ESPN Rob Neyer Blog

My favorite thing about winter is having the time to read something other than box scores. My second favorite thing about winter is prospect lists. Today Baseball Prospectus released Kevin Goldstein's annual Top 100 Prospects. As it happens, I've also got John Sickels' prepublication lists -- from his forthcoming annual -- and I enjoy comparing the lists (Sickels separates his, top 50 hitters and top 50 pitchers).

Goldstein and Sickels both have Cincinnati's Jay Bruce and Tampa Bay's Evan Longoria as the No. 1 and No. 2 hitting prospects. Sickels has St. Louis' Colby Rasmus No. 3 and Goldstein has him No. 4. But Goldstein's No. 3 is Toronto's Travis Snider, who Sickels has all the way down at No. 23. Sickels' No. 4 is Cincinnati's Joey Votto, who Goldstein has all the way down at No. 12. Goldstein has Kansas City's Mike Moustakas at No. 11; Sickels has him at 26.

While both analysts pay a great deal of attention to both performance and (supposed) potential (i.e. tools), I suspect that Sickels tilts just a bit toward performance, Goldstein just a bit toward tools. I'd love to see a backward-looking analysis of their picks, but of course that's problematic because (1) you'd need to look back four or five years, and (2) in the intervening years they might have changed their approaches somewhat, which limits the utility of your findings.

NEWSFLASH

I see that our own Keith Law has just posted his list, too. I see that he's right in line with the other guys on Longoria, Bruce, and Rasmus (though he's got Longoria and Bruce flipped). And he's got Snider No. 4 among hitters. But Law doesn't track right along with Goldstein; he's got Moustakas all the way down at No. 31 (among hitters). It's inappropriate for me to analyze Law's work any further. Suffice to say, his list is just as legitimate as any other you'll find.

Anyway, when I look at these lists I'm looking for extremes. Which teams have the most names? Which have the fewest?

• The Reds don't have a lot of prospects ... but the ones they've got are outstanding. In addition to Bruce and Votto, of course, they've also got right-hander Homer Bailey. I know the Reds are sort of a hip pick to surprise us in 2008, probably because of their kids. But as often as kids surprise us in a good way, they surprise us in a bad way. And it'll probably be another two or three seasons before all of Cincinnati's kids play well together.

• The Royals are also supposedly a team on the come, and they do have two excellent young hitters in the majors. But those guys aren't going to be enough, and otherwise the organization is terribly short of good young players. We've already seen that opinions about Moustakas differ, and anyway at Class A he's a few years away from helping the big club. He's the only Royal among Sickels' top 50 hitting prospects, and among his top 50 pitchers, only Luke Hochevar appears. And he's all the way down at No. 44. Same with Goldstein's overall list: Moustakas No. 11 among hitters, Hochevar No. 29 among pitchers. Essentially, the Royals have two of the 100 (or so) best prospects, which doesn't seem like nearly enough.

• Similarly, the Indians have some work to do. Ideally, the franchise will compensate for the likely departure of C.C. Sabathia with young talent, as that's the way cash-poor organizations are supposed to remain relevant. But like the Royals, the Indians have only two guys on Goldstein's list, and they're pretty far down: No. 52 is righty Adam Miller, No. 78 is third baseman Wes Hodges. Sickels has Miller No. 33 among pitchers and adds lefty Chuck Lofgren at 42, but doesn't have Hodges among his top 50 hitters. You know how rarely Grade B pitching prospects become good major league pitchers.

• But wait, it gets worse: the Giants have only two names on Goldstein's list. The Giants, who haven't developed a good young hitter since ... Rich Aurilia, maybe? The only hitter here is third baseman Angel Villalona, at 29 (19 among hitters). Sickels has him considerably farther down, at No. 36 among hitters. If you're a Giants fan, I'm sorry to be the bearer of more bad tidings, but I'm afraid you're going to be looking up at everybody else in the West for a long, long time.

• And then there are the five teams with only one prospect among Goldstein's Hot 100: the Astros, the Blue Jays, the Mets, the Tigers and the White Sox.

Those latter two teams do have a pretty good excuse: this winter they traded some of their best men to immediately bolster their 25-man rosters.

The Mets, believe it or not, have just one top 100 prospect before completing their trade for Johan Santana. But of course they can spend their way out of that mess (though as the Yankees have proved and may prove again in 2008, even a super-rich team can occasionally benefit from a super-cheap player).

The Blue Jays and the Astros, though?

When J.P. Ricciardi took over as Toronto's GM in 2001, he radically reconstructed his scouting and player development departments. I was right behind him all the way. But this is it? Travis Snider and Brett Cecil (No. 29 on Sickels' list of pitchers)? Sickels also gives letter grades to all the prospects in his book. Snider and Cecil both get B+'s. Third baseman Kevin Ahrens gets a B-. And that's it; no A's, three B's and a whole bunch of C's, most of them pitchers whose fame will never extend past mentions by Sickels and Baseball America.

The Astros are in the same spot, with only catcher J.R. Towles -- No. 32 among Sickels' hitters, No. 54 on Goldstein's overall -- making any sort of dent. Not a good sign as they try to avoid challenging the Pirates for last place.

And yes, here I go again, accentuating the negative. But of course there is a flip side: on Goldstein's list, three teams are tied for top honors with seven prospects: the Red Sox, the Rangers and the Athletics. But I think the Rays actually win this contest, because while they've got "only" six on the list, five are way up there: Longoria (3), lefty David Price (6), righty Wade Davis (15), outfielder Desmond Jennings and shortsop Reid Brignac. Even their last guy, lefty Jacob McGee, is No. 40 (and he's fifth, right behind Price, among Sickels' top pitchers). The Yankees are also loaded, relative to most clubs. You want some straight talk? That's a tough division, my friends.

I think that's enough for now. I sure do like lists. Dig in and have fun.

Correction: I wrote that the Mets had only one prospect on Goldstein's list before the (pending) Santana trade, but that's not true. I conducted a faulty search (for "Mets" rather than "Twins") and thus I missed Carlos Gomez (No. 65) and Delios Guerra (79). Which makes the Mets look better and the Twins worse.

What's the deal with left fielders, anyway? When we looked at first basemen and second basemen and shortstops and third basemen, it was easy to be impressed with the depth of young talent at each position.

Left fielders, though? Yuck. Last year a dozen left fielders posted VORPs higher than 28. Only three of them were in their 20s, and none of those three -- Matt Holliday (75.0), Adam Dunn (45.5) and Carl Crawford (38.0) -- are what you'd call fresh-faced kids. So I think in our question for the best left fielders of the next five years, we'll have to consider a few players in their (early) 30s. Which leaves out Manny Ramirez and Moises Alou, but lets in Pat Burrell and Alfonso Soriano. Below are some candidates for serious consideration (but most of them marginal). Remember, the listed ages are seasonal 2008, while everything else is from 2007 (and if you have a question about the stats, drop me a note in the comments).

Player	Age	OBP	SLG	OPS+	WARP
Matt Holliday	28	.405	.607	150	9.7
Adam Dunn	28	.386	.554	136	4.4
Pat Burrell	30	.400	.502	127	4.1
Carlos Lee	32	.354	.528	126	4.6
Matt Diaz	30	.368	.497	124	4.3
Alfonso Soriano	32	.337	.560	123	7.1
Carl Crawford	26	.355	.466	117	5.6
Chris Duncan	27	.354	.480	115	2.8
Josh Willingham	29	.364	.463	115	2.4
Ryan Church	29	.349	.464	114	5.4
Jason Kubel	26	.335	.450	109	3.0
Jason Bay	29	.327	.418	93	2.3

You see what I mean?

• Dunn, Burrell, Lee, Willingham ... All of them can hit and none of them can field, which knocks down their WARPs.

• Duncan and Kubel both were part-timers last season, or else they'd look better in the last column.

• Bay was awful last season, but his WARPs the two previous seasons were 10.6 and 9.8, so it would be foolish to ignore his considerable talents after one lousy year.

• You have to like Crawford, but it's worth mentioning that he has not showed a normal growth curve. At 22, he was roughly six wins better than a replacement player ... and was roughly six wins better than a replacement player at 23, 24, and 25. I'm not sure what to make of that, except there's no obvious reason to think he's suddenly going to become a great player (though I do believe he'll have a few great seasons).

Remember, we're looking at the next five years. Will Lee be a good player in 2012? I don't think he will. Not in left field, anyway. Same with Dunn, etc. Which makes it tough to come up with a top 10 (as I've done at the other positions). Fortunately, we can throw Ryan Braun into the mix. No, we don't know how long he'll be in left field. But considering the presence of Prince Fielder, we can guess that Braun won't be moving to first base anytime soon.

1. Crawford
2. Braun
3. Holliday
4. Soriano
5. Bay
6. Kubel
7. ????

Who's in line for that last spot? The super outfield prospects -- St. Louis' Colby Rasmus, Cincinnati's Jay Bruce, Florida's Cameron Maybin, Pittsburgh's Andrew McCutchen -- are center fielders. Yes, there's probably some excellent young hitter who will switch from some other position to left field in the next year or two ... but again, we're looking only five years ahead, and most young players, even the best of them, need a few years to establish themselves among the elite.

It's just not a good time for left fielders, and I think once you get past Crawford, Braun, and (arguably) Holliday, there's not much to get excited about. Among the younger guys, at least.

More reaction to the (pending) Big Deal ...

Tim Marchman:

[Johan] Santana is, stylistically, a very good fit with the Mets. Despite his gaudy strikeout numbers and lively fastball, he's a junkballer at heart, a changeup pitcher with terrific control, and so he gets a lot of flyball outs. Both Shea Stadium and Citi Field, due to open next year, have large outfields, and with [Carlos] Beltran in center, Ryan Church in right, and Endy Chavez on the bench, the Mets should have their usual fine outfield defense. Santana will be pitching in one of the more forgiving environments in baseball, and he'll take advantage of it.

While Santana is in some sense a replacement for Tom Glavine, and in a much more significant sense one for the aging [Pedro] Martinez, it's probably best to think of him as replacing Mike Pelfrey, until yesterday the nominal fifth starter. This is a lot of why this is not just a transcendently good trade, but a savvy deal dollar-wise.

The difference between Santana and what the Mets could expect from Pelfrey and a revolving door of No. 6 starters is worth something like six to eight wins, depending on your terms. According to sabermetrician Tom Tango's research, the going rate for a projected win above what a No. 6-type would likely do is $4.4 million. This suggests not only that Santana is well worth $25 million a year, but that the Mets will be getting the full advantage of the expense. He'll be worth less in future years, but so will $25 million, as baseball salaries inflate about 10 [percent] every year. And the wins here in question make the difference between the Mets being a strong contender and a strong favorite, greatly increasing the team's chances of saying goodbye to Shea in style and of ringing up even more cash when Citi Field opens.

Marchman also notes of the four prospects the Twins will receive, "Baseball America ranked [Deolis] Guerra as the Mets' No. 2 prospect, [Carlos] Gomez No. 3, and [Kevin] Mulvey No. 4, with [Phil] Humber No. 7; prospect analyst John Sickels had them in the same spot." So the trade does leave the Mets' cupboard bare (except for No. 1 prospect Fernando Martinez, and he's still a baby). But don't get too excited if you're a Twins fan; the cupboard was mostly bare before this deal. Guerra, their erstwhile/supposed No. 2 guy, doesn't turn 19 until this spring and has all of 179 professional innings under his belt. And it's downhill from Guerra unless Gomez's tools turn into skills.

This deal isn't exactly what he had in mind, but Twins blogger Aaron Gleeman has been screaming "Free Johan Santana!" for more than five years. Today Gleeman's not thrilled, but he's not ready to jump into the Mississippi, either ...

It seems natural that a team should be able to have its pick of elite prospects when trading away baseball's premiere pitcher, but from the Twins' perspective all they were truly shopping was one season of Santana. While that's plenty valuable, getting four solid prospects for one season of any player seems reasonable. Of course, had the Twins kept Santana this season and simply let him walk as a free agent, they also would have gotten a pair of first-round draft picks as compensation.

Given that, what the Twins really gave up was one season of Santana and a pair of draft picks. That complicates things a bit, but four solid prospects still seems like a relatively palatable return given the added cost and uncertainty of draft picks. Still, my suspicion is that the Twins could have done better and perhaps cost themselves a chance to get the maximum return for Santana by attempting to squeeze extra value from teams.

Well, they also gave up the exclusive rights to negotiate a long-term contract extension with Santana, and that's got some value too, right? By all accounts the Twins could have done better and should have. How badly will it hurt them? The real test comes in 2011. Of the four prospects they'll get from the Mets, the two potential stars (Guerra and Gomez) need more development time. So they won't help much in 2009 or '10. In '11 the Twins move into their new ballpark and the fans will show up regardless of the team's performance? In 2012 and beyond, though, the Twins will struggle to attract customers if they're not winning games.

One good thing: Say what you want about owner Carl Pohlad's unwillingness to dip into his own large pockets, but he's run his franchise with a steady, patient hand. Assuming you've hired the right people, organizational stability is a great asset, more valuable than some other team's Grade A prospect. In our rush to judgment it's tempting to cry that the sky is falling. It's not. Yes, it would have been nice for the Twins if they could have acquired the next Grady Sizemore, and that's probably not Carlos Gomez. You know what, though? It's probably not Jacoby Ellsbury or Melky Cabrera, either. We shouldn't forget that predicting the collective future of four young baseball players is neither easy nor precise, and we should allow for the distinct possibility that in five years Bill Smith will smell like a rose.

So what are the Mets getting (if the deal goes through) in Johan Santana? We know they're getting the best pitcher in the American League. Over the past four seasons, Santana leads all AL starters in ERA (by a wide margin), innings, starts, wins, winning percentage, and (by a huge margin) strikeouts. As The New York Times' Ben Shpigel notes, though, there's at least one lingering question:

The one note of caution for the Mets is the fact that he took a step backward last season, with a record of 15-13 and an earned run average of 3.33, and seemed to struggle after a standout game Aug. 19 in which he struck out 17 Texas Rangers in eight innings. Over his final seven starts, Santana went 2-4 with a 5.11 E.R.A., raising some questions as to whether he was hurt.

The physical exam by the Mets will address such concerns, although the Mets might not feel fully relaxed about their investment until Santana truly demonstrates he is healthy by pitching effectively in spring training.

No team should feel fully relaxed about a pitcher, ever. Are Santana's last seven starts something the Mets should be particularly concerned about, though? In those seven starts he struck out 44 batters in 44 innings, just shy of his career average. His walk rate was up some, and he gave up nine homers. That was his problem all season; he gave up 33 homers, a career high that directly led to his 3.33 ERA, his highest in a season since becoming a starter.

Normal statistical fluctuation? Probably. And one can't help but wonder: If Santana can strike out 240-260 hitters each season, pitching half the time in a decent hitter's park and most of the time in a good hitter's league, what's he going to do in a pitcher's park in a pitcher's league? And, how well will he perform on a team that's going to score some runs for him? My guess is that Santana will dominate the National League like Greg Maddux did in the mid-1990s and Randy Johnson did five years later. But maybe we shouldn't assume any limits.

I like what Baron Von Awesome said about the (pending) trade sending Johan Santana to the Mets for a quartet of prospects ...

The Twins just nailed their own coffin shut today. They're doomed to irrelevance for the next five years, at least.

This is the worst baseball trade I've seen since... I don't know. Kearns and Lopez for a bunch of relievers, I guess, but even then, Kearns and Lopez turned out not to be much to worry about. The Astros trading Dan Wheeler for Ty Wigginton and then releasing Morgan Ensberg comes to mind, but there wasn't nearly as much at stake; the Astros were already doomed to suck for the rest of the decade.

This trade is horrible.

I agree. As someone else said in the thread, the Twins would have been better off if they'd traded Santana straight up to the Mariners for Adam Jones. Why? Because potential superstars like Jones are precious, and Grade B prospects -- all the guys the Twins may get for Santana -- are not.

I've got John Sickels' new book, and Sickels rates only right-handed pitcher Deolis Guerra higher than Grade B ... and he's a B-plus. And a B-plus pitcher at that.

Now, it would be one thing if this deal was the best one available. But we know that it wasn't, right? The Red Sox were offering Jacoby Ellsbury (Grade A-minus) and Jed Lowrie (A-minus), along with a couple of lesser lights. The Yankees were offering a package including Melky Cabrera and Phil Hughes.

So what happened? Both teams made strong offers because, yes, they wanted Santana for themselves, but also because they didn't want the other to get Santana on the cheap. But there wasn't anything to distinguish either offer; both were outstanding, so the Twins figured they would wait until somebody upped the ante. And of course nobody did, perhaps because they realized they didn't have to. And then those offers just sort of ... faded away, like tender wisps of smoke.

Why? The Red Sox have been in these things before, and (with the exception of Daisuke Matsuzaka) they've eventually deferred to their richer cousins. Seems to have worked out OK for them so far. Meanwhile, the Yankees have, in Hughes and Joba Chamberlain, two of the best young (untested) pitchers in the game. Bottom line? Thanks to the wild card, the American League East is not a zero-sum game, and entering the 2008 season both the Red Sox and the Yankees figure they'll wind up in the playoffs again. With good reason.

So if the deal goes through, it sure looks like a rough start for Bill Smith, the Twins' new GM. When you trade someone as good as Santana, you simply must come away with a future star. It's not clear that Smith has done that. One caveat, though: No team has been better than the Twins, over the past seven or eight years, evaluating talent. Although it looks like they're trading the best pitcher on the planet for nothing but a bunch of Grade B prospects, we must allow for the possibility that they know something about these guys that we don't.

So, doomed to irrelevance for five years? I wouldn't go that far. We've seen franchises turn around their fortunes quickly. In the short term? The Twins are lacking good young hitters in the minors, but in the majors they've got Justin Morneau, Joe Mauer and Jason Kubel. If Francisco Liriano comes back strong and Kevin Slowey develops (I think he will), the Twins are capable of surprising us. I just think they'd have a better shot if they'd added Ellsbury or Melky Cabrera to their lineup.

With the release of the final 2007 payroll, Rich Lederer "thought it might be instructive to analyze payroll efficiency by comparing team salaries to wins."

To that end, Lederer graphs payroll vs. wins, which really is the best way to look at the numbers.

I'm optimistic about the Dodgers' chances this year, but a quick look at the graph shows just how poorly they fared last year, compared to their rivals. The Dodgers did finish with a winning record, but they also finished well behind everybody else despite spending substantially more money. Of course, that's the terrible impact of contracts like this: You're spending money and losing games.

Anyway, the graph is a lot of fun, but I do have a suggestion: I'd like to see the format adapted to show multiple seasons, as that would give us a better idea of the franchises' general competence over a period of years.

Last year, three-fourths of the Phillies infield were MVP candidates.

And the other one-fourth? Train wreck. Last season the Phillies' third basemen -- mainly Abraham Nunez, Wes Helms and Greg Dobbs -- combined to hit .255/.321/.368 with 11 homers. If the Phillies do sign Pedro Feliz, as reported, he'll almost certainly do better. So it's a good move, right?

As usual, it's not really that simple. As Philliesflow's egrissom points out,

Offensively overall on the year, Nunez was terrible, Helms was terrible and Dobbs was okay. But in the at-bats Dobbs got as a third baseman, he was just wretched ... I think you can make the argument that it was simply a fluke that Dobbs was so much worse offensively when he played third base in 2007 than when he played other positions. In the same way, Helms is virtually guaranteed to produce more offense in 2008 than he did in 2007. The Phillies got some miserable production out of third in '07, but there was a good chance that Dobbs, Helms and Bruntlett of '08 were going to outplay Dobbs, Helms and Nunez of '07 by a lot offensively.

Here are 2008 projections for those three players, plus Feliz, courtesy of Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster:

PLAYER	OBP	SLG
Dobbs	.313	.402
Helms	.326	.455
Nunez	.310	.285
Feliz	.290	.416

At the risk of sounding unkind, Nunez has absolutely no business playing in the major leagues. He's a sort of fluke, and someday students of baseball history will spend many hours trying to understand how he played more than 1,000 games at the highest level of professional baseball.

But Dobbs and Helms can play a little bit. Especially Helms. He's a better fielder than Dobbs, and a better hitter. So why don't the Phillies just give the job to Helms? Because he got off to a terrible start last season; in the first half he batted 168 times and hit just one homer. He did rebound somewhat in the second half, but it still was a terrible season: .294 on-base percentage, .368 slugging. So it's hard to blame the Phillies for not trusting him.

The numbers, though? The numbers say Helms will be a better hitter than Feliz in 2008, even with Feliz's new home ballpark giving him a boost. That, plus Feliz's big edge with the glove, probably makes him roughly as good as Helms this season, maybe a touch better. Is that touch worth $8.5 million over the next two seasons, though?

Over at Dugout Central, Steve Caimano delves into the run support for the best pitchers of the 1970s and '80s. He starts with Jack Morris and Bert Blyleven and finds about what you would (or should) expect: Morris got a great deal more support from his mates in the lineup than Blyleven did. For example, Morris's teams scored six or more runs in 35 percent of his starts, against only 27 percent in Blyleven's. As Caimano writes, "Wow!" Further:

If we dig into the individual numbers a little deeper, one of the things that stands out is that Blyleven and Morris were not as good as their HOF contemporaries at turning three runs of support into victories for their team. While the difference is relatively small with some (Niekro, Hunter, Carlton), a few of these guys blow the rest away. Namely, Jim Palmer and Don Sutton who both managed to convert more than 60% of the time when given three runs to work with. And then there's Tom Seaver. Seaver posted a .500 record when he had only two runs to work with. That's just insanity!

Seaver really was incredible. I suspect that if you polled today's fans, Seaver would finish behind Nolan Ryan and perhaps Steve Carlton, too. But Seaver certainly was the best pitcher between Warren Spahn and Roger Clemens, and here's just one more piece of evidence.

I think most hardcore fans understand that run support matters, in principle. But I also think we too often forget what it means, in practice.

Yes, the Clemens Report (pdf here) has arrived. Penned by Clemens' management agency, the report contains no mention of "steroids" or "HGH" or any other (supposed) performance-enhancing drug, but then that's obviously the point: One doesn't need to refer to drugs to explain the Rocket's brilliant career.

Do we need 49 closely argued pages to make the point, though?

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for information, and this is a valuable document because it contains a great deal of information. But the authors of the report have a long and successful history of making the case for their clients in arbitration hearings (I worked, in a peripheral sort of way, on some of their cases in the early 1990s), and their report reads more like a one-sided arbitration case than rigorous analysis.

Here's one representative passage:

One simply does not find straight trend lines in performance in major league baseball. A baseball career mimics life, in that there are good days and bad days, hot streaks and cold spells, as well as good years and bad years, both within and across seasons. A wide variety of factors determine the success of a player, including the player's health, the quality of his team, and the pitcher or hitter he happens to be facing in a particular at bat. As the chart and graph above demonstrate, Roger Clemens' baseball career is no exception.

What's graphed is Clemens' "ERA Margin" season by season. ERA Margin -- the raw difference between a pitcher's ERA and his league's ERA -- isn't great, but it's simple and that's how arbitrators like their statistics.

It's true: One doesn't often find "straight trend lines" … but you know, some trend lines are straighter than others. Clemens' shows one decline for three straight seasons, and one improvement for three straight seasons, but otherwise his line's up and down with no apparent pattern.

Which isn't so interesting. What's interesting? According to the report, "The year-to-year variations of Roger Clemens' ERA Margin are by no means unusual. An analysis of two distinguished contemporaries of Clemens, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, shows that year-to-year variations in ERA Margin are to be expected throughout the career of a starting pitcher."

Then we see Johnson's and Schilling's trend lines, and of course we do see those year-to-year variations … but they're not nearly as dramatic as Clemens'!

This is an old lawyer's trick: Say something that's true but not particularly meaningful, and then hope nobody pays a great deal of attention to the actual evidence. But if you actually look? Schilling was roughly the same pitcher for 10 years (1995 through 2004), was hurt in 2005, and in 2006 and '07 was again good (if obviously aging). Johnson improved for a few years when he was young, maintained a general level of excellence for 10 years (1993-2002), was hurt in 2003, and since then has suffered the typical fate of pitchers in their early 40s.

Next up is Nolan Ryan, and here's where Clemens' lawyers might rest their case. As the report notes, "The graph of Ryan's ERA Margin most closely resembles that of Clemens. … As with Clemens, Ryan posted two of his highest ERA Margins after the age of 40, from 1987 to 1993."

Well, OK. So in our imaginary courtroom, Clemens' defender can point to Nolan Ryan … and his prosecutor can point to nearly every other pitcher, ever. If you're the jury, who do you believe?

This of course is just a portion of the report. In the interest of getting something posted here, I've just skimmed the rest of it. The central conclusions are obvious, though:

1. Pitchers' careers do not follow a predictable path.
2. Clemens' career path has not been extraordinary, considering his talents.
3. Thus, we needn't look to steroids to explain that career path.

Points 1 and 2 both are arguable, but an arbitrator might buy them if skillfully made. Point 3 is certainly true, as there have been plenty of odd-looking career paths that had nothing to do with drugs.

Does the Clemens Report prove anything? No. But of course it's not meant to prove anything. It's meant to sow a few more seeds of doubt. The Clemens Report essentially says, "You think he used steroids because his career was strange. But really it wasn't so strange. So why would you think he used steroids?"

We think he used steroids because his career was unusually strange. And because a fairly credible witness says he did. Which doesn't mean he did. I just don't know that an arbitration case is really going to convince anybody.

In response to the rumored Mariners-Orioles deal, USS Mariner's Dave Cameron offers his 22 things I believe about this trade. Here are 7 of the 22 things:

1. Erik Bedard is awesome - one of the five best pitchers in the American League.

2. Erik Bedard and Felix Hernandez are both candidates for the 2008 AL Cy Young Award.

3. Two great pitchers and mediocre everything else is not a formula for consistent success.

4. The Mariners are going to miss Adam Jones. Badly.

5. The Mariners' right fielder in 2008 is going to suck.

9. The Mariners improved themselves by, at most, 2-3 wins in 2008 with this deal.

22. The M's have, once again, taken a bad path to a good goal. It will, once again, not work.

One detail worth mentioning: Nobody's actually been traded yet. I do believe the M's will miss Jones (if they do trade him), and I do believe the Mariners will be 2-3 wins better with Bedard (if they do trade for him). Are the Mariners about to travel down a "bad path"? It does feel that way. Between Bedard's demonstrated fragility -- he's never pitched 200 innings in a season, and has averaged 167 over the last four seasons -- and the likelihood that he'll become a free agent after 2009, there are a lot of things here that could go wrong for the Mariners. If.

And the funny thing about all of this? Supposedly it's the Orioles' owner who's holding up the deal.

• As more and more analysts dig into the evidence, the question remains: Do steroids and HGH leave any observable impression in the record books? As Alan Schwarz reports, now we can add Eric Walker to our list of analysts.

• From Bleed Cubbie Blue, a nice interview with Cubs broadcaster Len Kasper, one of the guys I actually go out of my way to enjoy.

• Recently the baseball-research community lost a shining star when Dick Thompson passed with no warning. Thompson was one of SABR's top researchers, and among other things he discovered who taught Christy Mathewson his famous fadeaway pitch.

• The Hardball Times' John Beamer writes again about MLB's rules and quirks.

• Theo and Cash got together Friday night, and it was Cashman who made news with less than kind (though perhaps fair) comments about Bernie Williams.

• The great Ernie Harwell turned 90 last Friday, and apparently he's still in fine fettle. During the Tigers' last season in their old ballpark, I spent a few moments with Harwell in his broadcast booth before a game, and one of my fondest memories is listening to him describe Al Kaline in right field, grabbing a ball off the wall and turning to fire a strike to second base.

• Jack Morris has grown up a lot in the last few years. Just ask him. Meanwhile, ShysterBall notes that Tom Glavine seems to have grown up a long time ago.

I mentioned this last week in passing, but Slate's Josh Levin now has a nice piece about Randy Newsom, the baseball-playing entrepreneur who's offering investors a small piece of his (potential) future income. Is this the wave of the future?

Let's assume that Real Sports Investments survives MLB scrutiny and recruits some more players. Will it work as a market? Jeff Ma, the co-founder of ProTrade and the leader of the Vegas-busting MIT blackjack team, says it's a winning concept for minor-league ballplayers like Newsom. A ballplayer's career carries substantial risk, Ma says, and it makes sense to shave off potential wealth in exchange for insurance against never getting a major-league payday. (If Newsom doesn't make the majors, his investors get nothing.) Ma is skeptical, though, that players with higher earning potential will care to participate, and without these higher-tier prospects, the market won't be as attractive to investors. "You're not talking about Barry Bonds or [future stars like] Billy Butler or Tim Lincecum selling their future upside," Ma says. "How many people will want to speculate on the Randy Newsoms of the world?"

My guess? Not many. Buying into Randy Newsom's career is not a particularly good investment. I bought five shares, which means I now own -- theoretically, at least -- 0.008% of Newsom's future major league earnings. For me to merely get my money (including fees) back, Newsom will have to earn $1.5 million as a major leaguer. Considering that if he does reach the majors he'll earn the minimum salary for at least two seasons, he'll have to pitch in the majors for at least four seasons before I see my $120 again.

As you probably know, most Grade C prospects don't spend anything like four seasons in the majors.

So why invest in a Grade C prospect? For the same reason you might buy stock in the Green Bay Packers: because of the "psychic income" that comes with the shares, if you're a Packers fan. And there are a lot of Packers fans. But there just aren't a lot of baseball fans who are devoted to the hundreds of Grade C prospects in the minors.

Last week, Newsom offered 2,500 shares of himself. As of last night, there were still 2,130 available.

This winter, the Johan Santana "story" has been written mostly as an East Coast story. Red Sox, Yankees, Mets ... Who's going to get him? But isn't this really a Minnesota story? The Red Sox and the Yankees and the Mets will likely be successful over the next five or six years whether they get Santana or not. The Twins, though? If they don't do the right thing, or one of the right things, they may be consigned to third or fourth place for some years. And as Sid Hartman writes today, don't assume the Twins won't just keep Santana for a while ...

So maybe the Twins' offer is a pretty good one. Santana will be paid $13.25 million in 2008 and the Twins offered him a four-year deal at $20 million or a total $80 million guaranteed. The Giants signed pitcher Barry Zito to a seven-year contract for $126 million last year, and the result was the former Oakland lefthander had an ordinary record of 11-13. The experience the Giants had might dissuade clubs from giving that type of contract to Santana.

I don't think smart teams factor Zito's contract in the equation much, if at all. Zito's contract was obviously foolish (for the Giants) before he signed it, not just after. Considering that Santana's got the profile of a future Hall of Fame pitcher, the notion that he'll be a great pitcher for the next six or seven years is hardly outlandish. It's a hard bet to make, though. Even if you're likely to win the bet, the consequence of losing is terribly embarrassing (if not embarrassing enough to cost Dan O'Dowd or Brian Sabean their jobs).

So yeah, maybe Santana will have to settle on $80 million, give or take. And you know what? The Twins can afford that. They don't play in a large market, but it's not really small, either. The Twins play their home games in the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the United States, just behind Seattle-Tacoma, just ahead of San Diego, and well ahead of St. Louis. The Twins' new ballpark is scheduled to open in two years. We've seen that a new building isn't a panacea -- just ask Pirates fans -- but the Twins' financial situation obviously will improve relative to the other teams. I'm not saying the Twins should sign Santana to a long-term deal; if it were my team I'd trade him for three young players. But paying him $20 million per season needn't be debilitating.

News, notes and whatnot while wondering why a bunch of baseball writers don't get together and bribe Jose Canseco to not publish his book at all ...

• Joe Posnanski writes the story that should warm the hearts of small-market fans everywhere: The Royals have a shot at Johan Santana. (Also, Joe's book about Buck O'Neil just won the Casey Award. You know what's scary? His next book, about the Big Red Machine, is going to be even better.)

• No matter what anybody says, John Sickels is sticking with his A- grade for Red Sox prospect Jed Lowrie. I agree with John. Yes, Lowrie's almost 24. He's also a middle infielder with mid-range power and a .386 career on-base percentage in the minors. Right now, the only thing holding Lowrie back is Julio Lugo's $36 million contract.

• Yeah, Keith Hernandez comes off sometimes as your typical crotchety old ballplayer who knows only enough Bill James to get himself in trouble. But he's still, you know, Keith Hernandez. He was in Game 6 (and if you're wearing this T-shirt, I apologize).

• As the Jim Rice Show continues, an interesting fact: Rice walked exactly as often whether there were runners in scoring position or the bases were empty. Does that mean anything? Depends on your perspective, I suppose.

• Speaking of perspective, MGL wants to up the stakes in the challenge to identify clutch hitters. There might actually be real money involved. So if you 1) think clutch hitters really exist, and 2) are willing to bet on your ability to identify them, your big chance has finally arrived.

• Home Run Derby's wondering if the Cubs ripped him off. Three things: 1) I voted NO; 2) either way it doesn't matter; and 3) if bloggers worry about only things that matter we'll be out of business before sundown. (Meanwhile, the Cubs' ad campaign, of which they're apparently quite proud, isn't universally admired. I love history, but 1945 was a long, long time ago. And it's not like we didn't exact plenty of revenge at the time.)

• As I admitted last week, eight years ago I predicted that Nick Johnson would become the best first baseman of this decade. He didn't. But man, he sure has been hurt a lot. And this piece reminds me that he was, in 2006, one of the best first basemen in the National League. Maybe he's been pacing himself. Maybe he'll be the best first baseman in the next decade.

• Happy 63rd to Wally Bunker. As a 19-year-old Orioles rookie in 1964, Bunker pitched 214 innings and won 19 games. He never won more than 10 games in a season again.

Update: Original version of this post included incorrect slugging percentage for Ramirez, and incorrect OBP and slugging for Kouzmanoff and Zimmerman. All have now been corrected.

Today, we turn to the best third basemen of the next five years. As you might recall, I've been ignoring players older than 30, but if there's a time to ignore that rule -- more of a guideline, really -- this is it, because the best player in the American League still has plenty of good seasons ahead of him. Here are my 10 holdovers from 2007; the given age is 2008 seasonal age, while the other numbers are from 2007, including adjusted OPS (which is how the players are sorted) and Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP).

Player	Age	OBP	SLG	OPS+	WARP
Alex Rodriguez	32	.422	.645	177	11.0
David Wright	25	.416	.546	150	10.6
Miguel Cabrera	25	.401	.565	150	9.2
Aramis Ramirez	30	.366	.549	129	7.3
Chone Figgins	30	.393	.432	117	3.4
Adrian Beltre	29	.319	.482	112	4.5
Garrett Atkins	28	.367	.486	112	3.7
Mark Reynolds	24	.349	.495	111	2.8
Kevin Kouzmanoff	26	.329	.457	109	1.5
Ryan Zimmerman	23	.330	.458	107	7.7

Missing from the list? Chipper Jones (who five years from today will be nearly 41 years old), Ryan Braun (who one month from today will be a left fielder) and Mike Lowell (a gamer who might have three or four good years left in him).

A few notes on that list:

• Last year there was a big space between No. 1 and Nos. 2 and 3, and a big space between Nos. 2 and 3 and everyone else. I expect No. 1 to drop off some, but absent injury I don't see any reason to think the top three this season will be different from last season. Yes, Cabrera will be facing better pitching in the American League. He'll also be a year older and it's hard see him not being one of the three best- hitting third basemen in the majors.

• You might be surprised to see Atkins even with Beltre in OPS+, but that's Coors vs. Safeco. When you consider Beltre's age in years and defense, he's clearly going to be a few slots ahead of Atkins when we make our final list.

• I was surprised to find Kouzmanoff with a higher OPS+ than Zimmerman, but Kouzmanoff's defense numbers are simply horrible, easily the worst on the list. If he doesn't get significantly better with either the bat or the glove, the Padres are left in an awkward position, because a 1.6 WARP means he's significantly worse than an average MLB third baseman.

• Meanwhile, Zimmerman's WARP is fourth-best on the list. This is partially due to his excellent defensive numbers, and I suspect there might also be a difference in how WARP and OPS+ utilize park effects. Regardless, I believe Zimmerman's youth and his defense clearly move him into the top five on our final list. In his three seasons with the Nationals, he has an .861 OPS in road games, which gives you an idea of what he'll do with the Nats moving into their new home this spring.

• It's hard to know what to make of Reynolds. Just one year ago, Baseball America opined, "Reynolds will probably begin the season as the second baseman in Double-A." He did spend roughly a month in Double-A but mostly as a third baseman, and spent the balance of the season with the big club. His defensive stats weren't good, but he has little experience at the position and figures to improve.

With all that (and some other stuff) in mind, our tentative list:

1. Wright
2. Cabrera
3. Rodriguez
4. Zimmerman
5. Beltre
6. Ramirez
7. Reynolds
8. Atkins
9. Andy LaRoche
10. ????

Figgins and Kouzmanoff didn't make this list because Figgins probably will continue to be a utility guy, and because Kouzmanoff's defense last season was just so awful. If he gets a handle on that problem, though, he certainly should rank among the top 10 over the next five years.

As you probably noticed, I've tossed Andy LaRoche into the mix, but there are plenty of other young candidates for the last three or four spots. Kansas City's Alex Gordon struggled last season but is still considered a future star. Tampa Bay's Evan Longoria hasn't played in the majors yet, but he's still quite young, has power and patience, and figures to take over at third this spring. Colorado's Ian Stewart hasn't moved quite as quickly as Longoria (or as quickly as we expected), but soon the Rockies will have to figure out how to use both him and Atkins in the lineup.

Your thoughts?

• ShysterBall exposes elements of the New York City Council for the dishonest panderers that they are. (Yeah, I know: Stop the presses!)

• Tim Marchman adds to the list of writers who recently have observed that baseball is, for the most part, recession-proof.

• Another fine effort from Rich Lederer, whilst discussing Messrs. Jim Rice and Bert Blyleven. Lederer observes that when it comes to Hall of Fame candidates, we just need to keep asking questions. Assuming of course that we're still interested in the answers.

• The Red Sox are going to wear ugly corporate logos when they open their season in March. I'm sure the Athletics will be wearing ugly patches, too. This is nothing new: the Mets wore them in 2000 and both the Devil Rays and Yankees wore them -- plus huge helmet logos -- in 2004. Frankly, back in 2000 I figured that within a few years we would see the same stuff on uniforms throughout the season. But even as advertisements have covered practically every square inch of the ballparks, to this point they've been kept off the uniforms and the actual field of play. For which I will happily thank Bud Selig and anyone else who's stood firm.

• Bay City Ball uses PITCHf/x data to analyze Barry Zito's 2007. Takeaway: It's not easy to retire major league hitters when you're throwing 86 with limited command of the strike zone. At this point it's only Zito's outstanding curveball that allows him to post a league-average ERA. No problem, though: The Giants only owe him another $116 million.

• MetsGeek's Dan Scotto writes about Billy Beane and baseball's new economics (?). What does that have to do with the Mets? Lately it seems there aren't as many great free agents available to the super-rich teams.

• Derek Jacques watches Bartolo Colon pitch Monday so you don't have to, and he's not impressed.

• Happy 46th to Benny Distefano, MLB's last lefty-throwing catcher!

Reading the message boards, one sees Heath Ledger's death described as a "tragedy."

No doubt. But for whom, exactly? He was someone's son, and the father of a two-year-old daughter. It's tragic for his parents, and for his daughter. In the grand scheme of things, though? Every day there are tragedies that would, if you could figure all the equations, rate larger than this one.

If you think Ledger's death is a tragedy, it's because of how it affects you, not his parents or his daughter. It's because he meant something to you. It's because you found his performance as Ennis Del Mar incredibly affecting and you wanted to see if he'd ever get another role as good. It's because you've been jazzed about seeing his take on The Joker since you first heard about that (presumably) brilliant bit of casting.

Or maybe that's just me. I just know I felt the same yesterday as I do when some long-ago major leaguer has died. It's my tragedy. I don't feel sorry for his wife or his children, or his grandchildren. They're mostly just abstractions in my mind. I feel sorry for me, because Johnny Podres and Tommy Byrne and Gerry Staley were all small-but-important pieces of my life.

Speaking of baseball, it occurs to me that anybody who thinks it's appropriate to make a player wait a few years for the Hall of Fame should be strung up (or drawn and quartered, or tarred and feathered; whatever's legal). A couple of years ago, Ledger was nominated for an Oscar Award that went to Philip Seymour Hoffman. Don't get me wrong; I've been a big fan of Hoffman's since Boogie Nights, and if there was a more impressive actor in 2007 -- he was great in three different movies -- I'd like to know who it was. That said, Hoffman's Oscar-winning role in Capote (as Capote) was, I suspect, not among his half-dozen best performances. But, you know: Excellent Actor + Good Script + Funny Glasses = Oscar.

Meanwhile, Ledger carried Brokeback Mountain. With him, it's a classic. Without him, it's a beautifully shot curiosity.

Now, this is just a guess, as the Academy doesn't release complete voting results. But I have to think Ledger didn't finish that far behind Hoffman. And I can't help but think some of the voters figured, "Ah, the kid's only 26. He'll have plenty of chances."

Except he didn't. So, Hall of Fame voters, if you're reading? Distribute your honors while ye may. Time is still flying.

Beyond the Box Score has started an interesting project, "looking at each position on a league wide basis." Yesterday it was catchers, and I was reminded again just how amazing Jorge Posada was in 2007 ...

Examining Posada's season a bit more in depth it's pretty amazing that at 35 Posada posted what amounts to a career season; I've heard of late bloomers but hitting .338/.426/.543 is pretty amazing. Of course part of that amazing happening -- pardon my lifting of the NBA motto -- would be his .389 BABIP which was roughly .040 points above his expected BABIP. It's pretty obvious to say Posada isn't going to repeat his performance, and the Yankees are more than likely going to regret giving him 13.1 million annually until 2011 ends, but if a team can afford to overvalue a player it would be the Yankees -- after all they've been following this method of overvaluing since 2000, particularly with their own.

As fans, we tend to assume that everything that went well last season will go well again next season, and that everything that went poorly will go better. As analysts, we know that sports doesn't work that way. Posada entered last season with a .270 batting average and batted .338. Today I'll offer one truly easy prediction: Posada won't reach even .300 this season.

Which doesn't mean the Yankees won't do just fine with him hitting .268 or .278 (or even .258). But when you're making a list of things that have to happen if the Yankees are going to win 95 games, chief among them should be making up somewhere else for Posada's significant decline.

The Padres and Khalil Greene were talking about a long-term contract extension, but talks broke down last week. Which doesn't mean they can't be restarted.

Greene's not eligible for free agency until after the 2009 season, so nobody has to do anything at the moment other than submit arbitration figures and prepare to defend them. But what about the future? Ducksnorts' Geoff Young calls it The Khalil Conundrum:

Greene is the best shortstop in club history, but Petco kills his game. This hurts both player and team.

Another question is this: If the Padres move Greene, how do they replace him? Drew Cumberland is the best internal hope, but he's light years away.

The list of potentially available short-term replacements underwhelms. Pittsburgh's Jack Wilson (yawn) probably is the best of the lot. Only problem is that he has a good year about every three or four seasons, and he just had one.

I think the more fundamental issue is that "we can't sign this guy to a long-term deal" doesn't fit into my concept of good reasons to make a trade. It's ahead of "I'm bored" but way behind "we have a chance to improve the club."

For all Greene's faults, if the Padres deal him, they will downgrade the shortstop position. The players who are likely to be better than him over the next 3-4 years (Hanley Ramirez, Troy Tulowitzki, Johnny Peralta, Jimmy Rollins, J.J. Hardy, Jose Reyes) aren't available in trade.

Greene is a good player. He's not a great player. His WARP last season was 4.3; he was 4.3 wins better than a replacement player (and "replacement player" sets the bar extremely low). This morning when I did my rankings of the best shortstops of the next five years, Greene came out No. 8, which is fine (and by the way, my list was the same as Young's, except I made the questionable decision to slot Stephen Drew ahead of Greene).

He did hit 27 homers last season, which destroyed the franchise record for home runs by a shortstop. The old record? Fifteen, set by Greene in 2004 and tied by Greene in 2005 and '06. In only four-plus seasons, Greene has 74 home runs; No. 2 among Padre shortstops is Garry Templeton with 43, and Chris Gomez (with 13) is the only other Padre shortstop in double figures.

So yeah, Greene is good, and his goodness is heightened by the fact that he's the best-hitting shortstop in franchise history. Should they try to sign him long-term? Well, of course, they should try. As always, it's a matter of degree. Should they offer him $15 million per season? Probably not. Should he accept $5 million per season? Probably not.

But nobody has to make or accept any offers at the moment. Two years is a long time away, and in the meantime, the Padres are trying to win, right? Granted, all the good National League teams -- and now there are four of them -- can't get into the playoffs every year. But considering the Padres won 89 games just last season, they certainly can't shift into rebuilding mode this year. When it comes to Greene, all you have to do is make him a reasonable offer, and if he doesn't accept it, you enjoy his value for another season and reevaluate. The only downside to waiting is that if he doesn't repeat his 2007 numbers, his trade value goes down. But when you're trying to win 90 games, that's not really something you worry about.

My, how things have changed in the Wonderful World of Shortstops. Remember five years ago, when Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra and perhaps Miguel Tejada all looked like Hall of Fame shortstops? Today, only Jeter remains a shorstop and only he and Rodriguez remain future Hall of Famers.

Which should, if nothing else, suggest just how dicey the prognosticating business can be. So how do we sort out the best shortstops of the next five years? We do the best we can and hope for the best.

Last season, 27 shortstops played at least 100 games at the position, and 16 of them were in their 20s. With the exception of Omar Vizquel, all the rest were in their early 30s (which makes Vizquel's longevity all the more impressive).

Here are my eight favorites. Their age is 2008 "seasonal" (June 30) age, and the other columns you know already (unless you skipped last Thursday's post on second basemen).

Player	Age	OBP	SLG	OPS+	WARP
Hanley Ramirez	24	.386	.562	145	8.9
Jimmy Rollins	29	.344	.531	118	9.2
Troy Tulowitzki	23	.359	.479	108	8.5
J.J. Hardy	25	.323	.463	100	4.7
Jose Reyes	25	.354	.421	103	7.3
Jhonny Peralta	26	.341	.430	100	5.7
Khalil Greene	28	.291	.468	100	4.3
Stephen Drew	25	.284	.394	72	2.1

Where is Edgar Renteria? He was fantastic last year, but that was a big surprise and this year he'll be 32. Carlos Guillen? He'll be a first baseman this year. Jeter? He'll be 34, and one of these years he won't hit or the Yankees will move him to a position for which he's better suited. Tejada? He'll be 32 and could soon become a third baseman.

All of which left me with only eight candidates. Not that it's easy to sort them out. Ramirez blows everybody away with the bat ... but his poor defense drops him below Rollins in WARP. Will Ramirez still be a shortstop five years from now? Probably not, but then I said the same thing about Jeter five years ago. Will Drew become the hitter we all think he will? Will Reyes rediscover the power that made him one of the National League's best players in 2006?

Rather than try to answer all of those (ultimately unanswerable) questions, I'm going to plunge ahead and offer you the following list, my top 10 shortstops of 2008-2012:

1. Ramirez
2. Tulowitzki
3. Reyes
4. Rollins
5. Peralta
6. Hardy
7. Drew
8. Greene
9. Michael Young
10. ???

As usual, I've reserved the last spot for the next great shortstop. As usual, I invite your thoughts on that and all other questions.

I'm not going to complain about baseball salaries. They are what they are, and plenty of entertainers get paid more for doing less. Still, it does give one pause, upon the news that the Royals just committed $3 million for one year of Brett Tomko. What are they going to do with him?

Gil Meche, Brian Bannister and Zack Greinke are looked at as sure things for the Royals' rotation. Tomko will likely compete for one of the final two spots, along with Kyle Davies, Jorge De La Rosa, Luke Hochevar and Luke Hudson. John Bale will also be given a chance at the rotation, and the Royals also signed Brian Lawrence and Hideo Nomo to minor league deals.

Considering those options for the last two slots, it probably doesn't hurt to give any warm body a shot, as each of those other guys comes with at least one big question mark. But Brett Tomko? Really?

Looking at Tomko's career, I was amazed to see just how rarely he's pitched well. As a 24-year-old rookie in 1997, Tomko went 11-7 with a 3.43 ERA. He's not had an ERA better than 4.04 since, and most years, it's been a lot higher than that.

From 1998 through 2000, Tomko was roughly league average in each season. Since then, his composite ERA+ is 89 (roughly 11 percent worse than league average). Among the 50 right-handed pitchers with at least 1,000 innings from 2000 through 2007, Tomko's ERA+ ranks 50th.

Is that really a guy you want on the mound every five days?

I agree with Craig Brown: If the Royals are short of starters, they need to stop fooling around with retreads like Tomko and Hideo Nomo and see if Joakim Soria has the right stuff to start. As a rookie last year, the Rule 5 pick pitched brilliantly out of the bullpen from early June through the end of the season. He's got three or four good pitches, and just more than a year ago, he threw a perfect game in the Mexican Pacific League.

Is Soria likely to become a good major league starter? No. But with the possible exceptions of Davies and Hochevar, he's got a better shot than any of the other guys on that list.

• Over at River Ave. Blues, Ben K. points out that Robinson Cano has a bright future, and I'm certainly not going to argue (I can't, considering that just last week I anointed Cano the best second baseman of the next five years). But Ben concludes by arguing that the Yankees' arbitration figure should have been higher than $3.2 million, lest they annoy their young star. Which is silly. Cano and his agent know how this game is played, and everyone will be smiling within a few moments after everything is settled.

• Nice interview with John Sayles, who directed "Eight Men Out" and once wrote a novel about a barnstorming softball team. I've been a fan of Sayles' movies for a long time. When he was finished filming "Eight Men Out," I sent him a letter asking if there were any props left over (yes, I was hoping he'd reward my fawning letter with a gift). Sayles responded with a gracious note, explaining that all the uniforms and such had been sold to help finance production. He did enclose a baseball card featuring himself. (I'm still a fan, and if I could save only 25 American movies, "Lone Star" would be among them).

• ShysterBall notes that John McHale -- like every other significant figure associated primarily with the Montreal Expos -- might as well never have existed. At least according to the Washington Nationals.

• Yet another outstanding George Vecsey column about baseball's drug problem.

• You think you know minor league prospects? Minor league pitcher Randy Newsom offers the chance to invest in young players. I'm not going to link to his company's Web site because there's not much information available unless you register, but Newsom talks about it here.

• I'm tardy with this one, but everything Voros McCracken wrote about the Rays last week is, I suspect, still true this week.

• Via Out of Left Field, longtime BBWAA member Stephen Brunt explains why he declined his Hall of Fame ballot this last time around.

• Has Ron Gardenhire gone off the deep end? With the news that Michael Cuddyer might be the Twins' new center fielder, Twinkie Town thinks maybe he has.

• Basic stuff for many of you, I'm sure, but if you're late to the sabermetrics party, I recommend Brock for Broglio's 5 Pitching Statistics You Can't Afford to Ignore Anymore (with a hat tip to BallHype).

• The only thing that's missing from John Beamer's review of the Andy Marte-Edgar Renteria deal is the why; as in, why did so many analysts -- including me, I'm sure -- get it so wrong? According to all the smart guys, the Braves got the short end of the deal ... but of course, they wound up with the long end. And by quite a healthy margin. I enjoy reading after-action reports like this, but they're even more valuable when they teach us something other than that ballplayers are humans, too.

• Weird $%@&# of the Week: Tom Cruise on Scientology. (Disclaimer: I do realize that Cruise's zeal is not fundamentally weirder than that of billions of others around the world; it's just fun watching someone express his zeal with the tricks of an accomplished actor. At great length.)

I've been lukewarm about Marvin Miller's Hall of Fame candidacy, which hasn't endeared me to my (usually) like-minded friends. It's not because Miller isn't a significant historical figure. It's because enshrining a labor leader would be establishing a new precedent, and I think you should think long and hard before doing it. It's also because I'm not 100 percent sure Miller ever had the game's best interests at heart. Maybe that's not fair and maybe it shouldn't even matter. But it does give me pause.

All that said, there's a lot to be said for a strong union. Which brings me to a couple of opposing views on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs. First, here's Mike Lowell on the prospect of blood tests for HGH:

World Series MVP Mike Lowell is willing to give blood if that's what it takes to be tested for human growth hormone. But only if the test is 100 percent accurate. Not 99 percent.

"If it's 99 percent accurate, that's going to be seven false positives," the Red Sox third baseman said Thursday before the annual dinner of the Boston chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. "Ninety-three percent is 70 guys. That's almost three whole rosters.

"You're destroying someone's reputation. What if one of the false positives is Cal Ripken? Doesn't it put a black mark on his career?"

And here's ex-pitcher/broadcaster Jim Kaat:

I have made my solution known to the current commissioner during a game I was doing for YES ... The first is that they can allow the players take anything and everything available to them to help their performance and, as a result, their team's performance, but make sure there is an understanding that there are health and legal issues if they are obtained without a prescription. The second solution is that the Union and administration should enter into an agreement whereby a player caught in the authorized testing program using illegal performance-enhancing drugs, will be banned for life from professional baseball. The illegal drugs should all be listed in clubhouses and training rooms, so players have full knowledge of what they are.

So Lowell's saying no test can be used unless it's "100 percent accurate," and Kaat's saying that if a test is used and a player doesn't pass, he should be "banned for life."

Don't both of these positions seem a bit extreme?

No test will be 100 percent accurate. Even if you devise the perfect test that works perfectly on every subject, there's still the possibility of tampering, of tainting, of various other ings. Just like our justice system, the best we can reasonably expect is nearly perfect. So for Lowell to argue for a perfect test is to argue for no test at all. Which makes it easy for him to conditionally volunteer his blood sample.

No test will be 100 percent accurate. So for Kaat to argue for lifetime bans for first offenders is to argue that complete innocents, some of them in their early 20s, should occasionally have their livelihoods stripped from them.

When there is a test for HGH -- and by the way, some reasonable people think it's not worth the trouble -- it won't be perfect, any more than tests for all the other stuff are perfect. Usually it'll work as designed, and that fact will serve as a significant deterrent to prospective users. Some won't be dissuaded, and some of them will get busted and suspended. But not forever, which is OK because almost everybody deserves a second chance. Somebody will get busted unfairly and suspended, also unfairly. That's not OK, but if there's a second chance at least the damage isn't permanent.

As many observers have pointed out, a number of congressmen earlier this week displayed what seemed to be almost a willful lack of knowledge about the relationship between union and management. The union (Lowell) prefer no rules whatsoever. Management (Kaat) prefers no limitations on its ability to make rules and enforce them. Fortunately, the dynamics of labor relations ensure that neither of these extreme positions will carry the day.

Just a few bits of news and amusement while wondering how you write about exciting players without mentioning this guy (and that's not even counting what he did in this other sport!) ...

• With the extension of Bud Selig's contract through 2012, Maury Brown says Selig's Hall of Fame plaque is a fait accompli. Agreed, and that was true before this week; the moment Bowie Kuhn was elected, the notion that Selig wouldn't someday be elected became unthinkable. Shoot, even I would vote for him.

• The Library of Congress has made a great number of baseball photographs available, circa 1911-1913. Great stuff, available for Web viewing, and best of all (for aspiring baseball authors and baseball bloggers) ... it's all in the public domain and available to anybody for the bargain price of zero.

• Rich Lederer and our own Buster Olney have devoted space this week in their respective venues to an entertaining back-and-forth that's ostensibly about Jim Rice but is really about something much deeper than one man's Hall of Fame candidacy. Highly recommended for the quality of the writing alone, and here's hoping it lasts the rest of the winter.

• Supposedly the Cardinals are thinking about inviting Juan Gonzalez to spring training. I really can't hope that he actually makes the team, because it might kill my dear old grandmother. But aren't you a little curious? Wouldn't it be interesting to see a 38-year-old Gonzalez trying to hit and pass the drug tests? Might make for an interesting (if short-lived) reality series (especially if the writers are still striking).

• Yesterday Mark Ellis didn't make my list of the 10 best second basemen (2008-2012). I doubted myself almost immediately, thanks to something a reader said in the comments section (from the bottom, the ninth up). Now, along comes Catfish Stew saying Ellis was more valuable last season than Derek Jeter ... and I'm having trouble finding a massive flaw in his analysis.

(Tip of the cap to THT Daily.)

• Oh, and speaking of Mark Ellis, he does quite well in skyking162's analysis, too. You know who else does well? Lou Whitaker. So well, in fact, that his fans may once again ask why Whitaker fell off the Hall of Fame ballot after only one season. Worth RTFA.

• Have some time to kill? Home Run Derby's Richie Rich offers a solid list of baseball-related YouTube finds that should hold you through quittin' time.

Today we continue our series of ranking the best players at each position, with an eye on the next five years ...

Last season there was one great second baseman and a passel of good ones. Chase Utley was the great one, but aside from him there were 10 everyday second basemen with OPS's between .805 and .875, and worthy candidates Howie Kendrick and Ian Kinsler weren't far behind. How to sort through all of them? Well, fair or not, I'm going to summarily dismiss (for the moment) anybody who's 30 or older this season, which eliminates Jeff Kent (40), Placido Polanco (32), Brian Roberts (30) and Orlando Hudson (30). That still leaves nine candidates.

Player	Age	OBP	SLG	OPS+	WARP
Chase Utley	29	.410	.566	145	9.3
Robinson Cano	25	.353	.488	120	9.2
Kelly Johnson	26	.375	.457	117	6.7
Dustin Pedroia	24	.380	.442	112	5.3
Ian Kinsler	26	.355	.441	109	5.4
Howie Kendrick	24	.347	.450	108	2.0
Dan Uggla	28	.326	.479	108	7.9
Rickie Weeks	25	.374	.433	108	3.5
Brandon Phillips	27	.331	.485	105	7.6

That last column is a new one: WARP, Wins Above Replacement Player, arrives courtesy of Baseball Prospectus and incorporates defensive value (in the form of Fielding Runs Above Replacement, which I believe is a generally worthy metric). Kendrick and Weeks both drop quite a bit with the inclusion of FRAR, while Uggla and Phillips both move up quite a bit.

The biggest mover, though, is Cano, who's credited with 50 FRAR, a gigantic number for a second baseman. Even if you don't believe he was that good with the glove, he still has to rank as one of the two best second basemen in the majors, right? Considering the league in which he plays?

For me, the options are clear: If you're looking for a second baseman for the next five years, you must choose Utley's bat or Cano's youth, and all the rest is just fighting over table scraps.

I'll take Cano, because I don't think we've yet seen his best work and because he plays in the toughest division in the toughest league. So here's how I've got them, with (as usual) the last spot held open for the next great second baseman who hasn't established himself yet. Remember, we're talking about value over the next five seasons ...

1. Cano
2. Utley
3. Pedroia
4. Phillips
5. Johnson
6. Kinsler
7. Weeks
8. Kendrick
9. Hudson
10. ????

One could definitely make the case for Roberts instead of Kendrick or Hudson, and maybe even Weeks (because of the latter's poor defense). The real surprise here is Johnson. He got a late start, but his hitting seems to be legitimate and defensively he's better than most. I'm not at all sure he'll have a better career than Weeks or Kendrick, but I do think he'll have a better next five years.

Looking forward to your comments ...

Scott Miller writes that Brewers GM Doug Melvin thinks all the defensive changes will work wonders, especially after new center fielder Mike Cameron finishes serving his 25-game suspension. Even before then, though, Bill Hall will be at third base, with Ryan Braun shifting to the outfield. Which is a tacit acknowledgment that Braun simply wasn't going to improve fast enough. Miller:

As for the patience level in Milwaukee, as a rookie in 2005, Rickie Weeks committed 21 errors in 95 games. Then he raised that to 22 in 92 games in '06 before improving to 13 in 115 last year.

Now in position to win, however, the Brewers simply can't give Braun an endless window to improve at third base. Thus, the Cameron move, which should play a big role in making Milwaukee better in the field and on the bases.

"In the old days, Don Baylor or Bobby Grich used to get sent back to the minors to improve their defense," Melvin says. "Today's game is so offensive-minded, though, that you bring guys up for their bat and then I think it takes two or three years for their defense to catch up.

"You can guarantee at-bats in the minors, but you can't guarantee total chances and tough plays (to accelerate defensive improvement). You can take all the fungoes you want, but it's not the same as game conditions."

I don't doubt that. Game conditions bring certain pressures, along with the occasional odd play that simply can't be simulated in practice. But when it comes to fielding grounders and making throws, isn't it mostly about repetition? I mean, assuming the natural ability is there?

It's interesting that Melvin would reference Baylor and Grich, because for years those two were intimately linked in Baltimore's organization. In 1967, the Orioles used their first draft pick on Grich and their second on Baylor. They spent most of the next four-and-a-half years together as minor league teammates before establishing themselves as major leaguers in 1972.

But were they really "sent back to the minors" to improve their defense, specifically?

In 1970, his first season in Triple-A, Baylor batted .327, drove in 107 runs, and was Minor League Player of the Year. Grich opened the season with Baylor in Rochester, but was promoted to the big club after batting .383 in 63 games. And the next spring? Both players were sent back to Rochester, which didn't go over so well. As Baylor later wrote in his autobiography:

When Orioles general manager Harry Dalton broke the … news to Grichie he had to shout it through a locked hotel-room door because Bobby refused to let Harry in. Bobby was close to losing it. When it happened to me, I just tried to keep up a brave front, telling reporters, "If they tell me to go back to Rochester I'll do the best I can." But I felt like I was falling into the same quagmire in which I had seen other prospects fall …

It was just that, in a talent-rich system, the policy was strictly "no room, no need." So Orioles prospects were left down in the minors to become not just qualified, but overqualified.

Were they left in the minors to work on their defense? By 1971, Baylor was already regarded as a good outfielder limited to left field by his weak throwing arm. Grich was still playing shortstop, which might not have been his best position; eventually he'd become a Gold Glove second baseman. But the real problem, as Baylor suggests, is that there just wasn't anywhere for them to play regularly. In 1970 the Orioles had four good outfielders on the roster and the middle of the infield was manned by Mark Belanger and Davey Johnson, both of them excellent defensively. Oh, and the Orioles won the 1970 World Series. So in the spring of '71 nobody was calling for big changes in the lineup.

(Grich and Baylor finally got their shots in 1972. Grich was still stuck behind Belanger and Johnson, but got into 133 games as a super-utility infielder and took over as the everyday second baseman in '73. The Orioles traded Frank Robinson after the '71 season, which opened up right field for Merv Rettenmund (who almost immediately stopped hitting) and opened up a roster spot for Baylor.)

(Tip of the cap to BTF.)

So anyway, I'm still trying to figure out the Blogging Rules. Maybe it's like jazz: The only rule is that there aren't any rules. But today I'm wondering if it's appropriate to link to something that itself is primarily a link to something, like this ShysterBall post.

Yes, I could instead just link to the original post, but I want to respond to ShysterBall's take on why Congress seems to care so much about PEDs in baseball when nobody else does:

I suppose it's possible that it's only Henry Waxman who thinks this is important, but Diesel makes a good point in noting that almost all Congressional action is calculated, and someone in Washington has calculated that PEDs still has some legs.

Yes, most congressional action is calculated. But I think Shyster and Diesel both are thinking too hard about this. Waxman doesn't care about this stuff, and we know Chris Shays doesn't care. What do they care about? They care about getting their mugs on TV. Unlike U.S. Senators, Congressmen toil for the most part anonymously -- quick, name five Congressmen! -- and hearings involving MLB might be the only time in 2008 that Waxman is seen by anyone but his constituents and die-hard C-SPANers.

I'll say this, though: While I certainly agree with those who throw up their hands and wonder why Congress is wasting time on Bud Selig and Donald Fehr when there are so many other, far more serious problems our politicians might be addressing, Tuesday's hearing did make headlines. Apparently those serious problems are less interesting to us than what men in tights are injecting into their posteriors. Or as a French politician once explained, "There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."

• I've linked to a fair amount of studies utilizing MLB's PITCHf/x data, but Mike Fast offers a PITCHf/x primer that should serve as a great boon to anyone out there who'd like to do their own work with the data (and the primer's worth reading even if you, like me, are merely a consumer of the studies).

• Home Run Derby offers this super-cool series of ballpark demolition videos (YouTube bonus: 2:30 into a video about the Brooklyn Cyclones, footage of Ebbets Field under the wrecking ball).

• Still thinking about the Troy Glaus/Scott Rolen trade? Mop Up Duty is, and while their conclusion -- Cards win! Cards win! -- is not new, their graphical comparison of the two players is unlike anything I've seen. And I hope to see more.

• BP's Joe Sheehan offers his list of nine breakout candidates. In my chat yesterday, I said David Wright is going to be the best player of the next five years, but Sheehan reminds me that Wright might not even be the best third baseman of the next five years.

• I don't particularly like the Yankees, which I come by honestly (video here). I don't particularly like Yankee Stadium, which is a matter of taste. But I love baseball history and you can't write baseball's history without the Yankees and Yankee Stadium, and this photo does send a happy shiver up my spine (even as I think about what lousy public policy this is).

• Steven Goldman makes the Hall of Fame case for Goose Gossage and wonders why it took so long for him to be elected. I've been arguing for Gossage for years, but I also believe that one can make the case that the bar for relief pitchers should be set extraordinarily high, and (further) that no reliever has done enough to deserve election. That horse is long out of the barn, though, and once Rollie Fingers and Bruce Sutter established a bar, the Goose cleared it with ease.

• Weird $@%&# of the Week: As you watch this -- and I promise you, it'll be your most rewarding five minutes of the week -- please respectfully remember: this man has won an Emmy Award.

Update: First version of this post was missing the key link in the last item, but it's been added.

We didn't learn a whole lot Tuesday, except that most members of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee don't know anything about labor relations and Chris Shays (R-Conn.) doesn't know anything about baseball (or as King Kaufman puts it, "there were times Tuesday when the only possible conclusions were that the member who had the floor was either grandstanding or just plug stupid").

So we didn't learn anything, actually, because we learned those same things the last time these clowns hauled Major League Baseball into Washington.

But that's not precisely accurate. We did learn something. We learned that, according to MLB, baseball players suffer from attention deficit disorder a great deal more often than the general population.

Amid discussion of steroids and human growth hormone, amid an atmosphere more tame than tempestuous, it was Rep. John F. Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat, who caught everyone's attention when he asked why the number of major leaguers claiming therapeutic-use exemptions for attention deficit disorder had mushroomed to 103 this past season from 28 in 2006.

To Mr. Tierney, the implication of the sharp increase was clear. Players were brazenly getting around the ban on amphetamines by making attention deficit disorder claims that allowed them to use stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall. Based on the 2007 numbers, Mr. Tierney said, the use of such stimulants among major leaguers was "almost eight times the adult use in our population."

In response, both Selig and Fehr offered their own versions of Ralph Kramden's homina-homina-homina-homina ... MLB's doctor approved the prescriptions, so what are they going to do?

That's actually a good question. What are they going to do? Fire their doctor? There were 103 exemptions last season. Did one doctor really administer this ADD test (or something like it) to every player who applied for the exemption? Or did he simply rubber-stamp prescriptions written by the players' own (cherry-picked) physicians? And even if a conscientious doctor administers the test, what's to prevent a player from simply giving whatever answers are likely to result in the desired diagnosis?

This problem doesn't have any easy solution. And that's assuming you think it's a problem at all.

ShysterBall notes that the Tigers are selling so many tickets, they might have to stop.

There are a couple of lessons to take from this: First, the notion that attendance is a function of winning and investment in the product on the field has once again been proven to be true. Second, given how rough Michigan's economy at the moment, the Tigers' good fortune is further evidence that, compared to most other things, baseball is extremely recession-resistant (other smart people have already noted this).

It's coincidental, of course, but yes, it's an odd juxtaposition: At the same time politicians are running around Michigan trying to reassure everyone about the nation's highest unemployment rate, business in Comerica Park is absolutely booming. I'm sure this says some interesting things, though I don't know if I'm smart enough to figure out any of them. Baseball attendance did drop precipitously during the Great Depression, but on the other hand, movie attendance boomed. This is from memory (so I'm sure it's not quite right), but I read somewhere that during the 1930s, an average American went to the movies two or three times every week. The ones with jobs, anyway.

Of course, when they weren't at the movies, they were huddled around a radio listening to "Amos 'n' Andy." That was a different time, and probably not all that instructive when it comes to how Americans spend their dispensable income. Better to stick to 2008, when it's clear that if you're competitive and you spend money, the fans will happily fork over their currency, even as it's becoming quickly devalued.

In the winter of 1999-2000, I spent a few weeks trying to come up with a "Team of the Aughts" -- you know, the best first baseman of the coming decade, the best second baseman, etc. I might as well get this out of the way: My choice for the best third baseman of the '00s was Fernando Tatis. I know. Seems crazy now. But look at what he did in 1999.

As near as I can tell, my ESPN.com output from that long-ago century is gone forever. So I don't have to do this. But I will. Here were my choices, from pitcher to right field, one through nine: Pedro Martinez, Jason Kendall, Nick Johnson, Edgardo Alfonzo, Nomar Garciaparra, Tatis, Ben Grieve, Andruw Jones, Vladimir Guerrero. Oh, and at closer, I chose Billy Wagner instead of Mariano Rivera (and instead of Rivera in second place, I had Ugueth Urbina).

This perhaps is the perfect time for a week of self-reflection (if not flagellation), wherein I try to understand just how I could have been so wrong about so many things. But life's short. Reading those old columns, I don't think I've improved much as a writer. I do think I'm a bit humbler than that guy. Maybe a little smarter, too. Either way, this time around, I'm going to make things easier and look five years ahead instead of 10. We'll start with the first basemen, just like last time, and should finish right around when pitchers and catchers report next month.

*******

Last season, two first basemen posted four-figure OPS numbers. Only five others topped .900, and I think it's almost safe to summarily eliminate everybody else from contention. There is one other first baseman who I'd like to include, if only for the sake of argument. But I'll give you a few minutes to guess his identity while we run through the list of last season's .900-plus OPS guys.

Player	Age	OBP	SLG	OPS+
Carlos Pena	30	.411	.627	172
Prince Fielder	24	.395	.618	156
Albert Pujols	28	.429	.568	157
Ryan Howard	28	.392	.584	144
Mark Teixeira	28	.400	.563	150
Todd Helton	34	.434	.494	133
Derrek Lee	32	400	.513	131

About the terminology: (1) Age is actually "seasonal age," the player's age on July 1, 2008; (2) OPS+, as you probably know, is a park- and league-adjusted metric that sets 100 as average (roughly speaking, Todd Helton's OPS was 33 percent better than the average National League hitter).

Here's something that absolutely blows me away every time it pops into my head: Albert Pujols is younger than Ryan Howard -- 58 days younger, to be fairly precise. Granted, there have been questions about Pujols' birthday for some time ... but nobody's yet come up with a different answer.

Something else that blows me away: Carlos Pena in 2007. At-bat for at-bat, he was every bit as good as David Ortiz (who actually should have been listed above, and we'll discuss him in a moment).

May we dismiss Todd Helton and Derrek Lee immediately? They're both fine players, but statistically, they don't match up with the others and they're both on the wrong side of 30. I just don't think there's a general manager alive who would take one of these guys ahead of (for example) Pujols. So let's call them non-contenders.

That leaves five. Running through each of them quickly ...

Teixeira: Two-time Gold Glover in five seasons, including two great ones and two good ones.

Howard: Older than Pujols (and Teixeira), doesn't run or field well. In Howard's favor, while he does play half his games in a good park for power hitters, his career stats are almost exactly as good in road games as home games.

Pujols: If there's a negative, it's awfully hard to find. He's an outstanding fielder and a fine base runner. While his hitting last season was not up to his usual standards, that was due mostly to a poor (for him) April; from May 1 through end of the season, he batted .342 with 61 extra-base hits.

Fielder: It's not hard to like a 23-year-old with a .618 slugging percentage. It's hard to love a 24-year-old who carries something like 275 pounds on his six-foot frame.

Pena: It was thrilling to watch him, overnight, become the best-hitting first baseman in the American League. In fact, look at that list ... Pena's the only American Leaguer. (Teixeira opened the season with the Rangers, but his numbers improved a great deal after he joined the Braves in early August.) If we account for the AL's superiority, Pena simply blows away all the other first basemen here. In 2007, that is. But as well as he played, we have to remember that he entered 2007 with a .789 OPS -- .331 on-base, .459 slugging -- in nearly 2,000 plate appearances.

We should consider David Ortiz, because a lot of teams would be thrilled to play him at first base. He's 32 and not getting any faster, but he does play in the better league, and his three best seasons were his last three.

We should also consider Adrian Gonzalez, who's now been quite good for two straight seasons, and his numbers would be significantly better if he didn't play half his games in the toughest hitters' park in the majors. I will argue that right now he's the equal of Helton and Lee, hitting-wise, and he's also a lot younger and has a good defensive rep.

My list, looking five seasons out:

1. Pujols
2. Fielder
3. Howard
4. Ortiz
5. Teixeira
6. Gonzalez
7. Pena
8. Lee
9. Helton
10. ????

I've reserved that last spot for the next Prince Fielder or Ryan Howard. Any ideas? If Ryan Braun had tried to play third base for almost any team but the Brewers last year, I'd give him the slot. But he's not moving to first anytime soon. So who's the next great first baseman?

Update: A reader found the "missing" columns with all my picks for the "aughts" (along with all my "reasoning" therein). They're here and here (and I'm a little perturbed to learn that so much ammunition is still so readily available, but at least I was right about Mike Hampton: He never has won 20 games since the Astros traded him, and in retrospect, it's hard to believe that was a controversial prediction).

It's not quite official yet, but by all accounts the Blue Jays and Cardinals are going to swap third basemen.

Scott Rolen has three years and $36 million left on his contract. Troy Glaus, after committing to an option year, has two years and $24 million left.

Here's the take in Toronto, from the Globe and Mail:

While the Jays believe they will not lose much offence with the departure of Glaus, they think the addition of Rolen will be a huge improvement defensively.

While the lumbering Glaus was often a statue on [defense], Rolen is a seven-time Gold Glove winner as the NL's top fielding third baseman -- most recently in 2006.

Only Brooks Robinson, who earned 16 Gold Gloves during his career, and Mike Schmidt, with 10, have won the award more often at third base than Rolen, who is entering his 13th season.

"He's a seven-time Gold Glove and a five-time all-star," a Jays source said. "We're getting better defensively and a guy who hits with a better average."

Gosh, that's putting it kindly, don't you think? Rolen does have the better career batting average. But it's 2008; aren't we over batting average already? I'm looking at some reputable projections, and they've got Glaus posting an .833 OPS, Rolen at .816. And that's before they switch leagues. Rolen certainly is the better defensive player. Glaus certainly is the younger player, by 16 months.

For a more nuanced comparison, I turned to Viva El Birdos, where, among other things, the news about Glaus' defense is non-statuesque. Adding everything up:

Trading Rolen for Glaus, as opposed to trading him for a prospect, or for a fungo bat to be named later, will gain the team 4-5 wins this year in all likelihood. Are we now a contender? No, b/c it's a negligible gain this year over Rolen and we weren't a contender w/ Rolen. Still, [Tony] La Russa would've never allowed Rolen to be traded for a prospect. He clearly insisted on getting back a player who can help the team this year. Which players have been mentioned in Rolen rumors beside Glaus? It's always been established major league players, never prospects (except in blogs or message boards). So I echo LB's sentiment from yesterday that he'd rather have Andy LaRoche.

Still, all in all, this is a good trade for the Cards. It's not ideal. Some will complain about Glaus' use of PEDs. Why? No one complained about re-signing Ryan Franklin! He took them when he was with the Angels, at least [four] years ago. His success in '05 and '06 w/ the Jays had nothing to do w/ 'roids.

I'm not sure I can go that far (4-5 extra wins for the Cards). There's a lot at play in the equation because neither of these guys are good bets to play 150 games. Here's how many they did play in the last three seasons ...

Glaus: 149, 153, 115
Rolen: 56, 142, 112

They're close the last two seasons, and we shouldn't place a great weight on what happened in 2005. Glaus gets slight edges in hitting and durability, Rolen the big edge on defense. They cost roughly the same per season, but Glaus' shorter contract leaves the Cardinals with more flexibility down the line. I like this deal for the Cardinals, too. Just not four or five wins worth of good.

We lost another historical light yesterday, as Johnny Podres passed. He was 75. As one of the best-known Brooklyn Dodgers, Podres has many admirers among the older set. If you're a member of the younger set and don't understand what all the fuss is about, you might want to start with a couple of obituaries: Here are Dodgers historian Richard Goldstein and Daily News columnist Bill Madden (that one comes with a couple of classic images).

Podres remains beloved in Brooklyn because in 1955 he beat the Yankees in Game 7 of the World Series. It was Brooklyn's first World Series title -- it was their eighth try and their sixth against the Bronxians -- and their last, as three seasons later they were gone.

In retrospect, it doesn't seem so strange, Podres beating the Bombers, since he would finish his career with 148 wins. At the time, though? Podres did have a fair amount of experience, and was already 29-21 in three seasons with the Dodgers. But his best years were ahead of him, and due to a couple of injuries, he'd gone just 9-10 during the '55 season. According to Podres, there was some question about whether he'd even make the Dodgers' World Series roster. But on the last day of the season, he started against the Pirates and pitched two good innings to hold his spot. Brooklyn's staff wasn't all that deep in the first place and became positively shallow in Game 1, as Dodgers ace Don Newcombe got knocked out in the sixth inning and, complaining of a sore arm, wouldn't pitch again in the Series.

On his 23rd birthday, Podres started Game 3 and went the distance, beating the Yankees 8-3. Because the entire Series was in New York, there weren't any scheduled days off, so Podres wouldn't be ready to pitch again until Game 7, if there was one. There was.

The Dodgers got on the board first, thanks to Roy Campanella's double and Gil Hodges' clutch single. The Dodgers added another run in the sixth on Hodges' sacrifice fly. Those were the only runs Brooklyn would score and the only runs they would need. Podres gave up eight hits and two walks but kept the Yankees off the board for nine innings, the last glorious out coming when Elston Howard grounded out to shortstop Pee Wee Reese.

A few decades later, Podres told author Peter Golenbock:

I won the car, the Corvette, after they voted me Most Valuable Player in the World Series. I was flying for days. I didn't really come down until a few weeks later. I was at a deer camp in the Adirondacks, walking in the woods by myself. It was silent. You couldn't hear a thing except the rustle of the leaves. All of a sudden I stopped and said to myself, "Hey, Podres, you beat the Yankees in the World Series!"

Is Podres the most unlikely Game 7 winner? He might have seemed so, at the time. In 1909, Pirates rookie Babe Adams beat the Tigers in the Game 7 clincher. Adams also won Games 1 and 5, but on the other hand, he started only 12 games during the regular season, and with 130 innings, he ranked just sixth on the staff. So he was a sensation.

But Adams was, in 1955, Podres' only competition. Oddly, another contender would come along just one year later. Once again, the Dodgers and Yankees faced off, and Casey Stengel turned to 23-year-old Johnny Kucks, who'd gone 18-9 during the season but had never started a World Series game. Newcombe started for the Dodgers, lasted only three innings, and Kucks shut out the Dodgers 9-0 on three hits. Kucks was out of the majors at 27, finishing with a 54-56 career record. (By the way, Podres didn't get a chance to repeat his '55 performance; he was drafted into the Navy and missed the entire '56 season.)

We have one more contender. Nearly 50 years after Podres and Kucks, Angels rookie John Lackey, four days after his 24th birthday, started Game 7 against the Giants and went five innings to beat them, 4-1. It was fairly shocking at the time, but Lackey's won 70 games in the five seasons since and seems destined for at least another 70.

So with the benefit of hindsight, Podres finishes behind Kucks. At the time, his performance shouldn't have been any more surprising than Kucks' or Lackey's. In the memories of Brooklyn's long-suffering fans, though? He'll always be No. 1.

According to skyking162, the Brewers' signing of Mike Cameron might be the best signing of this offseason. Why? Because that move alone makes them 40 runs better, defensively, than they were before they signed Cameron. How? Cameron replaces Bill Hall in center field (20-run improvement), Hall replaces Ryan Braun at third base (30-run improvement), and Braun replaces Gabe Gross in left field (10-run dropoff).

Cameron's a pretty good hitter, too. Bottom line?

Including both offense and defense, the Brewers are between 4.0 and 5.5 wins better with Mike Cameron than without him. At $4 million per win, that's worth between $16 and $22 million on the free agent market, all for only $7 million. We can't give all that credit to Cameron (the Brewers technically could have moved Hall and Braun without signing Cameron), but acquiring a good center fielder forces the issue. It's a great signing and the Brewers are now back to competing with the Cubs for first place in the NL Central.

One thing Sky doesn't mention: Cameron has tested positive for a banned stimulant, and for the second time. He'll be suspended for the first 25 games of the 2008 season. Still, I think the basic conclusion is correct: With Cameron, there's no reason the Brewers can't win 85 games and stick with the Cubs in the Central. Not bad for $7 million.

Just a few bulleted pointers to take your mind off Roger Clemens' troubles ...

• Lately, ShysterBall wrote about a couple of sportswriters. Takeaways: Dan Shaughnessy might be wrong but at least he's gracious, and Rick Telander should have his Hall of Fame voting privileges permanently revoked (well, that's my interpretation).

• Joe Posnanski offers his Twenty Greatest Home Runs Ever, which reminds me (again) that Joe loves lists, and also that I had planned my own special winter project that would have carried us all the way into spring training, which I was going to start last week but forgot until just now so it'll have to start next week. Monday, I promise, in this space. Or Tuesday.

• I believe it's been written about before, but I don't know if the case has ever been laid out quite so methodically: as John Brattain writes, ex-Tigers really have been jobbed in Hall of Fame balloting.

• When sorting through Josh Wilker's recent Cardboard Gods posts, I had a lot of choices. Too many, really. Was Pete Rose really the best Everyday Player of the 1970s? Did my old favorite Marty Pattin really finish his pitching motion like that? But no, this week I'm going with Geoff Zahn, Wrigley Field, and the mini-essay that I might spend this entire weekend trying to figure out.

• Honestly? After nearly a year, I'm still trying to figure out how to "blog." When I write about the Hall of Fame results, it takes me something like a thousand words. In other words, I write a column and we call it a blog. What I'm supposed to do is what Geoff Young does here, accurately (except for the Lee Smith comment) summarizing the latest results in a cool 175 words. Well played, sir.

Nearly 20 years ago, Tom House wrote a book called "The Jock's Itch: The Fast-Track Private World of the Professional Ballplayer". I don't believe I bought House's book and read it. Or borrowed it and read it. I do vaguely recall leafing through it at the bookstore, and the author's central thesis seemed to be that many professional baseball players never actually, you know, grew up.

House was in position to know. Best-known for catching Hank Aaron's 715th homer (in the bullpen), House pitched in the majors from 1971 through '78. House used steroids -- no, steroids weren't invented by East German swimmers and Jose Canseco -- and took college classes in the winter. [Don't you think that non sequitur might be a bit subtle for a family site like this one?--ed. Yes.]

House wound up getting his PhD in psychology and serving as the Rangers' pitching coach for eight seasons. [Again with the non sequitur?--ed. Yup.] So if anyone were qualified to probe the mind of the professional ballplayer, it probably was Tom House.

At the time, House's message didn't mean a lot to me. Growing-up-wise, I'd dropped out of college and was working just hard enough to afford rent and beer. It must have stuck with me, though, subconsciously. Because many years later, I thought of House when Barry Bonds employed his teenaged son as a clumsy weapon against the media. I thought of House again Monday when 45-year-old Roger Clemens bullied and whined and pleaded like an overgrown eighth-grader. I thought of House yesterday when I read Jack Morris' quote about Hall of Fame voters: "I just think there's writers out there who think, because they're the almighty powerful people they are, they can control lives."

That's right, Jack: All those writers resent you, because while you were making your millions and buying mansions with bowling alleys in the basement, they were stuck driving their family sedans to their crummy middle-class homes (granted, upper middle-class, but still). They just couldn't wait until six years after you retired and could finally control your life.

OK, so that's not fair of me. For all I know, Jack Morris is perfectly well-adjusted. We all have our blind spots, and perhaps Morris' just happens to be baseball writers. But when you read complaints like his, remember this: There were 25 players on the Hall of Fame ballot this time around, and maybe 20 of them can point to players in the Hall of Fame who weren't as good as they were. And if you're Jack Morris, it's easier to blame the almighty powerful writers than yourself for not having pitched better than you did.

Meanwhile, Alan Trammell has real beef with the writers. Not because they get off on controlling his life, but because they simply don't realize that he was a legitimately great player. But Trammell seems to have grown up …

Trammell, now a Cubs bench coach, was driving through the hills north of San Diego when he learned Tuesday of [Rich] Gossage's election and of his own increase in votes.

"Somebody had mentioned to me at a golf tournament out here at Torrey Pines that Jan. 8 was the big day," Trammell recalled, "and I said: 'Well, what's that?'

"I didn't even know today was the day the Hall of Fame vote was being announced.

"I honestly don't even keep track, because with my percentage having been as low as it's been, it would be a shock to have climbed very high," said Trammell, who had 2,365 hits during his 20-year career, all spent with the Tigers. "Until you get somewhere up there like Goose -- I mean really getting up there in votes -- it's not going to change much, although when you get up there with Jack (Morris) at 40, 50 percent, now at least you can see light at the end of the tunnel."

I pull for Trammell, mostly because I think he deserves the game's highest honor. I pull against Morris, mostly because I think his election would lower the standards of the honor. But I like to think I've grown up maybe a little since Tom House wrote that book I didn't read. And there's a small part of me that likes to pull for grown-ups.

Don't worry. It's almost over. Perhaps a few more mentions here or there, but this is the last time you should have to read much about Jim Rice until next winter. At least in this space. Anyway, it's become academic, as Rice came so close this year that he's practically assured of election next year.

Still, I don't feel that I can let Dan Shaughnessy's latest column pass without comment. Sandwiched between some appropriately snarky comments about our favorite arrested adolescent, Roger Clemens (who needs a new nickname, I think), Shaughnessy somehow figures out a way to once more exaggerate Rice's Cooperstown credentials:

Rice hit for power in a day when power numbers were legit. He was the dominant slugger of his time, a man capable of inducing an intentional walk when the bases were loaded. He amassed more than 400 total bases when he was MVP in 1978. He hit 35 homers with 200 hits in three straight seasons. He was more feared that Tony Perez, who is in the Hall of Fame.

Yesterday's news had to hurt, but Jim Ed has been typically stoic through these years of rejection. He hasn't cried about racism or favoritism (he'd probably already be in Cooperstown if he'd had the disposition of Kirby Puckett or Gary Carter), but he knows he was a better hitter than former teammates Perez and Wade Boggs and he suffers in silence while inching excruciatingly close to election.

You have to admire Shaughnessy for sticking to his guns. He wrote something about Jim Rice and intentional walks last week, and must have received a great deal of great deal of criticism from his loyal readers because -- as I and others pointed out -- Rice never drew an intentional walk with the bases loaded and in fact didn't draw all that many intentional walks whatever the situation.

Was Rice the "dominant slugger of his time"? Of course he wasn't. In Rice's time, slugger Mike Schmidt hit 548 home runs and won three MVP Awards. In Rice's time, Reggie Jackson hit 563 home runs. Rice hit 382 home runs.

He did amass 400 total bases in one season, which is impressive. Roger Maris once hit 61 home runs in one season. Rice did hit 35 homers with 200 hits in three straight seasons, which is impressive. It's also only three seasons. And in all the rest of his career, Rice topped 35 homers exactly once more and never did get 200 hits in another season. So really, it seems that Rice's entire case, his time as a dominant hitter, rests solely on three seasons.

Would Jim Rice already be in Cooperstown if he'd had the disposition of Kirby Puckett or Gary Carter? Well, Carter didn't get elected until his sixth year on the ballot and he's one of the six or eight greatest catchers ever. So that wouldn't seem to be a big edge. As for Puckett, well, maybe. But that's a little like saying Alan Trammell would be in the Hall of Fame if only he'd been able to play defense like Ozzie Smith. Some gifts are rare enough that we don't use them as imaginary attributes. (What's more, it's not clear.)

Was Rice a better hitter than Tony Perez? Of course he was. A lot of guys were better hitters than Tony Perez. For your consideration, an incredibly incomplete list of hitters who were better than Tony Perez: Dick Allen, Gene Tenace, Frank Howard, Boog Powell, Jack Clark, Keith Hernandez, Reggie Smith, Norm Cash, Fred Lynn, Oscar Gamble, Jimmy Wynn, Tony Oliva, Bobby Bonds, Bob Watson, Greg Luzinski and Rico Carty.

All of those guys have two things in common: (1) they were better hitters, career-wise, than Tony Perez; (2) they're not in the Hall of Fame, and won't be. Tony Perez isn't in the Hall of Fame because he was a great hitter. He's in the Hall of Fame because he had a few great years and a number of good ones, and because he played with the Big Red Machine.

Rice's supporters like to cite the elections of Perez and (especially) Orlando Cepeda, but those were mistakes. Seems to me if your case relies upon repeating mistakes, you might ought to take a new tack.

Ah, but then there's Wade Boggs. He was no mistake. Boggs sailed into the Hall of Fame with 92 percent of the vote in his first try, and you heard no argument from this quarter. Was Rice really a better hitter than Wade Boggs?

A direct comparison isn't easy, as their careers had different "shapes." Rice reached the majors at 21, became a star at 22, was washed up at 34 and out of a job at 37. Boggs didn't reach the majors until he was 24, but hung on until he was 41.

Nevertheless, let's try. Because Rice enjoyed only 12 good years, his fans usually ignore the rest of his career. In the interest of brotherhood, we'll do the same: we'll compare his 12 best years with Boggs' 12 best years.

Jim Rice vs. Wade Boggs
	Games	Runs	RBI	OBP	SLG	OPS	OPS+
Rice (1975-86)	1,766	1,098	1,276	.356	.520	.876	133
Boggs (1983-94)	1,761	1,160	757	.425	.456	.881	139

They played almost exactly the same number of games. Boggs scored a few more runs than Rice, which you'd expect because Boggs hit at the top of the order. Rice drove in a lot more runs, which you'd expect because he hit in the middle of the order and was always swinging. Their OPS's are virtually identical. Their adjusted OPS+'s -- which consider league averages and park effects -- are close, but it seems that Boggs does have a real edge there. When you consider that OPS (and OPS+) slightly undervalue on-base percentage relative to slugging, Boggs' edge only grows.

Oh, and the intentional walks? In Boggs' dozen best seasons he drew 153 intentional walks. In Rice's dozen best he drew 72. Maybe Rice really was better than Boggs. But the statistics don't support that notion. And the managers in the other dugouts apparently didn't believe it, either.

I haven't mentioned Fenway Park. That's OK; I've mentioned it before. By now, if you don't know that Rice had a huge home/road split over his career, it's because you choose not to know. What's amazing to me, more than 30 years after Bill James published his first "Baseball Abstract," is that a smart guy like Dan Shaughnessy can still pretend that inconvenient truths like Rice's performance in road games just don't exist.

People do take the Hall of Fame personally.

I don't. It does not concern me, personally, whether or not Bert Blyleven is in the Hall of Fame. Sure, it's unfair that he's not, and I suppose his life might be marginally better if he were elected.

But I don't feel sorry for Circle Me Bert or Alan Trammell or Ron Santo. OK, I do feel sorry for Santo, because he keeps losing body parts. And for some reason, I feel a little bit sorry for Tim Raines, too. But I think I'll get over it. I don't have a big heart, so I have to conserve my sympathies.

No, what fascinates me about the Hall of Fame is not the product, but the process. It's not that interesting watching superstars like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn saunter into the Coop as soon as they are eligible. What's interesting is how guys like Gary Carter and Ryne Sandberg spend years on the string before finally making it. Or how a guy like Jim Rice goes from 137 votes in 1995 to 392 votes in 2008.

Here are the six Hall of Fame candidates who garnered support from more than 30 percent of the voters this time around. For each player, the first row is his percentage of votes in each of the past three elections. The second row is his vote totals.

Player	2006	2007	2008
Goose Gossage	64.6	71.2	85.8
	336	388	466
Jim Rice	64.8	63.5	72.2
	337	346	392
Andre Dawson	61.0	56.7	65.9
	317	309	358
Bert Blyleven	53.3	47.7	61.9
	277	260	336
Lee Smith	45.0	39.8	43.3
	234	217	235
Jack Morris	41.2	37.1	42.9
	214	202	233

As you can see, progress is neither inexorable nor inevitable. Jack Morris and Lee Smith are basically holding steady, while Blyleven and Andre Dawson were down, then up. What's most striking when you look at the year-to-year results -- and I can tell you, this drives radio guys nuts -- is how many voters change their opinions about particular players.

Look at Gossage. Roughly 130 voters changed their minds in two years. Seems like a lot, doesn't it? But that's not even the half of it. When Gossage was first eligible in 2000, he got 166 votes. In seven years, he picked up 200 additional votes. Granted, things have changed. Eight years ago, there were only two relief pitchers in the Hall of Fame, so you can understand how the voters might not have known what to do with Gossage. When it comes to Hall of Fame candidates, better safe than sorry, because once they are in, you can't take them out.

And frankly, sometimes the voters just change their minds as the years progress. Aside from Gossage, the biggest mover here is Blyleven, who has picked up 59 votes in the past two years. But again, that's not the half of it. Not nearly. When Blyleven debuted on the ballot in 1998, he got 83 votes. He has picked up nearly 250 votes in 10 years.

How does that happen, exactly? Could someone explain that to me? The standards for starting pitchers certainly couldn't have changed much since 1998. Blyleven statistics certainly haven't changed. He actually was stuck around 17 percent for three years, but he began moving up in 2001 and, with the exception of last year's bizarre hiccup, hasn't stopped since.

You want to know how it happens? I have a theory. I think that your typical voter -- we'll call him Joe Voter -- doesn't do much research. When a player appears on the ballot for the first time, Joe Voter asks himself one simple question: "Does everybody say this guy is a Hall of Famer?" If the answer is yes, he votes for him. Otherwise, he doesn't (unless he liked the player personally).

Thus, Joe Voter misses a great number of Hall of Fame-quality players the first time around. Facts can be powerful things, though. Especially when they are easy to understand. In 1989, when Fergie Jenkins first appeared on the ballot, he managed to draw support from only 52 percent of the voters. But you know, Fergie Jenkins won 284 games and finished in the top five in Cy Young balloting five times. Two years after garnering only 234 votes, Jenkins got 334 votes and squeaked into the Hall with 75.4 percent support.

Did Jenkins win any more games in those two years? Did he show up on anyone's Cy Young ballot or strike out more batters? No, he did not. He was exactly as worthy a Hall of Fame candidate in 1989 as in 1991, and today, it's hard to imagine Cooperstown without him. If you were to hold a special election today, Jenkins would get well more than 90 percent of the vote. Yet, even when he did get elected, he was spurned by 109 voters.

Here's another, more extreme example: In 1979, shortstop Luis Aparicio first appeared on the ballot. He got 120 votes, or 28 percent. The next year, he got 124 votes, and the next year, he dropped all the way down to 48 votes! Aparicio got fewer votes than Roger Maris, Harvey Kuenn, Elston Howard, Thurman Munson and Ted Kluszewski. I mean, I know he was a great hitter, but Teddy Kluszewski? Aparicio got roughly a third as many votes that year as fellow shortstop Maury Wills (like so many others here, still not in the Hall).

How did that happen? I don't know. What I do know is that Aparicio's support grew massively in each of the next three years, and in 1984, he cruised into the Hall with 84.6 percent of the vote. How did that happen? Again, I don't know.

But again, it's clear to me that a great number of voters simply didn't do much work when Aparicio first appeared on the ballot and later were convinced by those who did. Little Looie is just one example; if you've got the time, I can cite dozens more.

I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. I suppose it's good that voters are cautious. Still, if you really look at the history of the voting, you do have to wonder how many Hall of Fame voters actually think for themselves, and how many just chill out in the echo chamber. Waiting for further guidance.

Hall of Fame balloting does not exist in a vacuum.

Now that Rich Gossage is in, more people will wonder about Lee Smith.

Lee Smith did save 168 more games than Gossage. But a lot of guys saved more games than Gossage, who's just 17th on the all-time list. What sets Goose apart is not his 310 saves (roughly the same as Tom Henke and Jeff Montgomery), but rather his 1,809 innings, an immense number of innings for a relief pitcher. Innings, outs, have value. By way of comparison, Bruce Sutter -- who somehow was elected to the Hall before Gossage -- pitched barely 1,000 innings. And those were good innings that Gossage pitched, valuable innings. Even as he was padding his career stats in his late 30s and early 40s, Gossage still was effective.

Gossage was a truly great reliever for roughly 10 years, and a good one for another decade or so. If Sutter and Dennis Eckersley are in the Hall, Gossage belongs there, too. But he should be the last of his contemporaries. There's not room for Lee Smith or Jeff Reardon. Not John Franco, either. Reliever-wise, we just have to wait a few years for the best of the next generation.

Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know the results of the Hall of Fame balloting, stop reading immediately.

No, not really. I want you to keep reading. Really, there's still plenty of suspense even after consulting Keith Law's survey of 120 Hall of Fame voters. Here are the only four candidates drawing more than 50 percent (75 percent needed for election):

Player	Votes	Pct.
Goose Gossage	108	90 percent
Jim Rice	82	68 percent
Bert Blyleven	79	66 percent
Andre Dawson	79	66 percent

Keith concludes:

1. Goose Gossage will be elected to the Hall of Fame this year. He will be the only candidate elected.

2. If there are two players elected, the second one will be Jim Rice. However, it's more likely that he will be elected in 2009 as he gains sympathy votes for his final year on the ballot.

3. Of the other players on this ballot, [Bert] Blyleven, [Andre] Dawson, and [Tim] Raines will all eventually earn induction, but no one else will.

Addressing those in order:

1. Agreed. I do not believe he'll get 90 percent, or even close to that. I believe Keith's survey generally has picked up the ballots of (relatively) younger voters, and it's the (really) older voters who typically won't vote for a relief pitcher. But once they put in Bruce Sutter, who's demonstrably inferior to Gossage, the latter's election became assured.

2. This -- if anybody joins Gossage, it'll be Rice -- certainly doesn't follow from Keith's survey, as only three votes separate Rice from the other guys. But I do agree that Rice is No. 1 among those three, as last year he outpointed Dawson by 37 votes and Blyleven by 86.

2a. If Rice doesn't make it this year, will he receive enough sympathy votes next year? Well, of course, it depends on how many he needs. Superficially, at least, Rice is comparable to Ralph Kiner, a top power hitter for a number of seasons before flaming out early. In 1960, Kiner's first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, he got three votes.

That's right: three.

By 1974, Kiner's penultimate year of consideration (by the BBWAA), he was doing quite a bit better: 215 votes, which still left him 59 votes short of election. But Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were on the ballot that year, and stole everyone's thunder. There were a great number of future Hall of Famers on that ballot -- including all-timers Eddie Mathews and Duke Snider, who both managed to draw support from only 30 percent of the voters -- and Mantle and Ford were the only two elected.

In 1975, whether due to sympathy or something else, Kiner picked up 58 votes, which put him just over the 75 percent threshold. If Rice doesn't make it this year, will he pick up 58 votes next year? I don't think so, as between now and then we'll only see more analysis like this. I do think he'll be elected, though. If not next year, then another year.

3. I'm not at all sure about Dawson and Raines. Dawson's not a great candidate, and Law's survey has Raines pulling only 35 percent support. I think he'll actually do worse than that this year because Keith's missing the older voters (who certainly won't vote for the guy with the great on-base percentage). Due to pages like this, Raines will only do better as the years progress, but I have absolutely no confidence that he'll move from 35 to 75 percent in 15 years.

Craig Calcaterra -- aka ShysterBall -- is not only an excellent baseball writer, he's also a lawyer. So his analysis carries a little more weight when TNP (The National Pastime) strays into the courtroom. Calcaterra says Roger Clemens is steaming toward some sort of victory …

The end game of this three week chess match is near, and Roger Clemens is poised to win handily. He has denied [Brian] McNamee's charges, McNamee has now blinked when challenged, and unless [Andy] Pettitte or someone provides first-hand, eyewitness testimony calling Clemens a liar -- fat chance -- Congress will have no basis for questioning whatever story Clemens decides to tell them, true, false, or otherwise. The cement that constitutes the record of this whole affair is beginning to set, and given what will appear to be effectively unsubstantiated charges forcefully rebutted in numerous contexts, it is setting in favor of Clemens.

That was written before the news that Clemens is suing McNamee, and the gloves are off as the complaint includes a scandalous item I hadn't seen reported before. As Shyster writes, "Get your popcorn kids, this one is going to be a humdinger."

You know what's disappointing to me?

It's not that Roger Clemens might have cheated. If he did cheat, he was just one of hundreds, and he's still a Hall of Famer in my book. It's not that if he did cheat, now he's lying about it. Most of us will dissemble about our misdeeds if we think there's a decent chance we won't get caught.

What's disappointing to me is that Clemens, with all his money and having been a family man for many years, still behaves like someone who never has grown up. A few snippets from the "60 Minutes" interview:

"I'm angry that what I've done for the game of baseball and the personal, in my private life, what I've done, that I don't get the benefit of the doubt," Clemens says. "The stuff that's being said, it's ridiculous."

"It's hogwash for people to even assume this," Clemens says.

"Twenty-four, 25 years, Mike. You'd think I'd get an inch of respect. An inch," he adds. "How can you prove your innocence?"

…

[Wallace voice-over:] Clemens may appear as requested at a congressional hearing in 10 days. His challenge is getting people to believe him.

"I don't know if I can defend myself, I think people, a lot of people, have already made their decisions," Clemens says.

"Well, a lot of people have made …," Wallace says.

"And that's our country, isn't it? Guilty before innocent. That's the way our country works now. And then everybody's talking about sue, sue, sue. Should I sue? Well, let me exhaust. Let me just spend. How about, let's keep spending," Clemens says. "But I'm gonna explore what I can do and then I want to see if it's gonna be worth it, worth all the headache."

It's not fair to expect our sports heroes to be articulate and emotionally mature. After all, nobody ever told Clemens to grow up. Why should he? Becoming articulate does take time, and it's not as if Clemens wasn't working hard at his craft all those years. It strikes me, though, that if the Rocket really does want to defend himself, change the minds of a lot of people, it sure would help if he'd learned at some point to come across as something other than a spoiled, petulant millionaire who thinks he did something for baseball. Rather than the other way around.

P.S. If those snippets seem like sparse evidence, here's plenty more.

Just a few links while waiting for Billy Beane to trade Joe Blanton …

• In the New York Sun, Tim Marchman argues that Alan Trammell was better than Jim Rice (and reminds me that Trammell -- he did have some help from Doyle Alexander -- essentially carried the Tigers to a division title in 1987).

• I'm not saying Roger Clemens is lying. But if he were lying, isn't this exactly how you'd expect him to do it?

• Joe Posnanski's Pozcar results are in, and I have to admit: I'm pleased. I'm also jealous, as Joe seems to have a great number of right-thinking friends. (And yes, I mean that as a joke. Sort of.)

• ShysterBall points out questions the Mitchell report didn't answer; on a related note, Shysterball -- when he's not wearing the cape and the tights, he's a lawyer -- looks at Rger Clemens' current imbroglio from the legal perspective.

• People will argue about why the InterWeb exists. Some say it's for sex. Some say sports. Some say it's about trading and selling Pez dispensers. I say it's Josh Wilker and all the wonderful things he does.

• But the InterWeb's not perfect. One big problem: By the time you think of doing something, somebody else has probably done it already. Case in point: For next week I was planning a sidebar listing the best players, one for each position, who have failed to gain election to the Hall of Fame. But of course somebody just beat me to it. I do have to disagree with three of Patrick Sullivan's choices, though. I have Keith Hernandez ahead of Will Clark (who had a lot of problems staying in the lineup), Ron Santo ahead of Dick Allen (ditto, plus he really didn't play many games at third base) and Dale Murphy ahead of Andre Dawson (who, among other things, played more games in right field than center).

Upon the A's trading Nick Swisher to the White Sox on Thursday for three prospects, Athletics Nation asked John Sickels about the young players the A's got. Here's Sickels on the better two, Gio Gonzalez and Fautino De Los Santos:

Gonzalez is a left-handed power pitcher with two Double-A seasons under his belt at age 22. He projects as a number two starter at the major league level, and showed much improved command this year. He could use some Triple-A time, but should be ready for a spot by 2009. De Los Santos is further away, but he's got a terrific arm and had a breakout season in the Sally League. He'd be more of a 2010 guy depending on how fast they want to rush him, but his upside is terrific.

Three weeks ago, A's GM Billy Beane picked up a bunch of prospects when he traded Dan Haren to the Diamondbacks. So what have these deals done for the organization? These were Sickels' top dozen Athletic prospects before the Haren deal:

1. Daric Barton, 1B, Grade B+
2. James Simmons, RHP, Grade B
3. Henry Alberto Rodriguez, RHP, Grade B
4. Trevor Cahill, RHP, Grade B-
5. Corey Brown, OF, Grade B-
6. Andrew Bailey, RHP, Grade B-
7. Sean Doolittle, 1B, Grade B-
8. Javier Herrera, OF, Grade C+
9. Dan Meyer, LHP, Grade C+
10. Greg Smith, LHP, Grade C+
11. Sam Demel, RHP, Grade C+
12. Andrew Carignan, RHP, Grade C+

Frankly, that's a pretty lousy list. There are plenty of teams that don't have any Grade A (or A-) prospects, but not many have just one prospect above Grade B.

And now? Here's the Top 10, with recent additions in bold:

1. Carlos Gonzalez, OF, Grade B+
2. Gio Gonzalez, LHP, Grade B+
3. Fautino De Los Santos, RHP, B+
4. Daric Barton, 1B, Grade B+
5. Brett Anderson, LHP, Grade B+
6. Chris Carter, 1B, Grade B+
7. James Simmons, RHP, Grade B
8. Henry Alberto Rodriguez, RHP, Grade B
9. Trevor Cahill, RHP, Grade B-
10. Aaron Cunningham, OF, Grade B-
11. Corey Brown, OF, Grade B-
12. Ryan Sweeney, OF, Grade C+

This must rank as one of the more dramatically quick transformations of a farm system in major league history. The A's have immediately gone from having one of the weaker systems in the majors to one of the best, with only the absence of a Grade A prospect preventing it from ranking among the very best.

Analytically, Beane had no choice. Last season the A's won 76 games. If they brought back the same team next season, they'd have been lucky to win 86 games, which almost surely wouldn't qualify them for the postseason. Essentially, 85 isn't much better than 75, and if you're going to win 75, you might as well win 65. Assuming, of course, that winning 65 puts you on the road to 95.

Five years ago, the A's were MLB's model franchise. They won a lot of games with just a little money.

The A's are no longer a model franchise. Now, that's the Indians. In 2003 the Indians won 68 games. In 2005 they won 93, and in 2007 they won 96. Their two best hitters? Grady Sizemore and Travis Hafner, both of whom were picked up in trades.

I don't know if the A's will win 95 games anytime soon. But this is the way to try.

Next week I'm going to present for your consideration a list of 10 deserving Hall of Famers, including a few ex-players, but mostly non-players (because that's where the process has truly failed for the last decade or two).

In the meantime, Nick Kapur presents a list of 33 men (and one woman) who are in the Hall of Fame … but shouldn't be. I can't run through the entire list in this space, but Kapur's right: Every name on the list is questionable, and most of them clearly were mistakes.

A few quibbles, though.

1. Here's the note about Phil Rizzuto:

26. Phil Rizzuto, SS - His top comp is Jose Offerman. The only other Hall of Famer in his top ten comps is the even more undeserving Johnny Evers. Even Phil Rizzuto didn't think he should have been in the Hall of Fame. But he had the unbeatable combo of being a Yankee and also being a lovable Yankee. Eventually, the Veteran's Committee just couldn't resist.

That's fair, mostly. I think it's true that if Rizzuto hadn't been a Yankee, and more to the point a longtime Yankee broadcaster, he wouldn't have finally been elected. That said, I think it's irresponsible to discuss Rizzuto's Hall of Fame credentials without mentioning World War II. Without checking, I'm pretty sure Jose Offerman didn't lose three full seasons of his career to a global conflict.

Absent the war, Rizzuto would have finished his career with roughly 2,000 hits (and probably a few more). Defensively, he was truly outstanding and would have won a bunch of Gold Gloves if they'd existed when he played. He did win the MVP Award in 1950 and might well have deserved it. I'm not saying Rizzuto's an obvious Hall of Famer even with the 2,000 hits. What I'm saying is that if not for the war, Rizzuto's right up there in career value with Hall of Famers Lou Boudreau and Luis Aparicio. And nobody's complaining about them.

2. Kapur lists Orlando Cepeda as an outfielder and writes, "His career stats have become a popular low-end benchmark for people to compare with when trying to make the case for putting other marginal outfielders in to the Hall." Cepeda spent the vast majority of his career as a first baseman. I agree with the general sentiment, though. Cepeda was a fantastic player, but no more fantastic than Keith Hernandez or Norm Cash.

3. Kapur lists 11 pitchers, and he's right: Most of them were poor choices. Ted Lyons, though? Lyons finished with 260 wins over 21 seasons with the White Sox. How many pennants did the White Sox win in those 21 seasons? Zero. How many winning seasons among those 21 seasons? Seven. How many second-place finishes? Zero. How many third-place finishes? Two.

If Lyons had pitched for a decent team instead of the White Sox he'd have won around 300 games. Oh, and then there was the war. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Lyons was three weeks shy of his 41st birthday. But he came back and pitched in '42, and -- this is one of my all-time favorite stats -- he started 20 games, completed 20 games, and went 14-6 with a 2.10 ERA that was No. 1 in the American League. By then Lyons was throwing mostly knuckleballs, and he looked like he might pitch forever.

Except he enlisted, and spent the next three seasons a United States Marine. He came back in the spring of '46 and started five games, posting a fine 2.32 ERA, but quit in late May when ownership asked him to take over as manager

You're going to kick that guy out of Cooperstown?

Anyway, if you get a chance to look at the entire list, we'll discuss below …

Monday in this space, I wrote: "I suspect if you solicited ballots from five nonvoters (say: Rob Neyer, Joe Sheehan, Keith Law, Rich Lederer and David Pinto), you would find a great deal of uniformity. I suspect that we all would vote for [Tim] Raines, [Bert] Blyleven, [Alan] Trammell and [Goose] Gossage."

Well, no. At the very least I should have checked to see if Joe Sheehan had already written about his (theoretical) ballot. He had, last week (members only). And indeed, Joe would vote for Raines, Blyleven and Gossage (and Mark McGwire, as I suspected). But not Trammell ...

Once again, Trammell's candidacy is the most difficult one to evaluate. He was one of the best players in baseball at his peak, and was part of the bridge from shortstops as singles hitters to the better players we see out there today. On the other hand, he had a fairly short peak and a short career. I'm wary of the defensive numbers on him, as his home park was notorious for its high infield grass. With so much of Trammell's statistical case built on very good defensive stats at his peak, the twinge of doubt I feel about their validity makes me nervous. My bigger objection, though, is to the way his career ended. Trammell was done as a full-time player at 32, which is awfully early for a 20th-century position player being pushed for Cooperstown. Like [Jim] Rice, Trammell would have been a Hall of Famer with a more typical decline phase. Instead, he had 10.2 WARP, total, after 32. I'm leaving him off, again.

A few things about this.

One, while it's true that a typical decline phase would make Trammell's career stats look a lot better, I don't think Trammell's (apparently) atypical decline is a reason to leave him out of the Hall of Fame. Joe mentions 20th-century position players, but I think the more relevant point of comparison is 20th-century shortstops. And they typically suffered early declines. Most of the best ones, anyway. Arky Vaughan, Lou Boudreau, Phil Rizzuto, Pee Wee Reese, Ernie Banks, Robin Yount ... All these Hall of Fame shortstops were either finished as productive everyday players in their early 30s or moved to an easier position.

I'm afraid I don't have an easy way to check, but I believe Trammell, even with that atypical decline phase, ranks fourth in hits among 20th century shortstops -- considering only hits gained while actually playing shortstop -- behind Hall of Famers Luis Aparicio, Luke Appling and Ozzie Smith (and for what it's worth, Trammell hit more home runs than those three guys combined).

I am not saying that Trammell's 2,365 career hits constitute, by themselves, a great case for the Hall of Fame. I'm saying we shouldn't hold Trammell's decline phase against him, because his career accomplishments are right in line with plenty of Hall of Fame shortstops.

Two, while I'm intrigued by the notion that Trammell's solid defensive credentials -- he won four Gold Gloves, and Bill James has him as a Grade B-minus shortstop over his entire career -- are partly the result of the high grass in the Tiger Stadium infield, I'd sure like to see somebody do some actual work on this one. Yes, sinkerballer Walt Terrell's home/road splits were massive when he pitched for the Tigers, particularly from 1985 through '87. But did other sinkerball pitchers fare particularly well in Tiger Stadium during Trammell's career? Were Trammell's fielding stats significantly better at home than on the road? If the grass was long and did lead to more plays for Trammell, did it cost him anything as a hitter?

Five years ago, Joe Sheehan did a great deal of work and concluded that Jack Morris did not "pitch to the score" -- that's the excuse often given for his relatively poor career ERA.

Maybe Sheehan and roughly 85 percent of the Hall of Fame voters have been right about Trammell, which means I've been wrong. Someday, though, Trammell's going to get another hearing before a different set of judges. I hope by then we know more about that Tiger Stadium infield grass.

• Colby Cosh explains, better than I did a couple of weeks ago, why comparisons of the Mitchell report to McCarthyism are facile at best, and Cosh aptly summarizes the double standard regarding steroids, baseball, and football.

Cosh does stumble, as so many do, when he writes, "Few of those named in the report ever broke any specific rule of baseball ..." That is absolutely false. As the Mitchell report concisely notes: "Beginning in 1971 and continuing today, Major League Baseball's drug policy has prohibited the use of any prescription medication without a valid prescription. By implication, this prohibition applied to steroids even before 1991, when Commissioner Fay Vincent first expressly included steroids in baseball's drug policy. Steroids have been listed as a prohibited substance under the Major League Baseball drug policy since then."

Got that, everybody? 1991.

• So much great stuff from the Amazing Joe Posnanski over the holidays that I can't even begin to enumerate the wisdom, but I have to heartily suggest you read this one about what's a Hall of Famer and this one about the best pitcher in the 1980s.

• Speaking of which, Vegas Watch offers the worst Hall of Fame arguments of 2008.

• Speaking of which, yesterday another ballot was published. It's Dave Buscema's first ballot ever, and he spent a week agonizing over all those serious candidates. At the end of the week? He voted for two: Jim Rice and Goose Gossage. "Amazingly, they are the players my instinct initially told me to select." Of course, as any psychologist will tell you, this really wasn't so amazing at all. Once we humans believe something, we tend to interpret all subsequent information as confirmation of our original belief. Which is the best explanation for Buscema, even after all that research, leaving Blyleven and Raines off his ballot.

• It doesn't happen nearly often enough, but as ShysterBall notes, sometimes bad things do happen to ridiculous people.

• Rick Morrissey says if the Cubs sell the naming rights to Wrigley Field, everybody will keep calling it Wrigley Field, and anyway it doesn't matter as long as the Cubs are still playing games at the corner of Clark and Addison. Well, I guess. But a new corporate name will be quickly used just about everywhere except in the scribblings of crotchety old columnists (for example, me), and I believe we lose just a little something every time something hallowed is sold to the highest bidder. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just another small sign that we're heading in that direction.