Greinke putting his balls in your face.

Year to date:  36-40-5  (+15.38 units)

All odds and lines are from matchbook.com.  Home teams are listed in all caps.

.6 units:  Red Sox / Yankees UNDER 9 -109

1.01 units:  Rockies (Chacin) over CUBS (SILVA) -101

1.18 units:  Royals (Greinke) over ORIOLES (MILLWOOD) -118

1.05 units:  Angels / Rangers UNDER 8.5 -105

Yesterday (2-2):  -.25 units

All odds are from matchbook.com and home teams are in all caps.

1.22 units: Braves (Kawakami) -122 over METS (MAINE)

.51 units: Braves/Mets -102 OVER 8.5

McCann looking for his second HR against the Maine Vein tonight.

The Mets are pretty bad.  They barely beat my Cubs this week and that’s saying something.  Even with that gift momentum the Braves are still the hotter team.  Maine will give up some runs, and Kawakami is underrated.  Braves win big.

.5 units: Orioles (Guthrie) +206 over RED SOX (LESTER)

This pitching matchup is a lot closer than people give it credit for.  Guthrie has gone 6+ innings in each game so far and hasn’t allowed more than 3 ER in any of them.  Lester got lit up the last time he was out.  I like putting a half unit on a terrible Baltimore team if I’m getting these long odds.

1.89 units: Twins (Pavano) -126 over ROYALS (MECHE)

My pick of the day.  Pavano had two good starts before getting torched by these same Royals last time out.  I can’t find a good Meche game.  Kansas City gets credit for a non-existent home field advantage while the Twins have been hot on the road.  I also have a lean towards the over 9.5, but don’t like the odds I’m currently getting.

.6 units: Yankees (Burnett) -120 over ANGELS (SANTANA)

Another road team?  I dunno, I just bet the numbers.  Both of these pitchers have been hot lately, so that’s a toss up.  Burnett didn’t give up a run in his last start so I guess that makes Santana’s one run complete game look like shit.  New York is the better team, they’ve been good on the road, and the Angels haven’t done anything good at home.  That’s good enough for a half unit bet.  Also a lean on under 9.5.

.5 units:  Mariners (Rowland-Smith) +144 over WHITE SOX (FLOYD)

1.01 units:  Mariners/White Sox -101 OVER 8.5

Floyd gave up 7 runs in a single inning last time out.  Yikes.  Rowland-Smith hasn’t been exactly setting the world on fire, but I’d give him an edge in this matchup.  He should add to that strikeout total with facing Chicago’s free swingers.  I handicapped this game much closer to a coin flip, so I’m jumping at +144.  Also I love the over 8.5 especially now while the Sox pitchers are struggling.

Just make it official and put your sign up next to these other scummy ticket scalpers

But this holiest of all holidays has been under attack from the likeliest of all foes, a giant corporation masking themselves as a baseball team.  This is way worse than Bill O’Reilly and some imaginary war on Winter Carnival.  These are bleacher seats we’re talking about.

The Cubs for years have been trying to come up with some way to get more money for their tickets, but without all that bad press that comes every time they raise ticket prices.  First they opened up their own ticket scalping business where they would funnel face value tickets BEFORE the public had a chance at them and sell them at 800% markups.  Still the gold standard in corporate douche-baggery and somehow was found legal by the corrupt Illinois court system.

Then they started offering a nine game ticket pack to buyers before the official onsale where season ticket waiting listers such as myself could purchase some opening day or Cubs / White Sox as long as we also agreed to buy the same seats at 8 other really shitty game of their choice usually on Tuesday nights in April and against the Pirates.  Not a bad upsale scam if the buyers let you get away with it.

But now, yesterday morning, I received an email in my inbox with the newest scheme to fleece more money out of us ticket buyers.  It’s the Mastercard First Chance Presale where we lucky devils get a chance to purchase whatever tickets desired before the official public sale date of February 19th, but at a 20% markup. Wow, thanks.

It’s enough.  I get it that you’re trying to compete with your own scalpers and get a piece of that big game pie.  But why all these schemes that only serve to insure more tickets in the hands of those scalpers and less tickets available to the public on the day you start selling tickets?  Why not A) take your lumps with the media, man up, and raise face value prices on those games or B) start auctioning off those seats directly to your fans?  Sell them to the highest bidder!

The placement of Derrick Lee's head makes this Anal, err... Annual oddly appropriate.

Is it not enough that you have given us fans over 100 years of failure, $7 Old Styles, Milton Bradley, and troughs in the very few tiny bathrooms?  Stop also back alley’ing us into paying huge ticket prices.  Stop saying you have a public onsale date when everybody knows that every seat will already be gone before then to every Saturday or Cubs / Sox game.

Stop making it so obvious that every single move is going to be a full on no lube raping of us fans.

Carlton Fisk hits this one out of the park

In the article Fisk comes off as bitter about the entire steroid era.  And why shouldn’t he be?  Anybody who played the game clean and lost their career to the inevitable accumulation of injuries has a right to be pissed at some pharmaceutical experiment defying nature to hit 73 dongs at the ripe old age of 39.  These monsters on steroids were signing big money contracts for long terms and stealing money out of the pockets of the clean players.  They never had a chance.

One of the silliest excuses spewing from the pock marked face of McGwire is the “I only took them to come back from injury, not to enhance my performance.”  Extending your career IS PERFORMANCE ENHANCING.  You would have lost time to the injuries naturally resulting from your body breaking down over time.  But instead you put that needle into your ass to repair those muscles in record time, getting you back on the field and hitting those tainted home runs at historic rates.  Fisk puts that whole lame excuse into it’s correct light:

“That’s a crock,” Fisk said. “There’s a reason they call it performance-enhancing drugs. That’s what it does — performance enhancement. You can be good, but it’s going to make you better. You can be average, but it is going to make you good. If you are below average, it is going to make you average. Some guys who went that route got their five-year, $35 million contracts and now are off into the sunset somewhere. Because once they can’t use (steroids) anymore, they can’t play anymore.

…

“Try having your knees operated on and catching for 30 years,” Fisk said. “Do you think you feel good when you go out there? (McGwire) had to stand around and play first base. So excuuuuuse me.”

The mouth breathing toothless Cardinals nation also appear to be eating up the old cheater adage that “steroids can’t help you hit a baseball.”  What a load of shit.  There’s a reason we all like playing Wiffle Ball, and it has to do with the fact that you can react really, really late on a pitch with that light of a bat.  Standing at the plate looking like Lou Ferrigno with a tooth pick in your hands gives you that same advantage.

“(McGwire) says, ‘Well, it doesn’t help eye-and-hand coordination.’ Well, of course it does. It allows you more acuity physically and mentally and optically. You are going to be stronger and you are going to be better,” said Fisk, who starred for the Red Sox and White Sox.

Fisk also targets Roger Clemens, who is one of the biggest assholes in the history of sports and doesn’t deserve the pass he’s been giving to sail off into the sunset forgotten in this whole steroids debacle.  Good stuff.

“The reason he got let go from the Red Sox was because he was starting to break down,” Fisk said. “His last couple of years in Boston just weren’t very productive, a la ‘The Rocket.’ Then all of a sudden he goes to Toronto and he wants to show somebody something. Then he gets two consecutive Cy Young Awards (in ‘97 and ‘98). Come on, give me a bucket.

The entire interview is great, and hopefully every baseball fan gets a chance to read this and get to hear somebody actually get pissed at their peers instead of just covering up for them.  It would be a great thing to also have more players sack up and start admitting that they think these cheaters are all raging fucktards who ruined the game they loved.  But I’m not holding my breath.  I’m sure the empty suits at ESPN are already devising a way to ignore this or sweep it under the rug so they can get back to tripping over each other declaring McGwire as a Hall of Famer the next time they vote.

The only topic where I part ways with the Hall of Famer is here where he’s diverting responsibility away from baseball and onto the federal government:

“You don’t blame people for not ratting them out; you blame the people who abused the pharmaceutical world,” Fisk said. “It’s not like you are taking a couple of aspirin and you don’t know what’s going on. (Non-prescription steroid use has been) a federal offense for a long time, regardless of whether baseball was recognizing it and putting rules into place. The people who did it … they were breaking the law to start with. It doesn’t have to be a baseball law. They knew what they were doing and the reason they were doing it. Now they are sorry because they are getting called out.”

It is absolutely the responsibility of Major League Baseball to make rules on what substances can and cannot be taken if you want to play their game.  The reason is that all baseball players don’t spend 100% of their time under the jurisdiction of the US Federal government.  During the offseason these players could train in any number of countries with less or no regulation of these drugs, building up the muscle and showing up at spring training a couple weeks late and 35 pounds heavier.  This was a common observation multiple springs in Mesa where the Cubs and Sammy Sosa spend their springs.  It’s not illegal to be a roided up freak, it’s illegal to use steroids without a prescription within US borders.

Add this statue to the Bad Ass Hall of Fame

You can’t fall back on the US laws because you are then giving baseball and cheating players an out by excusing them if they want to abuse performance enhancing drugs in other countries during the off season.  Baseball is responsible for policing their sport.  Stop giving Major League Baseball excuses for being criminally negligent on this topic for decades after the NFL decided to clean itself up.

Baseball execs are trying to tell you right now that the only way to get through this black eye in baseball is to forgive and forget.  No!  The way baseball gets through this is to get pissed about the cheaters.  Try to prove there were some angry good guys in the sport back then who wanted to speak out but thought they would be shouted down by the heads of the game running away with overflowing sacks with the dollar bill sign printed on the sides.  Let us get our fill of this righteous indignation instead of forcing us to repress it.

Shine the light on all the cockroaches, let baseball actually be sorry for this abuse of the game we all love, then strengthen the testing rules and honestly try to make it better.  There is an entire culture in baseball cultivated by Selig and coaches like LaRussa where steroid users are hidden, protected, and secretly encouraged as long as they don’t get caught.  Pressure to be clean by your bosses and peers is the only way these drugs will be squeezed out of the sport.

When Mark McGwire faked coming “clean” last week Bud Selig was ready with open arms to forgive, forget, and declare that this meaningless gesture somehow “puts an end to the steroid era.”  What Selig doesn’t understand is that the era will not be over until he stops this buddying up to the criminals and instead he starts embracing the true heroes of this dark time in baseball.

Like Carlton Fisk.

It's going to be a long decade.

But then I had to surf over to the boys at baseballprospectus.com and find my buzz kill.  There I found an article called “The Cubs’ Contractual Cul-de-Sac” by Kevin Goldstein breaking down the ball clubs contractual situation which he dubbed “among the worst in history”.  Ugh.  Back down to earth.

Yeah the disaster is obvious but I hadn’t heard it put into historical context that way.  Basically the article breaks down the top eight salaries on the Cubs for 2010 and that paints a very bad picture.  Like modern art bad.

The low side of the scale is Carlos Silva at $11.5 million for the fat and oft-injured “hurler”.  This contract is a pretty fair punishment to the club forced upon us because of asshat Milton Bradley and Jim Hendry’s predilection for bidding against himself for career year Texas Rangers.  If that money makes the team as a number 5 starter it will be a miracle.

The top end of the scale is hoppy outfielder Alfonso Soriano with his $18 million this year and $72 more owed through the end of 2014.  It’s already bad money now and by the last couple years of the contract that will look like Congress level bad spending.  The article points out that Marlin’s Cody Ross has the exact same stats as Alfonso during the same time frame as his Cubs contract.  Ouch.

I’m not going to break down every name on the list, but let’s just say there’s a whole lot of bad contracts on the book for 2010.  And the darkest part of it is that all but two of the names have even bigger money owed for years to come.  These cement shoes are not coming off any time soon.  The only two names that can come off the books this year are Derrick Lee and Ted Lilly.  Laughably these are the most value per dollar contracts in the list and with a good showing this year might be in line for a raise.

That fading light at the end of this tunnel is that the Cubs could still somehow luck their way into a World Series in the next year or two.  With half the teams in your division accurately described as an abortion you are never too far from winning the division.  And we all know that getting to the end of October is all about getting hot at the right time.  Even over priced players can piece that together.

Today the Cubs traded Aaron Miles’ lifeless corpse and the able bat of Jake Fox to the A’s for prospects.  The only apparent motive for the trade seems to be to save on the funeral costs for Miles’ career and save the $1.7 of the $2.7M that the Cubs were going to have to pay a guy who looks more like Mickey from Seinfeld than a baseball player.  The Miles contract was an albatross when it was signed and getting rid of him may be just as damaging.

In order to get the A’s to bite at the deal the Cubs tossed in Jake Fox, a flawed but talented player who can hit the hell out of the baseball.  Fox has value.  In return the Cubs received a 28 year old reliever with a whopping 30 innings of major league experience.  This is the only player being added to the 40-man roster out of the deal.  The other prospect of note is a 23 year-old utility outfielder/corner infielder who is according to the Tribune, “a more athletic Fox”.  Mind you this kid was in “A” ball this year and won’t be major league ready for a couple of years.  For a Cub team with a rapidly closing window this seems like a step back.

Jake Fox will take his bat to Oakland next season. Fantasy players take note.

Look, I consider myself a Jake Fox fan but it was clear his future was not on the North Side.  Jake Fox is built for the American League and the DH spot; it’s where he was destined to end up.  I love his bat but he wasn’t going to ever have a spot on a team that has bad contracts all over the outfield and good players at the corner infield spots.  His glove isn’t good enough to play the field everyday.  The point is, I was prepared to move on without Jake Fox.   I wasn’t prepared to give away a useful player to simply be rid of Aaron Miles.  That is not the recipe for success in any professional sport.  Cheap homegrown talent is at the core of championship teams in all sports.  The troubling trend here is that the Cubs have gone from spending their best young talent to acquire players to spending them on ridding themselves of crappy free-agent signings.  The problem with this team is that there are crappy free agent signings all over the outfield.  If this isn’t an indictment of the General Manager than what is?

The short-sighted fiscal responsibility over young talent trend isn’t limited to the Miles/Fox trade.  The Cubs didn’t offer Rich Harden arbitration on the off chance he would accept arbitration over signing with another team for a muti-year deal.  As a Class B free agent the Cubs would have received a draft pick as compensation.  Instead they are looking at internal options for the rotation spot (Could be a “shit or get off the pot” year for Jeff Samardzjia, methinks).  The Cubs of recent vintage would have not been afraid to roll dice on an arbitration decision and the opportunity at a sandwich pick in the upcoming draft.  With a farm system that is bereft of talent, any pick is valuable.

Let’s not forget that the Cubs also have the business of excising the boil that is Milton Bradley’s contract.  The Cubs have said repeatedly that they will not eat all the money in the contract to get a trade done.  That may just be posturing in attempt to not eat the entire deal but these recent moves make you wonder.  Will the Cubs be willing to throw in  prospects in lieu of spending additional dollars?  Do they even have any more prospects anybody would want?

The Cubs organization needs to strike a balance.  They cannot allow themselves to patrol the no-mans land that is having no prospects while trying to cut spending.  This team has so much money spent in long-term deals that they don’t have any choice but to throw good money after bad in hopes they finally find the right formula.  This is the world that you have created for yourself.  Until Josh Vitters and Starlin Castro are ready to take the Cubs into the next decade you need to spend, spend, spend. I assumed that Mr. Ricketts understood that when he bought the club.

In a separate but completely related story; ticket prices are going up at Wrigley Field next season.  The beer better be cold.

“He has a lot of baseball left in his body, and he’s looking for a team, hoping to make them look like geniuses,” agent Damon Lapa said of Jones, who played for the independent Newark Bears in 2009.

Who wants a peice of this?

I call bullshit on him having anything left in his body.  This guy was done when playing at the end of his Cubs career in 2007 when he demanded a trade out of town due to claims of Cubs racism.  Not only was he allegedly getting it from the fans, but also the management was too racist for his taste when firing a bad, bad, bad coach in Dusty Baker to hire a new, tired, probably also bad coach Lou Piniella.

The funniest part is when Jacque signed with the Reds to reunite with his buddy Dusty and the skippper rewarded him with a pink slip in spring training.  That kicked off his new career in the independent leagues and obscurity where he belongs.

That adds Jacque Jones to Milton, Hawkins, and Dusty as my list of schizo bad Cubs plagued by voices of imaginary racism.  The Cubs are a team that never retired the number of a white player until the last 5 years.  I spend a lot of time every year in the bleachers of Wrigley Field and trust me, we boo players not for the color of their skin but for the content of their awful play.

Perhaps a new side effect of massive doses of steriods?

Sammy Sosa is making news again.  This time it isn’t because of massive home runs or sudden loss of English syndrome, but because of his skin color.

It seems that Sosa has been undergoing a skin rejuvenation process that is lightening his skin tone.  It’s Michael Jackson without the disease excuse.   And the results are frightening.

Bye bye LJ

Ryan Moats – Hou:  Supposedly the Texans are going to go with the dreaded and fairly unprecendented (outside of Denver) three RB rotation.  If this trend catches on we will have to disband fantasy football and go back to watching Browns games on their own merit.  Let’s hope this fails.

Jamaal Charles – KC:  LJ is gone this week and has most likely played his last down for the Chefs.  The only other RB’s on the roster are Dantrell Savage and Kolby Smith, who has been injured so long the last time he played, I wore 36 waist pants.  The Chefs are bad but this should be Charles show from here.

Vince Young – Tenn:  I’m not buying it either.  Give the league two weeks to remember how to stop him from scrambling and get ready for stories about how Jake Locker or Sam Bradford would look in Nashville.  Only if you are desperate.

Mike Wallace or Malcom Floyd – These guys are essentially the same.  They are two decent but unremarkable receivers who will contribute one week and disappear the next.   Both of these guys have a firm grasp on their playing time and are serviceable fill-ins.

Eliminator Picks:

Let’s be honest, this has been pretty damn easy to date.  If you were able to dodge the Packer/Bengal landmine in Week 2 you should be on cruise control.  If your strategy isn’t to pick against the Browns, Lions, Bucs, Rams, Chiefs, Redskins or Raiders on the road then you just aren’t paying attention.  These teams are terrible and are completely incapable of beating a real NFL team away from home.  There are 4 road wins among this group of trainwrecks.  The only road win that didn’t come from beating one another was Cleveland’s stirring 6-3 win at Buffalo in Week 5.   The scheduling Gods are throwing you a bit of a curveball this week by giving the Raiders, Browns, and Rams the week off.  Don’t worry the Skins are still on the road.

Smart pick:
Atlanta:  This seems too easy and that scares me.  Washington did have a bye week giving their offensive coordinator/bingo caller a little time to get acclimated.  Clinton Portis isn’t on the injury report for the first time since, well ever?   You still have to like the Falcons at home.  They are 3-0 at home, the Skins are 0-3 on the road.  The Falcons can play a little and aren’t a colossal mess, the Skins are a debacle.

Obvious pick:
New Orleans:  Jake Delhomme is a wretched quarterback.  Seriously he sucks.  How will he hold up in a road game shootout against Drew Brees and an opportunistic Saints D?  I don’t even feel the need to answer that question.  The only compelling reasons not to use the Saints have to do with their schedule and not anything the Panthers can do.  The Saints play the Rams and Bucs the next two weeks.  That’s like an Eliminator bye week.

Balls of Steel pick:
Jacksonville:  They are playing a bad Chiefs team, but a well-rested bad Chiefs team coming off the bye.  The Chefs may have had a “coming together as a team moment” after lancing the boil that is Larry Johnson.  The Jags just aren’t very good either.  This is not a pick for the faint of heart.

Cubs Free Agent Prize!:

The Cubs just landed their big free-agent prize of the offseason.  They signed the Rangers hitting coach!!  Cub fans have been told to rejoice over this development.  Why you ask?  He was the hitting coach for slugging superstars such as Sammy Sosa, Jeff Bagwell, A-Rod, Juan Gonzalez, and Ivan Rodriguez!  Those five guys no doubt relied on hitting techniques and hours in the cage to reach the pinnacle of their profession.  Texas also played in a park where the ball travels only slightly worse than if they played on the surface of the moon.  That’s right; his best players juiced and played half their games in a park where I could probably hit a ball to the warning track.

What would the Cubs pay a man that clearly has some inflated credentials?  Why not shatter the all-time hitting coach pay day with a 3 year $2.4M deal (let me reiterate, THAT’S FOR A HITTING COACH!!!!!!!).  I love it!

In other news, Josh Vitters, the Cubs number 1 pick and latest great hope, went 3-5 in his first fall league game.  On the three AB’s he got his three hits he saw a grand total of four pitches.  He also made a throwing error and had a baserunning gaffe.  Does this sound familiar to Cub fans?  He’s hitting low minors pitching but has a long swing, poor plate discipline and is bereft of baseball sense.  Want to bet that he won’t have a TRUE defensive position by the time he’s in Double-A?  (I know I’m basing this on one game, but Cub fans aren’t especially logical and I’m not either.)

Only the Cubs wouldn’t realize that these two stories are indirectly related.  When you scout and develop talent, high priced hitting coaches aren’t going to be needed and I won’t have to listen to sports radio talking about how it’s great that we got the hitting coach of the Needlebutt All-Stars.  If we want progress, perhaps we should have gotten the team trainer.

(Note:  I have not mentioned the fact that he was Uncle Miltie’s hitting coach and this may be a concession that they cannot move him in a sensible deal and are hoping that they can rehab him by signing his hitting coach that he loved in Texas.  I haven’t mentioned it b/c that makes me want to hurt myself.)

My next rant will come the day we wildly overpay Chone Figgins to the tune of a 5yr-$40M contract.  I expect that the first week of December.  I’m kind of glad he has sucked in the playoffs or that drum beat would be deafening right now.  I look forward to watching his one measureable plus attribute, speed, decline as he ages in a Cub uniform.

Thankfully there are a lot of days until Pitchers and Catchers report.  I’m going to need them all.