the_nub.html
(politics and
baseball –
12/28/07)
Red Sox fan/American songbook
preservationist Jonathan
Schwartz said it: “When I turn on the
television these days I expect
to see an empty ballpark.”
Although baseball is all talk and
little news as the year
ends, the action, we know, is feverish in Pakistan
after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and more pertinently from a
domestic
standpoint, at the political ballpark in Iowa. One
of the sharpest media birddogs, Al
(Albert R.) Hunt of Bloomberg News, has scouted that two-party
presidential
contest and looked beyond it. He says, the
odds indicate that, despite her recent stumbles, Hillary Clinton has
the best
chance of going all the way:
“If
the senator from New York
wins the Jan. 3 Iowa
caucuses, she's a prohibitive favorite for the nomination. She's the
only
candidate who could survive a couple of early losses and conceivably
bounce
back. Clinton, 60, would have a difficult general-election matchup with
Senator
John McCain of Arizona;
against anyone else, she'd be a favorite.
As of today,
however...her aura of
inevitability is gone. Still, given all the vicissitudes, if you could
only bet
on one candidate, there is no stronger choice. The odds of Hillary
Clinton
being the 44th president: 3-to-1.”
Hunt’s
odds scoreboard has Barack Obama at 7-2, Mitt Romney
5-1, John McCain 8-1, John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani 10-1, and Mike
Huckabee
12-1. Others on the field are far
outside the competitive lines, as he sees it.
Former divinity student and NY Times
correspondent Chris
Hedges is taking Huckabee, and what he represents, seriously. Here is how he put it on Truthdig.com:
“The
rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate
represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of
the
radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later
primaries,
but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay… Members of the
Christian
right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote
against
their own interests around the issues of abortion and family values,
are in
rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming
economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what
is left
of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism...
“I
do not blame Huckabee or the tens of millions of
hapless Christians - 40 percent of the Republican electorate - who hear
his
words and rejoice. I blame the corporate
state, those who thought they could disempower and abuse the working
class,
rape the country, build a rapacious oligarchy and never pay a political
price.”
- -
-
The post-2007 season has been a revealing time for Mets fans,
the team’s flawed operational strategy exposed in trades and free-agent
signings. Two years ago, the Mets broke
decisively with what could be called their Joe McIlvaine past. In the nineties, GM McIlvaine ran an operation
centering on farm-system promotions and only marginal free agent
signings. The McIlvaine era produced
pitchers Jason
Isringhausen, Paul Wilson and Bill Pulsipher in one burst, but few
other
genuine prospects and no formidable teams. McIlvaine’s
successor Steve Phillips oversaw
a transition in which big-name trades and signings – Mike Hampton,
Kenny
Rogers, and Roberto Alomar came to the team during the late ‘90’s/early
2000s
period – replaced the emphasis on farm system call-ups.
That approach was a one-time success, in the
2000 World Series year.
Lacking a stable base of solid players,
the Mets staggered
for a few post-WS years until Fred Wilpon hired Omar Minaya and decided
to
splurge on superior free agents – Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran, Billy
Wagner
– and high-level trade acquisitions Carlos Delgado and
Paul Lo Duca.
The problem now is the team has neither a productive farm system
nor an
owner willing to spend on further blue chip talent.
Example:
a top-notch outfielder was needed to join Beltran (and perhaps
relocate
him to right, replacing Shawn Green). Andruw
Jones was available. Journeyman Ryan
Church was traded for instead. Another
problem: GM Minaya has a disconcerting tendency to go with players past
their
prime who are injury-prone: Moises Alou,
Orlando Hernandez, Jose Valentine, Pedro, etc.
A recent illustration: Minaya just signed second baseman Luis
Castillo
to a four-year contract. Castillo, who
is clearly a downsider, will be 37 when his contract expires.
Further darkening the 2008 outlook: the defending division champion Phils, who
have already added Brad Lidge to their bullpen, signed outfielder So
Taguchi
the other day. Taguchi hit .290 for
St.Louis last season, 18 points higher than new-Met Church did for Washington
(while
striking out well over 20 percent of the time with the Nats). Happy New Year, Willie Randolph.
- o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
(politics and
baseball, etc.
– 12/21/07)
The day after George Mitchell served up
his report on drug
use in baseball, Bill Moyers talked to Keith Olbermann, the leadoff
guest on
his PBS show. Although Olbermann rose
from the broadcast minors as a sports guy and now does sports stints
for NBC,
Moyers had more important deliveries than Mitchell’s to discuss: the
fireballs
Olbermann has been tossing at Team Bush on his MSNBC news show. Keith’s blistering polemics - he calls George
W. and Dick Cheney liars, fools and worse - are rare examples of
no-holds-barred truth-telling in the mainstream media (a distinction he
shares
with Moyers).
Moyers asked Olbermann about a new
feature on his nightly program:
a Bush Administration “scandals list.” Or, as Olbermann put it: “A list
of the
top three administration scandals you may have forgotten because of the
latest
administration scandals.”
The frequency of one scandal pushing
another off the media plate
- by happenstance or design? - was touched on coincidentally by
International
Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff:
“It is a
strange
affair when the CIA’s destruction of videos made of its torture of
prisoners
has created a greater scandal in the U.S. Congress and the press
than
the fact that the torture itself took place.
”The actual scandal is that the United States has been torturing
prisoners on
orders from the top of the Bush administration, using methods of
torture
authorized from the top that the administration still refuses to
condemn or
renounce. The White House says ‘the United States does not
torture,’
and therefore nothing that it does is torture.
”It is equally important that the U.S. Congress has been unable, or
unwilling,
as a body, to condemn torture in unequivocal terms, nor have Bush
presidential
nominees to high legal and judicial office been willing in testifying
to
Congress to identify torture as anything other than what America’s
enemies do,
not us -- since as the president says, we Americans do not torture.”
What
commentators – and all of us
– dislike facing is the reason the scandals are piling up unresolved: the impunity with which the Bush
Administration is operating, thanks to its control of law enforcement
and the courts.
- -
-
The Mets raised ticket prices for
’08 despite failing to improve their product: now they are apparently
worrying
that fans will stay away. The team is
offering reduced-price holiday ticket packages, with some single seats
going
for as little as $5.00. Sounds like what
the Nets have been doing in an effort to attract fans to their
basketball games
at the Meadowlands. The Nets are hurting
competitively because, like the Mets, they haven’t added any real studs
to
their nucleus, in their case, Jason Kidd, Vince Carter and Richard
Jefferson. Considering how the Knicks
are doing, NY/NJ pro basketball gets a “d” for the first part of the
season – d
as in “desultory.”
TV Program
Note: Bill Moyers will address the
implications of
the Mitchell Report - referring indirectly to The Nub – in his
commentary tonight
on his weekly program. The show can be
seen, as usual, in the NYC area on Channel 13 at 9.
- o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
(baseball and
politics –
12/18/07)
Shortly before George Mitchell issued
his report on the use
of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, former pitcher/author Jim
Bouton
talked at a forum about the importance of a level playing field. Were he playing today, Bouton said, he
wouldn’t want to lose his livelihood because his competitors had an
unfair
advantage.
Everyone – Bud Selig and the team
owners, the players and
their union, and the fans - want a level playing field.
But only the fans have the ultimate power to
see that the baseball professionals get the leveling job done. If in large numbers they would stop attending
games, stop watching their teams on TV, true reform would come, or
baseball as
a profitable business would die.
We know that won’t happen.
If organized protests on an important national issue like Iraq
have lost
their impact-making intensity, and massive protests against economic
unfairness
are non-existent, it is a stretch to expect collective action from
baseball
fans. Their indignant voices
notwithstanding, Americans don’t feel strongly enough about the need
for level fields
- economic, social or athletic - to fight for them.
Our government favors the upward tilt,
and, as in tax
policy, seeks to reinforce that unfairness.
More pernicious is its hostility toward other democratically
elected
regimes that act to level the economic and social disparities in their
countries. The lineup of Yanqui
interventions – open and covert - against left-leaning democracies in
Latin
America alone over the past half-century is a roster of shame: 1954
Guatemala -
Jacobo Arbenz overthrown; 1961 Ecuador - J.M. Velasco overthrown; 1963
Dominican Republic - Juan Bosch overthrown; 1964 Brazil - Joao Goulart
ousted
in military coup;
1973 Chile
- Salvador Allende killed in military coup; 2002 Venezuela
- Hugo Chavez survived coup attempt;
2003 Haiti
- Jean Bertrand Aristide removed. That’s
to name only a few.
And now Bolivia.
Four wealthier provinces have staged protests
against the government of the country’s first indigenous president Evo
Morales. He has begun leveling differences
between Bolivia’s
“haves” and “have nots” through land reform and a strengthening of the
rights of
those whom previous governments had discriminated against, his fellow indigenes. Morales says the
U.S. Embassy is managing
many of the players moving against him.
After looking at the record book, it is not hard to believe he’s
speaking the truth.
- -
-
Let’s see: The Mets’
number two trade target, Oakland’s Dan
Haren,
has gone to Arizona. Number one, Johan Santana, is apparently
going nowhere, almost certainly not to the Mets. The
Phillies have added reliever Brad Lidge,
the Braves veteran returnee pitchers Tom Glavine and Mike Hampton; Atlanta will
also have Mark
Teixeira for the entire season. The Mets
can point to newcomers Brian Schneider and Ryan Church (and the
departure of
Lastings Millidge and Paul Lo Duca). The
most positive transaction news for the Mets last week was the
subtraction of
Aaron Rowand from the Phillies. He signed
a five-year contract with San
Francisco. That
pre-holiday gift list must be taking some of the merriment out of
Willie
Randolph’s Christmas.
- o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
(politics and
baseball –
12/14/07)
It remains to be seen whether Yankee
fan Rudy Giuliani will
be the Mets of the presidential campaign:
Whether, after a strong start, he fades as the electoral season
plays
out. The beating Rudy’s been taking in the media – the brush-backs
about Bernie
Kerik, Judy Nathan, the tricky mayoral bookkeeping, etc: all
that, and his left-tilting stances on
abortion and gays seemed to be part of a possibly decisive losing
streak
But the scoreboard – in the form of
electoral polls – shows
Team Rudy is still ahead, and, for the time being, has weathered the
worst his
opponents have thrown at him. Giuliani
has been particularly effective in fouling off strikeout pitches about
the many
errors he has made in his public life.
He concedes “mistakes”, such as in failing to sufficiently check
Kerik’s
background, but then quickly notes the good appointments, the positive
side of
whatever the issue. In any event, he is
making cautious believers out of respected observers who thought he
didn’t have
a chance. One is expert analyst Charlie
Cook, who said this in the National Journal:
“Early
on, many political operatives and analysts
expressed skepticism about (Giuliani’s) chances of winning the GOP
nomination
based on the fact that his positions on social and cultural issues were
considerably to the left of his party and because of his relatively
colorful
personal life.
“I went
so far as to boldly -- and perhaps stupidly -- say
that I would win the Tour de France before Giuliani would win the
Republican
presidential nomination.
“But
while his personal history and positions on social
issues have certainly hurt him, the damage hasn't been nearly to the
extent
that many of us expected…. So, as far as I am concerned, I was wrong,
whether
he ends up with the nomination or not. Win
or lose, Giuliani has beaten the point
spread.”
- - -
Remember
“TG” as in TGIF – Thank God It’s Friday.
The Mitchell Report on baseball drug use has its own TG - Taint
and Grief:
taint on the players, grief for the fans.
The taint attached to particular players named in the report –
Andy
Pettitte, for example - causes sadness here.
The report, which recommends no punishment for past sins, has
been
over-hyped as a justice-dispenser. It
may turn out to be a useful starting point in bringing reform to a
sport whose suspect
credibility has now taken a big hit.
Meanwhile, affection once felt for Andy and former players like
Lenny
Dykstra won’t be quite the same.
Whadda you know, Joe:
Paul Lo Duca signed with the Washington Nationals for a modest
$5
million. So much for the Mets’ cover
story that he was asking for too much to re-sign
with
them. Let’s give the Mets the benefit of
the doubt and say it was drug use –as charged in the Mitchell Report -
that
prompted their badmouthing Lo Duca for much of the season.
Lo D’s signing with the Nats produced an
embarrassing sidelight for Omar Minaya. Washington’s
catcher-in-waiting is Jesus Flores, a former Mets farmhand. Flores
outhit new Met Brian Schneider with the Nats last season and matched
Schneider’s
rate of throwing out runners (29 pct.) Flores would still be Mets property had not
Minaya dropped
him from the 40-man roster before last season; dropped him to make room
for
guess whom? 49-year-old Julio Franco, who didn’t make it past
mid-summer and
shouldn’t have been kept around that long.
-
o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
(politics and
baseball, etc.
– 12/11/07)
If parks protection proves to be a
major issue in the 2009
mayoral campaign, potential candidate Christine Quinn has put herself
at a
disadvantage. Council Speaker Quinn grew
up a Mets fan, but was a key player in pushing through the Yanks’ new
stadium
project. At a breakfast last week
sponsored by Manhattan Media, she defended the project and the city’s
giving up
22 acres of contiguous Bronx parkland
as part
of it.
Offered a chance to back away from the
deal that outraged
preservationists, Quinn indicated she was proud of her involvement. “You observed but did not oversee that
arrangement,” The Nub suggested in asking if she had any second
thoughts about
the giveaway. “I oversaw it,” she
said. “The Yankees have committed to
helping
finance an economic revival not just around the Stadium, but in a
depressed
area nearby. And they are making good on
the promise to hire local help.” She
cited a small boiler-installing business that employs ex-offenders as
part of its
work force. She said she saw two of the
local
firm’s big blue boilers in place as she inspected the project not long
ago.
Elected officials like Quinn clearly
find the prospect of jobs
that come with economic development – in construction and related
industries –
reason enough to impose changes on neighborhoods like the one around
the Stadium. Few electeds stood with the
many local
residents who opposed the project and rejected the idea that the new
stadium and
parkland preservation was an either/or proposition.
Majora Carter, executive director of
Sustainable South
Bronx, expressed the broad borough-wide
opposition on the subject during a conference last summer on Robert
Moses’
legacy. Said Carter to fellow panelist and
Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff : “No community should have to choose
between
jobs and quality of life.”
In 1993, Mayor David Dinkins
was defeated for reelection by
Rudy Giuliani as his administration was negotiating the turnover of 42
acres of
parkland in Queens to the U.S. Tennis
Association.
- -
-
Laugh of the month: Omar
Minaya saying the reason for the Mets’ unproductive farm system is that
they’ve
been “good citizens,” adhering to the commissioner’s recommended
signing-bonus
ceilings in dealing with drafted players.
What we know you mean, Omar, is that the Mets have been
cheapskates. Fred Wilpon clearly seized
on Bud Selig’s recommendations as an excuse for saving money. Now the joke is his team trying to compete on
the trade market with the “bad citizen” Yanks, Red Sox, Tigers, etc.
and their
well-stocked systems.
Putting Wilpon’s frugality in context: Forbes magazine says the Mets franchise is
the second most valuable (behind the Yanks) in all of baseball. It puts the NYM’s value at $736 million,
ahead of the Red Sox, at $724 million. The
Yankees? Their out of sight, valued at
$1.2 billion.
For single-minded baseball fans who
find it hard to care
about pro football or basketball, we recommend
this antidote to restlessness: follow the frost-belt home-field playoff
teams: Patriots, Packers and Steelers.
You may find it diverting to watch their wintry games - however
interminable - from your
living
room. Similarly, you may enjoy watching superior NBA players like
Cleveland’s Lebron
James, New Jersey’s Jason
Kidd, Boston’s
Kevin Garnett, etc. take charge of
the often decisive last five minutes of their televised games. Just remember: five minutes of
late-second-half NBA playing time can take the better part of a
half-hour.
P.S. Only
two months
(roughly) to pitchers and catchers.
- o -
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
(baseball and
politics –
12/7/07)
(Still more) Field-Box Journalism 101:
“Why doesn’t Billy
Wagner just
shut up…He is not a real winner. Just a
real whiner.”
We
hear those sentiments these days not just from some Mets
fans (a friend messaged here, using those words). We
hear it about Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to name just a few of the growing number of
kvetching world
leaders unwilling to play ball with the U.S.
The Mets organization surely welcomes
the loyal fans’
attitude. Wagner, you may remember, said
on the team website that, having lost Tom Glavine and Paul Lo Duca, the
team is
in trouble. That’s a piece of accurate
counter-spin for which, pace, loyal
fans, we should be grateful. Any time we
can see or hear something credible at variance with the party (or, more
often,
the government or corporate) line, we are getting something rare: info
that
balances the one-sided viewpoints lofted from various public- or
private-sector
PR offices and too often relayed unchallenged by the mainstream media.
The media have revved up public animus
about designated
enemies, saying little about the misguided provocations that prompted
their
anti-U.S. outbursts: Bush’s plan to set
up a missile defense system on Russia’s - and Putin’s – doorstep, for
example; or our cloak-and-dagger
complicity in the 2002
attempt to overthrow Chavez ; or our president’s dismissal of
Ahmaedinejad’s truthful
claim that Iran was not making nuclear weapons.
Journalists true to their trade read
the work of colleagues
the way all news consumers should: with a generous slab of
skepticism. They have a series of
questions at the ready:
Who was the source of this story? Who
benefits from it? Are we hearing in a
substantive way from the ‘bad guys,’ the people, businesses or
governments
being attacked? The most predictable and
pernicious slant - you’ll find it in the papers and on TV every day -
is, as
already noted, toward our “friends”
internationally (whether or not they are dictatorships) and away from
the
government-designated enemies (whether or not they have democratically
elected
leaders).
- -
-
Newsday’s Wallace Matthews is clearly not a fan of Hank
Steinbrenner. He thinks the Boss’s son
has been too clever by half in his negotiations to improve the Yankees.
But Matthews also thinks Steinbrenner has
no
choice but to reopen his bid for Johan Santana and perhaps give up too
much in
order to keep the Twins ace away from the new Evil Empire:
“For Hank
Steinbrenner's Yankees, ‘No’ is the new
‘Yes.’
”A couple of weeks ago, Boy George just said no to negotiating with
Alex
Rodriguez after A-Rod exercised the opt-out clause in his contract. A
couple of
days later, ‘No’ turned out to mean ‘Yes’ after all… He wanted
Rodriguez back
so badly that he not only reversed a very loud and public proclamation,
he
wound up bidding against no one but himself in his mad rush to secure
A-Rod's
services. What makes you think the same
thing isn't going to happen with Santana?
“…History tells us Hank
will reverse field, bundle
up Ian Kennedy, Phil Hughes, Melky Cabrera and throw in the rights to
the
first-born sons of A-Rod, Jeter and Robinson Cano in order to get what
he
really needs, which is Santana at the top of his rotation. Either that,
or
watch Santana go to Boston
and take the AL East title with him for the next 10 years.”
At least the Yanks are in the running for Santana (or
Dan Haren
or Erik Bedard). As for the Mets,
fugedaboudit, says another Newsday columnist, Ken Davidoff:
“ (Willie) Randolph
is on a short leash. (Omar) Minaya really has to get the Mets back into
the
playoffs in order to re-establish his own credibility with his bosses
and his
fans. And yet, Santana, Haren and, very
likely, Bedard are not coming through that door. Minaya passionately
defends
his trading chips, as well he should; it comes with his job. The
deafening
silence on the other side of the conversation tells the real story.”
- -
-
Can’t say it better than this:“The new National
Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney's rush to
war with
Iran
is, in fact, a rush to war."- John Edwards
- o
-
(The Nub is a team effort
skippered by Dick Starkey. Comments to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found by
scrolling
below.)
(politics and
baseball –
12/4/07)
During a recent flap over what to do
(if anything) about
Social Security, Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton was pulling a
“hidden ball
trick” on the issue. That is, she was
pretending to do one thing about it – form a bipartisan study
commission – but
hiding what her real intention was.
As we know, the hidden ball trick -
fielder motioning to
throw a ball he keeps, hoping to decoy a stationary runner into leaving
a base –
seldom works. Although rarely tried now
in baseball, the trick has been a political staple, especially at
election
time. Most of us remember George W. Bush
promising in 2000 that he would be a “compassionate conservative”, a
non-“nation-builder”, etc. And in
the
same campaign year, Al Gore coming on as a progressive with a rousing
speech
(written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) at the Convention.
We know what happened then: he moved to the
center, losing his passion and the election.
Gore hid a strategy of caution behind his ball-of-fire rhetoric.
Progressive Democrats worry now that,
contrary to Obama’s
charge, Hillary is hiding nothing. She
truly supports Bush’s staying-the-course policy in Iraq
and his aggressive confrontation of Iran. As for the Republicans, no one can accuse them
of seeking to decoy the public: nearly all have made clear they aspire
to be
like anti-terrorism commander-in-chief George W., only more so.
The mainstream media has had a field
day calling Hugo Chavez
every dirty name in the market democracy book – “socialist,” “fascist”,
“autocrat”, etc. – in advance of Sunday’s referendum in which the
democratically elected Venezuelan president hoped to broaden his powers. That he narrowly lost is almost a source of
embarrassment to those who were sure the fix was in.
Matthew Yglesias of Atlantic (Monthly).com is
an exception:
“I guess if Hugo
Chávez can't even
get majority support in a referendum for proposed changes to
the
constitution, then he can't be much of an aspiring dictator, can he? On
the
merits…Chávez's proposals - an end to presidential term limits
plus concentration
of more power in the president's office - are probably a bad idea for a
country
like Venezuela
and it's probably a good thing that they were defeated. Still,
the level of pious screeching about
Chávez's authoritarianism from people who think … dictators (elsewhere). should be treated with nothing
but the utmost respect has always chafed.”
-
- -
“Despite
a lack of splashy moves, Minaya believes he has improved
the Mets and still has a chance to land a big-time starter.” – Newsday
(David Lennon)
Omar
Minaya is kidding nobody with his brave but
contradictory talk. On the one hand, the
GM said the team was willing to spend big money again for players, on
the other
that Paul Lo Duca wanted too big a contract.
The resulting pickle: the loss of
prime trading chip Lastings Millidge for Lo Duca’s replacement,
journeyman
235-hitting catcher Brian Schneider and another Washington Nat,
outfielder Ryan
Church. So now the Mets have no
Millidge, no Lo Duca and must be prepared to give up one or two other
of the
few marginal prospects left with which to deal for a would-be ace. At the same time, the mystery persists as to
the real reason for the Mets’ determination since mid-summer to drop Lo
Duca.
In contrast to the hole-filled Mets,
the return of Andy
Pettitte stabilizes the Yanks’ rotation, moving them close to the same
ballpark
as the Red Sox in 2008 starting pitching.
It is reasonable to expect at least two of three of the
newcomers – Phil
Hughes, Joba Chamberlain and Ian Kennedy – to fill regular slots as
starters. A rotation of Pettite,
Chien-Ming
Wang, Hughes, Chamberlain and Kennedy or Mike Mussina, while not
matching Boston’s
front line corps
of Beckett, Schilling, Matsuzaka, etc., wouldn’t be too shabby.
A last word (perhaps) on Lastings
Millidge from Newsday’s
Wallace Matthews:
“Of
all the assets Lastings Milledge brought to the Mets, none
will be missed nearly as much as his speed.
I refer not to his time in the 90-foot dash but to the amazing
speed with
which his status plummeted from Untouchable to Undesirable. In a little under seven months, L Millz went
from the kind of precious property with whom the Mets would not have
parted in
exchange for Alex Rodriguez, Josh Beckett and a vial of Tom Seaver's
DNA thrown
in, to a guy they couldn't wait to ship off for the equivalent of a
sack of
baseballs, a smear of eyeblack and a pine-tar rag. “
- o
-
(The Nub is a team
effort skippered by Dick Starkey.
Comments
to dickstar@aol.com
are welcome. Previous Nubs can be found
by scrolling below.)
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