greatest Final Four EVAR, with all four #1 seeds advancing. That certainly made for competitive semifinal games, didn't it?

ESPN's fill-in guy for Doug Gottlieb spent a lot of time talking about how these were the matchups we were rooting for, that there were no stories in Xavier or Davidson or Western Kentucky possibly making it to the Final Four. How no casual fans would tune in to see anyone but the big names, the big teams, the big seeds.

Of course, finding the compelling story is what a sports journalist is supposed to do. Davidson? Stephen Curry, a brutal early season schedule and an undefeated conference schedule - nope, no story there. Xavier adamantly refusing to be called "mid-major" (and incidentally, don't look now but a C-USA team is the favorite in the championship game. Maybe not having a BCS football team doesn't affect your basketball after all.) Western Kentucky moving on when the Wildcats didn't? All of these were great stories, or could have been. But when the people who are responsible for finding and promoting those hooks instead sandbag them, well, it's no wonder that ratings are down. It's not because of the upsets, fellas. It's because you keep on telling the viewers that unless it's the biggest names, it's not worth watching.

Unpopular Moves That Teams Should Make - Part II

Chicago Cubs
Stop messing around with Matt Murton
Right now, Murton is possibly the Cubs' best trade asset. Their top prospects, such as Veal and Patterson, are suspect, their pitching really isn't deep enough to trade from, and their glut of interchangeable middle infielders would be appealing only to the Pirates, who like to stockpile that sort of thing. Murton's a serviceable outfielder who'd hit sixth for a lot of clubs, and fourth for the Giants. Instead of letting him rot on the bench, let him play and build up some value. Then Jim Hendry can banish him into the outer darkness for whatever reason he sees fit, and actually get some return back in the process. It's foolish - right now the Cubs are devaluing an asset, hurting their ability to improve, and costing Murton the best years of his career for no reason that anyone can fathom.

Cincinnati Reds
Deal Homer Bailey
Will Carroll called it last year. Uber-phenom Bailey might not be all that, even if most prospect mavens are still high on him. At a time when young, cheap pitching is the most valuable commodity on the trade market, Bailey would fetch a princely sum in return. Meanwhile, the Reds could still trot out a front three of Harang, Arroyo and Cueto, which ain't half bad. Right now, Bailey's a huge chip, one that seems likely to diminish in value in time, and perhaps suddenly. Hanging onto him too long might be a crucial mistake for a franchise that has plenty of needs.

Houston Astros
Blow it up and start over
There's nothing in the farm system. The rotation is Roy Oswalt and the cast of America's Got Talent. Two of the three best position players are old, slow, and tending towards what the scientists call a "gherkin-like" body shape. They may be able to squeeze one more run at contention out of this bunch, but that's about it, and in a division where the Cubs, Brewers and Reds are improving markedly, the Pirates have sharp new management, and the Cardinals have already started their rebuilding, one last Montana-as-a-Chief-style charge for glory may cause years of damage on the back end.
So blow it up. Trade Berkman for prospects. Trade Lee for prospects. Flip Tejada if you can. Refill a farm system completely devoid of arms in order to take advantage of Pence and Towles' prime years. And for God's sake, stop flipping every half-usable arm you've got in order to do a Giants-like "one more year" lunge.
You see how it's turning out for them, yes?

Milwaukee Brewers
Stop building a team around Ben Sheets
He's not going to be healthy. He's just not. Every year, the Brewers pin their hopes on what a healthy Ben Sheets can do, which is exactly like Nepal dreaming of what a yeti could do for their Olympic weightlifting team.
Instead, construct the roster - and the rotation - to maximize Sheets' occasional contributions. Leverage the depth in the rotation to coddle Sheets to make sure he makes as many starts as possible, and don't get caught flat-footed every year when he strains his medial collateral frammistat in the sixth start of the season.

Pittsburgh Pirates
Get value for vets
The one thing that Dave Little field did well as GM was stockpiling flippable veterans that could, in theory, be traded for useful prospects at the trade deadline. Of course, then he forgot to trade them.
Right now, the Pirates are loaded with slightly-above-average players - Wilson, LaRoche, Sanchez and more. Most of them had off years last year, diminishing their trade value. Most of them really don't have that much of a prime left, and are signed to affordable contracts. That makes them trade bait as soon as they go on a hot streak. If the team's willing to live with a few months of the Nyjer Morgans and Brian Bixlers of the world, they could move a lot of useful pieces. Think the Yankees couldn't use Adam LaRoche? Think they'll revisit that right around the time Jason Giambi's annual mystery illness pops up? I do.


St. Louis Cardinals
End the Tony LaRussa era
He drives off big players. He questions players when they are obviously injured. He got nailed for a DUI while managing a team that now has a drunk driving death on his resume. He oversaw the steroid-laden Bash Brothers era in Oakland, and his denials of any knowledge of wrongdoing sound a little weaker each time around.
So now's the time for Tony to step down gracefully. Let someone else do the messy rebuilding this franchise needs to do, let someone else suffer through the seasons until the Colby Rasmuses of the world are ready to win some games in St. Louis again. Take the heat off the franchise, save the remainder of the legacy, and let Cardinals fans move on.