Today we’ve got a tie between a couple of Vons:

First, VonRay Opolous, for whom there is sadly no photo available. Opolous played in 1969 for the Mets minor-league affiliate in Marion, VA — alongside the equally-excellently named Victor Worry. (Worry managed a 2-0 record that year despite an 11.77 ERA, but his career lasted just 13 innings.)

and:

Fritz Von Kolnitz. His full name was Alfred Holmes Von Kolnitz, so no wonder someone came up with “Fritz.” He played for the Reds and White Sox from 1914 to 1916, and ended up with a career line of .212/.264/.261. He… must’ve been an excellent fielder. My favorite part, though, is that he played on that 1914 team with Fritz Mollwitz.

Picking up on her Varsity Letters presentation, here’s Emma’s debut article for Baseball Prospectus:

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the maxim that if you can imagine it, there’s porn about it on the Internet. That’s no joke. It was only a few years ago that I first learned of fan fiction, when a friend explained that one of his coworkers not only contributed to, but ran, an extensive website entirely dedicated to fan-written stories about the characters from the animated series Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. The stories that turned sexual—yes, stories about cartoon chipmunks that turn sexual—were called slash fiction, named for the typographic symbol in the “Kirk/Spock” liaisons that launched the genre in the 1970s.

Naturally, this prompted my friends and I to go online and see if there was any kind of subject, anything at all, and that did not have something pornographic written about it and posted on the Internet. The answer: not really, no. We couldn’t find anything pairing Jay Leno with bandleader Kevin Eubanks, but that was about it.

What we did discover was a trove of imagined romance and sex between baseball players, on multiple websites. I thought that over the years I’d seen most of the dark corners of sports fandom, but as it turns out, I still was not fully prepared for baseball fan fiction. If you’ve thought about it at all, you might expect to find quite a few tales of Jeter and A-Rod, and those are certainly there. But I was less braced for just how prominently players like, for example, Doug Mirabelli feature. You just do not ever expect to encounter the phrase, to quote one story, “Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed…”

Well—Doug Mirabelli’s huge, unlubed anything, really. Let’s leave it at that.

Hey, Now…

I know many of you are, to say the least, wary of Twitter. I don’t blame you at all. I avoided it for a long time, only signed up under pressure from my publisher to promote my book last year, and approached it with a lot of eye-rolling and sighing about how the 140-character limit would be an oppressive bind on my beautiful, beautiful words. I know Alex (or @AlexBelth, if you will) has some doubts about it. And it’s far from perfect – it can be silly, shallow, repetitive, a self-promoting extravaganza. But it can also be funny and useful and downright supportive. It did end up being useful for book promotion and networking and what have you, but I’ve also made actual, flesh-and-blood friends through Twitter; for me, anyway, it helped me connect with people I might not have otherwise. So I know it’s not for everyone and understand the reasons for avoidance, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Well, mostly.

Anyway, via Hardball Talk, here’s a list of more than 200 MLB players with verified Twitter accounts, from Bobby Abreu (mostly in Spanish) to Ben Zobrist (yawn). Most of these guys, in my experience, aren’t a fascinating read – most are too PR-savvy and/or not great with words. I still follow my guy Denard Span, but only because I’m still hoping to find out whether he has any short, poorly coordinated Jewish relatives. And sometimes players slip the PR leash, for better or worse: the Rays’ Logan Morrison is usuallyentertaining, as is Dirk Hayhurst, author of The Bullpen Gospels. Nick Swisher does a lot of charity work on there. So does Curtis Granderson, who has also been pondering his at-bat music for this season; Ozzie Guillen is just as hilariously semi-comprehensible as you might’ve hoped. And the other night the Orioles’ Adam Jones tweeted a photo of turtles having sex.

Have fun out there, kids.

Okay, so I don’t entirely mean that headline. As usual, I’ve been looking forward to spring training since late November. In fact, I always have to stop myself from needlessly capitalizing it — Spring Training — because it seems like it ought to be some kind of official holiday, like Christmas or Independence Day.

So it’s not that I’m not happy that, starting this weekend, we’ll get something vaguely resembling real baseball news. It’s just that I don’t actually want spring training — I want real baseball. Spring training is a plate of carrot sticks and celery when you’re craving a huge hamburger and fries. It’s fine at first, but hardly a long-term substitute.

Sure, the first few days are blissful. Photos of Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada loosening up, stretching hamstrings and that sort of thing. Noting that someone got skinny and someone else fully enjoyed the holidays. Seeing all those shiny pitching prospects practically glowing with promise, before the real world tarnishes them. Seeing that, somewhere, skies are blue and the sun is shining, and the whole world isn’t like New York, covered in filthy gray slush. Yes, there is hope… yes, baseball is coming.

But: still not for six weeks. That’s the thing. Once you’ve looked at the sunny photos for a few days, and then a few weeks later once you’ve watched a few games, which are a pale imitation of real games in that no one really gives a hoot about them and the teams play accordingly, spring training is pretty much a six-week dry hump. If a player does well in spring training, it doesn’t mean he’ll do well in the regular season, so you can’t fully enjoy it. If he plays badly, you worry anyway even though, again, it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s good to see prospects you don’t normally get to see on television, but it’s no substitute for genuine baseball where the score is important, or at least as important as a baseball score ever is.

Of course, the good news there is that six weeks isn’t really such a long time. And I guess that’s why I still look forward to spring training… we’re not out of the dark yet, but it’s the light at the end of the tunnel.

Best Worst Movie

As I’ve probably mentioned at some point, for the last year and half or so, I’ve been meeting up with a few friends every Tuesday for Bad Movie Night. We have a few beers, order pizza, and sit around and laugh/cringe/stare in disbelief at a lousy or confusing or misguided movie: Highlander II: The Quickening; Howard the Duck; Bionic Ninja; Gladiator Cop; Body Rock… we’ve been doing this for a while now and the list is extensive. But one of our all-time favorites (“favorite” being a relative term here) is a real classic of the genre, Troll 2. It’s hilariously inept, with laughable costumes, some of the worst acting ever put to film, and a ludicrous plot that not only has nothing whatsoever to do with Troll 1 but is actually about goblins. It’s about a family that makes the mistake of vacationing in a town called Nilbog… which is, of course, “goblin spelled backwards!”

Troll 2 is so much fun in its way that it’s developed quite a cult following, with midnight screenings and gatherings around the country. Best Worst Movie, directed by Michael Stephenson (the now-grown child actor who played the son in the movie) and focusing on the small-town dentist who played his father, is a fascinating look at the bad-movie-loving subculture, and at how the people involved in a film react to having it become famous – or infamous – for all the wrong reasons. It’s alternately very funny and, at times, touching, sad, and uncomfortable. And it’s well worth a watch.

In case you were wondering, tonight’s Bad Movie selection will be Robot Jox.

There’s a movement to make the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday; I don’t know about that, but today I’d be all for it because it’s also PECOTA Day, when Baseball Prospectus unveils its yearly projections regardless of what that silly groundhog might’ve said last week. Always fun to look at, and today, the site is free to all, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

I’ll try to check in later with some thoughts once I’ve had a chance to take a good look.

Happy end-of-NFL-season, everybody. Yankee catchers and pitchers, such as they are, report to Tampa one week from today.

Meantime, it got a bit lost in the Andy Pettitte shuffle from last week, but I’ve been meaning to mention another Yankee news item from Friday: Robinson Cano ditched his previous agent and signed with Scott Boras. It’s no substitute for the actual baseball we’ll get in a few short weeks, but I still found it interesting. Cano is in the last year of his contract, but the Yanks have two option years coming up; in the 2014 season, with Boras on board, do not expect Cano to offer the Yankees any kind of hometown discount. (Not that he should – they have plenty of money, and he’s turned into a genuine star; there’s no reason he shouldn’t get paid accordingly). Second basemen that hit like Cano aren’t easy to find, and I’m sure Boras will get him a massive payday. But I wonder why Cano chose to do this now, with the next two years pretty much taken care of already.

Also intriguing in that, from what I understand, Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano are reasonably close — and Rodriguez famously parted ways with Boras after the PR debacle (though financial success) of his last opt-out. Hmm. Speaking of A-Rod, the FOX cameras caught him and Cameron Diaz together early in the game, and of course she was hand-feeding him at the time:

Only A-Rod. As my friend said tonight, he should probably just stop appearing in public.

[Screencap from the gentlemen at River Avenue Blues.]

Lots of mustache news today, which is my favorite kind of news.

Not only can you order nifty ‘stache-silhouette t-shirts — if you fit into men’s sizes; women, of course, would never be interested in clothing that’s not pink and/or sparkly! Not that I’m bitter or anything — but now Tim Lincecum is growing a lip-warmer of his very own.

Well… sort of. Keep at it, Timmy.

Photo via @ChronLiveCSN.

1. Bernie Williams walking in late, and Pettitte calling him on it.

2. Jon Heyman’s sweater (screencap via @jaydestro):

Pettitte said “never say never” about pitching again at some point in the future, but that he does not expect to and definitely won’t this year. So that’s probably that. As usual, he was aw-shucks and earnest during the conference; he said he feels good physically, but his heart’s just not in gearing up to play. Vaya con dios, Andy.

Well, I’m not taking this very well.

I’ve written a lot about Andy Pettitte this winter, and of course by now, with spring training less than two weeks away, it’s not exactly a shock that he’s retiring. It’s bad news for the Yankees, whose rotation is not exactly AL East-ready, but I’m more bummed that I just won’t get to see Pettitte pitch anymore. More than any other current player he appeals to the lizard-brain part of my fandom, formed when I was still more or less a kid, and went to the Stadium for the first time, and had my mind blown. Andy Pettitte was on the mound when I fell in love with baseball, and I don’t think I can really be objective about him, even after all these years.

The is-he-a-Hall-of-Famer discussion has already broken out, and I think the answer to that is probably no. But he was certainly a pleasure to watch. Even more so in his later years, when he relied less on stuff and more on control and, for lack of a better phrase, know-how. The stat-head in me hates using wishy washy phrases like that — he had grit! he was gutty! — but like I said, when it comes to Pettitte I really can’t help myself. As I’ve written in this space so many times over the last few years, Pettitte just knew what the hell he was doing out there.

It’s interesting how little his admitted PED use seems to have affected his reputation. I’m not someone who gets particularly exercised about steroids in general, but even so, it’s usually a factor I take into account when looking at someone’s career. And I’m as cynical about athletes as the next person. Yet, when Pettitte says he only used it two times when he was injured once and then stopped, I do find myself believing him. I don’t know why and it’s probably not intellectually justifiable. I got to talk to Pettitte only a couple of times back in 2006 and 2007 when I was writing for the Village Voice, and yes, he was remarkably nice and seemingly sincere, though perhaps not the world’s deepest thinker. He didn’t seem annoyed to have to answer questions, he looked you in the eye and thought about his answers. That may not sound like much but for a star player, it kind of is.

But anybody can play nice in the clubhouse for a few minutes. I think more than that, what endeared Pettitte to fans is how we all saw him react to games: he was harder on himself than anybody else ever was. Paul O’Neill-style, but without the rage. When he pitched poorly he excoriated himself afterwards; when he pitched well, he always focused on his lucky breaks or the things he could have done better; and when he pitched excellently he praised his catcher. Every time. No wonder that, per Jon Heyman, “Pettiite is telling people he is feeling good but he just couldn’t get up for the grind of the season.”

Anyway, forgive me for the uncharacteristically sentimental post, but Andy Pettitte just has that effect on me. Maybe that’s why I’ll miss him so much, and why I regret that the fans won’t have a chance to say a proper goodbye, embarrassing the heck out of him on the mound.

The will-he-or-won’t-he Andy Pettitte stories turned into self-parody weeks if not months ago, but yet here we still are (Newsday):

The Yankees aren’t the only ones waiting on Andy Pettitte.

Pettitte recently postponed a private autograph signing scheduled for Wednesday with a memorabilia dealer that would have brought him to the New York area.

The date was advertised on Steiner Sports’ website for Wednesday, but it has been changed on the site to Feb. 15.

Remember Schrödinger’s Cat? Pettitte is Schrödinger’s Pitcher. I don’t mean in the sense that he is trapped in a box with poison and is simultaneously alive AND dead according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics… well, let’s hope not, anyway; that would make Sergio Mitre pretty inevitable. No, I mean he’s in this weird stage of not being a Yankee but at the same time still being a Yankeee, simultaneously retired and unretired. Let’s hope we open up the box soon and find out his current state one way or the other, before some poor New York Post reporter is forced to dress up as a priest and ambush Pettitte in his church’s confessional.

The other day I mused offhandedly about how cool it would be to own a baseball team, and also how completely impossible. And that made me think of minor-league or independent-league team ownership, which is still kind of a possibility for mere mortals – and which, these days, has a lot more room for quirk. Given the choice between two clubs, as a general rule of thumb, you’re probably better off joining the one that doesn’t require Bud Selig’s approval.

Back in the fall I read Neal Karlen’s Slouching Towards Fargo, which is an affectionate portrait of the St. Paul Saints circa 1996 and 1997, an independent Northern League team owned in part by Bill Veeck’s son Mike (decades after his Disco Demolition Night debacle) that boasts a pig delivering baseballs to the mound, a nun in the stands  offering massages, appearances by part-owner Bill Murray, sumo-wrestling contests for opposing managers between innings, and much more. “Fun Is Good,” is the Saints’ motto, and it’s refreshing to watch a team that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Bless the Yankees, but you know it would do them good to lighten up once in a while). Daryl Strawberry, who redeemed himself with the Saints shortly before joining the Yankees and salvaging his career, serves as something of a focal point in the book, representing the Saints’ function as a haven of second- and third-chances for baseball types and locals; there are also draft holdouts, washups, career minor leaguers and female pitcher Ila Borders. The Saints have room for just about everyone.

Author Neal Karlen also tries to tell the story of his own sort of redemption, as he was initially sent to Saint Paul by Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner to dig up mud and write a story eviscerating Bill Murray and Strawberry. But there’s little suspense or originality in the story of how he ultimately grows a conscience once away from the big city. This part of the book was less successful, for me – partly because Karlen’s writing (and, to be fair, editing – the book is very unevenly paced) is not up to the standards of his material, and partly because his view of cynical and immoral New York City media types vs. big-hearted Midwesterners struck me as overly pat. He frequently brings up petty grudges against other writers or media-world denizens, and he’s too on-the-nose when writing about how baseball and the Saints will heal us all; it’s a theme that would have benefited from subtlety. Still, Karlen does a good job of chronicling the fascinating collection of individuals who cluster around the Saints, a haven for nonconformists, and whatever his flaws as a writer, they don’t prevent the charm of the team itself from coming through loud and clear.

Remember when there were all those rumors swirling about how much money the Mets had invested with Bernie Madoff, and how that could impact their ability to run the team? And the Wilpons kept saying, nope, it would have no effect at all? Well, today they issued a statement:

As Sterling Equities announced in December, we are engaged in discussions to settle a lawsuit brought against us and other Sterling partners and members ofour families by the Trustee in the Madoff bankruptcy. We are not permitted to comment on these confidential negotiations while they are ongoing.

However, to address the air of uncertainty created by this lawsuit, and to provide additional assurance that the New York Mets will continue to have the necessary resources to fully compete and win, we are looking at a number ofpotential options including the addition of one or more strategic partners. To explore this, we have retained Steve Greenberg, a Managing Director at Allen & Company, as our advisor.

Regardless of the outcome of this exploration, Sterling will remain the principal ownership group of the Mets and continue to control and manage the team’s operations. The Mets have been a major part of our families for more than 30 years and that is not going to change.

As Craig at Hardball Talk notes, this is pretty similar to what Tom Hicks said about his Rangers back in the day – and things didn’t quite work out the way he’d planned. Can the Mets find someone who’ll be willing to invest significant amounts of money without gaining any control? If not, would they consider selling the team outright, if they got the right offer?

Depending, of course, on who they might theoretically sell the team to, it could actually end up being a good thing for the Mets – the team has had certain issues over the years, with organization and finance and general PR, that have persisted regardless of who the GM or manager was. But in the short term, it’s not good news – it’s very hard for an organization to make bold moves, or to spend much money, when ownership is uncertain.

Start saving your money, gang! If we all put in $100…

Actually, I’ve had a longstanding fantasy about what I would do if I owned a baseball team. Note that even if I were to win the lottery, I STILL wouldn’t be able to afford to do that, but we’re just daydreaming here. I’d move a team to Brooklyn, where the Nets’ new eyesore of a Stadium is going (as long as we’re fantasizing), and keep ticket prices low, and have weird funny Bill Veeck-like promotions and giveaways, and sell lots of women’s team gear that wasn’t pink or sparkly, and hire as many knuckleballers and players with amusing names as possible, and…

Sorry, I got distracted. Point is, things will likely be pretty challenging in Flushing for the next few years.

—

Photo via Real Clear Sports

Over at Deadspin, Katie Baker has a very good post up about her teenage life online, when she constructed an elaborate fake identity on a Usenet newsgroup as a Harvard-bound 18-year-old: “I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait.”

The Flyers newgroup was my favorite by far.

I’m not sure when I started to lie, but it seemed like no big deal. Upholding a cherished tradition among so many high-school-aged girls throughout history, I shrugged and added two years to my age. Fifteen became seventeen. The truth just sounds different.

But the more I lied, the more I lied more, creating extraneous backstories to flesh out the details of my fictional life. I was about to graduate, I blithely allowed, scattering fibs around various posts like so much confetti. I had Rangers season tickets. I had gone to the 1999 NHL Draft party, I reported in one post, and boy,had I been surprised by all the boos for Jamie Lundmark!

On and on, each lie more pathologically gratuitous than the last. I explained that I was taking a year off before going to college at, wait for it, Harvard. It remains a great embarrassment to me that I would be so unimaginative with the location of my faux matriculation, but I more than made up for it in conjuring a whole cadre of fake older brothers whom I credited for both my love of sports and, having been knocked around by them for years, my own physical toughness at the hockey rink. I did play hockey, at least. “The Chick with the Hockey Stick,” my signature file read, one of the very few things that was actually true.

It’s a well-written piece, an an interesting story – if not a common one, at least one that I’d expect many of us can relate to. I never had any lie become as elaborate as Bakers’ eventually did, or spill over into my “real life” like hers, but my friends and I messed around on AOL chat rooms all the time, making up different identities. On several occasions a friend and I, when we were maybe 13, signed onto AOL in the guise of an 18-year-old named “sexpot69” or something equally silly, and giggled to each other while random guys (who, in fact, were quite possibly also 13) asked us into private chat rooms and narrated their masturbation. We thought it was hilarious. We would read for a few minutes, type occasional semi-encouragement or immature jokes, laugh hysterically, then sign off in a rush and delete all traces of sexpot69 from the computer.

I suppose this is exactly what parents are afraid their kids are doing online, but really, it never did us any harm – we were smart enough never to give out any addresses or phone numbers or personal details; the guys (if they even were guys) involved were gross and awkward but never scary. In retrospect, it was a pretty safe way to feed our curiosity. In fact, as in Katie Baker’s story, in the end it may have been harder on the guys involved than on us.

In honor of the upcoming celebration of ancient Roman martyrs:

Squeaky Valentine.

His real name is Fred Valentine, which is still not too shabby. Born in Mississippi in 1935, he debuted with the Orioles in 1959 and went on to play with the Washington Senators. His only very good year came with them, 1n 1966, when he hit a highly (and uncharacteristically) impressive .351/.455/.806 for an OPS+ of 131. Two years later his OPS+ was 86, and that was his last season.

If I were a GM I would hire any player named “Squeaky Valentine” so fast it’d make your head spin. As an added bonus, he has a 964 similarity score to someone named Coaker Triplett.

Sugar came out in 2009 to excellent reviews and relatively small audiences. Somehow, despite the fact that baseball movies are something of an obsession with me, I only just got around to seeing it – and, wow. It’s an understated movie, but never uninteresting, beautifully made, and more honest about the game than all but a handful of films have ever been. I liked it significantly more than Field of Dreams and about five million times more than The Natural, and though I can’t imagine that Sugar will ever get the kind of mass audience that those movies did, I still hope it manages to stick in the cultural consciousness.

In its outlines, the story is a familiar one to serious baseball fans: kid from the Dominican Republic signs with a major league team, struggles to deal with culture shock and professional competition in a small minor-league city. We’ve all read articles and interviews with international players that fit that profile, and beyond that, nothing hugely dramatic happens in Sugar — except that this story in and of itself is, really, a pretty dramatic one, even if dozens or hundreds of players a year go through it. And while I don’t want to give away the ending, I will just say that it feels honest, and very refreshingly so for a sports movie. There is no Big Game that will make or break everything, no villains, no inspiring speech, just a series of events and decisions that together make a story.

The movie opens at the just-barely-fictional Kansas City Knights baseball academy in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic. It establishes the rhythms of the place, which is part school and mostly training facility – the camaraderie and competition between the players, the strict coaches, and life on the weekends at home in the town, where Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto, doing a good job in his only American film role to date) lives with his family. The scenes in the DR were some of my favorites, for their laid-back slice-of-life feel: peeling, brightly painted buildings, beaches, friends playing dominos, stray dogs, music, dancing, beer.

Sugar and an academy teammate finally get their long awaited call to Los Estados, attending spring training with the Kansas City Knights (who I assume were named after the New York Knights, Roy Hobbs’ team in The Natural). He and his Dominican teammates are taken under the wing of Jorge, a slightly older player who’s been slipping down the prospect lists after a knee injury – and who explains to them that you never drink the beer in the minibar, gives Sugar his old I.D. so he can get into bars, and takes the newcomers to a diner where, following his lead, they all order French toast. It takes weeks before Sugar, incredibly sick of French toast, figures out how to order eggs.

More than anything else, the movie does an excellent job of dramatizing the cultural disconnect and language barrier. There are no villains – some people are nicer than others, some are less helpful, but no one is evil. When Sugar gets assigned to the Knights’ single-A team in rural Iowa, he stays with a local couple, older farmers who live in the middle of cornfields. They are religious, reserved, extremely different from anything Sugar’s experienced before, and he feels deeply isolated living there – but they mean well. The movie is as much about finding a community in a new place as it is succeeding at baseball, and suggests that the latter may not be possible without the former, anyway.

If I had one issue, it’s that Sugar himself is a little bit of a cipher, as a character. I think partly this is by design – the character did not finish high school, has thought about almost nothing besides baseball for years, and once he reaches the U.S. is restricted by language and cultural differences – he’s quiet because he so often doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. Sugar’s favorite player is Robinson Cano; he’s never heard of Roberto Clemente. He loosens up a bit with the other Spanish speakers on the team, but even so the details of his personality come across only vaguely. Perhaps that makes it easier for the character to stand in for so many real-life immigrants.

The whole movie is excellent, but it’s the end that sets it apart for me – realistic and wistful without being depressing. He doesn’t make it to the Majors and throw a perfect game his first start out, and he doesn’t end up a drug addict with a life in ruins. The movie’s restraint doesn’t make it the least bit boring – on the contrary, because it rings true, it’s that much more engrossing.

Six years ago if you’d told me Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon would, in 2011, both sign relatively inexpensive one-year contracts with the Tampa Rays, it would have been jarring. Really, it’s still a bit jarring. Time and change come to us all, yet it’s odd to think how quickly yesterday’s superstars become today’s late-offseason bargains: Manny Ramirez made $20,000,000 last year, and last week he signed for $2,000,000. He didn’t get old overnight, but he started getting paid like an old player overnight. He is still only 38.

The real winners of this move are the few, the proud, the Tampa beat writers and columnists, whose clubhouse just got about 12 times more interesting: Damon is outgoing and easy to talk to and always sticks around to offer goofy quotes, and for a player who rarely talks to the media, Manny manages to provide plenty of material. Not that either new acquisition is destined to be useless, by any means. Damon had quite a lousy 2010, by his standards, but still produced more than the average left fielder, and is a clever enough hitter that he’ll be finding his hits here and there even after his bat speed and power deteriorate further; Manny fell off too, but I wouldn’t want to see him up against my team in the late innings with the game on the line, and I doubt too many pitchers would either. With that said, Damon was, even four or five years ago, not the best fielder- I remember bleacher fans at the Stadium joking about his “perfect 20-hoppers to first” – and hasn’t gotten better with wear and tear, which means right-handed visiting hitters may find their BABIP getting a nice boost in Tampa next year. Manny, of course, will probably not be seen in the outfield unless he jogs out there to urinate between innings.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Damon is getting paid more than twice as much as his brother-in-hair, even though he’s nowhere near twice as good a player as Ramirez, and just one year younger; I can only assume that Manny’s positive steroid test played a role, and perhaps the lingering ill-feeling after his acrimonious breakup with Boston (where he was more or less accused, at various times, of faking or exaggerating an injury, missing spring training to make promotional appearances, and shoving an elderly traveling secretary to the ground). When I mentioned these signings to a friend, her first thought was that Tampa might be looking for veteran leadership on their young team, and she wondered if it was really a good idea to have Manny try and full that role. But I don’t think any team’s management would view Man-Ram as that kind of figure, although you could do a lot worse that having young players watch the way he hits. I think he’s there for his pop, as well as his talents as a box-office draw and attention grabber. I have a hard time imagining that he won’t give the Rays their $two million’s worth.

For more analysis check out Jay Jaffe over at Pinstriped Bible, talking about how the additions of Damon and Ramirez give the Rays flexibility. I know it’s way too early to surmise anything, but on this frigid winter day I’m not loving the Yankees’ odds against Tampa or Boston.

—-

And speaking of old friends… Bill Clinton had dinner in Miami last week with Alex Rodriguez and Cameron Diaz. While none of those people are on my “If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?” list, I have to admit that, like the nymag.com headline, I’m curious about what they might have talked about. Other than “so, being incredibly rich: pretty cool, eh?”

Via the inimitable Pat Kiernan, yesterday’s mass mob arrests in the New York area have unearthed some fantastic new mob nicknames. As a group, mafia types really excel at the nickname, perhaps even more than ballplayers; today I thought I’d try to merge the two genres. Herewith, actual mob nicknames from the Daily News, and their imaginary position on the baseball diamond:

Tony Bagels
Two good options here: the reliable ace who keeps putting zeros up on the scoreboard, or the hapless rookie still hitting .000 two weeks into his first stint in the majors.

The Claw
Knuckleballer.

Jack the Whack
Dumb-as-a-post platooned corner outfielder who plays unfortunate defense but, at the plate, runs into one every so often and hits it to the next county.

Fat Larry
Elder-statesman DH beloved by teammates and groupies coast-to-coast.

Baby Fat
Fat Larry’s younger brother, a perenially disappointing 3B who would be more suited to DH but is just not a good enough hitter.

Jello
Popular hefty lefty starting pitcher.

Meatball
This would work for like 40% of all Major League players, actually.

Vinny Carwash
Middle reliever who’s nothing to write home about except for his one truly fantastic secondary pitch, probably a changeup.

Junior Lollipops
Light-hitting shortstop who plays just good enough defense and smacks just enough seeing-eye singles to stay in the league basically forever.

Mush
Ancient first base coach famous for his heckling gifts with regards to opponents and umps.

The Beard
I did not know Brian Wilson was a member of the Genovese crime family.

Nighthawk
You know what? I’m not going to make fun of anyone nicknamed Nighthawk. Likely not someone you want to mess with.

Baby Shacks
Former Rookie of the Year 2B who never lives up to the hype.

Mousey
Bullpen catcher and professional butt of jokes.

Johnny Glasses
Grouchy veteran umpire.

Milton Bradley has such a fun name… why’s he have to keep ruining it by doing lousy things?

The latest incident – in which Bradley was arrested yesterday on felony charges for threatening an “unidentified woman” – is still firmly in the “alleged” category. No details have leaked out yet as to what precisely he’s charged with, beyond that, let alone evidence of anything. But it’s going to be an uphill battle for the public to keep an open mind, since half his Wikipedia page is taken up with “Controversies.” And that list isn’t even comprehensive – it does not  include, for example, a prior domestic violence allegation (although that  never led to an arrest, and in a separate incident Bradley was the one who called the police on his wife; the police were called to his home three times in a 33-day span). U.S.S. Mariner has a more detailed rundown of Bradley’s troubles over the years. The fact that he’s still in the majors and being paid $11,000,000 a year is a testament to both Bradley’s talent and the Cubs’ poor judgment.

The Mariners, who work with a number of Seattle women’s charities, were lauded in the past for their “zero-telerance” policy on domestic violence – which, as demonstrated by the mess of the Josh Leuke incident, turned out to be, really, more of a guideline. It will be interesting to see what action, if any, they take with Bradley when more facts are known. And although this is premature, it’s interesting to think about what we believe they should do.

It’s a complicated issue. As long as someone is legally free to work, after all, a team has a right to hire them. I appreciate that the Mariners care enough about domestic violence to draw up a policy against it… but with an issue that so often comes with conflicting information, changing stories and inconclusive evidence, it’s not simple to enforce. And if you’re not going to enforce it, what’s the point of having it – except as a PR tactic with a high chance of backfiring?

Of course, there’s a difference between finding yourself in a moral muddle and – as appears to have happened with Leuke – deciding that your farm system is more important than your ethical system. The former is understandable and maybe, with this kind of situation, unavoidable. The latter is pathetic.

It was surprising when the Yankees signed Rafael Soriano… mostly because Brian Cashman had been saying, pretty clearly, that he did not intend to. He explained that he didn’t want to give up a first-round draft pick for anybody besides Cliff Lee (and especially not a pick that would then go to the Rays), and that made good sense, especially since decent relievers can generally be uncovered from within the organization. Today, at the press conference officially announcing Soriano’s signing, Cashman admitted – or perhaps “confirmed” is the better word – that as many suspected (and several, including Buster Olney, previously reported) it was not ultimately his call. Per Joe LeMaire, on Twitter:

Yankees GM Brian Cashman acknowledges he did not recommend signing of Soriano. Says final call was Hal Steinbrenner’s.

Cashman: “I just didn’t think it was an efficient way to allocate our remaining resources.”

Huh.

That’s not surprising, as the Soriano contract is very much not Cashman’s style – not, as he says, an efficient allocation of resources. But I was under the impression that Cashman had successfully wrested control of the Yankees’ baseball decision, except perhaps in the case of a blockbuster like Alex Rodriguez’s most recent signing. And while of course Hal Steinbrenner owns the team and has a right to have input on how his money is spent, I find it puzzling that he would choose to interfere here, in the case of a middle reliever. Signing Soriano is not likely to have a huge impact on the team either way – they’re overpaying for him, but not by a crippling amount, and it’s unlikely to prevent the Yankees from making whatever other moves they feel they need to. Still, it seems like a weird thing for Hal to overrule his GM on. It’s a George kind of move.

Meanwhile, in further disturbing news: we also learned that Cashman not only considered Carl Pavano as a plug for the Yanks’ starting pitcher gap, but (per LoHud) had several discussions with The American Idle’s agent. Yipes! I choose to see this as just a sad, transparent attempt to make Andy Pettitte come rushing back into the Yankees’ arms…

UPDATE: Oh gosh – per WFAN (via Hardball Talk) the Yanks actually made an offer! One year, $10 million, supposedly.  “Carl, how would you like to hear 50,000 people screaming contemptuous insults at you every fifth day…”