MLBeat

No, we haven't died yet. We just decided there's no better time than March to duck out for a quick Mozambique getaway to refuel for a long and glorious MLB season. (Actually there were many better times and no Mozambique, but what's done is done.) The day when we can quit our nine-to-five jobs and focus on MLBeat full time, steadily approaching as it may be, has not yet arrived. Until then, a natural lull in the postings is often a possibility as the dreaded "life events" warrant. Such are the quirky charms of the amateur sports blogosphere.

Fear not though, for on tap are such heavily anticipated items as a recap of the much-ballyhooed World Baseball Classic, an update on the ongoing Cheater Chronicles, and of course our full-on 2006 Preview, but in the meantime we owe it to you to at least gloss over some of the best of March's happenings:

The Soriano flap. This has actually worked out well as possible for the average fan. It's been months since Nationals GM Jim Bowden, in a classic case of How Not To, traded for Soriano to man the outfield. Right away Soriano complained, but the rest of the winter was apparently a game of chicken: neither side budged, and Soriano apparently didn't even bother learning how to play his potential new position, judging by his spring training mishaps. Soriano has never had any leverage in this saga, but that doesn't make Bowden any smarter for bringing him on board. But highlight-addicted fans will surely enjoy the escapades of a man primed to make the outfield look much harder than Ryan Klesko or Lonnie "Skates" Smith ever did.

The annual onset of Mets pessimism is late in coming. Just pointing out that the pundits are more hopeful for the Mets than any year since the 20th century, as much a function of the Braves' numerous question marks as anything else. But let's stay prepared for the inevitable April losing streak -- perhaps coinciding with their early jaunt out here to Telephone Park -- and remain confident that by July the only remaining mystery will be how long until Philly blows it again.

Steroids. Chances are you've heard about this suddenly urgent issue. It's much ado about...well, not nothing, but at this point it's unclear what exactly. We all know Barry Bonds has been established as a juicer, certainly, but at this point much of the media focus seems to be on the prevalence of steroids amongst the witches yet to be hunted in the league, mixed in with a certain degree of resignation because Bonds still appears to be the only man who can stop himself from playing this year. Meanwhile, a great debate is stirring up as a Bud Selig investigation (a phrase which ranks up there with "diet bottled water" in terms of potency) gets underway, spurred by the hesitance of major sponsors like Pepsi to underwrite any hypothetical Aaron-surpassing celebrations. But Bonds plans to play, and his 2.000 spring OPS leaves little doubt as to his expected effectiveness when he does take the field. Frankly, if Game of Shadows is to be believed (which it is), and if Bonds has never tested positive for anything more than general assholery (which he hasn't), then there's not much reason to think he'll be off the "shit" this year, despite all the self-righteous concern swirling about him.

Bronson Arroyo thrown under the bus. Poor bastard had it all: rock band idol status, a spot in Boston's rotation, the coveted status of being one of the fewer and fewer remaining 2004 postseason heroes, a fresh contract extension, a team that looked like it was really going to need him in '06, plus...well, I guess those cornrows were once appealing to somebody out there. Now, despite recent asurances of a future in Boston, he's been banished to Flyball Pitcher's Hell along with Eric Milton and Co.

I sign up for five fantasy leagues. Thus shattering my previous single-season best of three. Look, you don't understand, okay? I don't have a problem. There's no problem. You're the one with the problem. Shut up! I hate this family! ::Runs upstairs crying::

Ankiel hits another bump in the road. Now there are rumors of knee trouble, but not all is lost. Apparently the Cardinals are looking for a way to push Ankiel through waivers so that, once unclaimed, he can return to the minors to start the season, and reports of a knee injury will certainly help scare teams away. I guess this is because Ankiel is out of options. Have you ever looked at the rules for options? I'm pretty sure someone is making them up as they go along.

Jimmy Rollins prepares to hit the ground running. At least until he goes 0-for-4 in the opener, thus ending his 36-game hitting streak and dissolving the suspense. Soak it in, Jimmy, while it's still there.

Retirements. Al Leiter, master of the cutter and hopefully a future broadcaster. Tuffy Rhodes, a name forever synonymous with Opening Day glory. Marquis Grissom, onetime basestealing wizard turned late-career platoon asset. And last but not least, the baseball world can finally bid adieu to Anna Benson, before she even got a chance to have a Morganna phase.

ESPN does some things right for a change. We like to rip on them, as does much of the outside commentariat. And frankly, they deserve it, for reasons too numerous to mention. But they still have some strong columnists on staff, and a couple of recent pieces in particular deserve mention. This one, by Page 2 editor David Schoenfield, bitterly bemoans the tragic fact that baseball fans still drink the competitive imbalance Kool-Aid. And this Insider-only piece by Buster Olney addresses the ongoing steroids charade with such damning vitriol that anything else we were going to say on the subject has been rendered moot.

Okay, so the full naked exposure of Barry Bonds has finally happened. Welcome, 2006 season, here's your dominating lead story before we even can get started. Great. Since everyone will now be forced to discuss steroids all year long -- again -- and since we can see no feasible way around it, we have a smattering of thoughts and predictions for the fallout:

-It bears repeating: baseball in 2006 just got a lot less fun thanks to this 8.7 earthquake of a story. It's an inevitability anytime politicians decide to involve themselves, and you can cue the self-righteous invective from John McCain in 5, 4, 3....

-This is sort of a tragedy in the ancient Greek sense, because the same thing that helped infuse Bonds with such greatness proved to be his undoing. But even sadder for baseball fans is the fact that Bonds was already a Hall of Famer before 1998, when his jealousy of Mark McGwire reportedly drove him to start using. Nobody will remember this. He was already the hitter I least wanted to see coming up in a tight situation against my team, the toughest out in the game, tougher than Ken Griffey Jr., Tony Gwynn, Albert Belle, or anyone else. But jealousy and ambition wouldn't let him be content with that. Tragedy.

-On the bright side, it's about time that Pedro Gomez started to reap dividends from his relentless shadowing of Bonds over the past--oh wait, you mean he didn't even get this story? It was a pair of SF Chronicle reporters instead? Oh.

-The most sickening aspect for me so far? That amidst all the bravery of this grand expose, Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams are either unable or unwilling to name any of the other seven NFLers and four MLBers implicated in this scandal by their apparent involvement with Greg Anderson, Victor Conte et al. Why not? What honor are we trying to protect here? Whose agents have had to go how far under the table to prevent the naming of their clients? I'm getting nauseous just thinking about it.

-Hopefully the Giants do not escape their share of blame here. Their complicity in this whole saga, up to and including their spin of Bonds as a gentler, rehabilitated personality in the midst of his home run chase, is as damning as if Peter Magowan had just injected Bonds himself. Already their 2006 season looks doomed -- not that Randy Winn and Matt Morris were going to lead them to glory anyway -- and we can expect ticket sales to take a nice precipitous drop. Everyone knew that the post-Bonds Giants were going to be a disaster area; that process may have started ahead of schedule.

-It looks like Hank Aaron will now be safe at 755 HR, which is another nice unintended consequence. Too bad though, because allowing The Cheater to set the new record would eventually set the table for Alex Rodriguez to come riding in on his white horse (a horse of no particular national affiliation). If anyone was asking the question of what it would take for A-Rod to revive his limpid image, this would have done the trick, albeit a decade later than he and Scott Boras might like.

-Bonds may be stricken from the record books -- although I'm not sure it should happen -- but nobody will ever be able to take away the TV ratings, ticket sales, World Series appearances (where Bonds' OBP was only .700), or that ungodly May 2001 series against Atlanta, when Bonds homered six times in three games. Nobody will be able to take away the feeling of seeing Bonds come to the plate and knowing, in a sport where a 60% failure rate is wildly successful, knowing that Bonds was either going to launch a homer or be walked. It was exhilirating to see, and at the same time the natural order of baseball was thrown completely out of whack. The commentariat began floating proposals for altering intentional walk rules to allow baserunners to automatically advance a base. We got to see the very fabric of the game being altered in such a way that it *had* to be unnatural. Not the sort of thing we're likely to see ever again in our lifetimes.

-Until the next cheater, that is. And there will be one, if there isn't one already, if not several dozen. Human growth hormone is still practically undetectable, as are at least ten to twelve designer drugs that you and I don't even know about yet. Try not to think about it. Hey, how about that World Baseball Classic? U-S-A! U-S-A!

As a Braves fan, Kirby Puckett attained Natural Enemy status for me in the 1991 World Series with his famous Game Six-winning homer off Charlie Liebrandt. There he stayed, his jovial face adorning a WANTED poster in my mind alongside the likes of Jim Leyritz, Ed Sprague, Eric Gregg, and every New York Yankee since 1996. So all the stuff I'd read about Puckett's infectious personality rolled right off my shoulders. Even when it was reported this afternoon that he'd passed away, I felt nothing.

Until I went here.

I've sung the praises of this particular site before, but this collection of Puckett testimonials is truly amazing, to say nothing of the shocking quickness with which they have acculumated. Now, finally, I begin to understand what all the fuss was about.

(The richness of this link doubles as a tribute to the website itself, and to the fact that one's readership is half the battle. Yeah, we should maybe try to work on that.)

That Deadspin's Will Leitch rose early this morning to take some cuts against John Rocker is impressive, inasmuch as Leitch's job is to entertain and this, well, is a damn entertaining premise.

That Leitch uses his lengthy recap of the experience to work in the question, largely unasked in today's sports media, of why Rocker remains such a vilified character because of his comments in an article that ran in Sports Illustrated seven years ago...that's impressive as well. (The answer, you ask? We need demons in the public eye to make us feel better about ourselves and our own, milder prejudices. For Exhibit B, see last night's Oscar winner. Oh, and it doesn't help that Rocker may be one of those guys who is just a little hard to like, but we digress.)

More impressive than that? If you look at the pictures, you'll notice that Leitch, an avowed St. Louis Cardinals fan, showed up in a Rick Ankiel jersey. If we weren't drooling with admiration for all things Deadspin before, suffice it to say we are now. (Envy, too, since we've always wanted one of those, or more specifically one of the batting practice t-shirts that are way more reasonably priced, and here Leitch is, parading it around like it's nothing. But we digress again.)

For kicks/archiving purposes, here's a link to what appears to be an old New York Times piece on the post-meltdown Ankiel. Our unhealthy fascination with the life of a once-talented pitcher with Steve Blass syndrome shows no signs of remission. That is all.

The message boards for ESPN Fantasy Baseball leagues are shifty, as no person is allowed to keep more than one message posted at a time. So I took it upon myself to record for posterity the text of our particular league's message board (the league is called 24-Hour Procrastination Center), as it stood at the date and time of posting. Come tomorrow morning it may well look completely different, but the overall tone is likely to be the same.

(We promise to take it easy on the fantasy baseball stories in '06. We here at MLBeat know of the potential resemblance to rambling on about one's golf game or one's NCAA tournament bracket. But we consider ourselves to be performing an important service in this case, and we can't promise we won't indulge ourselves in future, less-important cases.)

A brief backstory: One team, suspected to be the JNLV Tigers, has anonymously protested every single accepted trade since the league's inception a year ago. The protested trades have gone to ESPN's monolithic review board, which then ruled to veto at least fifty percent of the time (a conservative estimate). The league's managers, who represent decades of collective fantasy baseball experience, have detected no rationale for which trades make it through the system. Various appeals and inquiries to ESPN have gone unheeded.



Scott W, Pawtucket Redwolves Wed, Mar 1, 3:15 PM
Do you think ESPN ever looks at leagues message boards and knows what people think of their games?

Taylor U, The Mission Magicians Wed, Mar 1, 10:02 AM
interesting post, dan. you make it sound like ESPN is going the way of MTV, which would be unfortunate if true. but sports can be such a huge market on their own without the glitz/glamour, so yahoo and CBS are more than happy to step in to fill the void.

------

it appears the dissatisfaction with ESPN's service is more than justified and well on its way to unanimous in this league...except perhaps for our lone protester / s h i t h e a d. unfortunately i'm not sure what to do next, except for maybe hacking into JNLV's account and committing an act of fantasy baseball terrorism.

because i'm all about accountability, i must take this opportunity to apologize to everyone i personally convinced to pony up $50 for this league, myself included. i'll still be showing up to compete this year, just a little more reliant on the waiver wire than usual i guess, but it'll be a cold day in hell before i recommend ESPN over the myriad alternatives again.

Daniel Z, Agents of Fortune Wed, Mar 1, 6:39 AM
It was pretty plain to see the writing on the wall when ESPN decided to make sports akin to Hollywood. Everything is flash and no substance...it's a sad state of affairs in sports all around. It seems media types like ESPN are more interested in who went to what party and who they were with rather than focusing on what their bread and butter really want...sports. It's filtered down to staples like their fantasy sports and sooner than they think they'll be wondering what happened and how do we fix it. But it will no doubt be too late...we will all have moved on to greener pastures. ESPN has gone the way of the DoDo bird and broadcast news....irrelevant and hardly noticable anymore.

Patrick F, No Hope of Redemption Wed, Mar 1, 6:39 AM
Yeah... I would much prefer a league that, when my 800th trade attempt is vetoed, would at least tell me why. I am really tired of having to go through 3 days of review each time and then having proposals rejected without knowing which way they feel the trade is tilted unfairly. Half the time I can't even figure out what the logic is behind the review. It's killing me. How are we supposed to trade if we don't know what the standards are for review? (esp. when we KNOW it's going to be protested!).

Mike S, OSU BEAVERS Sat, Feb 25, 7:04 PM
ESPN sucks. Each year I have bought around 20-25 teams in each sport. This year I have zero baseball teams other than this adopted dead team. I am sticking to CBS where I can make money and I dont have to put up with the crap of ESPN. Their service has gone to hell over the past couple years.

Joey R, Kevin Brown,To The Glue Factory Fri, Feb 24, 10:52 AM
i'm wondering the same thing. after this league finishes up, remind me to avoid espn fantasy leagues like the plague. why i spent $50 on this is beyond my comprehension.

Gabe W, (Pay)dro Martinez Sun, Jan 15, 4:32 PM
I agree. I will be on vacation from the 9th to 16th, and I very much would like to be there for the draft this year.

Bobby G, Unbeatables Fri, Aug 26, 12:28 PM
Tigers just moved Randy Johnson onto his bench for his start today despite the fact that he has less than half of the maximum allotted starts for the whole season with just over a month to go!

Marc D, The Odeon Panthers Sat, Jun 18, 3:43 PM
Upheld. It's all good. Given the recent rash of injuries to my team and the thin availability on the waiver wire, Guillen and Thome (with precieved upside) were more of a gain for this season's production. Cabrera will be missed, but Edgardo will not. Besides, you know I'm a sucker for Thome every year, Dan. He usually doesn't disappoint. No acrimony and no bad vibes. Let's play on!