SQUIB KICKS FOR YOUR SUPER MONDAY

Woke up too late to formulate a good semi-cogent rant, so here's some random offerings:

• As the basketball coach at Toronto's Humber College (defending Ontario champs), Darrell Glenn knows about managing pressure situations... but this is something else entirely: Glenn delivering his own son in the front seat of the family car last weekend when his wife Koren Bogle-Glenn went into labour. Mom and Rayner Winston (7 lbs., 1 ounce) are reported to be doing well.

• Quebec City says it has a budget plan in place to co-host the 2008 world hockey championship.

• There's an irrational little voice that hopes the Boston Red Sox complete the trade for Todd Helton. It keeps repeating, "The more Boston can overpay for guys in the winddown portion of their career, the better!" Helton's not that old (34 on Aug. 20), but once you remove the Coors Field factor from his stats, it kind of paints a picture of someone whose career is in freefall.

Baseball-Reference.com, which is to stat geeks what Saks Fifth Avenue is to shopaholics, has a "stats neutralizer" that puts every player's numbers in a context of a 162-game season where every team scored 4.42 runs per game. When you put in Helton's '06 numbers, it works out to an .829 on-base plus slugging (OPS) -- a drop of more than 100 points from two seasons earlier. The Blue Jays first baseman, Lyle Overbay, had an .848 OPS in '06, and he's both four years younger than Helton and comes cheaper. Overbay's new deal calls for $6 million per, as opposed to Helton's $16.6 million salary, although the Colorado Rockies would cover some of that.

Could Helton correct that? Well, a lot of the "most similar through age 32" players to Helton are guys who went downhill fast, but most of those are 1930s sluggers such as Chuck Klein and Sunny Jim Bottomley, and their short career span may have just been a byproduct of their era. The third-most similar player to Helton is Frank Thomas, and Jays fans are hoping he continues his late-career renaissance.

• Pro Football Hall of Famer John Mackey, who's struggling with dementia, is a little upset that Indianapolis Colts wideout Marvin Harrison wears his old No. 88. (David Steele, Baltimore Sun.)