Man Bites Blog

In 2008, Cole Hamels took home the MVP of both the World Series and NLCS. He was an ace pitcher who led the Phillies to the world title. Once the Phillies won their third game, and it was apparent the Rays would gave to beat Hamels to win the Series, the Series was essentially over.

In 2009, the Phillies deemed it necessary to trade for another ace starting pitcher in midseason. In four postseason starts, Hamels never got out of the sixth inning. His turn in the rotation would have been up for a Game 7, but if the Phillies had forced it, they would have seriously considered other options.

Yet, many sabermetricians would have you believe that there really was no substantial difference between the 2008 Hamels and the 2009 Hamels, and anyone who think differently is stuck on silly narratives and debunked stats.

To which I respond: are you serious?

I understand that the MSM memes are annoying — Hamels had a rough year and needs to come back strong; David Eckstein is a gritty, gutty player. A-Rod doesn’t come through in the clutch. And so on…

But there is a kernel of truth to each of these, and they are fun to talk about.

When a pitcher goes from being a mortal lock in one postseason to a liability the next, people are going to look for explanations. And random fluctuations in opposing batting average on balls in play isn’t going to satisfy.

And that’s what make sports fun.

I’m sure it’s possible that the difference between the 2008 and 2009 Hamels can be entirely attributed to factors beyond Hamels’s control. I also know that I would need to accept pretty heavy odds in order to bet on the 2009 Hamels over the 2008 Hamels. And that it’s interesting to discuss why.

@Jaysonst tweets:

Is there ANYTHING about the NFL playoffs that’s better than the MLB playoffs?

Oh, let me count them:

• The game played bears a passing resemblance to the game played during the regular season.
• The time between games is generally the same as they are in the regular season.
• The games all end before my regular bedtime.
• Weather does not generally wreak havoc on the schedule.
• There has been more than one close NFL playoff game in the past two years.
• All games are on network TV.
• All games are not taking place while I’m at work.

Stark’s full article is behind the firewall, but even as a Phillies fan, if I had to rank the last two Super Bowls and World Series in rank order, it’s pretty clear the two World Series would occupy the #3 and #4 spot. Off the top of my head the last two NFL playoffs (plus this one) have featured:

• The Jets’ upset of the Chargers yeterday.
• The Cardinals-Packers OT game last week.
• The Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl, featuring an amazing game-winning catch coming right after Larry Fitzgerald’s touchdown.
• The Giants beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl after with David Tyree’s catch.
• The Giants-Packers OT NFC Championship Game

Now, I am a fan of the one team to take part in both of the last World Series, and these are my memories of the last two postseasons:

• Jimmy Rollins’s game-winning double in Game 4 of the NLCS this year.
• Shane Victorino and Matt Stairs’s home runs in Game 4 of last year’s NLCS.
• David Price shutting down the Red Sox in Game 7 of the ALCS.

Yes, I’m cheating a bit by spanning 3 NFL postseasons and 2 MLB postseaons, but what do you remember about the 2007 MLB postseason? Can you name who won without looking it up? Thought so.

Of course, I enjoyed watching the Phillies win the World Series last year, but I can’t deny that was one ugly World Series.

The NFL postseason may not be perfect, but baseball fans shouldn’t start crowing.

The idea that we somehow “owe” star major league baseball players a Hall of Fame induction, the use of words like “injustice” and “tragedy” in describing our failure to give an additional honor to baseball players is patently absurd. This is especially true in the fee agent era, when players have been handsomely compensated for their efforts.

In some cases, like Negro League Players, the Hall of Fame can be a tool to help right a historic wrong. But I do not consider the fact that the baseball community over-valued pitcher won-lost records or undervalued on base percentage or that New York players receive more attention to be a crime crying out to heaven and earth for vengeance.

Ok, so if the Hall of Fame isn’t for the players, who is it for? Well, the fans.

I don’t mean to get off on a Jim Caple-style populist “what about the fans who pay these guys’ salaries?” rant here. I just mean to observe that we don’t need a Hall of Fame to tell Andre Dawson he was a good baseball player. He was paid quite well during his career, and received numerous awards. We put Andre Dawson in the Hall of Fame because we want to remember him, and pass those memories on to future generations of fans.

Which is why I had a bit of schadenfreude when Bert Blyleven didn’t make the Hall of Fame last week. Not because I have anything in particular against Blyleven; I’ve never heard anything about him. But against the “Eat your vegetables!” type arguments deployed on his behalf.

“Eat your vegetables” arguments have their place. On your team, you’d rather have the guy who’s a little chubby but draws a lot of walks than the “five tool” type player who looks great in the uniform but is never on base. I get that. I also get that how we evaluate past players can have a cultural effect on current decisions. If our vision of a Hall of Fame pitcher veers toward Jack Morris and away from Bert Blyleven, that might impact how we evaluate current pitching prospects, for better or worse.

So when people who are not old enough to see either of them pitch blasts some sportswriter who did watch both pitch votes for Morris but not Blyleven, I’m not impressed.

There’s also this notion that following sports is an exercise in which we dispense athletes respect that they are due. I kind of thought following sports was supposed to be, you know, fun. I suppose part of the fun is appreciating players others might not appreciate, but when I start saying that those who don’t share my appreciation are morons, I’m making the sport less fun for everyone.

If the sabermetricians want to evaluate GM’s, I can handle that. When they start telling me what players I should like, and which memories are more important, they’re hurting the sport.

I think in all the discussion of a Hall of Fame Standards, what gets lost if that what I think what the BBWAA uses to make these decisions is something like this, at least in the first few ballots:

If one were writing a history of baseball covering this player's career timeline, and left this player out, would it be a glaring omission because of that player's performance over several years?

Bill Simmons put the standard as whether you would scalp tickets to see that player when he was in town. I think that’s a little strong. Not sure that many people would have scalped tickets to see Paul Molitor or Tony Gwynn or Dennis Eckersley play, and I think they still belong.

This explains why there was a bigger initial constituency for Jack Morris than there was for Bert Blyleven. We have vivid memories of Jack Morris. Taking the ball all those Opening Days. Starting All-Star Games. The 10-inning shutout in Game 7 of the World Series.

But Bert Blyleven? Yes, I was a National League fan, and my time being a fan started toward the end of his career, but I’m still drawing a blank. And if someone wrote a history of baseball in the 70’s and 80’s and never mentioned Blyleven, I probably wouldn’t notice.

After a while, the statistics come out in relief more than a player’s impact, and so someone like Blyleven will ultimately make it. But in the first few ballots, it’s a lot about whether the player “feels” like a Hall of Famer.

There are some exceptions. Baseball history would not be complete without Hack Wilson or Roger Maris or Don Larsen, but those were flashes in the pan. Others compiled statistics without making much of a mark.

This standard is a bit tautological — a Hall of Fame induction is part of what establishes a player’s historical legacy. But for someone coming from this perspective, all the statistical analysis in the world is not going to make a difference. And it’s probably not worth getting upset about as if it’s a terrible injustice.

Bert Blyleven did not leave enough of a mark during his career that 75% of the BBWAA do not think the Hall of Fame would be incomplete without him. Calling these sportswriters Luddites isn’t going to change that.

The Cardinals signed Matt Holliday last week to a long contract. I’m not sure how it will work out.

Holliday plays left field. One reason I’m not enthusiastic about it is that with Pujols, the Cardinals will have a significant portion of their payroll committed to the two right-most positions on the defensive spectrum (unless they lose Pujols, in which case they’ve got bigger problems). Any prospect who comes up through the system who can’t play defense will effectively be blocked. If the Cardinals need to add a hitter, he will have to field a higher-skilled position. The Cardinals will likely need to fill some of the other positions with replacement-level talent, which at other positions means some serious holes in the lineup.

Holliday seems like a great guy and a wonderful player. But I’m afraid his signing is going to leave the Cardinals a bit lopsided.

Rob Neyer writes of Stephen Strasburg only getting to negotiate with one team that drafts him:

Scott Boras wonders what Stephen Strasburg would do, if he had been born in Tibet. Well, that’s a cute little rhetorical trick, but if Strasburg had been born in Tibet he probably wouldn’t throw 101 miles an hour and he probably wouldn’t have become a future multimillionaire while pitching for San Diego State.

I’m sorry, but I simply don’t have any tears to spare for a young man who’s soon going to be worth $15 million instead of the $50 million he so obviously deserves.

Of course, Strasburg “deserves” $50 million because, to paraphrase Crash Davis, God put a thunderbolt in his right arm, and he was born in a time and place where being able to throw a baseball 100 miles and hour is richly rewarded.  I’m sure Strasburg works at his conditioning, and will need to continue to do so as a professional baseball player, but there’s lots of guys who work hard and aren’t about to sign eight figure contracts.

Boras’s wistful musings about if Strasburg were raised in a poor repressed region throws this into relief.  Even before he signs his first contract, Strasburg is already on the long tail of privilege distribution among people born in the world.   What is at stake is how many nines are in the percentage of people Strasburg is more fortunate than.  And yeah, I’ve got more pressing concerns than whether that thunderbolt should make Strasburg rich or super-rich.

But I don’t blame Strasburg or Boras (OK, I blame Boras a little).  They’re doing what they’re supposed to.  And the same is true for all of us who are sitting in America reading this on a computer.  The things that irritate us and that we fight for and feel hurt over are the differnence between being in the 98th and 99th percentile of material comfort.

It can seem absurd to us that Stephen Strasburg is aggrieved that he will get a contract for low eight figures instead of mid eight figures before he does a thing for a professional team.  But probably no more absurd than our grievance would look to those who came before us, or to those in less fortunate parts of the world.

Rob Neyer looks at Tom Verducci’s Year After Effect, that pitchers under 25 who see their workload increase by 30 innings are susceptible to injuries the following year:

I’m sure you see the gap in this analysis … Where’s the control group? We know — we’ve known for a long, long time — that young pitchers who pile up innings are susceptible to injuries. The Holy Grail of baseball is something that will keep young pitchers from ruining those oh-so-valuable gears and levers and pulleys that allow them to somehow perform their superhuman feats. But are young pitchers who boost their workload by 30 innings more injury-prone than pitchers who boost their workload by 20 innings? Is a 24-year-old pitcher who goes from 120 innings to 150 innings more likely to get hurt than a 22-year-old pitcher who goes from 175 innings to 190 innings? Do pitch counts matter, at all?

Right — it seems that, absent a control group, this boils down to the uninteresting observation that pitchers tend to break down.

One of the pitchers in Verducci’s alert list is Cole Hamels.  Why was Hamels’s workload increased?  Because he was a very effective pitcher driving the Phillies to a division title, and then three rounds of playoff victories.

Thus, his elbow injury is big news.

If a pitcher does not have such an increase in innings, it’s probably because he’s not a very effective pitcher, and the team has better options for those innings.  If that pitcher breaks down, it’s not a big deal.

We remember high-profile breakdowns for a while.  We remember those who don’t break down even longer, which is why people cited Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton in saying that it’s not necessary to limit pitch counts.  We’re smarter than that now, but maybe not as smart as we think we are.  It seems that there aren’t a significantly higher number of pitchers having long, durable careers as there was when we weren’t so smart.

We like to think we can control things like pitching injuries, but I’m not so sure we can.

If Verducci, really wants to impress, rather than red-flagging young pitchers he considers at risk for injury, he should green-flag some he believes will be injury-free.  If he can do that, then we’ve got something.

Field of Dreams was the first DVD I purchased.  I make a viewing of it a rite of Spring, one which I will soon begin sharing with my daughters.  I have used Moonlight Graham’s speech about his vocation as a doctor in PSR class.  It is a wonderful story about relationships, forgiveness, and redemption.

Nevertheless, I had to agree with a writer in Bill Simmons’ recent mailbag:

Just watched “Field of Dreams” for the umpteenth time and it still gets me choked up, but I noticed a fatal flaw: Terence Mann (African-American and 1960s leftist radical) doesn’t go ballistic when he sees the ghosts from the deadball era and realizes not one is black. Wouldn’t he say, “You mean even in the afterlife you SOBs wouldn’t let Cool Papa Bell, Josh and Satch play?” I mean especially after Ray Liotta describes the place as heaven? Had they cast Sam Jackson instead of James Earl Jones, he would have gone ballistic and arranged a sit-in until justice was brought to Iowa. Either way, why did I have to notice this? I wish my favorite sports movie wasn’t ruined.

To be fair, the Terrence Mann character was a bit of a rush job, since the character in the book was based on J.D. Salinger, and the movie people got late word from Salinger that he didn’t want the movie character to be recognizable as him.

But still.

The main narrative of the first half of the movie is Ray Kinsella addressing the gross injustice that Joe Jackson was denied a chance to play baseball.  Now, Joe Jackson wasn’t denied a chance to play baseball because of something like the color of his skin.  He was denied the chance to play baseball because he took part in the greatest scandal in modern sports history, being involved in a conspiracy to throw the World Series.

The movie waves this off in a scene where Ray Kinsella explains to his rapt five year old daughter how Shoeless Joe hit over .300 in the Series, and nobody could ever prove that he did anything to lose the Series,  while she nods in agreement.  If that’s good enough for her, why not you?  Who are you to argue with a father passing on the tale of his father’s hero to the granddaughter he would never meet? The Cider House Rules was less manipulative.  If Rob Neyer were on that tractor instead of a five year old, we might have gotten closer to the truth.

And even you see Shoeless Joe has a hapless illiterate rube who got sucked in by his dastardly teammates, that doesn’t let the movie off the hook, because at the end of Joe’s first appearance on the field, he mentions the others, and Kinsella invites them all to the field, again implying that he is righting some historic wrong.

Which is OK.  You don’t have to buy into a movie’s interpretation of history in order to enjoy it.  As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, the idea of a God who would give the Nazis great power just because they happen to find some object is, let’s say, a troubling theology, but I still enjoy the Indiana Jones movies.

But the Terrence Mann character makes it all a little more difficult to ignore, since people who had done nothing wrong were excluded from the game only because they had the same skin color as him.

Yet, Mann seems to think the idea of a field where Shoeless Joe and his fellow conspirators can play is just delightful.  He leaps to Jackson’s defense when Kinsella recounts the story of how his teenage self called Jackson a criminal.  He gives the impassioned “People will come, Ray” speech that is a valentine to baseball.

Cariag Calcaterra at the Hardball Times points us to the half-baked populism from Bill Shaikin regarding the winter meetings:

As Americans lose their jobs and homes at a frequency unseen in decades, baseball convenes today for its annual holiday shopping spree in Las Vegas. The setting, according to the hotel website: “Contentment and opulence are the hallmarks of your Bellagio hotel luxury experience.” The pitch, according to baseball executives from the commissioner on down: Believe us, times are tough.

The retort is the same one Congress used on the auto executives that flew to Washington in private jets: It’s hard to believe you amid all that luxury.

It’s not the economy. It’s the symbolism

 Clacaterra points out that the accommodations are actually less expensive than last year’s location and Nashville (though I suspect that the GM’s are not paying the last-minute rate Calcaterra names, and having been to Las Vegas last year, I can attest that it is no longer the land of the $2.99 steak dinner).

Of course, the big problem with the auto executives each taking his own private plane was that they were doing so in the process of asking the taxpayers for billions of dollars to save his struggling business.  The baseball GM’s are meeting to discuss trades.  Slightly different.

Some might argue that baseball owners are just as big beneficiaries of government largesse given the sweetheart stadium and parking deals they get.  And that they do so at the expense of local urban governments that struggle with basic needs.  True, true. 

But it’s still not the same as flying a private plane to ask struggling taxpayers for money.

I poked some fun last night at Jayson Stark’s tendency to turn every somewhat unlikely event into a “how unlikely was that?  Well, since xxxx, this situation has ocurred yyy times, and how many times has this result ocurred? Zero.”  item.

But I think it points to an important observation — baseball, and life, are made up of individual occurrences that are themselves unlikely, but come together into an aggregate that solidifies into a whole.

Let’s take another look at Stark’s two items:

Before Ryan Madson gave up that home run to Rocco Baldelli, he hadn’t allowed a homer in over two months  since an Aug. 28 gopherball to Mike Fontenot at Wrigley Field.

Madson hadn’t given up a home run at Citizens Bank Park in exactly SIX months — since a Scott Hairston bomb on April 29.

And while it didn’t lead to a run, J.P. Howell’s sacrifice bunt almost set up the go-ahead run. Which is notable because you’ll never guess how many regular-season sac bunts Howell has laid down? Right you are. Zero.

How unlikely was Geoff Jenkins’ contribution to this extravaganza? Consider all this:

It was Jenkins’ first hit in over a month — since a Sept. 28 single off Odalis Perez in the final game of the regular season, after the Phillies had already clinched.

It was Jenkins’ first extra-base hit since Sept. 24  a double against the Braves.

And when Jayson Werth drove Jenkins in, it was the first time he’d crossed home plate since (ready for this?) Aug. 11. That was 79 days ago!

Now, Stark is correct that each of those individual items was statistically odd.   But I didn’t get the sense watching last night’s game that I was witnessing some wild game that was a grand departure from typical baseball.  In many senses, it was perfectly ordinary — the final score was 4-3, the closer closed, etc.

But if you look under the microscope enough — anything notable is an aberration.  The exepcted outcome for every at bat, both from the hitter’s and pitcher’s perspective, is an out.  Every hit or walk or hit-by-pitch could be considered an aberration from this norm.  Yet there has never been a double perfect game, and only a couple dozen perfect games in the history of baseball.

A baseball game is a large enough sample size that there will be the occasional aberrant event, yet as a whole it will be mostly hum-drum.

So maybe it was unlikely that it would be Geoff Jenkins would initiate a rally, but it wasn’t unlikely that somebody would, even though it would be unlikely for each individual team member to do so.

So, on a micro level, expect the unexpected, even if the results on the macro level are pretty average.

• Been living here in St. Louis since the last time the Phillies were in the World Series, but enjoyed this much more than the Cardinals’ win two years ago or even the Rams’ Super Bowl in 2000.
• Great that it happened at a reasoable hour.
• I was dreading the Brad Lidge grpahic before the bottom of the 9th — the same kind they put up on Mariono Rivera in Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS.  At least they didn’t show the Pujols HR.
• How predictable was it that Jayson Stark would take a “how unlikely was it?” angle on the first two runs scored tonight?  Consider this — since 1995, there have been 125 runs driven in either by a bench player who rarely plays, off of a pitcher who hardly ever gives up runs, or from a lefthanded batter against a lefthanded pitcher when he never hits lefties.  In how many of those instances has Jayson Stark failed to produce an item about how statistically odd or unpredented the event was?  Yup. Zero.
• The Phillie Phanatic makes the shots of the postgame celebrations 57% cooler.
• I still don’t get why the press keeps referring to David Price as some combination of the 1998 versions of Marioano Rivera and Randy Johnson. 
• All in all, a solid victory from a solid team.  They didn’t have a righthanded pinch-hitter, and their bats could go cold at times, but a really solid team top-to-bottom, and a deserving champion.

Unprecented night of baseball tonight…

• Game start will be delayed for half an hour by Obama’s infomercial.  Not that it probably matters at this point, but this seems to be a hubristic move in the same mode as the summer tour of Europe.
• Both teams will have fully rested bullpens; the only player out is Scott Kazmir.  Everyone else is available with at least 3 days of rest.
• Phils have 12 outs; Rays have 9 so that’s an advantage.
• It would be great if the Phils wrapped it up here in an hour or so, so come kids could see the final out.
• We’ll start right out with some strategy — Hamels due up first, the Rays have a righthanded reliever on the mound. Who do the Phils pinch hit with?  Do the Rays respond with a lefty?
• I’m not sure I buy the Legend of David Price. 

The Phillies are one win away from a world title, and a game where they seem to have everything going for them — they’re at home, their ace is pitching, Ryan Howard’s got his home run swing back, the Rays’ 3-4 hitters haven’t found theirs.  Couldn’t ask for a better situation.

But since no professional Philadelphia team has won a title since I was seven years old, I start to doubt — what if the Phillies lose tonight?  Yes, Hamels has been brilliant, but he’s not a sure thing.  Then, it’s back to Tampa where they would have neither Hamels nor home-field advantage, and have to face James Shields again.  And can we expect another great perfromance from Jamie Moyer in a Game 7?

I’m not used to the story ending with the Philadelphia team winning, so I start looking for scenarios in which it wouldn’t happen.

But then, this is as good a position as a Philadelphia team has been in to win a title since Ed Pinckney caught that inbounds pas in Lexington.  So I may as well enjoy it rather than worry.

which given the way World Series have gone recently may be a big deal.

More substantially, on the one hand, the greatest advantage the Phillies have in this series is starting pitching when Cole Hamels pitches.  They had that advantage last night, and parlayed that into a one run victory.  They will not have that advantage the next three games.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that they will continue to perform as dreadfully with runners in scoring position as they did last night.  Ryan Howard has about as bad a game at the plate and in the field as a player on a winning team can have.  Pat Burrell wasn’t much better.  I don’t think that will continue.  Also, we got the Not Messing Around Brad Lidge last night, which is much preferable to the Let’s Make Things Interesting Brad Lidge.  The middle of the Rays lineup looked helpless against him.

So, all in all, the Phils have one win under their belt.  Probably not much information about how the rest of the series will go, but it’s better to be one up than one down.

With the upcoming Phils-Rays World Series, I’ve been trying to work up a hatred for the Rays and Tampa.  Here’s what I could come up with:

• Tampa’s has two championships in the last decade already — the Bucs won the Super Bowl and the Lightning won the Stanley Cup.
• Both those teams beat Philly’s teams in the semifinal round on their way to the championship.
• The Bucs victory was especially egregious, beating the favored Eagles in the last game played at Veterans Stadium.  I still have nightmares of Ronde Barber running back the interception that sealed the game.  If not for that, we might not have had the annoying Barber twins act.
• The Bucs went on to beat the Eagles in the following season’s opener, the first game at Lincoln Financial Field.
• “Tampa Bay” is not a city, and the Rays play in St. Petersburg, not Tampa.  Who are they trying to fool?

Yeah, Boston probably would have been more fun…

Before the LCS’s began, we were left only with teams from the coasts.  Even then, the Midwestern qualifiers hailed from Chicago and Milwaukee, on the coast of Lake Michigan.

Now, we are guaranteed a World Series between two teams from the East Coast, with the (now remote) possibility of an all Northeast Boston-Philadelphia Series. 

Sarah Palin can’t be pleased…

The extra off day built into the middle of each of the LCS’s brings into relief a basic problem with the baseball postseason — that postseason baseball is much more different from regular season baseball than any other sports’ postseason is different from theirs.

The extra day off means that every pitcher gets an extra day of rest.  It means the Red Sox bullpen pitching 16 innings in the last three games looms a lot smaller than it otherwise would.  It means the Rays can slot Scott Kazmir in Game 5 to set up James Shields for a home start and avoid an unfavorable umpiring assignement.  It means both the Dodgers and Phillies can go to their closers in the eight inning without worrying.

This has some negative effects — a dominant balanced team like the 1990’s Atlanta Braves only won one championship, as many as a grossly unblanced team like the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks.  Regular baseball rewards the knowledgable fan — those who have a sense of what relief pitchers are available can have a deeper understanding of what’s going on in a game.  And there’s some drama as well — part of what was so stunning about the Red Sox comeback in 2004 was that their pitching was shot from 1 9-8 drubbing in Game 3; Schilling had to pitch the “bloody sock” game because the Red Sox had no alternative.  A day off between Games 4 and 5 would have taken away a bit of the magic.

But from the perspective of postseason baseball as a television product for a “casual fan”, this approach has some advantages.  If you schedule a Cavalier-Lakers game for network television, you can be pretty sure that, barring injury, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James are going to play siginificant minutes.  A Patriots-Chargers game will feature LaDanian Tomlinson and Randy Moss.  But a Mets-Brewers game?  You might get Johann Santana against C.C. Sabathia.  Or you could have Oliver Perez against Jeff Suppan.  Yes, hitters like Prince Fielder and Jose Reyes will almost definitely play, but they will each get to bat only four or five times, and have the opportunity to make one or two non-trivial defensive plays.

The days off maximize the amount of time the best pitchers are pitching, and thus maximizes their influence.  I think powers that be see this as a feature, not a bug, so it’s not going away anytime soon.

Seeing as Jaime Moyer struggle through his second consecutive sub-par post season start, which is also in a Game 3 after an off day, I’m thinking thagt Moyer is more effective in the grind of the regular season when the hitters aren’t used to him.  Given a day to prepare, and with increased focus inherent in the postseason, his stuff is about effective in the playoffs as Billy Beane’s.

Bernie Miklasz takes on Albert Pujols’s critics.

Here’s some suggestions for future targets of Miklasz columns:

• Folks pooh-poohing Michael Phelps’ eight gold medals 
• Those who think Jackie Robinson breaking the color line wasn’t a big deal
• People who think Brett Favre wasn’t that great a quarterback
• Those who don’t think much of importance happened in Yankee Stadium

It’s fun arguing with nobody.

• Good to see Brett Favre going to New York, where he’ll finally get some media attention.  Hey, Peter King is right down the street.
• I am a firm believer that good starting pitchers are more valuable than relief pitchers, and that many “bad bullpens” are a result of starters not eating up enough innings.
  Thus, when Adam Wainwright returns, he should go into the starting rotation. 
• Look for my ode to sports fandom soon at quiblit.com