The Man in Blak

Wrong Florida team. Contract the Devil Rays, instead of the team that has two World Series championships and longer tenure in the league. That way, you kill off two markets with intra-league competition (Florida and Baltimore/DC).

It's funny - the fans are very loyal to the team itself, but there's a very vocal subset of the fans that absolutely despises the Jocketty/LaRussa regime and openly wishes for Whitey Herzog to instigate a coup d'etat for the whole organization.

Even though Renteria was the big fish in the small pond in the NL, he's still a great shortstop that's competent (not necessarily strong) in a lot of different areas. He plays good defense, has decent speed, hits the ball fairly well...he's just a very well-rounded player. That being said, he's a much better fit for the Red Sox. He'd be hitting at the top of the Cardinals, where his agent already said he wasn't comfortable. In Boston, he'll probably hit around sixth or seventh and earn about $8 million of the $10 million he'll get from Boston this year.

When you consider the Diamondbacks' outrageous demands for Johnson in trade, nobody really has a lot of trade bait. There are still pitchers out there (Clement, Perez) to be had and, given the money that we get by clearing Morris's old contract, along with Matheny and Renteria, off of the books, we really should be able to snag one of them if we pursue them.

Actually, I think the Cardinals' over-pursuit of a "ace" in this market has done a lot of damage to their offseason so far. Until the winter meetings concluded, they spent most of the offseason in trade negotiations for Randy Johnson and Tim Hudson, even though they really had no trade material for either team. I think those talks really killed them with Renteria, who Jocketty really lowballed until the very end, for some bizarre reason (perhaps to clear up salary room for Johnson). Plus, by spinning their wheels so intently on those targets, the once-thick market for shortstops has now basically come down to Orlando Cabrera (or maybe even Barry Larkin), which isn't exactly comforting.

Funniest thing happened today. I heard a New England Patriots fan bitch about how the media hype for Ben Roethlisberger had spiralled out of control. With a straight face. Oh, and if Martz didn't get fired for coaching himself out of the Super Bowl and single-handedly grounding the team in mediocrity after the first two years of his tenure, then why would they fire him for said mediocrity now?

*BUZZ* Wrong. Minnesota won the conference Then why did the Lakers play the Pistons in the NBA Finals?

Here's an...interesting article on the new possibility that could be revived as a part of this: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=1947231

Here's a great quote for Kobe: "The only consistent feature in all of your dissatisfying relationships is you."

Hardee's is considerably underrated. And I ate at a Whataburger when I was eight, I think. My aunt still has the collectible glass and that's about all I remember.

You need to get laid. I would wager that 20% of sports fans in America don't even realize that the NHL is on strike right now. To wax melodramatic about how hockey is lost in America because of the strike would be insinuating that America ever really had hockey in the first place. When the labor agreement gets settled and they play next year, there will be a collective shrug in the U.S. and then everybody who watched hockey before will watch again. It'll be like waking up from a long nap for the majority of the American "fanbase."

Here's a couple of fixes I found: http://www.computing.net/security/wwwboard/forum/14438.html http://forums.designtechnica.com/showthrea...p?threadid=5986

I'll tell her while we're shopping for the baby.

Then the monopoly argument is made more valid.

Somehow, despite having nearly a thousand relaunches in the last decade, Marvel fans are still conditioned to buy any big #1 issue. Let's see how the series does, sales-wise, for the entire 2005 calendar year.

It's funny how everybody feels like you can't win without "clubhouse chemistry", even though there have been championship teams that have hated each other and tons of "happy" teams that never even sniffed the playoffs. Well, having Pettitte would have meant that the Yankees had no need to trade for either Brown or Vasquez, both of whom contributed to the Yankees' playoff berth. No matter how much the Yankee fandom hates both of those players, you can't realistically argue that it would be better to have a handful of starts in the regular season from Pettitte than the seasons that Brown and Vasquez turned in. Explain to me how Mussina and Sheffield (especially Sheffield) have earned their "stripes", even though they were free agents just like Giambi and Matsui. All of the players that you listed were responsible, with the rest of the team, for the ALCS collapse. What excuses Jeter from hitting .200 with a .233 slugging percentage in the Championship, but damns A-Rod for having an .894 OPS with two homers, eight runs scored, and five RBIs?

It wouldn't hold up in court, but the only argument you could really make is that this agreement mutes competition and stifles the sports gaming industry because of the exclusivity of the NFL license. This isn't a situation where you can make a different game with similar gameplay elements and attempt to build up a new intellectual property. Though football games are merely a subgenre in video gaming, the NFL license represents the whole of professional football, which serves as the entire basis for that subgenre. To make a game based on an alternative "intellectual property" - in this case, a fictional football league - would be virtually impossible, as such a company would not only be competing with Electronic Arts, but the NFL as well. In a sense, you'd have to prove that the NFL was not an intellectual property, which would involve going down the painful road of defining how NFL football is different from college football and Arena Football and arguing whether those differences are valid enough to consider each of them as separate sports (and, thus, rendering the EA's exclusive hold on the NFL license as a monopoly on a particular sport). As I said, it'd never hold water in a court room. Ultimately, I think ESPN should pull a counter-strike and get an exclusive license from the NFLPA, if they can. Such an agreement is not unheard of in the industry (example: Ken Griffey Jr.'s baseball game for the SNES). After all, what good are the NFL image and the team licenses going to be if you have to stock the teams with fictional players?

I like how the Brewers are looking at the market, which is drowning in overpriced talents, and moving to improve their team through some deals that are looking pretty good. The talent that they gave up in this deal seemed to have good odds on topping out (Podsednik, Vizcaino) or even regressing (Kolb) and they got a great return for it. Carlos Lee is probably one of the five most underrated players in the league right now.

Initial reports are saying that the Brewers/White Sox deal is: Chicago White Sox get: CF Scott Podsednik RP Luis Vizcaino PTBNL Milwaukee Brewers get: OF Carlos Lee

MLB.com radio is covering a press conference in 10 minutes between the Brewers and White Sox - I'm guessing maybe the Podsednik/Carlos Lee rumblings are true?

I'm not trusting anything until I see a press conference.

*comes in for the save* Indeed. Happy belated birthday, d00d.

With Jim Bowden in charge of the Nationals, nobody is untradeable. And, as far as the Cubs' outfield sans Sosa, they could always resign Ben Grieve on the cheap for a temporary fill-in. The guy's 28 and - most importantly - he gets on base (his line last year: .260/.361/.424).

He's still a tremendous writer, no doubt about it, but he's starting to reach Summerall-levels of "TV senility."

Yeah, it's hard to see the influence whenever you watch the decrepit husk of Peter Gammons work on Baseball Tonight now but, ten years ago, Peter Gammons and his Diamond Notes were probably the best run of sports journalism that you'd see on TV.