MLBeat

If you're curious to gauge the baseball-fan populace's level of anticipation for the 2005 season, look no further than the practice draft rooms at ESPN's fantasy baseball section. These mock live drafts are mere outlines of the real thing; they only last seven rounds and your positional flexibility is low, meaning that if you take Teixeira in Round 2 then you can't take any more corner infielders, even if you want to steal Daryle Ward in Round 5 just to get a rise from the crowd. In the final round everyone scrambles for a catcher because it's the only unfilled position, meaning the guy with the last pick ends up with A.J. Pierzynski or Paul Lo Duca.

And yet these rooms are constantly filled, with roto-heads and general enthusiasts who can't wait a moment longer for things to get rolling. (Naturally I only know this because I'm one of the top five or ten most offending parties. Full disclosure as always in the MLBeat house.) But there's still 5-6 weeks left to whittle away, so we have to put up with the usual STOBS articles (that would be Spring Training Optimism BS, to coin a new term) that serve no purpose other than to attempt to stir up interest in semi-fans who haven't really been paying attention and thus don't know if their team really has a chance this year.

It is out of a desperate need for distraction from these wimpy fluff pieces that I hereby declare: Thank God for Steroids.

I'm not even kidding. Steroid use is something else to talk about, it's interesting, and there are any number of thoughtful sides to take on the issue. Some folks think steroid use has marred the game and its records (I don't), some folks think MLB's cleanup attempts are insufficient thus far (I don't), and some folks even think Barry Bonds should decline to pursue Aaron's home run record (I don't, and this is the best reason why). Some of us even found ourselves sympathizing with Bonds when he delivered his now-infamous press conference this week. I did, except for this one little digression from his otherwise cogent defense to the sports media:

All of you guys have lied. Should you have an asterisk behind your name? ... Yeah, I lied to my parents when I was growing up. Lied to my friends. Have I lied about baseball? Yeah, I told a couple of stories that I hit a couple of balls places that I really didn't.

Clearly Bonds was getting carried away with himself, as he is wont to do in these situations. The analogy is deeply flawed. None of these reporters are arguably the best ever to pick up a pen or laptop; there is a difference between fibbing about a homer you hit and lying to a grand jury (or a ravenous sports press for that matter); and if members of the press corps have lied in print then they deserve fates worse than asterisk-ing. Bonds was asking for it here - I felt myself actually cringing while watching him say it. He seems to get reamed by the press at least once every year, and this year we were getting an early start.

Which means it simply blows my mind to read Gwen Knapp's column today in the SF Chronicle. She admits to lying about Bonds and steroids! This is ballsy because 1) sportswriters have an understandable bias against Bonds on account of he treats them like feces, 2) Gwen has nothing to lose by holding the party line and playing sound defense of her sound reputation, or by even refusing to acknowledge the accusation at all, and 3) she shifts the focus to Mark McGwire, and properly so since his (and Sosa's) home-run chase attracted much more unadulterated fanfare while being, in retrospect, more suspicious. I'll say it here and now: the MLBeat shall duly recognize all sports columns that are ballsy enough to attract the attention of our editor, who also happens to be our writer, who also happens to make the endless business decisions to boot.

Unfortunately the column is not without a few traps. Things start to fall apart around here:

I have lied about Bonds, too, but not in the way he meant when he went after the media at his spring-training debut on Tuesday. The first time I saw him in 2001, I said to myself: "He's juiced.'' I didn't say it in this column because, again, I didn't have proof. But I was sure of it.

I have committed several more lies of omission since Bonds was implicated in the BALCO case a year and a half ago. I covered his 700th home run and never once mentioned that maybe, just maybe, he didn't reach the milestone naturally. I had plenty of excuses -- a brutal deadline, a reluctance to draw a cloud over the celebration, an inability to introduce such an important topic without letting it become the entire story. It was cowardice as much as anything, but it was a lie, too.

Actually, it's wasn't a lie. If you choose not to go to the public with information you don't have on a scandal that may or not exist, then you're not lying, you're simply being a journalist. Many journalists do lie by omission - enough in recent years to justify the WMD analogy a few paragraphs later - but Gwen wasn't lying here, she was just suppressing her own personal opinion. That may be tantamount to dishonesty for an opinion columnist, but I still think it's a big difference.

So we're left with the feeling that she's bending over backwards to defend Bonds here, in the face of a thousand reasons to let go of the handle, open the drawbridge, and let in the wolves.

It appears that Ugueth Urbina's mother has finally been rescued. I was wondering when ESPN would come around to the idea that this saga is worthy of an above-the-fold headline. How many kidnappings do you get to cover in the sports world? If I ran a sports section I would have devoted at least half a page to this...maybe a full page on a slow day. Even if I wasn't based in Detroit. C'mon guys, grow a sense of spectacle here.

The kidnapping, which happened on September 1 of last year, was accompanied by a $15 million ransom, which had dwindled to $3 million by last month. Talk about a tough racket: if you know Urbina (or, possibly, the Player's Association) can pay $15 mil, then why let them haggle you down like that? Clearly I need to brush up on my kidnapping knowledge.

This sentence from the above story caught my attention: "Urbina had left the club in September to go to Venezuela, and the Tigers had been working with Major League Baseball and its Venezuelan contacts to assist the pitcher." Aside from any personal support from the MLBPA to Urbina, how exactly would MLB work with him in a kidnapping situation? Send Billy Beane to Venezuela to negotiate?

The more I think about this, the more I think MLB probably tried a little too hard to be included in that sentence for the sake of a little positive PR. Every little bit helps these days, I suppose.

There are two schools of thought on fantasy baseball: it's either a curse on the game or a wondrous supplement to fandom. The former opinion used to be predominant, but truth be told I can't scrounge up anyone anymore who still feels that way. I imagine the only remaining fantasy-sports haters would be people over fifty, people without computers, and women...three demographics I rarely encounter these days.

So I guess that means there's only one remaining school of thought on the subject. FLB's sheer addictiveness has become the overriding theme; even those who didn't like the idea of it in the beginning now have their own array of teams, cheat sheets, stats services, and old editions of Baseball Prospectus stacked in the closet. A guy who pooh-poohs fantasy sports is simply one who hasn't been invited to the party yet. Like it or not, the train left the station years ago and is now coming back around to pick up another load of passengers.

Fantasy baseball is huge. I probably don't have to tell you that, but what's interesting is that MLB has finally hitched its reins on the wagon. I'm surprised this didn't happen five years ago, just as I'm surprised that Carlos Beltran doesn't have a clause in his contract that awards him a bonus for finishing in the top five on ESPN's Player Rater.

(Obviously the madness isn't limited to baseball either. I might as well point out that, in the midst of composing this post, I am checking out the NBA scoreboard for updates on games that won't even end for another hour or two, and it ain't because of a deep appreciation of the Atlantic Division race, it's to check up on Shane Battier's field-goal percentage and blocked-shot totals. Such is the drudgery of the sporting life in February; this will get much worse when the real fantasy season begins in a couple months.)

What we have on our hands is a booming sports industry for the Internet Age: ethereal, 'out there,' difficult to describe to an outsider, but still enormous. Celebrities have their roto teams, which leads to stories in prominent sports publications about celebrities' roto teams, which leads us directly to today's lesson, a truism even if celebrities are involved:

Stories about other people's fantasy teams are intensely boring.

This cannot be exaggerated. They are a social anathema, designed to relieve listeners of any obligation to continue listening. Want to set a captive audience free? Tell them how you rose to the top of your 12-team 5x5 league last summer, never to look back, when you declined to trade Johan Santana for Jose Vidro because you knew Santana was about to pull of a streak of Koufaxian dominance that would give you the lead in ERA, K, WHIP, and wins. By the time you reach the "declined to trade" part of that sentence, any bystander who hasn't already wandered off to the bathroom or to the fridge for another beer was already tuning you out to begin with and doesn't realize you've changed the subject to fantasy baseball.

This means fantasy victories are private victories, for the benefit of you only, recognizable only to the foes you bested, not counting the ones who quit checking their teams in late May. I pulled off the season of my life in 2004: prepared extensively, aced the draft (snagging Santana in the sixth round), made killer in-season trades, and won my 12-team roto league by thirty points, a lead I had established firmly by June. The payoff in the end was that I could check the league standings the day after the season ended, where my team name was now adorned with the accompanying phrase "League Champion." The owners in my league were more personable than most, so I got a couple congratulatory notes too. But that was it. No celebratory parade, no PS2 in the mail, no gift certificates to Amazon or the local hair salon. Just a peculiar pride I couldn't share with, or even properly describe to, anyone else.

I will never top that performance, no matter how hard I try, and that's exactly the problem. With all the time and concentration I put into my team last year, I could easily have landed a better job, or published a novel of some kind. But here I sit, in mid-February, hardly able to contain myself because FLB goes on sale tomorrow. And we have passed the point where I might consider myself peculiar for feeling this way. There's no going back, gentlemen.

This blog exists because nobody should ever have to wake up on a Sunday morning with an empty schedule and realize he hasn't written about baseball in over three years. Any questions?

Most interesting news item of a slow baseball day in February: the Lakers-Cavaliers game, dominated by Lebron and the Cavs in the game that Kobe chose to be his first back on the floor after a painful ankle injury several weeks ago.

Why is this a baseball item? Because included in the footnotes to the AP game recap was this little nugget: "Always in the middle of controversy, Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley wore a Bryant No. 8 jersey and at one point taunted the Cleveland crowd from his seat."

Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta has gone on record defending Bradley time after time, despite one "off-the-field incident" after another that keeps sending sportswriters back to the question of his "attitude problems" and "character." He's gone on record as saying he'd take a team of nine Milton Bradleys if he could, and the folks over at BP tend to agree.

I use the quotes because those phrases get used so often that they lose all meaning and after awhile make me wonder if the sportswriter in question has an ulterior motive of some sort. Bradley has the unfortunate distinction of seeing his name come up on the wire alongside the word "incident" more often than most. The last installment involved driving away from a speeding ticket after refusing to sign it, which is probably never a good idea but then again the article doesn't include any possible mitigating factors either (I'll leave you to speculate). But before that was the bottle-slamming incident - understandable to me, as a person who hates getting pegged with objects by an onlooking crowd - which was followed by the dreaded insult-the-reporter story. Who hasn't wanted to insult a reporter, especially a sports reporter, from time to time?

But after this Cleveland-crowd-taunting episode I'm more convinced of Bradley's flawed character than ever before. I mean, who wears a Kobe Bryant jersey in public anymore? C'mon.