Halladay of Reckoning (maybe)

It is not like there was no warning about Roy Halladay ("it's tempting to think of the Brewers reprising the CC Sabathia trade to get Roy Halladay for a playoff run," March 29, 2009 and " do realize that trading him this season would be wise, since he's in the second-last year of his contract," April 4, 2009).

The wikiality at this moment is that evil, no-good J.P. Ricciardi (whom everyone forgets, passed up a shot a running his home-state Red Sox early on in his Toronto tenure) said he is going to trade the Jays' talisman. Whatever happens, happens, it would no doubt suck, but the vultures are kind of circling with the Jays at 43-41.

It might be best to invoke the Clavin Rule. The rest of you lot might want to check out Minor League Ball to get a low-down on who is out there for prospects and young players. Meantime, others have outlined potential trading partners (none in the AL East, thankfully), and here's a symposium of thoughts from around the interweb.

Craig Calcaterra, Circling The Bases: "My insta-takes on the deals about which (FOXSports' Ken Rosenthal) speculates: White Sox (arguably plausible but unlikely); Braves (totally doable but the Braves would never, ever do it); Dodgers, Cubs, Angels, Mets (no; they don't have the chips); Rangers (no; don't have the cash); Brewers (did it last year, won't do it again).

"All of this chatter may be fun, but it's a total pipe dream."

Jeff Blair, Unwritten Rules: "They’ll want to get something approximating what the Cleveland Indians received from the Montreal Expos in return for Bartolo Colon: Cliff Lee, Grady Sizemore and Brandon Phillips (the Indians also had to pick up the prorated portion of Lee Stevens' $4-million - all currency U.S. - contract). They’ll want cost-effective players with one or two years of major-league experience at the very most and a prospect ready for the majors.

"The Blue Jays have long-term commitments to Alex Rios and Vernon Wells and serious revenue concerns, but there is also some relief in that B.J. Ryan, Scott Rolen and Lyle Overbay’s contracts coming off the books at the same time as Halladay’s (after the 2010 season — Ed). Ryan, Rolen and Overbay’s exit clears $28-million."

Buster Olney, ESPN.com: "The Jays essentially will have three windows of opportunity in which they could consider dealing the former Cy Young Award winner — in the 24 days before the July 31 trade deadline; during the offseason; or next season.

"Right now, the team most aggressively searching for a frontline starting pitcher is the Philadelphia Phillies, who no doubt would covet Halladay for their particular park for his ability to generate ground balls and missed swings -- he has a ground ball/fly ball ratio of 1.30, to go along 98 strikeouts in 116 innings this season. The question about the Phillies -- as it is with most teams these days, when the value of young players has never been higher -- is whether they would be willing to give up what the Jays would require in trade."

(And lookey-doo, they're already salivating down in Philadelphia over what the Phillies would have to send the Jays' way. The San Francisco Giants, though, would not part with prize pitching prospect Madison Bumgarner.)

Bill Shaikin, L.A. Times: "To say that 'Halladay is a goner" and 'Once this process starts, it's almost impossible to stop' — well, to that we say: Where is Jake Peavy pitching this season?" (San Diego, same as last year.)

Zach Sanders, Baseball Digest Daily: "If things don’t go as planned next year, then Halladay will be a valuable trade piece to be dealt to a contender. I understand the need to deal him now, because teams won’t just be getting a rental, but I don’t see the need to deal him because of financial issues. Teams should be planning ahead with the budgets, and not giving out big extensions in years they can’t afford them."

Orland Kurtenblog: "Dear Roy Halladay: If J.P. Ricciardi is telling the truth and he’s willing to entertain trade offers for your services, don’t fight it. Barring realignment, you aren’t seeing the playoffs in Toronto."

Mannywood, Air McNair and the death of manufactured outrage

You live in a moral grey zone. You don't exit it when you are in sports fan mode.

That is the ketchup answer — covers everything — for whatever has been said in the past week about Manny Ramírez and the late Steve McNair. Some sportswriters based in the cities where Manny has hung his do-rag, Boston and Los Angeles, were apoplectic that Ramírez got a hero's welcome when he returned from a 50-game suspension for a positive drug test. Less than 24 hours after Ramírez rejoined the L.A. Dodgers, McNair, who played QB in the NFL for 13 years, was found dead next to the body of his 20-year-old girlfriend. As you know, McNair was still married to the mother of his four children (and God forbid that U.S. lawmakers realize allowing a 20-year-old, not much more than a child really, to buy a handgun is a really bad policy it's a bad idea to have a society where a 20-year-old can easily get a gun).

The common thread is how to deal when sports get crowded by stupid reality again. Once and for all, it is time to divest oneself of the notion that sports fans, much less sports writers get to play the ethics and morality squad. We don't.

Honestly, distancing oneself from the scribbling practised by the likes of the L.A. Times' Bill Plaschke and Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, is about the best thing a sports nut can do. It's not clear if they really hate Manny Ramírez, or if it's just a routine, a face-dance. Either way, very little of it is needed.

Life is too short for both hate and for pundits who substitute shtick for trying to honestly convey what an event was like. When did manufactured outrage replace telling the shades-of-grey truth? As a L.A. Times user, reading Plaschke rail about, "Manny did the time, but what about the crime?" is a little like a pivotal scene near the end of The Shawshank Redemption. You know it. Red (the Morgan Freeman character) tells off a parole board official over the meaning of the word "rehabilitated."

"I know what you think it means sonny. To me it's just a made up word. A politician's word so that young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job."

That is really part of what we're talking about. It's not whether Ramírez's return proves standards have gone all to hell. It's about respecting that ultimately, everyone gets to assert their own terms, not adhere to society's, like Red/Morgan Freeman did with his redemption. This is about getting rid of a sportswriting construct where the columnist fulminates over What Should Be, which has made Bill Plaschke semi-rich.

The hero's welcome Manny got in places such as Albuquerque while playing a few tune-up games in the minor leagues was not reason to go off half-cocked. Americans have always loved outlaws, from Wild Bill Hickok to Barry Switzer. This was not going to change on the say-so of some sportswriters who wanted Manny to do their jobs for them by being all teary and apologetic.

Honestly, Dan Shaughnessy comes off less like a gatekeeper (an outmoded old-media concept) and more like an out-of-touch grouch.

"The longer this goes on, the more it seems that the only people who care about steroids are Hall of Fame voters, a handful of baseball purists, and perhaps those players who have not cheated and now feel like suckers.

"I called the commissioner to ask him about Manny getting the Charles Lindbergh treatment in San Diego (site of his first game back with the Dodgers).

" 'The only comment I have on that score is that fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment,' said a disgusted Bud Selig. 'That certainly is out of our control. That’s all I'll say on that.' "

Far be it to say there was another way to take Selig's comment that "fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment." No one who was not privy to the conversation know that the MLB commissioner was really "disgusted."

Perhaps Selig, in the parlance of our time, actually dared to address baseball fans as if they are adults. Maybe those aggrieved Hall of Fame voters, rather than act above the rabble who pay for tickets and the MLB Extra Innings package, ought to heed the people who support the whole pro sports apparatus with their discretionary income. Just because you memorized baseball stats as a kid and that influenced your choice of profession doesn't mean you have superior reasoning skills.

Thankfully, there are a few who can better channel their rage and get a post up about this much sooner, such as ShysterBall. ("What all of these columns seem to boil down to is anger at the fact that there has been no sturm und drang associated with Manny's suspension. The minute baseball actually discovers and penalizes a major star in a drama-free and orderly fashion, however, everyone gets bent out of shape.") There is also Charles Pierce, who wrote a wicked piece for Slate on Monday pointing out that if anything, Ramírez betrays the general attitude toward steroids, exposes the big lie.

"... it was of a piece with Manny's greatest gift as a professional athlete — his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous. In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it's Manny's who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. It is his holy mission to take the living piss out of the self-important, the moralistic, and the people who cling to baseball in order to defend their inherent right to be 13 years old for the rest of their lives. So, there he was, an Albuquerque Isotope, selling out the ballpark and, by all accounts, happy as a clam.

"... the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans — who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers — have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he'd pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he's back. That's the way things are going to be from now on."

No one says you have to like what has gone on in baseball any more than you have to like hearing that McNair was found dead next to a Woman Not His Wife.

This is not an apologia for anyone. There is no hair-splitting about the nature of Ramírez's cheating. Steroid experts say the fertility drug he tested positive for is one that "every steroid dealer carries." It is in the same vein with McNair. Not to speak ill of the dead, but there is little to no defending someone straying outside her/his marriage.

The question is why, as a sports lover, one would assume the best about a NFL player, whom you only know through TV images on Sunday afternoons and the odd Monday night, along with some touchy-feely PSAs for the United Way. It might be best to presume everyone, whatever their many virtues while in the moment doing their thing, is flawed like everyone else. One of the most perceptive comments in that vein came from the Chicago Bears defensive end, Adewale Ogunleye:

"Life is not a game. Football is a game. You can't expect a guy to make pinpoint decisions the way he would as a quarterback. I'm not condoning anything but at the end of the day, he's a human being."

You know this already, but there are other, better options to have as heroes. Point being, people need to let up a little on the knee-jerk judgments. Meantime, and everyone does this in sports (present company included), it's important not to conflate ability with character.

You cannot keep real life from seeping into sports. If anything, sports seeps into real life. The desperate traditional media might be getting high-school catty, but you don't have to play ball. You just have to accept, hey, in this age you have to stickhandle through a lot of weirdness and shamelessness, kind of like the protagonist in Douglas Coupland's JPod.

I am not advocating for everyone to have lower personal standards for her/his conduct. If anything, it's as important as ever to try to set a good example. But if you're going to have people on that we should expect unambiguous virtue from sports figures, you're dead wrong.

Thank you, Manny Ramírez, and thank you, Morgan Freeman.

Mornings with Mr. Canoehead

Water off a duck's back, raisins off an Oldsmobile ... what's not bothering you know.

... Sports columnists who think they have a right to comment on Serena Williams' body. Shame on you, Jason Whitlock: "She'd rather eat, half-ass her way through non-major tournaments and complain she's not getting the respect her 11-major-championships résumé demands...seriously, how else can Serena fill out her size 16 shorts without grazing at her stall between matches?"

... Whoever at FOXSports.com came up with the "Jays' Halladay all but gone in Toronto" headline based on J.P. Ricciardi saying, "if something makes sense, we at least have to listen." Flimsy basis, much? New rule: If a list of teams a reporter believes someone might be traded to exceeds one-third of the league, it's straight out of Eklund country. Quoth Craig Calcaterra: "The Blue Jays ... cannot spend a decade talking about how impossible it is to compete with Boston and New York and then turn around and give them one of the best starting pitchers in baseball during a pennant race ... if it did, it would potentially kill baseball in Toronto forever, and the fact that Rosenthal spends any time on those options at all suggests that this is more of a 'throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks' column than anything else."


... Whatever possessed an Ohio sportswriter to say, "Let the rest of the world play rugby," after Team USA beat Canada in the final of the world junior football championship on Sunday. Far be it to point out Americans should be flattered some of their backwards neighbours throughout the world have taken up the gridiron game. No matter how bad the over-the-top chauvinism gets in Canada during the world junior hockey championship, you'd never catch someone saying, "Let the rest of the world play ringette."

... The rumour Leafs first-round draft choice Nazem Kadri did not put on a hat on draft day because of his Muslim faith. Brian Burke was hilarious shooting that down: None of the Leafs' choices put on a hat when called down to the podium at the NHL draft as per a team policy (Burke noted he wanted photographers to get a better shot of the players' faces), plus there were published photos of a younger Kadri wearing a Canadiens hat. Whoever started that is out of touch.

... Bob Uecker dropping hints on-air about the possibility of a Major League 4.

... idly wondering if ave people seen the blog, Tennis Has A Steroid Problem?

BT to the dub, Erin Nicks is back up and blogging at The Universal Cynic. It will get more traffic than this site without even trying, and that's OK.

Fronts: Erik The Greatbranson pegged as Top-10 pick

Note the time and place: OHL Prospects says the Kingston Frontenacs defenceman Erik Gudbranson is "going to need to take a huge step back next year in order to NOT be a top 10 selection (in the NHL draft)." The World of Junior Hockey, meantime, rates him as a top-10 pick.

There is a rationale to writing a junior hockey post in the first full week of July, beyond unseasonably mild temps in the low 20s making it feel like mid-September. It is part of trying to help the diehards get primed for what the season has in store for the Fronts in the 12th year under owner Doug Springer, whose regime is still awaiting its first playoff series win.

Brock Otten's and Nathan Fournier's learned opinions are a good baseline with respect to the Erik The Greatbranson (you like it, feel free to steal it). Two learned hockey minds reckon that Gudbranson stands a rather good chance of becoming a high draft pick. It will be a reflection on the Fronts if he slips out of the first round, like his blueline brethren, Taylor Doherty, did in the past season before being taken by the San Jose Sharks at the bottom the second round 10 days ago in Montreal.

This might also serve as a passionate plea to the people paid to cover the major junior hockey team in the Limestone City. Please do not punt on addressing fans intelligently by towing the HMCS Royal Mavesty's party line. This is 2009. The "write what he said" approach to reportage does not work anymore. It flies about as well Springer infamous calling GM-for-life Larry Mavety "an astute hockey man" when the pair of them are well into their second decade without a playoff series win, with not a hint of change in sight in the organization's structure.

Point being, there have to be some standards beyond Springer and Mav's 11 levels of Fail. Kingston ratepayers have gifted Springer with a $43-million arena for a team which has been at the bottom of the standings and was called in front of city council last February over its poor play and subpar attendance figures (sorry, it was over their "marketing plan").

That is why it is good to get it down on record with Gudbranson. Please commit it to memory that a learned hockey mind feels that the Orleans native, who was captain of the gold medal-winning Team Ontario at the World Under-17 Challenge in January and did not look out of place as an underaged player at the world under-18 tournament in North Dakota this spring, could be a top 10 pick.

There should be no repeat of the self-back patting the Frontenacs organization indulged in after another Doherty was taken by San Jose. Similarly, the big d-man came into last season touted as a potential first-rounder ("Frontenacs defenceman Taylor Doherty, by the way, is being touted a first-rounder in at least one mock draft," this site, Nov. 7, 2008). His draft stock fell off the side of the cliff in the first half of the season, since playing for a gong-show franchise with poor coaching clearly slowed his development.

In Kingston, where going along to get along means having the memory of a fruit fly when it comes to the franchise's false promises and myriad stupidities, Tim Cunningham of TVCogeco and K-Rock 105.7 was about the only person in the traditional media who was honest about Doherty.

Everyone else, and no one is judging, was only to happy to write something along the lines of, "Interest in Messrs. Werek and Doherty rose smartly during the second half of the 2008-09 OHL season as both players honed individual skills and rounded out their games." (That is just generic, not specific; there is tremendous respect on this end for the veteran journo.) If Mavety said of Doherty and Ethan Werek prior to the draft that "those two guys are much better players today than they were a year ago," then it must be true. Never mind that Mavety, a losing GM whose propensity toward self-serving statements is surpassed only by his knack for self-preservation, is homogeneously unqualified to offer an informed assessment of a player's progress.

Saying that interest Doherty rose sharply in the second half of the season is true, at face value. It is just that first interest in the big rearguard had to drop drastically before it rose, marginally. He was touted as a first-round pick. That did not happen. Yet the Frontenacs were not held accountable. Meantime, some of the diehards at Fronts Talk believe Doherty will need a ticket out of Kingston to realize his potential.

"Doherty's game has so many holes in it that it'll take a top-notch organization with a track record of developing raw potential in order to fix it. I just don't see Kingston being that club. Especially with how high San Jose took Doherty (2nd round), I think that by about mid-season, if Doherty is still struggling here, you might see San Jose ask that he be dealt elsewhere. To be completely honest, I'm surprised Doherty's camp didn't ask for a trade last year, when it was obvious his game needed a lot of refining and he wasn't getting it here."

There is also speculation, idle mind you, whether NHL teams are cool with having their prospects develop, such as it were, in the Kingston organization. It is pretty evident, based on the moves Mavengil has made (Doug Gilmour says he's responsible for player personnel moves, but they look an awful lot like Mavety's), that the hope is just try to eke out a playoff berth.

People should not be satisfied by second-best, or seeing first-round talent slide to the second. K-town deserves better, honest.

Big Fan: The dark side of obsessive fandom — can't wait

One can only assume that Big Fan, due out in theatres Aug. 28, might hit a little too close to home for some sports obsessives. It is written and directed by Robert Siegel, who wrote The Wrestler, so that might be a clue as to tone.



Casting a comic actor, in this case, Patton Oswalt, as the lead in a dramedy is high-risk. Moviegoers did not exactly warm to Seth Rogen in Observe & Report (which grossed only $25 million US, but must have something going for it since it was from Jody Hill, one of the bright minds behind Eastbound & Down) and, dating myself here, a lot of people we not ready for the Jim Carrey that they in The Cable Guy.

Not everyone's up for a movie which might creep people out as much as making them laugh. Then again, what is comedy if not pushing people's thresholds? By the sounds of what the movie nerds are saying, people expected lighter comedy when Big Fan was screened at Sundance.

"With Oswalt in the lead, most festival-goers were expecting a flat out comedy, but were shocked to find a dark dramedy. Big Fan is a character study much in the same vein of Siegel’s The Wrestler. It is a profile of an obsessed sports fanatic who has invested too much of himself into a past time. You might not like the twists and turns, and you probably won’t have any idea where this story will conclude, but you’ll walk out of it with an all new respect for Oswalt." — Peter Sciretta, /Film

"This actually looks a lot better as a trailer than I remember it being. Siegel's writing may have been fine, but his directing was completely amateur (read my review). I may still give this another shot when it hits theaters to see if Siegel has tweaked it at all since Sundance. Anyway, give it a shot, I expect a few of you may end up liking this indie a lot." — Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net

" ... audiences at Sundance were amazed to see such a dark and dramatic performance from the comedian and the trailer below really gives us a sneak peek into what we can expect from both the actor and the director." — ScreenCrave

Five other feature films about sports fans:

• Fever Pitch (1997). The good Brit adaptation of Nick Hornby's book, starring Colin Firth, positing that anyone who doesn't care about something at age 35 the same way they did at age 12 is in the wrong. "Maybe there's a big bit of you that's gone missing somewhere, maybe everyone should want something they've always wanted." Worth it alone for the melt of 1970s-vintage Arsenal footage. It's almost guaranteed that when that happens, you'll free-associate with moments from your own sports fan past. When Paul Ashworth harkens back to Frank McLintock, you might be picturing Roberto Alomar crushing a post-season homer off Dennis Eckersley.
  
  
• The Football Factory (2004). Gets right inside the culture of the firms, the organized group of club supporters in England whose fanaticism borders on illegality (that is a diplomatic way to put it).
  
  
• Rudy (1993). The real-life Rudy did become a player against million-to-one odds, but really, he was a fanboy first.
  
  
• Field of Dreams (1989). It's in here over the line delivered by James Earl Jones which might sum up why people go to games, "For it's money they have, and peace they lack." It's in despite a personal objection that this is, on the whole, pandering Boomer bathos (the dead giveaway being the casting of Timothy Busfield, then as now known as the "redheaded guy in thirtysomething."
  
  
• The Fan (1996). Steer clear. Robert De Niro at his scenery-chewing worst as a low-rent Travis Bickle out to help his favourite player, a brash, belligerent outfielder on the San Francisco Giants who in no way is intended to resemble Barry Bonds.

BT to the dub, Patton Oswalt had a recurring role on the old CBS sitcom King of Queens as a neighbourhood buddy of Kevin James' lead character, who ironically, was a New York Jets fan. Please keep this factoid to yourself, lest people think you watched that show for any reasons beyond Leah Remini's rear end.

DanyWatch Day 28: More great moments in Melnyk-mollification

Given a choice between Ottawa and the KHL, Alexei Kovalev chose the warmer climate. He was misinformed.

Trite jokes aside, it is understandable if Senators fans see this as a sop to getting Dany Heatley back in the fold. The Senators are apparently over the salary cap, but teams can stickhandle around that $56.8-million figure. They can be above it by 10 per cent for one year and can always bury players in the AHL, which means Jason Smith was awfully prescient to get a Skype account in the 607 area code.

After a decade and a half in the league, Kovalev, like his homeland, a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but he can still get it done every once in a while. Montréal Canadiens fans taking to the streets to lobby for Habs GM Bob Gainey to re-sign him, so Senators fans can relish the signing for that reason.

It does fairly smack of Bryan Murray doing the equivalent of taking one of those Senators logo pacifiers which were recalled last week and sticking in owner Eugene Melnyk's gob. (British expressions, really?)

Meantime, you might have read, via Puck Daddy, a report about "projections that the poor economy will cause the salary cap to dip from $56.8 million to as low as $50 million for 2010-11." It might be important to keep in mind that is a worst-case scenario and a lot of NHL teams are taking the stance they'll come to the bridge when the cross it vis-à-vis the salary cap.

Last and not least, a good question for Senators fans: Would you rather have 36-year-old Alexei Kovalev, or 28-year-old Martin Havlat, who signed with the Minnesota Wild?

Kovalev's stats:



Havlat's:

Sentenced to the Island ...

No doubt a lot of in-the-know people were aware what Ontario Hockey League player was convicted of manslaughter in the death of 15-year-old Manny Castillo in a high school rugby game two years ago.

Long story short, the player received a year's probation and 100 hours' community service. Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act is what is, so one cannot say explicitly who it was. Apparently it was decided that being drafted by a certain NHL team was punishment enough. Suffice to say, if you do not want to know who the player was, do not visit Chris Botta's blog.

(Update: Does it need to be explained that it was a joke to say being drafted by a certain NHL team is punishment enough?)

Related:
The Castillo verdict: Don't press the panic button (May 28, 2009)

A Jay a Day: Free John McDonald (sort of)

John McDonald is actually starting a game today.

The non-use of McDonald is an entry point for discussing one of the more enigmatic aspects of how Blue Jays manage their 25-man roster. It's a bit dated, but Marc Hulet pointed out recently at FanGraphs that Cito seems to be playing a game of burnout with his regulars. Four Jays have started at least 78 of the team's 83 games. Marco Scutaro, who has been awesome at shortstop, has started every game (and yes, finding a picture from 2007 of McDonald and Scutaro together was deliberate). If you use 78 starts as the threshold, the Red Sox, Rays and AL Central-leading Detroit Tigers have each used two regulars that often. The Yankees have only one, second baseman Robinson Cano.

Hulet's point bears reiterating since it helps fill in the picture with the Jays, who are 15-27 since May 19 and will be at .500 for the first time all season if they lose vs. the Yankees today. The perfect storm of arm ailments, the equivalent of an entire starting rotation on the disabled list, has been a huge culprit, but Hulet raised a good point about the over-use of five players.

"As of June 20, the Jays club had played 78 games (41-37). Five regulars had played 76 games or more: Aaron Hill, Marco Scutaro, Adam Lind, Vernon Wells, and Alex Rios. Two of those players (Rios and Wells) have been terrible this season and were also left in the No. 3 and 4 holes in the lineup until mid-June.

"Two other players are obviously being over-worked by the manager. Hill appeared in just 55 games last year due to a concussion. Despite the time off, the manager has failed to ease the second baseman back into regular play. Scutaro, the club’s undisputed spark plug in the first two months, had never really been a full-time player until last year when he appeared in 145 games. At 33, he’s no spring chicken.

"... As a side note, I’d also like to point out the disappointing use of veteran back-up infielder John McDonald. The fifth-year Jay has been used in just 28 games this season with just 26 at-bats. That is the most embarrassing use of any player in the Majors this season ... That, ladies and gentlemen, is not the way to use you bench ... Or treat your veteran players. You know, the ones you’d have to turn to if your starting shortstop or second baseman suddenly got hurt."

Obviously, no right-thinking fan wishes Hill or Scutaro ill just so he can say, "Told you so." Hill, the all-star second baseman, has emerged as the Jays' best all-around player. Scutaro, by the numbers, has been the best-fielding shortstop in the American League. The fact remains is that, after leading off and playing short every game and batting a league-high 395 times (this is someone who's only had 500 plate appearances once in his career, and that was last season), Scutaro has dropped off with the stick.

April & May: .305/.408/.457
Since June 1: .244/.336/.350

The rub is John McDonald is still on the team, two seasons after a lot of bandwidth was burned up debating whether his combination of web gem-worthy fielding and hide-your-eyes hitting made him an acceptable as a No. 1 shortstop. It's not about whether he should get more starts at the expense of Hill and Scutaro. The point is that the Jays should have somebody who can spell off their starting middle infielders.

Today marks only the fourth start all season for McGlovin, three at second base and one at third (oddly enough, he had a rare two-hit game that day, both singles, in a 10-0 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies). The way McDonald has been utilized is tantamount to wasting the 25th spot on the roster.

The onus is not necessarily on Cito Gaston as the field manager. It could be that the front office has not stocked the team with viable options to spell off Hill, Scutaro, Rios and Wells (Jose Bautista has been a decent find, but he can only play the corner positions). Point being, overplaying the regulars too much tempts fate.

The Jays ought to make a decision on McDonald, who is in the back half of a two-year contract, before the end of the season. Give him his freedom to find another organization where he might actually get to start a game more than once a month.

(For point of comparison, Gaston does not like to use his bench much, but it was nothing like this back in the glory days. On the 1992 team, Devon White was the heaviest-used regular, starting 151 games in centrefield, while Roberto Alomar started 149. The following season, Alomar, Ed Sprague and Joe Carter, who shuffled between the corner outfield spots, each started at least 150 games.

The '93 World Series-winning Jays used the 25th spot on a Rule 5 draft pick named Willie Canate, who got 47 at-bats all season, got caught in a rundown during his only appearance in the World Series and never appeared in the majors again. They had nothing on the 1985 team, which carried two Rule 5 picks, Manuel Lee and Lou Thornton, meaning it played the whole season with 23 guys. That was obviously before Tony La Russa invented the 12-man pitching staff.)

Sports media: Wilner to baseball-yak it up on the old yak-box

This ought to be good for the geek love. The FAN 590's Mike Wilner announced on his blog tonight that his station is adding a daily baseball show, to run in Hockey Central's normal noon-hour time slot.

"Starting tomorrow, Monday the 6th, the Fan590 will be carrying a daily, one-hour program dedicated solely to the discussion of the greatest game there is — Baseball Today will be on Monday through Friday at noon Eastern and (for the time being, at least), be hosted by yours truly. It's still kind of open as to what kind of show it will be. I'm going to want audience interaction. I'm going to want discussion of not only the goings-on in Blue Jay land, but across the landscape of MLB. I'm going to want to have the audience learn about newer metrics to measure and predict performance. I'm going to see if I can get a Blue Jay or two to pop by in studio (when they’re at home, of course) to chat and take phone calls. All kinds of things. Tomorrow’s premiere edition will be a phone-in show, because I'm going to want to hear from you, the listeners, about what you want from a daily hour-long baseball show."

It might even take more of a commitment. You are going to have to take a leave from a job and dissolve all personal relationships.

Clearly, this might have come out of Rogers bean-counters figuring a hour of baseball talk each weekday might be good cross-promotion for the Jays. The FAN 590, case in point, has a tennis show that's a pretty obvious attempt to whip up interest in the Rogers Cup. It's either that or there are a lot of males 18-49 who want to call in and talk about Juan Carlos Ferrero's second serve. Nevertheless, this is welcome news, presuming CSIS will not trace all the calls since anyone in Canada who wants to talk about baseball instead of hockey in the middle of July is probably capable of treason.

Mornings with Mr. Canoehead

Well I woke up Sunday morning, with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt. And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert ... here what's not bothering you now, raisins off an Oldsmobile.

... The new Yankee Stadium after Roy Halladay was done out of a win Saturday. It's understood that the Yankees honour their history, but turning Johnny Damon into Lou Gehrig is going too far. Between its ridiculous hitter-friendliness — Damon has already hit 12 home runs there, hey, lots of 35-year-olds just suddenly become power hitters — and the super-extendo seventh-inning stretch, it's borderline cheating. The latter actually comes from Mike Wilner:

" Speaking of the 7th inning, and I hate to bring this up since the idea of signing God Bless America in the 7th inning stretch, especially on the 4th of July, is a lovely thing, but seriously. Does it have to be the extended dance mix of the song, a Yankee Stadium tradition? I would love to go back over the last nine years and see how many runs the Yanks have scored at home in the 7th inning after freezing the opposing pitcher for an extra five minutes while Dr. Ronan Tynan dragged out every last syllable of GBA.

"And maybe it’s me, but I just find it to be the overwhelming Yankee arrogance that carries over into Tynan’s rendition, since he’s the only one on the planet who actually sings the whole thing. It's as though the thinking is 'this is New York City, we’re going to be the only ones who do it right.' It would be like the Blue Jays stopping home games in the 7th inning stretch to sing O Canada and making sure to include the mysterious second verse about great prairies spreading and mighty rivers flowing."

The new Yankee Stadium calls to mind the late, great Dan Quisenberry's line about another stadium, "I don't know if there are good uses for nuclear weapons, but this might be one."

... two players on a Double-A team driving in more runs last night than Vernon Wells has since the first of June. No, they were not playing a doubleheader.

... Dany Heatley thinking it's despicable Sarah Palin won't honour her commitment to the Alaska electorate. Incidentally, if Heatley is coming to Ottawa for teammate Jason Spezza's wedding, they might need to hold the reception at the U.S. embassy, for the extra security.

... the irony of minor-league hockey player Robin Gomez being acquitted of assault on the same day that his team, the Oklahoma City Blazers, went out of business.

(Former Ottawa Gee-Gees goalie Jordan Watt was one of Gomez's defence lawyer.

... the Toronto Argonauts running radio spots calling themselves an "accessible team." The B.C. Lions deserve that appellation after the way their offensive line blocked on Friday (nine sacks allowed vs. Saskatchewan).

... Team-hopping football coach Nick Saban playing himself in the film version of The Blind Side. Apparently he wandered off the set in the middle of the shoot to take a role in another movie.

... knowing why it is not socially acceptable to say Formula One's Bernie Ecclestone got roasted for praising Hitler. You would be almost as bad as he is.

... not knowing Tyler Arnason was still in the NHL.

Steve McNair: Slain NFL MVP bridged a generation of black quarterbacks

The media tends to overemphasize the importance of someone being the first or last of his kind.

Steve McNair, the former NFL MVP who was murdered Saturday in Nashville, would fill the middle chapters of a book about the progress of the black quarterback in pro football. He was important, as someone who was taken in the first 10 picks of the draft. McNair, who "won’t get inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but was one of the league’s toughest players," (Biloxi Sun-Herald, June 28), spanned a generation when black quarterbacks went from novelty to normative to being at risk of becoming a novelty once again. That is important.

(P.S. Interesting comments from the ex-boyfriend of the slain young woman, Sahel Kazemi.)

McNair came up the hard way, playing at Alcorn State in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, which Sports Illustrated described in 1994 as "small, underfunded and unable to lure recruits with big-time television, yet it has sent a steady stream of players, from Buck Buchanan to (Walter) Payton to Charlie Joiner to (Jerry) Rice, to the NFL."

In that sense, he was the last of his kind, reaching back to a bygone era when the big-time football schools were not open to blacks. One macabre irony of his death is that McNair had just opened a restaurant on Jefferson Street near Tennessee State University. That is the alma mater of one of his predecessors in the NFL, Joe Gilliam, who also died young. Gilliam's nickname was Jefferson Street Joe.

McNair was a few years ahead of the trend in major-college football toward the spread offence, which has spawned a new breed of star, the dual threat quarterback. (He was more of a drop-back, pro-style passer, but since people think in images, he probably would have got a shot in the spread.) Here one thinks of several exemplars who are both black and white, such as Tim Tebow at Florida, Vince Young when he played at Texas, Alex Smith at Utah, current Pittsburgh Steelers backup Dennis Dixon, who if not for a knee injury would have led the Oregon Ducks to the BCS title game in 2007 and, of course, Michael Vick. Scouting and recruiting networks even in the early 1990s were nothing compared to today. Someone would have discovered him in this day and age, when in 30 seconds you can find YouTube footage of a quarterback from the University of Montana who might be signing with the Saskatchewan Roughriders (Cole Bergquist, remember the name).

Less than 20 years ago, people still noticed when you turned on a NFL game on Sunday and saw a quarterback who was black. In January, when the NFL playoffs were on, a writer named David D. at The Smoking Section mused that it might seem passé to dwell on this issue with Barack Obama now in the White House. However, it still draws a lot of water, especially with how Young, Vick and Daunte Culpepper have struggled:

"Aside from perhaps the hockey goalie, the Black quarterback is one of the last frontiers of major sports. The fact that the quarterback is responsible for the cerebral field has historically made general managers and coaches hesitant to put the keys in the hands of an African-American who is characterized as merely a instinctual athlete good for running out of the pocket, with questionable accuracy and limited ability to think on his feet."

If you read the S.I. cover story from the fall of 1994, you can understand the banner McNair carried into the NFL.

"It also makes him, one hopes, the standard-bearer for a new generation of black NFL quarterbacks, the first who will enter the league without needing to break some shabby stereotype about their capacity to lead. Williams's triumph in the 1988 Super Bowl and Warren Moon's stellar consistency over the past decade forced this change, but there's one final step to go: There have to be "so many black quarterbacks that it no longer seems like a novelty," says Minnesota Viking defensive coordinator Tony Dungy, 'or a charismatic type, a Joe Montana who wins so many Super Bowls that the issue just fades away.'

" ... College football has spawned many winning black quarterbacks over the past three years — Colorado's Kordell Stewart, Nebraska's Tommie Frazier, Virginia Tech's Maurice De Shazo; even Ole Miss, of all places, started Lawrence Adams last year. And now here's McNair, out of the same conference that quietly produced Jerry Rice and Walter Payton, carrying superstar intangibles like leadership and grace under fire.

"Of course, people said Florida State's Charlie Ward possessed those characteristics. But once the 1993 Heisman Trophy winner refused to commit to the NFL over the NBA, his supposed deficiencies — too short and lack of a cannon arm — made him anathema. He wasn't drafted, and that created an intriguing divide: It was easy to conclude that Ward must not be good enough for the NFL, but a significant number of blacks felt, as Dungy put it, 'slapped.' Ward was taller than McMahon, with a stronger arm than Montana's, in a two-sport quandary similar to that faced by John Elway as a college senior. His snub confirmed the suspicion that the NFL still takes fewer chances on black quarterbacks than on white ones. 'If you're black,' Williams once said, 'you have to walk on water or be gone.'

"Ward never even got the chance to try for that miracle. 'I remember the day it happened,' says Los Angeles Raider tight end Jamie Williams, who is black and who last year wrote and produced a documentary film on the media's treatment of black quarterbacks. 'My wife looked at me, and her eyes were watering. I almost cried. The guy did it all in college, and he didn't get drafted. I was training with Jerry Rice and Ricky Watters, and they were like, "I can't believe that happened." It hit an emotional chord with black Americans. It gave everybody a sour taste.' "

The record should show McNair carried the standard pretty well, guiding the wild-card Tennessee Titans to within one yard of forcing overtime in the Super Bowl in 2000 and sharing MVP honours with Tom Brady Peyton Manning in 2003. Brady Manning deserved it hands-down, but the voters made a huge deal of McNair's toughness and leadership, which shows how attitudes have improved.

Meantime, talk about an awful, unnecessary death. No one deserves to leave this mortal coil at such a young age, 36 years old. Ultimately, in the short time he had, McNair made a lot of progress, for that he should be remembered no matter what.

Update: Mocking The Draft wrote a very nice tribute:

"Still today, McNair remains one of the greatest quarterback prospects of all time. He was not wasted potential like Ryan Leaf, Todd Marinovich or Vince Young. He was like John Elway and Steve Young – incredible athletes who went on to NFL glory. Much like Jerry Rice and Walter Payton, he was the rare star from the Southwesten Athletic Conference.

"It took 13 years for an NFL team to take a Division I-AA quarterback in the first round when Baltimore took Joe Flacco. It's only fitting that McNair's roster spot in Baltimore to be theoretically used by Flacco after his retirement in April 2008.

" ... What was even greater about McNair was that he seemingly broke that last quarterback color barrier. Doug Williams won the Super Bowl. Warren Moon sustained greatness for a whole career. McNair was the first to be a top draft pick. It's impossible not to think, then, McNair's success played a factor in Philadelphia's decision to take Donovan McNabb second overall in 1999."

Update II:Jeff Pearlman has some good stuff:

"McNair was genuine. Teammates loved him. I mean, really loved him. He was gritty and tough and hard-nosed. He played through pain and thrived at overcoming odds."

Related:
McNair defined the magic of the NFL Draft (Mocking The Draft)
Air McNair; Steve McNair is the best quarterback — black or white, big school or small — in college football (S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated, Sept. 26, 1994)

Raptors: There is no D in 'Türkoğlu,' but we can get past that

It's good when the Raptors sign a player whom MLSE executives might have heard of.

Adding Hedo Türkoğlu and spending right to the NBA's salary cap is a huge dice-throw by Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo. It is also an easy sell. Türkoğlu comes wearing the mantle of having been a NBA all-star and having just helped the Orlando Magic throw a wrench into David Stern's vision of a LeBron James-Kobe Bryant NBA Finals. Plus he has a cool-sounding name. You can just hear Matt Devlin or Paul Jones, the Raps' radio and TV announcers, yelling, "Hedo-nism Three!" after Türkoğlu swishes a three-pointer. (That's trademarked, by the way.)

It's probably a necessary risk. It gets the Raptors closer to a return to the playoffs. It is easier to implement a grand design when you still have a job or confidence of the highers-up. It will not make them a top-four team in the East.

By the same token, the Raptors' Achilles heel during the Colangelo era has been defence, rebounding and athleticism. Adding Türkoğlu, a 30-year-old perimeter player, does not necessarily address those areas.

They can probably sign a two-guard on the cheap and they have added Reggie Evans, who can get plenty of rebounds (as any fantasy leaguer knows). Meantime, as they showed in 2006-07 and much of '07-08, sometimes you can just outshoot and outscore teams in the NBA, which can be damn entertaining if hard on a fan's blood pressure.

As the Toronto Star's Doug Smith noted, Türkoğlu gives Jay Triano and the Raptors coaching staff more options when they are either late in the shot clock or in an endgame situation. It also somewhat addresses the Chris Bosh Question.

"Another good ball-handler and initiator on the court.

"A guy you can give the ball to at the end of the game and say, 'make a play' while you stretch the floor with José Calderón (a very good three-point shooter) in the corner.

Let's just say – as Jeff Blair first pointed out on a radio show last night – that (Chris) Bosh leaves (and no, I don’t have any idea if he will). Do you feel more comfortable going forward with Calderon, (Andrea) Bargnani and Turkoglu or Calderon, Bargnani and (Shawn) Marion? A no-brainer over here.

You can put Hedo and Bargnani in the pick and roll; you could never do that with Marion."

Needless to say, it was crazy how this came together late on a Friday night. Michael Grange from globesports.com described it thusly:

"Five hours later Turkoglu has a tentative deal in Toronto and I’m standing outside a bar trying to confirm and write a news story on my Blackberry while under the influence. Given that Turkoglu was in Portland and all indications were that he had agreed to a five-year, $50-million offer from the Trail Blazers, that’s a pretty major reversal."

Meantime, the defence, rebounding and athleticism parts will be works-in-progress. Ultimately, when you miss the playoffs and you're overshadowed by the hockey team, you have to take some chances. A lot of the armchair GMs might have done the same thing.

Related:
The dawn of a new era? Or something like that (Doug Smith's Toronto Raptors Blog)
Colangelo works fast and hard to get Turkoglu (Michael Grange, From Deep, globesports.com)

CFL: B.C. - Saskatchewan live blog

I'll be live-blogging the B.C. Lions - Saskatchewan Roughriders game tonight. It's the first one of the year for both teams, so it should be a good one. There are also several strong CIS connections, which I explore in my game preview over at The CIS Blog. Kickoff is at 9 p.m. Eastern, and the game will be televised on TSN. Come join me then for the live blog!

The Danys of our lives: In which we go broke appealing to the highest common denominator

Ottawa Senators fans are right to fume over DanyDebacle '09. The point remains, as noted yesterday, that the "endless flame-fanning and rip-jobs in the Ottawa media ... got really old really fast."

Call it naive, whatever, there was a time this cowboy would have been one of the 450 get-a-lifers on the Fuck Dany Heatley Facebook group. It is just hard to see the gain in slamming Heatley day after day for not just surrendering his "negotiated right through the no-movement clause to have a strong say in where he gets traded." (Pierre LeBrun, ESPN.com.) It's negotiated. Contrary to what some bar patron quoted in the Ottawa Sun, the Senators cannot actually "stick him in the minors and let him rot." This came to mind before Jason Spezza stood by his wingman in an article posted on the website, by the way.

Being a fan is not expressed by venting the kind of rage typically seen on cable news (please don't take that last part literally, it's just a good article). There is no desire to side with Heatley (AKA Joseph Stallin) side for the sake thereof. It would just be nice if the city's rank-and-file looked a bit better informed about sports. There is an exemption if you write half-funny, like Scott Feschuk at Macleans ("A small number of Ottawa residents are still keen to give him the key to the city, though only if he agrees to accept it rectally.")

Anyway, it's not a defence, but Alanah McGinley at Kukla's Korner has an all-things-considered post on the whole mess that reasonable-minded Senators fans ought to read.

"... most of the rhetoric floating around seems to go off the charts.

"And why? Well, the justification for this is clear, we're told. First, Heatley went public with his desire to leave Ottawa. Next, he turned down a possible escape trade to Edmonton, making the situation infinitely worse.

"However, being that I’m willing to give Heatley the benefit of the doubt, I’m also willing to believe in at least the possibility that there were other factors at play in the choices he’s made in the last few weeks. After all, it wasn't so long ago that a goalie named Ray Emery was in the hot seat, getting blamed for all the destruction around him as his once-mighty Senators took an abrupt and unexplainable plummet into the crapper. And back then, everyone whispered all sorts of unsubstantiated and shocking gossip blaming Emery for the team’s fortunes.

"But then Emery left and seems to have done reasonably well since then. And yet Ottawa is still... Ottawa.

"So isn’t it remotely possible — just an tiny bit possible — that the problems in Ottawa might have more to do with the Senators organization itself than any one player? If so, then maybe Dany Heatley's comments to Darren Dreger last night, implying he felt he was getting deliberately screwed around by the team, are at least reasonable from his point of view. (Not that I have any reason to believe he was, simply that I'm no more likely to let the Senators off the hook than I am to let Heatley off for this mess.)

"On the other hand, Heatley is the one that made this public and that wanted out of a contract that HE willingly signed in the first place, so he has plenty of fault in this no matter what. And I’m not saying the Senators are the 'bad guys' in this drama, either. Only that we don’t necessarily know the whole story. And since Heatley strikes me as a reasonably smart guy able to anticipate he'd look pretty bad in all this, I can only assume he felt he had good reasons to take this path.

"Whatever the truth, it seems likely there's far more back-story to this than simply 'Dany Heatley is an evil psycho,' and everyone's sanctimonious moaning about how terribly Heatley has treated the 'poor Ottawa Senators' strikes me as an infantile over-reaction. At the end of the day, it's just business, and conflicts aren't unheard of in business, especially given the amounts of money at stake.

"... until some clever and gutsy Ottawa hockey journalist writes a tell-all book about Heatley and/or the Senators, I'm reserving judgment."

Point being, it's a little much to hear people making statements such as, "He's hurting the city's reputation." Hurting the city's reputation is supposed to be Larry O'Brien's job ... at least for the next couple weeks.

Meantime, LeBrun's column is a pretty balanced take on the ramifications of Heatley killing a trade. Freudian slip fans will note he refers to the Ottawa media as "the Senators' media," which is odd. Self-serving though it might be, agent J.P. Barry told LeBrun the Senators kind of screwed themselves:

"I specifically told (Bryan Murray) two days ago, long before the trade happened, 'Do not trade him to Edmonton until you have other options.' And he turned around and consummated the trade despite my request. The result of which is that I get a phone call from a guy that I really respect in Steve Tambellini, who was excited, and I had to inform him what happened.

"I think it was completely mishandled by (Murray). It was a pressure tactic. He loaded up the gun and put the gun against our heads."

"We advised Bryan continually that Dany requires more than one option (team) to make a decision and, as of last night, we still only had one option, so he still wasn't able to make a decision, given that there still was only one option in front of him."

Meantime, fans have a right to be livid. They also have an option to play it smart and unlike the option Heatley had, it doesn't involve having to pack for Edmonton. Bonus! Oh, sorry, shouldn't use that word.

Remember, we're all in this together.

As a post-script, Down Goes Brown imagined how a conversation between Heatley and Oilers president Kevin Lowe might have unfolded:

"Lowe: Now, just so I'm clear on your side of things, you're demanding a trade because...

Heatley: ... because I can't spend another day in Ottawa. I'm miserable beyond any measure of human understanding. Every day I spend in Ottawa is the worst of my life, and the only joy I find is in the knowledge that every day wasted in that god forsaken town brings me one day closer to the icy relief of death.

Lowe: I see. And you're not waiving your no-trade clause because...

Heatley: ... all that still sounds better than spending the winter in Edmonton."

Blog blast past: Requiem for the released, Russ Adams

The Blue Jays have given former first-round draft choice Russ Adams the dreaded DFA, designated ... for ... assignment. It might sound bad, but Quad-A ballplayers take it in stride. From Aug. 7, 2008, here's a tribute to a human footnote.

Russ Adams is best known for not being something.

Let's think about what that says about us, rather than what it says about the first-round pick who was once the answer to the Jays' shortstop situation. Being a sports fan and cheering for a bunch of jocks employed by a multinational corporation, because it's your team, is an ultimate act of naive sentiment. It's odd how it's rare that any of that is saved for a bright hope who fell flat on his face.

Maybe it's an offshoot of the self-loathing that builds up from having spent your waking hours worrying about the outcome of games you cannot control. To think I believed in Russ Adams?! He's dead to me.

There's names for the exemplars of this phenomenon -- bust, flop, fizzle, dud, Ryan Leaf. It might be the worst ignominy to own in sports, on par with being a cheater. People will let an athlete off the hook for being an out-and-out rat bastard, but not for failing like Russ Adams has as a major-leaguer.

"I don't see playing baseball professionally, playing over two years in the majors, if someone thinks that's failing, I don't know what planet they live on. I'm not going to be sitting at home at 40 and think I'm a failure in life because I didn't play 20 years in the big leagues. That won't dictate my happiness." -- Syracuse Post-Standard

Hands up, everyone whose knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines, "Oh, go cry me a river." It might create the mental picture of Adams, barring some near-miraculous turnaround, spending the next 20 years dreaming of a parallel universe where he was the American League's answer to Chase Utley.

A lot of sports fans probably look it that way. It's not clear that the ballplayers actually do.

It's undeniable what springs to mind after seeing that quote from Adams, whose Triple-A rate stats in Syracuse this summer (.232/.322/.378) scream, "quintessential Quadruple-A player." This, of course, is from someone who as every Jays fan must know by now, was drafted ahead of Scott Kazmir, Nick Swisher and Joey Votto (not just a Toronto boy, but a paisano of J.P. Ricciardi).

It's actually straight of out of the novel North Dallas Forty. There's a scene where the antihero Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte played him in the movie) recalls commiserating with a player who had been traded, dumped by a team that had publicly proclaimed he would be brilliant:

"He seemed like the only survivor of a ten-car collison who was trying to explain how it happened. Several times during the course of our conversation he had stopped to stare off into his disastrous past, thinking of all those glories he had only tasted slightly."

There's a double-edge to that analogy. It could seem empathetic or just downright cruel. But it's c'est la vie for a human footnote.

For anyone who needs a refresher, the Jays advanced Adams quickly through the minors after he was drafted in 2002 (Matt Cain and Cole Hamels, both now top-flight starters in the NL, were also available when Ricciardi made the 14th overall selection).

In 2005, he put up a decent enough first season as a rookie shortstop. According to his Baseball-Reference.com page, his age-24 season compared pretty favourably with that of Orlando Cabrera, who's been an adequate, sometimes all-star shortstop for a decade.

He had the throwing yips in '06. You can't presume to know what's in a player's mind, but the stats make it look like he was taking his defensive problems up to bat with him. The Jays eventually had to send him to Syracuse to learn how to play second base, which was a give-up play.

Inside of two years, the Shortstop of the Future has become one of among the couple hundred Triple-A veterans -- roster flotsam who move about the minors, their names known only to the most hardcore baseball fans. They're valued by MLB organizations for what might be called their overdeveloped flexibility. Most of them, almost as a survival skill, have learned to play several positions (good for when the big club is shuffling players around). They've been around long enough that they don't need to be babysat by their manager. They're also fully comfortable with the hard reality that they can traded, demoted, promoted, or released at any time.

Who knows why it didn't work out for Adams. One historical note is that left-handed hitting shortstops are a rarity. (Stephen Drew of the Arizona Diamondbacks is the only everyday SS in the majors who bats lefty.)

The thing is, though, is that most fans don't fully appreciate that it does take exceptional skill, the kind not found in 99% of the population, to even be a career minor leaguer. People also don't get, or don't care, that's it debatable whether failing as an everyday shortstop actually hurt Russ Adams as a person. He got far enough to get all his illusions about playing baseball shattered, but a lot of men never will.

Some day in the not too distant future, the Jays will probably waive him. Drunk Jays Fans and the like will write a blog post for shits and giggles. Maybe someone will do up a Top 10 list of Toronto sports busts, slotting Adams in with Rafael Araujo and Ricky Williams, but Russ Adams will just go on living his life. The wicked burn won't be on him.

Slotback slog: Jesse Lumsden is Eric Lindros

Jesse Lumsden deserves credit for trying to make it as a Canadian playing an American position in a Canadian league, with a playing style which owed more to American football.

This is not meant to kick a guy when he's down. Given a choice between the two, you'd rather have the CFL with Lumsden than without him. However, the former Hec Crighton Trophy winner failing to last one quarter in the Edmonton Eskimos' season opener before injuring his shoulder played into a personal theory: Jesse Lumsden is a CFL analog to Eric Lindros.

Lumsden went down last night after injuring his surgically repaired shoulder on a hit from Winnipeg's Siddeeq Shabazz, who is lighter than him by 20 pounds. On TSN's panel, Matt Dunigan seemed kind of shaken, talking about how tough it was to see such a fate befall a player who has worked to come back from surgery and prove he can take the pounding in the CFL. Jock Climie also showed sympathy while evoking the games-goes-on ethos of football, pointing out if you can't withstand a regular football play, you should not be playing.

The Lindros comparison is a hell of a tag to stick on someone. It is cheerfully acknowledged that many sports fans hold Lindros, the oft-concussed former NHLer, in very low esteem.

This has nothing to do with personalities. It's just that there are similarities between the two beyond alliterative surnames (both with seven letters, too). Each athlete had that golden boy vibe about him, that whole jocky, ruggedly handsome thing going on (you can admit it). Both had a parent who was a prominent part of their backstory, albeit for vastly different reasons (Lindros' parents, you know about, whereas Lumsden's legacy started with his dad, Neil Lumsden, the Ottawa Gee-Gees and Edmonton Eskimos fullback of yore).

Last but not least, each benefited from a false idea about their sports. Both was built up as a next big thing by people who did not fully acknowledge that having a huge physical and skill advantage over your peers in small junior hockey or Canadian university football ponds is not a guarantee of sustained success in the pros.

The false idea with Lindros, back in the early 1990s, was that he was a prototype for what hockey would be all about in 2010. The sport was going to be full of 6-foot-4, 225-lb. power forwards who were as mean as Mark Messier while possessing the flair of Mario Lemieux. Now, with 2010 around the corner, we can see that was wrong. Hockey is back to being about normal-sized humans like 6-foot-1 Alex Ovechkin, 5-foot-11 Sidney Crosby and 5-10 Patrick Kane, like it always had been prior to the '90s. Lindros, meantime, had all his concussion and various other injury problems.

A lot of people still believe this stemmed from how he played in junior with the Oshawa Generals. He got hit hard then, but often players just bounced off him because he was so damn big. Lindros did not have to adjust.

One does not profess to know why Lumsden has had difficulty staying healthy since debuting in the CFL in 2005 with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats after setting Canadian university records at McMaster. David Naylor, globesports.com's football writer, was clear that this setback could short-circuit his career, as much as we hope otherwise.

"Lumsden has legions of supporters who will insist he's merely the victim of bad luck (including his former coach at both McMaster and Hamilton, Greg Marshall). But the evidence suggests otherwise.

"Which is why when Lumsden became a free agent this off-season, there wasn't exactly a stampede to his door, despite his significant talent. CFL general managers and coaches simply didn't feel comfortable building their offence around a player they thought could not be counted upon to handle even 10-15 carries a game. And the fact that Lumsden doesn't play special teams made it even tougher to justify a large investment in him."

That speaks to the false idea. Running backs in the CFL cannot be one-trick ponies. Having one less down to play with than the NFL means a running back must be a factor in the passing game. For a Canadian running back, you have to be able to play special teams.

The Toronto Argonauts' Bryan Crawford, who was the tailback for the Queen's Golden Gaels when they went 0-5 vs. McMaster during the Lumsden years, is pretty typical of the breed. Crawford, in new Argos coach Bart Andrus' offence, gets the occasional touch when he lines up in two-back sets with Jamal Robertson. In Toronto's season-opening 30-17 win over Hamilton on Wednesday, Crawford had four carries for 20 yards and one catch for 25, setting up an early touchdown. He threw a block to spring Robertson for a 46-yard gain (which ended up being a 61-yard play thanks to a Tiger-Cats penalty) and contributed on special teams. As Apu Naheesapeemapetilon once said, it might not be glamourous, but it's good honest work.

Point being, one irony with Lumsden is that he was a Canadian boy next door whose style was a better fit for four-down American football. The teams he played on under Marshall at McMaster were perfectly suited to his style. The Marauders, typical of most OUA teams in the '90s and early 2000s, played straightforward power football, using a tight end and a fullback on most plays.

They just bludgeoned teams until they ran into someone their own size, which in the OUA, was not often. Mac won games on the recruiting trail and in the weight room, not by coming up with fancy pants plays. Running backs did not participate much in the passing game. As for special teams, Lumsden was limited to the odd kickoff return, as Queen's fans remember painfully well. (In a 2003 game, Queen's went ahead with 30 seconds left on a 99-yard Tom Denison-to-Craig Spear touchdown pass, only to have Lumsden returning the ensuing kickoff 88 yards to the end zone to lead McMaster to an eventual overtime win. It's hard to see where people in the rest of Canada ever got the idea the OUA was the no-defence league.) In Lumsden's senior year, 2004, Mac tried to shift to a more pass-first focus to give itself a better shot at reaching the Vanier Cup. Greg Marshall adapted, too. Last season, Western reached the Vanier Cup with a 180-lb. scatback-type, Nathan Riva, playing tailback.

It is important to go back and understand what contributed to the hype five years ago. It was a trip to watch him try to defy the long odds of a Canadian becoming a feature back in the CFL. He was fun to watch.

There will be a great Canadian 1,500-yard rusher yet who will owe a debt to those who came before, such as Lumsden and Éric Lapointe. After Thursday night, though, it's tough to banish that Lindros comparison.

Rany Jazayerli provides the ultimate 'It's not you, it's them'

At least we know what it means when a sports franchise comes down hard on the media.

Baseball Prospectus co-founder Rany Jazayerli does a radio show about his beloved Kansas City Royals. Long story short, he wrote a post saying the Royals should fire their long-time head athletic trainer. The Royals retaliated by banning team personnel from going on his show (they also tried to ban team personnel from all stations which carry it, but backed off once word spread virally).

(Update: There is a relatively happy resolution. Yay!)

Out of that, ShysterBaller Craig Calcaterra proffered an explanation of what it says about a team who rides herd on someone who speaks critically of the team:

"There's no escaping that they're focused on the wrong things. There's also no escaping that, if this how they respond to external dissent, there's no reason to believe that they're making the right decisions internally either, because all good decisions are made in a setting where people can feel free to say anything without fear of reprisal."

In other words, this is not on Rany, this is on the Royals. Seeing how a team treats the media as an off-shoot of how they go about their business is pretty ingenious. The ones who are hyper-sensitive about honest criticism or insist that coverage of the team be "positive" are typically the bad organizations.

The principle is pretty simple. Teams which worry about media coverage probably should be spending more time worrying about themselves and less time worrying about what's said on a blog, news website, message board, radio or television. Outsiders have always had opinions about how well the coach, general manager and owner are doing their jobs. There are just so many ways to now journal them. Dealing with it is a sign of character.

This is inside baseball, but it is germane when you think of stories like the Edmonton Oilers turfing a reporter for blogging from the press box. More recently, a media friend who wouldn't her/his name used, lost a media gig because a team did not like what was said about it on the air. Thankfully, this friend is in a much better place, with bigger and brighter things in the offing.

No one can say for sure how every semi-halfway significant sports franchise in Canada and the U.S. deals with the media. It is not clear if there are thinner skins than compared to 20 or 30 years ago. Back then, teams did not have to worry about what was said about them floating around on the Internet in perpetuity. People threw away newspapers, they could not record what was said over the air so easily.

The situation with Rany was a pretty clear case of shoot-the-messenger. Jazayerli, a co-founder of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to FiveThirtyEight.com (the political analysis website) who at is a diehard Royals fan, was only saying what was borne out by his research. He noted the one constant in the Royals' surpassing suckiness over the past two decades has been its head athletic trainer, a guy named Nick Swartz, and that time and again, the team has mishandled player injuries.

For those who don't pay the Royals much mind (present company included), their closer, Joakim Soria, ended up having a stint on the 15-day disabled list extend to six weeks. Centrefielder Coco Crisp is done for the year due to shoulder surgery. It was announced the other day that shortstop Mike Aviles is going to need Tommy John ligament replacement surgery. Injuries are part of the game, but in this case there was a pattern:

"The handling of Coco Crisp’s shoulder injury is by itself a fireable offense. Crisp was playing – terribly, mind you – with a bum shoulder FOR FIVE WEEKS, and even after his shoulder pain became severe enough that he could no longer play, the Royals kept shuffling him in and out of the lineup for three weeks, putting him back out there as soon as the pain became tolerable again.

"But the pain didn’t go away. It only got worse, and presumably his shoulder only got worse. The question that no one can answer is whether, five weeks ago, Crisp already had a torn labrum, or whether the injury occurred while trying to play through the inflammation. We can’t answer it, but we sure as hell can speculate. As far as I’m concerned, the Royals’ ham-fisted approach to Coco Crisp’s shoulder turned an injury which might have healed with a few weeks of rest into a season-ender.

"The ham-fisted approach to Soria’s shoulder turned a quick 15-day DL stint into a six-week drama . We don't know the nature of Aviles' prognosis yet, but the fact that the Royals commandeered him into playing again even after he came clean with the injury certainly could not have helped.

" .... This is a trend, people. When the Royals downplay the extent of an injury, then give the player a few days off before sticking him back out there, and only later realize the injury was worse than expected THREE TIMES in the span of less than three months, this is not bad luck. This is incompetence, plain and simple. And while (manager Trey) Hillman and (GM Dayton) Moore are the ones quoted above, they’re making those decisions based on the medical information they’ve been given. And the point man for all that information is Nick Swartz."

"... it seems like every year some Royals player has an injury that lingers beyond any reasonable timeframe, or an injury that we’re told for weeks is minor turns out to be season-ending."

The point is the obvious. Jazayerli was being even-handed. He wasn't making anything up. He simply said there probably is a cause-and-effect between who's minding the store and the results. It's like, random example, pointing out that the Kingston Frontenacs have gone longer than any other Ontario Hockey League team without winning a playoff series, so maybe it's time to replace the general manager they have had over that entire 11-year run. Perhaps the Kansas City Star would not call for a trainer most people have never heard of to get fired, just as calling Larry Mavety "The Royal Mavesty (Rhymes With...)" is going to be restricted to a couple blogs. For anyone who has an issue with that, well, welcome to the web. The standard of decorum is a bit different, plus you can't pull punches if you want to differentiate oneself from traditional media.

Meantime, point being, what does it say about a team which has a problem with what people say about them?