SOMETHING ... MID-FRIDAY MORNING

Baby On Board, something something, Burt Ward... This thing writes itself!

• There's been a lot of attention devoted recently to the two Winnipeg twin sisters, Amy and Jesse Pasternak, who have taken their fight to play boys high school hockey instead of on the girls team all the way to the Manitoba Human Rights Commission. I turned to an expert in the subject, Trina Sager, Official Sister and Goaltending Expert of Out of Left Field, who played both boys hockey and girls hockey during her time at Ernestown Secondary School, and played men's intramurals at Queen's University.
  
  Trina says the girls have a point. When she helped get a girls team started at ESS, she played forward -- "otherwise, I would have been bored" -- but believes the real story is why there isn't a travel team for them to play on? Call me old-fashioned, but high school hockey is more for recreation
  
  Something else that seems to have failed to come up -- at least in all the news accounts I've read -- is that there is a recent precedent for a girl playing on a boys team in Manitoba. Two years ago, when yours truly was the sports guy at the Portage la Prairie Daily Graphic, an opposing team, Sanford Collegiate, had two girls on its baseball team who also played girls fastpitch. No one had a problem then, although I suppose the way for the high school association to get around that is to say it was two different sports, when really it isn't, unless fastpitch had four strikes for an out.
  
• Microbano, responding to a statement issued by Christie Chorley, retracted his post from yesterday. (Here's Deadspin's take, here's mine.) The focus here has never been on Chorley -- it's squarely on the people who spread such allegations and the people who are peddling a somewhat credulous story that Lauren Pronger hates Edmonton.
• The Geek probably got a little carried away last night, what with the rambling diatribe about how the Blue Jays are getting hosed by the schedulemaker and the division they're in. Turns out my friend Pat Pearce at View From The Nosebleeds is a similar wavelength -- must be a Napanee, Ontario thing -- as has pointed out the plight of the Minnesota Twins, who are on a 17-2 run but still remain 11 games back in the AL Central (and 8½ out of the wild card). Salon.com's King Kaufman also wrote about the Twins today.
  
  Granted, aside from a three-game sweep of Boston, the Twins really haven't beaten any team of consequence during this run, reeling off 11 of 12 in their current stretch of interleague games. (That partially explains why Joe Mauer is so hot right now.) However, the point is the obvious: with a second wild-card berth, Twins fans would feel a lot better about their chances in the second half of the season.
  
  At 3 a.m., Kaufman's point that "winning never goes to waste" was probably lost on The Geek, who was too far gone at that point. However, it's not that winning never goes to waste -- it's about properly rewarding it and giving every team more or less a fair shot.
• Jays-Phillies outlook. Tonight: Casey Janssen (5-6, 4.76, 1.22 WHIP) vs. Adam Bernero, who had a 1.57 ERA in three starts at Triple A, although this is the same Adam Bernero who was 1-14 with the Tigers and Rockies in '03. Considering that Janssen is already hitting the rookie wall and it's not even July 1, there's reason to be a little worried.
  Saturday: Ty Taubenheim (1-4, 4.73, 1.61 WHIP) vs. Cody Lidle (4-6, 5.11, 1.44 WHIP). The Jays welcome another old teammate back to town. May it go better than it did against Steve Trachsel and the Mets last weekend.
  Sunday: A.J. Burnett (1-1, 3.24, 1.04 WHIP) vs. TBA. Watch out for this TBA. He/she apparently throws a wicked breaking ball.

That's all for now. Send your comments to neatesager@yahoo.ca.