MLBeat

The anticipation has set in and quickly melted down to frustration as we all come to realize just how overrated spring training can be. Today the top baseball story in the Bay Area was the burning question of where Erubiel Durazo will bat in the order, thus ignoring the relative unimportance of batting order for the sake of something to write about spring training. No spring training game has ever mattered, and the only relevant and meaningful spring training stories have been about someone's torn labrum or busted knee. We still have to wait another month for baseball to start, as far as I'm concerned.

So today the top baseball topic comes from a football story: the trade of Randy Moss to the Raiders. His welcome-to-Oakland press conference merited a sizable chunk of the Chronicle's front sports page, attention usually reserved for a home-team playoff victory, or maybe a Jose Canseco assassination. Accenting the story is this angle: Randy Moss is a wide receiver with such incredible potential that owner Red McCombs considered firing the head coach just to light a fire under him.

Not often do we hear someone come out and say it so bluntly. Coaches are nominally supposed to have the full backing of their employers, right up to the minute they get fired. Normally overt signs of weakness such as this would indicate serious lame-duck status. But we know this is really a common practice in all the major team sports. The article even mentions the frequency with which teams keep superstar players while firing coaches , in addition to this gem of a line:

Moss leaves Minnesota with every major receiving record for a player in his first seven seasons in the league.

Hard to top that. Favoring the star doesn't always work (Kobe's Lakers, Iverson's Sixers, Lindros' Flyers...it goes on), but it makes sense to anyone who saw the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks win the World Series on the strength of two ace pitchers whose utter dominance was able to overcome the bumbling in-game strategery of their manager.

The burning question we've produced: which current MLB teams are run by players?

Such a player would have to be a) playing really well, because people listen to a pitcher with a 2.10 ERA; b) charismatic enough to be the acknowledged team leader and assertive enough to be outspoken when necessary, thus eliminating from consideration the soft-spoken likes of Carlos Beltran and Greg Maddux; and c) on a team without a dominant establishment in place, such as Joe Torre or Bobby Cox.

Bonds. If you were the GM with Barry Bonds on your team, Objective A would have to be to keep Barry happy at all times.

Pedro. Rookie manager, marquee offseason acquisition, success-starved team, shiny new World Series ring. Check, check, check, and check. All he needs now is to back it up on the mound for a few months, at which point he could probably get Ricky Martin hired as manager if he wanted.

Sosa. Um, strike this one.

Jose Vidro. Not really, but he should get some special recognition here. For the worst six-year-span in any franchise's history, he was the glue on the Expos, a one consistently All-Star caliber player who stuck it out through all the uncertainty, vagueness, and appalling lack of direction, even going so far as to accept a healthy contract extension from Omar Minaya in the midst of all the swirling contraction talks. (Of course Vladimir was really the glue for awhile, but he was predictable enough to bide his time until free agency and head for the highest bidder.) Without Vidro's unflailing loyalty, the Expos/Nationals franchise would have had no personality or continuity whatsoever. They should allow him one free handpicked managerial hire as compensation since the team is going nowhere in the standings anyway.

A-Rod If He Was Still in Texas. Yes.

This brings up one final (for now) point, which is that it's much more common for a star player to demand to be traded to a contender as a way of escaping his manager or team. It takes a special kind of enmity to decide that your team is good enough to win it all as presently composed, now all you need to do is influence the front office to replace the manager. Call it the Bowa Exception.