It's not me, it's you

So the Phillies went to the Opryland Resort in Nashville for the Winter Meetings and came back empty handed (though I bet one of the guys in the travelling party swiped a towel or two and all of the sample bottles of shampoo and soap… they know who they are), which really isn’t much of a surprise. After all, just a few weeks ago general manager Pat Gillick told the local scribes to stay home to save them from the boredom. Then he said he wanted to leave Nashville with a pitcher. In between all of that he called Randy Wolf a jerk for choosing his family and sunny California over dreary Philadelphia and its bandbox of a ballpark.

Nevertheless, the Phillies and… well, the nothing they left with was hardly the most interesting part of the Winter Meetings. Instead, the most interesting part of the Winter Meetings was Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa’s verbal thrashing of ex-Phillie (and soon to be ex-Cardinal) Scott Rolen in which he ripped the gold glove third baseman a new one before adding, “But of course we’d like to have him back… I don’t understand why he wouldn’t want to come back.”

Then he looked to the side, flashed his lashes coquettishly with his hands jammed into his pockets as he shyly twisted his foot into the ground. Seconds later, a balloon cloud appeared adjacent to the halo above La Russa’s head with, “I’m a li’l stinker,” written in it.

Tony La Russa is, indeed, a little stinker. He’s also a hypocrite and a jackass, but we’ll get into that soon enough. Let’s backtrack to the stuff he said about Rolen for a second.

Here’s the Greatest Hits version from La Russa’s diatribe at Opryland on Wednesday:

“It was unanimous that everyone was for me except him. It's gotten to the point where I don't care. What I care about is that he re-establish his stature as a major league productive star.”

“Scott's got a lot of goodness to him. ... I think he has been a team man. He plays a team sport. I don't think he's going to want to be the one guy and the 24 guys on the other side of the room.”

“There's absolutely no intention to accommodate Scott. I mean, that's not how you run an organization. The idea is to accommodate the St. Louis Cardinals, our team, our responsibility to our players and to the competition. So, no, I don't want to accommodate Scott. But somebody doesn't want to be part of the situation, you investigate it.”

“Nobody has more often said that I don't think Scott should be traded than me. I think he should be with our club. I think we need him. We need him to reassert himself as an impact player. I don't care what anybody wants in a trade. We need him and we expect him to be productive.”

“It's very clear that he's unhappy. And I'm making it clear that I don't know why he's unhappy. I can make a list of 50 respect points that this man has been given by our organization. It's time for him to give back.”

“He's got a contract to play, and we need him to play. And he's going to be treated very honestly.”

“If he plays hard and he plays as well as he can, he plays. And if he doesn't, he can sit. If he doesn't like it, he can quit.”

“I think he's strong-minded enough that I don't see his opinion changing on a personal basis. And it's gotten to the point that I don't care. What I care about is that he re-establish his stature as a Major League productive star. And that's one of the points I've tried to make to him.

“We've had issues where guys are saying, 'What's going on with Scott?' And he needs to understand that he's slipped, not in his play, but just in the way he's perceived as being the Scott we've known for a few years. And I think that means a lot to him. He can play mad every day if he wants to. It's OK.”

“He asked to be traded, so under normal circumstances if a guy doesn't want to be part of your situation, then you consider that. So inquiries have been made. There hasn't been anything happening so far that would make the guys in charge pull the trigger . . . I'm just saying from a manager's point of view, I consistently say don't trade him. And I say that because one of our important needs is to have somebody who can hit behind Albert [ Pujols].

“I think he has put some things together in his mind and I think he needs to understand that the Cardinals have given him a lot since he's gotten here. He's been given a contract, a world championship, and he's given back some. And so, we need him.”

So yeah, La Russa told Rolen he’s a bad teammate and that everyone else likes the manager but him so he should just shut up and play for a guy he does not like. I don’t know otherwise, but I’m also guessing there isn’t much respect for La Russa either. Sure, he’s a good manager and all of that and Rolen had problems with his last manager before the Phillies sent him to St. Louis.

But I don’t think Rolen ever had to go to court to plead guilty for being drunk and asleep behind the wheel of his car in the middle of an intersection. I also dug around and can’t find any YouTube videos of Rolen flunking a field sobriety test.

I found one of Tony La Russa, though. Here it is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wfztB1KrtE&rel=1]

Two months after this event occurred in Florida, one of La Russa’s pitchers (Josh Hancock) was killed when he was driving drunk. Actually, it was reported that in the days prior to Hancock’s death La Russa had a meeting with the pitcher about drinking.

But really, that isn’t La Russa’s problem. Nor does he set the agenda that Major League Baseball is in business with companies that push the last legal drug. Instead, La Russa’s job is simply to win baseball games and if it takes tearing down Scott Rolen in order to do so, that’s part of it.

Yes, his job is to win baseball games and it’s something he does very well. Better yet, La Russa seems to have a laser focus on winning games to the point that nothing else matters. It’s all about La Russa and winning ballgames.

For instance, La Russa has been an ardent defender of Mark McGwire and the allegations of performance-enhancing drug use during the former player’s assault on the single-season home run records. In 2006, after McGwire’s infamous showing before the Congressional House Government Reform Committee, La Russa continued to maintain that his former player was “legal,” which is a bit semantically. McGwire admitted to using then-legal steroid, androstenedione.

“I have long felt, and still do, there are certain players who need to publicize the legal way to get strong,” La Russa told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March of 2006. “That’s my biggest complaint. When those players have been asked, they’ve been very defensive or they’ve come out and said ‘Whatever.’ Somebody should explain that you can get big and strong in a legal way. If you’re willing to work hard and be smart about what you ingest, it can be done in a legal way.”

Nothing has dissuaded La Russa from believing McGwire was clean.

“That’s the basis of why I felt so strongly about Mark. I saw him do that for years and years and years. That’s why I believe it. I don’t have anything else to add. Nothing has happened since he made that statement to change my mind.”

La Russa managed the Oakland A’s when McGwire and Jose Canseco were the most-feared slugging duo in the game. Canseco, of course, detailed his (and McGwire’s) steroid use in his book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big. But when he played for La Russa, Canseco was something of a “steroid evangelist,” as Howard Bryant wrote in his book, Juicing the Game:

He talked about steroids all of the time, about what they could do and how they helped him. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Canseco put the A’s in a difficult position. The question of his steroid use and the possible use by another teammate, budding superstar named Mark McGwire, grew to be an open suspicion.

Deeply compromised was Tony La Russa. Canseco often spoke unapologetically about steroids, yet La Russa did nothing about it. … La Russa knew about Canseco’s steroid use because Canseco had told him so. Under the spirit of baseball’s rules, La Russa could have contacted his boss, Sandy Alderson, who in turn could have told the Commissioner’s office. That’s how the chain of command was supposed to work, but Canseco was a superstar player, an MVP, and the cornerstone of the Oakland revival. Turning him in would have produced a high-profile disaster. La Russa, knowing that his best player was a steroid user, did nothing.

In fact, La Russa did more than nothing. He not only did not talk to Alderson, but actively came to Canseco’s defense. …

But perhaps the best example of La Russa’s unwavering focus on winning baseball games at the sacrifice of everything else came when he was just beginning as Major League manager for the Chicago White Sox in 1983. Just as the White Sox had broken camp and were to begin the ’83 season that ended with the White Sox winning the AL West, La Russa’s wife, Elaine, called from Florida to tell her husband that she and their 4-year old and 1-year old daughters would not be joining him in Chicago because she had, as detailed in Buzz Bissinger’s 3 Nights in August, been diagnosed with pneumonia and required hospitalization.

According to Bissinger:

La Russa responded to the news with a fateful decision, one that would cement his status as a baseball man but would define him in another way.

Based on a strong finish in 1982, the expectations were high for the White Sox in 1983. But the season got off to a wretched start, mired at 16 and 24. Floyd Bannister was having trouble winning anything. La Marr Hoyt had a record of 2 and 6 and Carlton Fisk was a mess at the plate. In the middle of May, the team had lost eight of nine games. Toronto swept them; then Baltimore swept them. La Russa found himself fighting for his life, or what he mistook for his life. He had a team that was supposed to win, that had spent money on free agents and had good pitching and still wasn’t winning. The only reason he was still around was because of the vision of White Sox owner Reinsdorf, who continued to stand by him. So he did what he thought he had to do: He called his sister in Tampa and asked whether she could take care of the kids so he could take care of baseball.

Bissinger writes that La Russa regretted the decision and has never forgiven himself, but a pattern of behavior that put baseball before anything and everything else was in motion.

So yeah, maybe Rolen does have a problem with La Russa, though the manager just can’t seem to figure it out.

“I keep saying it, I don't understand. I told him this. He's never given me an explanation,” La Russa said. “I don't understand why he can be down on the Cardinals, and I don't understand why he can be down on me.”

Maybe people just don’t get along? Maybe there is no explanation? Or, perhaps, maybe some people don’t want to be judged by the company they keep. Either way, it doesn’t seem as if Rolen is going to change his position and it appears very certain that La Russa hasn't done anything different than he had done in the past.

We waited for this?

As Billy Bob Thornton said in the epic film, Bad Santa, “Kids… they’ll run you ragged.There have never been truer words spoken in the entire history of the cinematic arts, and the fact that it took a movie about a miserable conman and his partner who poses as Santa and his Little Helper in order to rob department stores on Christmas Eve should be of no consequence.

Kids will run you ragged. It’s so very true.

As a result of being run ragged over the last three weeks or so, I’ve had a chance to really watch the Phillies very closely on television and at the ballpark (and I’ll be tap-tap-tapping away on my little laptop from the splendor of Robert Francis Kennedy Memorial Stadium in the District of Columbia this weekend) and I gotta tell you – I’m perplexed.

The Phillies are running me ragged.

Thinking about the Phillies and their chances to make the playoffs renders the same response as my wife gets when she peppers me with three questions without pause right on top of each other. Actually, this happens at least twice a day and my response is always the same – my brow scrunches tight, my eyes narrow and then my lips move but no cognitive sounds come out of my mouth.

It’s as if my brain was a typewriter and someone pushed all of the keys at the same time.

Anyway, most folks will tell you that the Phillies’ 13-11 victory over the Cardinals in St. Louis last night was a harbinger of bad things to come. Nursing an 11-run lead into the late innings the way our pal Ken Mandel suckles a Shirley Temple, the Phillies’ bullpen turned the game into a save situation and faced a handful of at-bats in which to potential game-winning run was at the plate. Had the Phillies lost the game it would have been devastating, they say, because there are so few games remaining in the season.

How does a team deep in the throes of a pennant race bounce back from blowing an 11-0 lead?

Guess what? We’ll never know.

We’ll never know because the Phillies didn’t blow the 11-0 lead. In fact, they won the game and picked up more ground in the NL East standings to cut the Mets’ lead to 2½ games. Sure, there was the issue of the bullpen giving up 11 runs in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, but chances are manager Charlie Manuel will bypass relievers Clay Condrey (five runs on four hits without getting an out) and Jose Mesa (6.11 ERA) in any situation of significance during the next 12 games. With J.C. Romero, Tom Gordon and Brett Myers unavailable last night because of the heavy lifting the trio did in sweeping the Mets at Shea last weekend, the Phillies’ bullpen was asked to do nothing more than play a little matador defense.

With an 11-run lead what else were they supposed to do? You know, aside from give up 11 runs…

Though Gordon is recovering from back spasms, the Phillies seem to have everyone in place for the final 12 games. With Cole Hamels set to start tonight – though he will only throw approximately 70 pitches before he heads back to the clubhouse to rub fish oil on his arm – the rotation is as good as it is going to get. And with Myers entrenched at the back of the bullpen, along with Gordon, Romero, and Geoff Geary as the go-to relievers, everyone is reasonably healthy.

The real question is whether or not the Phillies’ pitching is good enough. Most people have doubts, though the answer will be evident in less than two weeks.

The day of reckoning It should be noted that the public relations folks that run interference for Floyd Landis have supplied me with all pertinent information to this point regarding the soon-to-be announced decision by the three-man arbitration panel in the USADA’s doping case against the Lancaster Countian and Tour de France champ. But the truth is there really isn’t anything anyone can say… at least until the big day comes.

Which will be soon, apparently.

Either way, Floyd’s people have been nothing but kind to me, which makes me feel a tiny bit bad about being a little smart-assy with them yesterday… but not that much. I kind of base my entire personality around being a jerk.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that we will know whether or not Floyd is exonerated or will face a ban and more legal wrangling by Saturday… or Sunday… absolutely by Monday.

Take your numbers and crunch them In an essay for ESPN.com, the advanced and wildly astute cultural commentator Chuck Klosterman explained that fantasy football has nothing to do with reality or football. Yet despite this – or because of this – fantasy football remains wildly popular. People, it seems, love to use non-contextual statistics to show others that they… well, I don’t know what they’re trying to prove. It’s the gambling, I guess.

Anyway, if there was a better example of how sports statistics are meaningless (aside from Barry Bonds and pretty much all of baseball and football), it was seen in Donovan McNabb’s outing against the Washington Redskins last night. By all reasonable accounts, McNabb turned in a mediocre (at best) game in the 20-12 loss. However, his 240-yards passing (on 28-for-46) looks fairly decent considering that McNabb did not throw an interception.

But McNabb wasn’t very good and his team lost the game. Do you think that fantasy football players care about that?

Of course not.

My theory is that 75 (maybe 90) percent of the folks that follow the NFL from week to week do so solely for fantasy/gambling purposes. Actually, my contention is that most people really don’t care about football aside from the folks wearing the local team’s uniform, but the fact that Kelly Holcomb is a person's bye week starter makes every smacked ass with a wireless card Doctor freaking Z.

My point is sports statistics are meaningless. They are meaningless because good players on good teams sacrifice personal glory and statistics for the good of the team. In a sense these players on good teams are a type of neo-Marxists like Steve Nash and Derek Jeter, who, despite the fact that they make hundreds of millions of dollars, wantonly distribute and share the statistical wealth to their teammates. To players like Jeter and Nash, and locally, Chase Utley, the numbers beneath their names don’t mean nearly as much as the digits in the win-loss columns.

That's the biggest reason why people, subconsciously, don't want fantasy sports to be "real."

Regardless, my personal draw to fantasy football is the incessant one-upsmanship in trying to be the most funny and the most insulting amongst the people in the league. In fact, I can’t think of any other reason to participate... well, aside from winning the league championship (like I did last season) and the ancillary benefits that go with such a thing.

Finally The burgeoning criminals behind the art-rock band, Les Savy Fav, have released a new album. It's called "Let's Stay Friends," and the masterminds at Pitchfork gave it an 8.3, which seems rather arbitrary, though I'm sure it's very meaningful.

Anyway, I uploaded three tracks from the new record on the widget on the right column. Go nuts.

It's Game 3!

Here are a few observations from Tuesday night’s Game 3 in St. Louis:

* If I’m not mistaken, commissioner Bud Selig took the “boys will be boys” approach to the controversy regarding Kenny Rogers and his dirty hand during Fox’s pre-game show. In an on-the-field interview with the always-entertaining Penn alum, Ken Rosenthal, Selig said that if Tony La Russa didn’t do anything about it, why should he?

Selig said that La Russa has been known to be combative.

What Selig and player’s union president Donald Fehr were with Rosenthal for was to announce the new labor agreement that will last through the 2011 season.

Selig called the new deal “historic.” You know, like the Treaty of Versailles.

* Kevin Kennedy, one of Fox’s pre-game analysts with a penchant for dismissing everything controversial in the game, was on top of his game on Tuesday night. This summer he debunked all steroid and performance-enhancing drug accusations and controversies with a hand waving, “He never tested positive!” As well as, “Put your name next to it! Stop using unnamed sources!”

OK, Mr. Haldeman.

Much to our surprise, Kennedy was just as dismissive of the Rogers controversy.

“It happens all the time,” Kennedy said. “It’s part of the game.”

Could you imagine what Kennedy might say if he were in Uganda with Idi Amin when people just started disappearing.

“What? It’s no big deal. It happens all the time. That’s just Idi being Idi.”

Yes, I see how silly it sounds comparing a brutal, homicidal dictator to a baseball pitcher with dirty hands and an apologist announcer. Better yet, it reminds me of one of my favorite Tug McGraw quotes.

After escaping from a tough, late-inning jam against the Big Red Machine's Joe Morgan, George Foster, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench with his typical aplomb, Tug was asked by a reporter how he was able to stay so cool. “Well,” he said. “Ten million years from now, when the sun burns out and the Earth is just a frozen snowball hurtling through space, nobody's going to care whether or not I got this guy out.”

My favorite Tug quote is when he was asked what he would do with the money he got for making it to the World Series with the Mets in 1973.

“Ninety percent I'll spend on good times, women and Irish whiskey. The other 10 percent I'll probably waste.”

* I had Nate Robertson on my rotisserie team this season, Game 3 was the first time I saw him pitch. He’s a lefty… imagine that. He wears glasses, too. He’s also No. 29 like 1968 World Series hero Mickey Lolich and has been driving the same car for a really long time.

At various points of the season, I also had Jason Isringhausen, Anthony Reyes, Jason Marquis, Preston Wilson and David Eckstein of the Cardinals, as well as Pudge Rodriguez, Craig Monroe, Brandon Inge and Sean Casey of the Tigers.

I finished in ninth place of a 12-team league.

* Richard Ford’s new novel The Lay of the Land is out. This is the third of the Frank Bascombe series, which includes The Sportswriter and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day. The reviews look good, which isn’t too surprising since Ford is a bit of a media darling. Nevertheless, I’m anxious to dive in.

* I had the chance to tune into the radio broadcast of the start of the game while running an errand. ESPN radio’s Jon Miller and Joe Morgan handle the call on radio, which is filled with much more insight than the TV version.

Yeah, I know a lot of people are not fans of Morgan’s work for ESPN, but there were a few nuggets from Morgan and Miller that the more superficial TV broadcast would miss.

This is no fault of TV, I suppose. After all, if someone is listening to the World Series on the radio they are seeking it out. A non-baseball fan isn’t going to drive around and listen to the game, though that same non-fan person could tune in on TV. You know, maybe the batteries on the remote died or something.

Anyway, Morgan and Miller pointed out that Preston Wilson could be the key for the Cardinals in Game 3. The reason? Wilson is in the No. 2 spot of the batting order, one place ahead of Albert Pujols. It would be Wilson’s job to ensure that the Tigers cannot pitch around the fearsome Pujols.

Yet because Wilson is hitting ahead of Pujols, the duo pointed out, he should get a lot more pitches to hit than if he were batting in front of, say, Jim Edmonds or Scott Rolen. Plus, they said, Tony La Russa likes for someone with some power to hit ahead of Pujols in the No. 2 spot. That’s why Wilson is so important, the announcers said.

This is interesting, though if La Russa likes power in the two-hole, why not try Edmonds or Rolen there. Certainly they both have much more power than Wilson and strike out a lot less, too.

* In the first inning after Robertson came up and in to Pujols, Morgan made a joke.

“Looks like that one slipped. Maybe he needs some pine tar?” Morgan said.

“He plays for the Tigers,” Miller said. “I think I know where he can get some.”

It made me laugh.