With the QuesTec computerized evaluation system spending a lot of time in the news the past few weeks, the strike zone has been a hot topic. Mike’s Baseball Rants has an exhaustive archaeological dig through the changing strike zone:

So as far as I can tell, the drama that is being played out between owners, umps, and players regarding the strike zone and the QuesTec system, started in the mid-Eighties with umps ceding the outside strike to pitchers and almost simultaneously, batters crowding the plate and getting hit more often. But it seems impossible to disentangle those two events into cause and effect. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg type Ghordian knot. What is clear is that as a result the batter’s box was obliterated. I believe if the umpire requires a well demarcated batter’s box, the hit batsmen and potentially the outside strike issues are somewhat mitigated…

To me it boils down to a management issue. 2001 got them three-quarters of the way there. Now if the owners had used QuesTec to enforce the strides made in 2001 and retrain and empower (yeah, I said it) the umps instead of becoming oppositional with it, maybe they could get to the promised land, that is a strike zone according to the book. I’m afraid now that Bud and MLB’s inability to properly motivate their employees will cause more bad than good as neo-Luddite umps attempt to circumvent the QuesTec system and bring the issue to a head.

As usual, another excellent, informative rant from Mike.

• • •

The Mets finally canned GM Steve Phillips today, a move that was as overdue as that library book you checked out in sixth grade and forgot to return. The New York Post had the best headline (“Stevie Nixed: Mets tell GM Phillips to go your own way”) and back page, while William Rhoden of the New York Times sums it up best:

This ship has been off course for three seasons, not because of a lack of resources, but because of a lack of judgment. The Mets began the year with a payroll of about $120 million, which is second only to the Yankees’ roughly $180 million. They have nothing to show for it but a clubhouse of aging stars with big names, big contracts and big injuries. It’s all Steve Phillips’s fault.

He sold Wilpon on the notion that you had to win with big names in New York, that the fans weren’t patient enough to wait for rebuilding, that you had to do it now. Forget the farm system.

Rhoden suggests that Giants GM Brian Sabean, Braves GM John Schuerholz and Expos GM (and former Met assistant GM) Omar Minaya would be the best choices to replace Phillips, but obviously, all three are currently employed. Jim Duquette, cousin of the Boston Red Sox General Pariah Dan Duquette, was named the interim GM until the end of the season and will be a candidate for the permanent job, as if any high-level New York sports executive can consider his job “permanent.”

• • •

New Kid on the Blog: The Minnesota Twins are already well-represented in the blogosphere by a couple of great pages, John Bonnes’ The Twins Geek and Aaron Gleeman’s Baseball Blog. Now comes a new blog from another Twins fan called Seth Speaks. Recent topics include the playing careers of the Twins coaches and manager (ahem), an evaluation of Latroy Hawkins’ career, and the callup of Justin Morneau. Good luck, Seth.

The Yanks became a part of baseball history in a most undignifed manner on Wednesday night. Not only did they have a no-hitter pitched against them, they had a no-hitter pitched against them by a sextet of Houston Astros hurlers. While four pitchers had combined on a no-hitter before (twice, actually), no team had ever used so many in a no-no. The Astros’ situation came about when starter Roy Oswalt pulled up lame with a groin injury two pitches into the second inning. Manager Jimy Williams deftly scotch-taped his way through the ballgame until he could get to his two relief aces, Octavio Dotel and Billy Wagner, to close the deal.

I saw the second half of the ballgame, but I have to admit I was mostly half-watching. I had dinner on Wednesday night with Greg Spira of Baseball Prospectus, and afterwards we went to a bar to watch the Yankee game and shoot the breeze. I took him to Manitoba’s, an East Village bar owned by Handsome Dick Manitoba, the former lead singer of the ’70s New York punk band the Dictators. Handsome Dick (real name Richard Blum) is a big Yanks fan and the bar’s a decent place to watch a ballgame if you don’t mind closed-captioning and a punk-heavy jukebox. So the Dead Boys classic “Sonic Reducer” blared while the ‘Stros pitchers reduced the Yankee bats to splinters, the Yankee lineup underwent its own “Personality Crisis” in tandem with the New York Dolls chestnut, and Joe Torre looked like he wanna be sedated.

We joined the game right as Lance Berkman made his diving catch on Alfonso Soriano’s blooper to end the fifth. At that point the score was 4-0, but that’s all we knew. It wasn’t until the end of the sixth that I saw a shot of the scoreboard and that trio of zeroes in the Yankee R H E columns. That piqued our interest. We started talked no-hitters. Greg’s been to Jose Jiminez‘s in Arizona in 1999, along with an entire SABR convention. The closest I’ve come was Bartolo Colon taking one into the eighth against the Yanks on September 18, 2000. Greg asked if I had been rooting for Colon at that point, to which I replied that I would have if the no-no had survived until the ninth inning. That was in the midst of that infamous Yankee slide at the end of the 2000 season, and I wasn’t in any mood for concessions then.

But it’s not as though I’d never seen a no-no. I’ve watched two in full (Nolan Ryan’s fifth, in 1981, against the Dodgers — now there was a guy who could turn me against my own team — and Jack Morris’ 1984 gem agains the White Sox) and seen the last few innings of several (Kevin Gross and Bud Smith come to mind). I missed both David Wells’ and David Cone’s perfectos for various reasons, and came one agonizing strike away when Mike Mussina nearly pulled it off.

When the Astros’ Brad Lidge got through the Yanks in the seventh, I smelled toast. They were about to face the best setup man in the game in Dotel, a fireballer who strikes out 1.5 batters per inning pitched, followed by Wagner, who… well, ditto. The two lived up to their billing. Thanks to a passed ball on a third strike that allowed Soriano to reach first, Dotel actually tied the major leauge record with four strikeouts in one inning. Wagner struck out the first two batters in the ninth, giving the Yanks an ignominious eight strikeouts in a row, tying an AL record. Hideki Matsui mercifully ended both that string and the game by doing what he apparently does best, grounding out.

I have to admit I wasn’t even finicky this time. I figure to see the Yanks lose about 60 times this year, and this was already going to be one of them. The no-no would be a neat little catch, but it might also serve the larger purpose of showing the Yanks that they’d reached the nadir of their season.

Joe Torre certainly treated it that way, reading the Yanks the riot act. According to the Times:

Manager Joe Torre kept the clubhouse closed for several minutes and held a meeting in which players said he called the game embarrassing. Torre, bothered by how the Yankees played, looked and acted, told them this sort of play would not be tolerated.

“Whatever kind of history it was, it was terrible,” Torre said. “It was one of the worst games I’ve ever been involved with.”

Echoes of Tommy Lasorda I’ve-never-been-so-sick take on Reggie Jackson’s 3-homer World Series game in 1977. Elsewhere, phrases like “embarassment,” “totally inexcusable,” and “rock bottom” were used by players and management. Not suprisingly, the Steinbrenner Watch is on Full Alert in all of the New York area papers today, with hitting coach Rick Down assumed to be the one wearing the tightest noose. It must be a great time to be a Yankee hater.

• • •

Against this backdrop, I headed to Yankee Stadium on Thursday afternoon, fairly certain that the sequel would have a different ending than the night before. After all, only once in baseball history have two no-hitters been thrown in the same park on back-to-back days. I was joined by Greg, the second ballgame we’ve taken in together this past week (we went to last Friday’s Mets-Mariners ballgame at Shea, along with Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference and frequent Baseball Primer poster David Nieporent — an experience I haven’t had much chance to write about).

I arrived a bit late due to subway difficulties, and thus missed the Astros scoring two runs off of David Wells in the top of the first. Greg filled me in with a flawless play-by-play, rescuing my scorecard from oblivion. The Yanks got a run back in the bottom of the inning against Jeriome Robertson, a rookie lefty I’d never seen before. Soriano led off the first with a walk (something he does fewer times a year than hit a leadoff homer, I’ll wager) and then Derek Jeter beat out a bunt to third, the newly-annointed captain getting the monkey off of the Yanks’ back in short order. Sori ended up scoring on a sac fly by cleanup hitter (and Torre pet) Todd Zeile. Gulp.

Wells settled down, and the Yanks took a lead in the fourth. Raul Mondesi laced a ground-rule double down the leftfield line and over the wall, and Hideki Matsui followed with a sharp RBI single to right. A John Flaherty single took Godzilla to third, where he scored from on a sac fly by Juan Rivera.

The Astro hitters kept finding holes, racking up six hits through five innings. But some timely defense, especially by Zeile, kept the Yanks in front. Zeile made good plays on a couple of slow rollers and started an inning-ending 5-4-3 DP on Jeff Bagwell in the fifth. My presence seems to be bringing out the best in him.

But in the sixth, Wells ran out of whatever combination of luck and gas had carried him through the first five frames. Three straight singles loaded the bases with none out, and Brian (the speedy one, right?) Hunter followed with a sac fly (the fourth of the ballgame). Number nine hitter and defensive specialist Adam Everett nearly took Wells over the wall, then socked a ground-rule double that scored two, at which point nearly 40,000 Yankee fans sighed in unison, “Uh-oh, here we go again.” During this May-June swoon, one stat that hasn’t been overlooked is that the Yanks had yet to come from behind to win a ballgame in which they’d trailed after six innings.

The team seemed to be feeling that pressure in the bottom of the inning. With one out, Bubba Trammell singled, and Flaherty ripped a double into the left-center gap. With the Astro outfielders having displayed woefully off-line throws thus far, third base coach Willie Randolph was licking his chops as he waved Trammell around to score. This time the Astros made a perfect relay play, Berkman to 3B Morgan Ensberg to catcher Greg Zaun, and Bubba was lunch.

Jimy Williams chose the occasion to pull Robertson in favor of Kris Sarloos, one of the previous night’s heroes. Juan Rivera worked a full count off of Sarloos and then picked up Flaherty on a single to left, and the Yanks cut the Astro lead to 5-4. They tied the game in the next inning after Berkman dove and missed a Jason Giambi bloop for a double, and Mondesi lined a two-out single to right. The clutch hitting animated the crowd considerably, and there was a palpable sense of we’re-gonna-win-this-one relief in the air.

Antonio Osuna had come on in relief of Wells after six; the REAL Osuna , not the impersonator who bore a rather strong resemblance to Juan Acevedo on Tuesday night. Osuna shut down Houston in the seventh and eighth, allowing only one hit.

Facing Octavio Dotel, Hideki Matsui led off the Yankee eighth. In the hole 0-2, he hit a fast grounder right down the line to Bagwell, who got the ball just past the bag, but apparently not so well. E-3. Pinch-hitter Ruben Sierra stroked a single as I badmouthed him, and then pinch-hitter Jorge Posada battled back from 0-2 to draw a walk, loading the bases with none out. Rivera popped out, but Soriano dunked one into rightfield, scoring a run. Dotel finally settled down and struck out Jeter and Giambi for a grim reminder of the previous evening’s affairs.

But the Yanks had the lead going into the ninth, so “Enter Sandman.” Mo Rivera rung up Craig Biggio to start the 9th, and ended up closing the door on the Astros, just like he’s supposed to, giving the Yanks their first late-inning come-from-behind victory of the season.

Not to mention their third straight in my presence. If George won’t spring for my limo, I figure the Yankee coaches might chip in.

Seldom has a single player ruined an entire weekend for me the way Juan Acevedo did this past weekend. Not only did he blow what was potentially Roger Clemens’ 300th win against the Cubs, but he also contributed heavily to their loss the next night via a throwing error and his usual craptacular pitching. Two New York papers reported yesterday that Acevedo would be gone by sundown, and sure enough he was. ERA at the time of release: 7.71. Adios!

Of course, in the department of Being Careful What You Wish For, when Antonio Osuna entered last night’s ballgame against Houston I wrote “I don’t care what happens from this point forward, I’m just glad Juan Acevedo is gone.” Osuna’s first pitch ended up about 400 feet away in Monument Park, prompting me and a few others in Game Chatter to wonder whether Acevedo was really gone (“I think Acevedo killed Osuna and put his body in the river. Now he’s pretending he’s Osuna,” was the best guess). Still, it was only a solo shot, and the Yanks won the ballgame 5-3.

Meanwhile fairly hefty but interesting debate over Acevedo’s “merits” sprung up over at Baseball Primer, with a few heavy-duty statheads singing “The Ballad of Small Sample Sizes” and “The Regression to the Mean Song” to us high-blood-pressured, myopic Yankee fans. Their main point was that Acevedo’s been more or less average for the past three years and that sooner or later he’d return to being more or less average again, and that we shouldn’t get all fahitched about 23 lousy innings. Meanwhile we Yank fans argued that it was senseless for the Yanks to waste their time waiting for Acevedo’s performance to normalize when they had access to plenty of other relievers on the farm and in the free talent pool, including Jason Anderson and Al Reyes, both of whom they recalled after whacking Juan.

Larry Mahnken of the Replacement Level Yankee Weblog has done a better job summarizing some of the arguments that broke out on that thread, and he’s got a few other interesting tidbits and smart-assed comments as well. If your’e a Yank fan, you should be reading him.

My mother often chides me about being a pack rat, the kind of person who has a tough time throwing out anything. I’ve got a desk at my parents’ house in Salt Lake City that she’s been ribbing me about cleaning for, oh, about a decade. Fortunately, she knows better than to touch any of my baseball-related stuff. I’ve brought some of my old Salt Lake Gulls and Walla Walla Padres programs back to New York City, but I still have boxes full of cards resting safely in my SLC closet, some great Aaron, Mays, and Koufax cards, along with a complete 1978 Topps set that took me about nine years to finish.

One thing I’m extremely grateful that never got tossed was my baseball mitt, a Rawlings RBG80 Greg Luzinski model that dates back to my days in Little League. It’s funny because not only was Luzinski a horrible fielder (“worst outfielder I ever saw, bar none” says Bill James), but he’d also graduated to his natural position as a DH by the time I was playing. Fortunately, I was at least competent with the leather, unlike the Bull (who could make up for his shortcomings with the long ball, unlike yours truly). I retrieved that mitt about five years ago, and regularly toss the pea around with friends (even my girlfriend gets into the act — she’s got a great arm). But that old glove is really starting to show some wear, especially on the inside, where moisture has led to cracking. Still, I’m horrified at the thought of having to replace it, because of how long it would take to break in a new one and because this thing still fits like, um, a glove.

That kind of relationship with a glove is something nearly everybody who’s played the game at any level can relate (everybody except Edgar Martinez, perhaps), which is why it’s surprising it’s taken so long for somebody to do a book about them. My mom called my attention to Noah Liberman’s Glove Affairs: The Romance, History, and Tradition of the Baseball Glove via this review in the Salt Lake Tribune. I haven’t seen the book yet, so I’ll let the linked review do the talking. But I’ll be looking for Glove Affairs the next time I’m in the bookstore.

It’s always nice to get a good laugh over your morning cup of coffee. This morning, Baseball Primer called my attention to a couple of amusing takes on the Sammy Sosa situation that are too good not to pass on.

First up is Charles P. Pierce of Slate, who asks, “Is this man a danger to your children?”:

Whenever anybody in the modern communications media starts vaguely maundering about The Children—whether it’s Weepin’ Joe Lieberman talking about rap music, or Cokie Roberts wondering how she’s going to explain Oval Office blowjobs to her daughter, or sportswriters worrying about the dearth of good role models—it is time to turn off the set and throw the remote control to the dog. My lord, on Tuesday morning, a full week after the incident happened, Jay Mariotti in the Chicago Sun-Times was still gathering the shattered young ones under his wing. “Children deserve to know what he did and why it’s wrong,” Mariotti thundered, perhaps mindful of the generation we lost to drugs and crime because of society’s tolerance for Gaylord Perry.

Speaking of Mariotti, an otherwise anonymous Primer poster offered a parody, “Sammy Sosa Is a Fraud Who Poops His Pants,” that’s so dead-on that it makes you wonder how many of the nation’s sportswriters churn this kind of stuff out while napping.

Also worth a grin is John Levesque of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who says that Sammy was merely taking up the cause of the world’s cork farmers:

He says he uses the corked bat in batting practice to put on a show for fans, and that he used it an actual game completely by mistake.

I believe him because, well, the whole premise of this column would be shot if I didn’t. By using a corked bat in practice, Sosa is telling the struggling cork growers of Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, France and Tunisia: “I’m with you guys. Try to stay afloat.”

As a popular role model, he’s also telling America’s kids it’s OK to buy a bulletin board, or to ask their parents to install cork flooring in the rec room.

One of my friends, warning that the use of synthetic wine corks is on the rise (dear God, NOOOOO!), asked with a wink, “Won’t somebody think of the cork-growers’ children?”

Yankee fans are still grumbling about the results of their first-ever regular-season foray into Wrigley Field, in which the Cubs took two out of three games on the strength of their fine young pitchers, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, and plenty of sloppy play from the Yanks. Sunday night’s ballgame started with Andy Pettitte getting shelled, reached its nadir with Juan Acevedo donning the goat horns yet again (this time via a throwing error) and ended with pinch-runner/tying run Charles Gipson being picked off of first base after the Yanks had turned an 8-3 deficit to 8-7. Grrrrr.

But as bad as things look from the Pinstriped view, at least one astute Cubs fan sees the contrast between the owners of the Yanks and the Cubs and finds his own team wanting. Neither Cub Reporter Christian Ruzich nor Bronx Banterer Alex Belth should need introduction from regular readers of this space; Ruz has an excellent piece on Alex’s site called “I Wish George Steinbrenner Owned the Cubs.” Here are a couple of excerpts of some required reading. Of the Cubs, Ruzich writes:

The Cubs were not the first team to be owned by a large corporation (even the Yankees spent some time owned by CBS before Steinbrenner rescued them), but their purchase by TribCo certainly foreshadowed the current wave of corporate ownership. Tribune looked at the Cubs as cheap content for their WGN TV station, which was showing up on cable systems all over the country. They talked up the team on WGN Radio and in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. With the exception of the hiring of Dallas Green, however, they did very little to improve the team.

They did lots of things to improve the amount of money the team brought in, though, like installing lights and skyboxes. After the ’84 division title, they ended the decades-old practice of selling bleacher seats on the day of the game… And yet, not much of this extra money ended up on the field. Or, when it did, it went to people like Larry Bowa and Dave Smith, and (famously) not to people like Greg Maddux.

On the Yankee front:

Steinbrenner has a lot of money. TribCo has as much money as Steinbrenner, if not more. So does Fox, and Peter Angelos, and look how well their teams have done. Steinbrenner not only has the money, he isn’t afraid to spend it, and he is smart enough to hire smart people to run his team. For some reason, those last two things get lost when The End of Baseball As We Know It gets discussed.

Steinbrenner wants to win, and he does what it takes to do so. Plus, he brings all the excitement of a loaded pistol with a hair trigger being passed around by a bunch of speed freaks… But I’d gladly deal with all that uncertainty and day-to-day craziness if it meant I have the privilege of following a team that gave itself every opportunity to win.

While it’s tempting to tell Christian, “Be careful what you wish for,” I do think he’s hit the nail on the head. Baseball needs more owners like Steinbrenner, not fewer, and by that I don’t mean a guy who’s going to make a horse’s ass out of himself every time something goes wrong, I mean a guy who cares more about his ballclub winning than he does about petty issues like revenue sharing. Wouldn’t you, Twins-Orioles-Brewers-Royals-Pirates fans, rather have as an owner a guy who’d knock his own grandmother on her ass in order to gain an advantage than a guy who’d pocket revenue-sharing money while complaining about having to trade a star on the verge of free-agency because he “can’t afford” him and fielding a team which might struggle to win 60 games? Yes, the Twins are winning right now, and perhaps the Royals have finally turned a corner. But the bottom line is that the bottom line depends on winning: build a winner and fans will show up, and plenty of money will follow.

• • •

Speaking of building a winner, the Dodger fan in me is very excited about the news that Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer is close to buying the Dodgers. According to the Los Angeles Daily News:

Malcolm Glazer is finalizing his agreement to purchase the Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and people with knowledge of the negotiations believe the deal will get done by the end of the week… The purchase price is believed to be in the $375 million range, but even if an agreement is reached this week, it could be months before the ownership officially changes hands. Major League Baseball previously said it wouldn’t schedule a special owner’s meeting before one in mid-August.

I’ve cringed before at some of the Dodgers’ suitors. When Dave Checketts made a bid earlier this spring, I wrote, “I want my Dodgers back, but I don’t want Dave Checketts anywhere near them. I’ll take my chances with the next S.O.B. who comes along instead.”

I have yet to read anything saying that Glazer is an S.O.B., but even if he is, that shiny Lombardi Trophy he’s holding as the owner of the team who won the Super Bowl is good enough for me. Anybody who can turn the Buccaneers into champions ought to be able to restore some of the winning mojo to the Dodgers. I’m sold, and I hope the Dodgers will be soon enough.

I’m of two minds about Saturday’s Yankee loss to the Chicago Cubs, in which Roger Clemens left the ballgame with a 1-0 lead en route to what would hopefully be his 300th win. Should the Yankees hang Juan Acevedo in retribution of all of pitches he’s hung to opposing hitters? Or should they choke him for all of the times he’s choked after coming into a game?

In a Wrigley Field pitchers duel with Kerry Wood that had lived up to the one in the catalog, Clemens pitched a magnficent ballgame through six innings. Slowed by a respiratory infection, he began to tire in the seventh and was removed after having thrown only 85 pitches. It took just one pitch from Acevedo to undo all of Clemens’ good work. One pitch which the undead Eric Karros swatted for a three-run homer. One pitch that had me perilously close to throwing a solid object through my TV screen as I unleashed a string of curse words that had mothers covering their children’s ears within a five-block radius.

One pitch that ought to seal the fate of Juan Acevedo. There is simply no reason for a team fighting for its spot atop a division to show any allegiance to a journeyman reliever with a 7+ ERA and complaints about his role. Acevedo is “only” making $900,000, but the Yanks have nothing invested in him beyond that. They’re destined to take on more salary as they reinforce themselves, so exactly what the hell they’re waiting for with Acevedo is beyond me; they should have released him when they added Ruben Sierra to the roster (another eye-roller) rather than optioning Jason Anderson to the minors. The only way Torre’s use of Acevedo on Saturday can be justified is as a white flag to Brian Cashman, similar to the way he used Enrique Wilson in rightfield last summer in order to key a trade which netted the Yanks Raul Mondesi.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A reliever with an ERA that can be confused with the make of a Boeing jet is no relief at all.

If you were within a mile of a TV set on Tuesday night, you know that Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat in a game against the Devil Rays. Between Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter, ESPN must have run the replay of Sosa’s bat breaking over 200 times between 11 PM and 1 AM, accompanied by a slew of talking heads instantly speculating on what damage this will do to Sosa’s career. This morning’s reaction has some of the country’s most esteemed (cough, cough, HACK) sportstwriters looking for tall trees over which to sling their ropes, ready to lynch Sosa and boot him from the Hall of Fame before his playing career is even done, and before MLB’s disciplinarian, Bob Watson has handed down his sentence.

Don’t be swayed. What Sosa did was wrong, but he immediately came forward and offered a fairly convincing explanation — he mistakenly grabbed a bat that he uses to wow the crowds for batting practice and home run derbies. You don’t necessarily have to buy that, but I do. Sosa’s credit line is good with me, and not just because I once put him on the cover of a book. First of all, the accountability has to count for something. Sammy didn’t hide, issue a denial or pass the buck to anybody else. He said, in essence, “My bad.” We’ve seen superstars do a lot worse.

Second, we have zero proof that he’s done this before. Think for a moment about the intense scrutiny the man’s been under since he made the country’s radar screen during the Great Home Run Chase of ’98. Sammy’s probably broken a few bats since then, while millions of people watched. None of them ever turned up corked, not a single one. So if somebody wants to tell us that the reason Sosa hit all those homers is a corked bat, the burden of proof is on them, not on Sosa.

Third, it’s not even clear that a corked bat helps hitting homers. Cub Reporter Christian Ruzich has a lengthy excerpt from Robert Kemp Adair’s The Physics of Baseball devoted to the subject. Basically, while corking one’s bat allows a quicker swing, the ball’s not likely to go as far — about 3 feet off of a 400-foot drive. I don’t know about you, but most of the Sosa homers I’ve seen didn’t need that extra three feet. (Ruzich has links to more Sosa-related pieces than you can shake a corked bat at, so check him out today.)

Fourth, even if a corked bat DID help hit homers, baseball has a colorful history of gamesmanship that’s as long as a Sosa homer. That history includes batters leaning into a pitch to get hit intentionally, catchers framing pitches so they appear to have crossed the plate in the strike zone, pitchers adding a little something extra to the ball, outfielders sno-coning balls, sign stealing (see the 1951 Giants) and so on. We smile bemusedly as we discuss Gaylord Perry’s Vaseline, wink at Whitey Ford’s wedding ring and giggle at the superballs that came out of Graig Nettles’ bat. Spitballing at least has the precedent of being legal at one point in the game’s history, but this really isn’t that different. Baseball Tonight ran a lengthy clip of former co-host and current Texas Rangers manager Buck Showalter demonstrating in painstaking detail how to cork a bat. If Buck is adept enough to know how, and if ESPN is bothering to show us, doesn’t that make this all a bit hypocritcal?

Fifth, baseball has a strong precedent for how to punish this. Sammy will be taking a vacation for about 7-10 games assuming that holds. Given that the Cubs are barely leading a tight NL Central, a suspension that sends the Cubs into another June swoon would be plenty of punishment right there.

Baseball’s been berry, berry good to Sammy. And Sammy’s been berry, berry good to baseball as well. In these contentious and often uncertain times, amid the game’s labor strife and the country’s war on terror, Sosa’s given the fans an amiable mega-slugger to cheer and embrace while the likes of McGwire, Bonds and Griffey puckered as if sucking on lemons. Sosa’s the most marketable player active, an ambassador for the game the world over, and he’s helped countless writers fill up thousands upon thousands of column inches. Yet those same columnists are ready to hang him. Here’s the New York Daily News’ Bill Madden frothing at the mouth:

Make no mistake about this, however: There is no humor in Sosa being caught using a corked bat, only shame and disgrace. Worse, a huge shadow of distrust has been cast over baseball as Sosa, who on April 4 became the 18th player to join the elite 500 club, is now the only one of them known to have used a corked bat.

In other words, unless he can somehow prove otherwise, Sammy Sosa is a fraud and all of his home runs are now tainted. He is the only man in history to amass three 60-homer seasons and, to that, we now say: Yeah, right, and how many of them were hit with a legitimate bat?

…It has never been done before, but if Sosa is to have his credibility restored, Selig must order X-rays for the four bats (home runs 58, 62 and 66 in ’98 and the 500th this year) that he donated to the Hall of Fame. And, if it turns out any of those were corked, Sosa should be banned from baseball for life and all his home runs be expunged from the record.

Okay Bill, time for your rabies shot. We never took away Gaylord Perry’s Cy Youngs or forfeited any of his teams’ games ex post facto, why should this be any different? And speaking of the Daily News, one can hardly wait for the other horseshit-covered shoe to drop, in the form of Mike Lupica telling us how disillusioned he is about the summer of ’98 any minute now. Let’s get a shovel and dig up Dick Young for his reaction(ary) while we’re at it.

Here’s Rick Telander of the Chicago Tribune, in his auto-hack, one-sentence-paragraph, gee-my-head-hurts-from-these-big-thoughts writing “style”:

Sosa confessed.

“I just took the wrong bat and went up there,” he said in the interview room. “I apologize from the bottom of my heart.”

Sosa said he keeps a corked bat to use during batting practice be-cause “I like to put on a show for the fans. I like to make people happy and show off.”

I believe that. I believe gangsters keep shotguns in their trunks to shoot rabbits. I believe the Tooth Fairy is married to the Easter Bunny.

I believe–I guarantee I be-lieve–that Sosa is a liar.

Puh-lease. If this doesn’t show you the modus operandi of those newspaper hacks, ready to pounce on today’s down-on-his-luck superstar in order to sell papers, then you’d better get a seeing eye dog. These people invested so much in deifying Sosa that once it’s been revealed he is — stop the presses — human, they can only respond by trashing him.

Resist the temptation. Get mad at Sammy, boo him if you must the next time you see him. But let him serve his time and move on. Sammy’s been too good to the game to keep this incident hanging over his head for long.

I don’t pretend to know a hell of a lot about the Major League Baseball amateur draft, which is happening today. I don’t really follow college baseball, I don’t subscribe to Baseball America, I don’t hang out at the local sandlot looking for the next superstar. And chances are, neither do you, which is one of the reasons why MLB’s draft is a very understated affair compared to that of the NFL or the NBA. The bulk of these guys are years away from contributing at the major-league level, which means most of us who are keeping track of the home team and our fantasy teams and our HACKING MASS picks have very little room in our heads for the name of some 18-year-old kid who might not make it past Rancho Cucamonga before blowing his elbow out.

But the draft has been on my mind lately, primarily because I recently read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. Lewis spends a big chunk of the book focusing on the Oakland A’s draft strategy and Billy Beane’s attempts to revolutionize it. Under Beane, the A’s strategy is to rely more on performance and statistical analysis than traditional scouting methods, and to focus on college players over high-schoolers because their performance data is more reliable. The A’s took college players with their first 24 picks last year, waiting until the 19th round before picking a high-schooler (readers of Moneyball will recall that the A’s had seven first-round picks due to letting Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen, and Johnny Damon depart as free-agents).

Beane’s tactics are a novel way to counteract the A’s financial situation — they can’t afford to be wrong about those five-tool players who everybody else is chasing after, players who might turn out to be the next Roberto Clemente if they could only learn the strike zone. Hell, they can’t afford the bonuses most of those five-tool players’ agents are asking. So they go after players who have the one tool they can afford — the abiltiy to hit. That’s not to say Beane’s strategy would work for every team, or that baseball would be as interesting a game if his methods were adopted. A team with more money can afford to take a risk on a high-school pitcher or a speedy, free-swinging outfielder with a gun for an arm, even if it only means using that player to bamboozle a wide-eyed GM out of some bullpen help at the trade deadline (“Mr. Bowden, Brian Cashman is on the line again…”).

For most teams, the draft is still something of a crapshoot, even as high as the overall #1 pick. The historical record of number ones is a spotty one. Since the beginning of the draft in 1965, none of the players chosen first has gone onto induction in the Hall of Fame. Hell, some of them –1966 pick Steve Chilcutt (Mets), 1991 pick Brien Taylor (Yankees) — never made the bigs. Others scarcely made a dent; does anybody remember Danny Goodwin (’71 and ’75), Al Chambers (’79), or Shawn Abner (’84)? Many went on to be servicable but hardly star-spangled major-leaguers: Rick Monday (’65), Tim Foli (’68), Mike Ivie (’70), Bill Almon (’74), Shawon Dunston (’82), Tim Belcher (’83), B.J. Surhoff (’85). Well, Monday was kind of star-spangled, come to think of it.

One man has had some extraordinary success drafting first. Roger Jongewaard, Vice President of Scouting & Player Development for the Seattle Mariners, can lay claim to what more than likely will be the first overall #1s to reach the Hall of Fame in Ken Griffey, Jr. (’87) and Alex Rodriguez (’93). Prior to that dazzling duo, Jongewaard, while working for the Mets, made another #1 pick you might recognize: Darryl Strawberry (1980; he also drafted Billy Beane at #23 the same year). ESPN’s Alan Schwartz has an interesting look at Jongewaard’s career. Suffice it to say, he’s not crying himself to sleep about having missed out on Mike Harkey and Darren Dreifort.

One thing is for sure: gone are the days when a team would draft a pitcher #1 and then rush him to the majors just for show. David Clyde, picked first by the Texas Rangers in 1973, lived that dizzying saga in a matter of a few weeks. Chosen ahead of Robin Yount and Dave Winfield, Clyde won his first start at the tender age of 18 years, two months and five days old (he beat Jim Kaat). The phenom stuck around the majors as much for his ability to draw crowds as for his pitching promise, but he went on to win only 17 more games in the bigs due to arm problems and mismanagement (those Rangers were a three-ring circus; see Mike Shropshire’s hilarious, unsung classic Seasons in Hell for the details). Clyde was gone from the majors at 24, and done at 27. ESPN’s Jeff Merron has a lengthy piece devoted to the Clyde saga (thanks to Adam Hardt for passing on the link).

Friday was something of a dark day here at Futility Infielder World Headquarters, for the simple reason that my favorite active player, David Cone, announced his retirement. The 40-year-old Cone had been attempting to resume his comeback with the Mets, but after one less-than-encouraging outing and with his ERA still hovering above 6.00, he decided his body could take no more. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Cone’s medical-marvel arm which finally ran out of gas, but an arthritic hip.

Say this for David Cone: whether he was at the top of his game or the bottom, the cerebral righty always kept things interesting. His evolution from brash young punk to mercenary marksman to sage elder statesman to grizzled vet salvaging his dignity with one last go-round was a story too rich for fiction (Roger Angell did pretty well with the facts). He was a pleasure to behold, no matter which uniform he was wearing.

I remember gleefully jeering the punk who provided the Dodgers with bulletin-board material before Game Two of the 1988 NLCS, then allowed five runs in the first two innings. Who knew the brash young punk doing the jeering would one day be calling him a favorite? In fact, if the tale is to be told properly, it was Cone who finally turned me towards being a Yankee fan.

In 1996, my second baseball season year in New York City, I read the sports pages daily, waiting for George Steinbrenner, his new manager Joe Torre, or one of the players to spark a controversy worthy of the Bronx Zoo’s legacy, whereupon the team would implode. Remarkably, it never happened. I had no great affection for Cone at this point in his career, but his seven innings of no-hit ball in his post-aneurysm comeback on September 2 — and his willingness to call it a day at that point — exemplified these new Yankees: they had perspective. My Dodgers were still a factor in the National League at that point, but in my disgust with their meek showing down the stretch (a choke in the season’s final week relegating them to the Wild Card, then a quick cha-cha-cha out of the postseason entirely), it seemed automatic to turn my attentions to the Bronx side. The rest, as they say, is history.

I revelled in Cone’s finest moments as a Yankee, and empathized with him through his lowest. He was the voice of the team as far as I was concerned, and his honesty and accountability in the face of adversity, particularly in that miserable 2000 season, proved worthy of a role model. Even milking forty-five minutes of World Series postgame press conference out of a five-pitch outing, Cone was a treat to savor.

I’ll be adding an entry for Cone to my Wall of Fame in due time, but I’ve already written about him on several occasions. What follows is a six-pack of links to some of my Cone-related pieces, all of them dating from after his career in pinstripes ended:

• My Yankees’ replica jersey is a midnight-blue batting practice model adorned by Cone’s number 36. I took quite a razzing one spring day in 2001 from a dimwitted bitch with a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude towards Cone, then rehabbing in preparation to pitch for the Red Sox.

• Here’s a piece about Cone as he kept the Red Sox afloat during the summer of 2001.

• Cone continued to pitch well for the Sox throughout that summer, but perhaps his finest moment of the season came on September 2, 2001 — five years to the day since his the post-aneurysm game. As his replacement on the Yankees, Mike Mussina, came within one strike of a perfect game, Cone hung tough, holding the Yanks scoreless into the ninth inning before surrendering an RBI double to Enrique Wilson. I missed Cone’s own perfect game, but this game, with its rich, multi-layered storylines, may have been even better. Possibly the best pitching duel I’ve ever seen.

• Through a complete fluke of post-September 11 rescheduling, I had tickets for Cal Ripken Jr.’s final game. Who should he be facing that night but David Cone. In what looked like it might stand as his own farewell to the major leagues, Cone threw eight innings of three-hit ball, allowing only one unearned run and resisting the easy temptation to groove one to Cal for old time’s sake.

• Cone spent last season evaluating his options, dabbling in broadcasting while he waited for a phone call that never came.

• My Spring Training trip this past March took me to Port St. Lucie on the off chance that Cone might be pitching for the Mets that night as his comeback attempt continued. I got lucky.

But then again, we were all lucky to have David Cone.