Bored

Essentially you're on the right track. Only thing is a player has to have a certain amount of service time to become arbitration eligible, I think four years but I've always been a little fuzzy on arbitration eligible status. The first few years a player is in the Majors he's pretty much at the mercy of his team when it comes to his contract. Although that's not to say a young player can't make big bucks as most teams won't completely lowball their young superstar realizing that they'd pretty much kill their chances of signing him to a long term deal and him leaving the second he becomes a free agent.

Soriano actually wasn't under contract for the upcoming season as he's signed a series of one-year contracts since being in the Majors. Since he's not eligible for free agency yet but he has accrued enough service time to be arbitration eligible and really cash in, not that he wasn't at $7.5 million last year. I wish they'd televise arbitration hearings as it's basically teams talking about how shitty their own player is for a of couple of hours and then they'll have to pretend like it never happened afterwards. Thanks for the plug, as I noted in my entry now current manager Dusty Baker made the final out of that game.

Now it's non-stories like this that makes you want the damn season to start already. http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-y...ov=ap&type=lgns Baseball Jesus talks so it makes ESPN and Yahoo's front page.

Here's hoping NBC gets baseball back as I'd love to hear Al do baseball again. FOX's contract expires after this season.

I didn't even name my keepers and now I don't even remember who was on my team.

Bettis has 37 yards rushing. Not even the NFL would be so overly sentimental to give him the award.

Unless they give it to Parker (he's not in the game) and he breaks another big one, Ward is the MVP.

What the hell, I'll pour fule on the conspiracy fire (I actually don't care, kinda pulling for Seattle but doesn't really effect me either way)...from December 4th: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2247517

Asuming the Steelers win, Roethlisberger has probably had the worst game ever by a winning quarterback in a Super Bowl.

Now Hines Ward becomes the MVP favorite. 5 catches, 123 yards.

He just broke Marcus Allen's record for the longest Super Bowl run ever by one yard.

Seriously if your a Seahawks fan you have to be pulling all of your hair out after that first half. They've dominated the Steelers and they have a four point deficit to show for it.

Now that I think of it I'm surprised they didn't have Jerry Rice do it so ABC could get cross promotion for Dancing with the Stars.

TOM BRADY? Are they fucking kidding me? Seriously you have 90% of Super Bowl MVPs in the stadium and they choose an active player to do the coin toss?

What do you have against team introductions? Do we really need to stretch the pre-game anymore? Yes we do or just eliminate the pregame musical performance that didn't use to exsist. The individual player introductions were a cool little Super Bowl tradition. NFC gets their offense introduced, the AFC gets their defense introduced. Personally it brought a little extra excitement to the game right before the kick off. And the team introductions are just lame, self serving crap. Oooo we're a team, we don't think of ourselves. Bullshit.

Oh boy "team" introductions. They're never going to do player introductions ever again. Fuck you Patriots. Poor Seahawks, this is a Steelers home game.

Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw not there. Interesting.

So are we going to get individual player introductions this year or that bullshit "team" introductions that the Patriots started doing in recent years?

Silly me for tuning into the Super Bowl pregame as they're talking about the Iran Hostage Crisis and it's very loose connection to Super Bowl XV to just give Chris Berman an excuse to do his trademark "this is a very important story" hushed toned voice.

Moon getting in on the first ballot is definently a surprise as quarterbacks with as little postseason success as Moon had typically aren't locks to get in. Quarterbacks as we all know are unfairly rated too much on their success in postseason and Moon never played on a team that got past the divisional playoffs, not that was necessarily all his fault.

2006 NFL Hall of Fame Inductees Reggie White Troy Aikman Warren Moon Harry Carson (good he can stop whining) John Madden Rayfield Wright

Given Meltzer's comments and that Booker T still owes Orton favor, some how Orton will get a match against Rey at No Way Out for the WM title shot and Booker will interfere to cost Rey the match to repay Orton. Now how they'll come up with an angle where Rey would be stupid enough to put his title shot on the line against Orton I'm not sure.

Unless there is some sort of angle where the winner of the Rumble will get involved with one of title matches tonight, this is incredidbly stupid to hold the Rumble now.

NFL Network will televise eight regular season games next year including a third Thanksgiving game which will probably be a rotating game. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2309549

Meh, I wasn't totally sold on the guy as he's not really shown any signs he'll get BB/9 down to a decent ratio. He was probably a strong candidate to be dealt at some point this year as there's no spot for him on the big club and the emergence Huston Street has made him expendible to a certain extent. Now this revelation though will definently hurt his potential trade value.