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Proof positive the Mets only sign guys after they’re over the hill.

Boston Champs Nickname T-Shirt – Boston Red Sox – Drunken Bleachers

And they say there aren’t real nicknames anymore…

Jenny (867-5309) by Tommy Tutone

While trying to summarize about all of the rather amazing baseball happenings this week, I came upon this rather amazing fact: The guy who wrote Jenny (867-5309) was named Alex Call, and he was in the band that backed up Elvis Costello on My Aim is True.

Ask Rotoman’s Message Board

I started the message board two years ago as a way to solicit questions for my mlb column, and for the first few months I posted most of the answers. But gradually a coterie of regulars arrived and have, for the most part, stuck around.

There have been some squabbles and some fights, but I have to say that the general tone has been pretty fun and full of interesting baseball/roto chat. I point all this out because while I’ve been leaving the blog here alone, the regulars have been taking care of all the breaking news.

I find myself stopping by just to find out what the latest skinny is.

Baseball General Manager & Scouting Course / Training / Sabermetrics | Sports Management Worldwide

This ad says the course started in Fall 2004, but it popped up among the ads served by Google at the askrotoman discussion board. Eight one-hour online chats for college credit? To be a major league GM? Amazing.

Born Suckers – The greatest Wall Street danger of all: you. By Henry Blodget

It isn’t a new thing to point out the similarities of financial markets and fantasy baseball. This story by the former genius, Henry Blodget, is as compact and lucid a litany of the mistakes we make in both spheres.

There are logical inconsistencies, mostly because there are no hard and fast rules that we can follow that will easily make us perform better picking our stocks or ballplayers, but certainly we’ll do better more of the time if we avoid the perceptual and behavioral mistakes Blodget writes about.

ESPN.com: Page 2 – How can you be sure?

I’ve started to weigh in on the steroid news a few times, but really haven’t had anything new to add. So I deleted the posts I’d written.

This references a Skip Bayless column that offers Barry Bonds some reasonable doubt. I think Bonds is the greatest ballplayer we’ve ever seen, the greatest we could ever see, but I’m nagged by his late-career rebirth. I think it’s possible he got serious about conditioning and did this, but I think it’s far more likely that, like Mark McGwire, he saw his physical reliablity in eclipse and decided to do something about it.

And so he trained hard and he got extra stuff. Stuff that was legal, at least according to MLB’s rules.

What I know for sure is that the rules that McGwire and Bonds (and perhaps Sosa and others have violated) are only going to be redefined. With each generation of nutrition, supplements and technology, we’re going to see new assaults on our notions of the integrity of records. We can pretend it’s a level playing field, but that certainly isn’t true.

For each generation what willl matter is what is happening now, and the glory of the past will be devalued as measure (without necessarily being devalued as narrative).

That’s as it should be. Bonds eclipsing Ruth or Aaron doesn’t diminish them. It’s just part of the ongoing story that amazes and intrigues us. Which is as it should be. That’s the new way.

Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Throw the book at ‘em

The headline doesn’t do justice to Black Jack’s argument, which is that everyone avoided dealing with the steroid issue for their own reasons. And damage has been done.

He’s wrong though that this does more damage than Pete Rose. Gambling goes to the fundamental integrity of the results. It hinges on the possibility that someone won’t do their best to be their best, and thus contravenes the basic definition of competition.

This steroid use may shake up the competition for “best player,” but the reason to take the juice is to be a better player than you were. This is, of course, completely in accord with the basic definition of competition.

Which is why I think it is possible to make a complete rational argument that the drugs shouldn’t be banned. Because where in the continuum of performance enhancers, from spinach to multivitamins to andro to hgh, do you draw the line? As consumers we want to see athletes perform to their utmost ability. If the steroids really help, why should they be banned?

What exactly is our objection? You can say it’s because they’re dangerous, but Olympic athletes test positive for taking therapeutic levels of other drugs to cure/treat their asthma or other malady. How dangerous could that dosage be?

And if someone came up with a steroid that was proved not harmful would that be okay?

In all the hoo hah about this issue, about baseball players taking these drugs when they weren’t banned, about journalists making wild and sweeping declarations that treats the players as if they’re criminals and their union as if it is wildly irresponsible, there is little addressing what it is about these drugs that makes us take umbrage.

As sports comsumers we control the terms of play. If we don’t like the way athletes are playing the games we like to watch, we can turn them off. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say we won’t permit these (make a list) drugs in our games. But it is naive to think that athletes aren’t going to pursue every legal avenue to improve their game. Especially when years of service time are at stake, and huge amounts of money.

This is what I think we should think of when we hear Selig say how sure he is that strict rules are the answer. Maybe. But if the owners hadn’t tried to screw the players out of hundreds of millions of dollars in the collusion case, if George Steinbrenner hadn’t hired a guy to impugn Dave Winfield to try and get out of the last few years of his contract, in other words if the owners had acted honorably, maybe the players would have accepted a top-down drug policty.

But there is no reason why any player should trust the owners, at least not collectively. Which is why Selig is just speaking bluster.

I don’t really intend to let players or the union off the hook. As a health issue the union should have been out in front on this. But the larger issue is one that goes to the heart of what we define as competition and the spectacle we pay for. I’d be happy to ban all the juice, and watch natural players play, but in the back of my mind I’ll know that there are chemists and geneticists coming up with ways to beat the tests, and whenever someone extraordinary comes along the whispering will start again.

It just doesn’t seem like that much fun.