What would Roberto Clemente do?

I'm pretty sure he wouldn't approve of this response.

At a news conference Thursday following an owners meeting, Selig brushed off calls to move the All-Star Game out of Phoenix and instead pointed in defense of baseball’s minority hiring record.

"Apparently all the people around and in minority communities think we're doing OK. That's the issue, and that's the answer," Selig reportedly said.

"I told the clubs today: 'Be proud of what we've done.' They are. We should. And that's our answer. We control our own fate, and we've done very well," he adds.

Of course, even that's better than the transparent bullshit issued by the Diamondbacks' owner.

"We certainly are well aware of the struggles our state has due to federal inaction on illegal immigration," Kendrick said in the statement. "The fallout of recent state legislation has a direct impact on many of our players, employees and fans in Arizona, not to mention our local businesses, many of which are corporate partners of ours.

"Unfortunately, this whole situation is sad and disappointing for all of us who are associated with the Arizona Diamondbacks. We remain hopeful that this situation can be resolved in a manner that does not cause harm to our great state."

Kendrick, who would not take questions when reached on the phone Friday, has been targeted by opponents of the bill because of his previous contributions to the Republican party.

UPDATE: Doug Glanville, in what is sadly his last column for the NY Times before going to the barren territory of ESPN, writes about something that surprised him -- and me -- the openness with which pro athletes have been protesting the AZ immigration statute.

Many of today’s players are those 12– to 18-year-olds from a decade ago, and they didn’t see the erosion of privacy as a loss, but rather as an invitation to be open.

As a result, today’s players have a voice, and it is never off, never toned down for a minute. You tweet, you post, and the world listens. Baseball, with more young general managers like Josh Byrnes in Arizona and Jon Daniels in Texas, is even more with the times and more likely to embrace the culture of the player. They understand that everyone is an enterprise, and that collective enterprise can effect change in a micro-minute.

We will see how things in Arizona will play out in the coming days and weeks. But regardless, public political neutrality for the athletes has gone out the window. In many ways, it is historic, maybe a paradigm shift for how players see and use their voice. It will go through challenges, most likely swerving left and right for a while, but if nothing else, you will know where everyone stands — and there is something refreshing about that.

We'll see, indeed. While the Pheonix Suns have protested, I haven't heard much from the Diamondbacks team. As Glanville writes earlier in the column,

In so many organizational cultures in sports, the ownership is the invisible smoke in the room. You feel its presence, you know it is there, but you can’t find it, you can’t relate to it, you can’t talk to it, even though it is changing the chemistry all around you. And you cannot possibly know what impact your public opinions can have on how you will be perceived. Because even in the sports world, perception — not just your batting average — is reality.

Something tells me the Kendrick smoke is pretty noxious.

"Johnny Baseball"

A new show in Boston looks at one of the central reasons the Red Sox didn't win a World Serious for 86 years.

“Johnny Baseball’’ traces the Curse back to 1919 and the collision of three lives: rookie player Johnny O’Brien, his idol Babe Ruth, and Daisy, the object of his affection. The play’s action moves back and forth among three time periods: the early days of Johnny and Daisy’s romance; 1948, when a talented young black player tries out at Fenway Park for team owner Tom Yawkey and general manager Joe Cronin; and Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, when David Ortiz hits a two-run walkoff homer in the 12th inning to save the Sox from elimination, and the Curse begins to lift. The voice you hear calling the plays during the show? None other than Sean McDonough. The musical mixes spry tunes composed by Reale’s brother Robert with provocative social history, which makes it an ideal project for ART artistic director Diane Paulus, whose mission is to create populist theater with integrity.

“This is exactly the kind of show we should be doing,’’ says Paulus, who was, serendipitously, attached to “Johnny Baseball’’ as a freelance director before she was hired to run the ART. “Part of what we do in theater is keep our stories alive and keep our history present. And so much of what I’ve been interested in this year has been kind of enlarging what we call the [theatrical] experience.’’

To that end the ART, which has already this season staged an immersive production of “Macbeth’’ in an empty schoolhouse and a reimagined “A Midsummer Night’s Dream’’ as a disco romp, is turning the area around Cambridge’s Loeb Drama Center into a mini-Yawkey Way with hot dog vendors, popcorn, and beer that — hold onto your caps — will be allowed in the theater. Paulus hopes their love of the game will lure neophytes who would otherwise be more inclined to spend the evening at a sports venue than in a playhouse.

But some wonder if Paulus and the company are prepared for the responses the show may elicit. Glenn Stout, sportswriter and editor and coauthor of “Red Sox Century,’’ has a long list of concerns.

“What worries me more than anything is I hope it doesn’t trivialize a subject I don’t think should be trivialized,’’ Stout says. “Racism is a dangerous, complicated subject, and I’m not sure a commercial musical is the right way to explore it. I assume it has a happy ending? A story that makes it seem like it’s over now? That’s a real concern. I’m not saying today’s Red Sox are the same as in the past, but racism is still an important element in all professional sports. And I think some members of Red Sox Nation are going to be angry the subject is broached at all.’’

Now, the Yankees weren't much better when it came to integrating the team and I don't know too many historians of baseball who don't think it affected the team's declining fortunes in the 1960s. It sounds like the defenders of "Yawkey Way" are still working for the Sox and still in denial.

Among the latter is Dick Bresciani, Red Sox vice president and team historian, who responds to a question about how racism is documented in the Sox archives with exasperation.

“I don’t think there’s any way we’ve dealt with it in the official annals. Who can say what is racism? We don’t believe we had racism,’’ Bresciani says. “You can’t judge people who are deceased by their beliefs. You can’t judge them by what you read or hear. That’s not factual.’’

One fact is that the Red Sox had a chance to sign Jackie Robinson when he tried out at Fenway in 1945. But the team passed, and Robinson went on to break the major league color barrier two years later and become a superstar with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Another fact is that Tommy Harper, who played for the Sox in the early 1970s and returned for several stints on the team’s coaching staff, successfully sued the Red Sox for firing him in 1985 after he complained in the media about the club allowing segregated festivities during spring training in Florida. Harper — now a minor league consultant for the Sox who is being inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame this year — believes that a refresher is in order.

Cocks!

The convergence of baseball and politics...and not in a good way.

Boycotting D-Backs

At his Edge of Sports blog, Dave Zirin, notes the complicity of the Arizona Diamondbacks ownership with the real innovative and cool laws the Republicans of that state are laying down.

As the official Arizona Diamondbacks boycott call states, “In 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s third highest Contributor was the [executives of the] Arizona Diamondbacks, who gave $121,600; furthermore, they also contributed $129,500, which ranked as the eighteenth highest contribution to the Republican Party Committee.” The team’s big boss, Ken Kendrick, and his family members, E. G. Kendrick Sr. and Randy Kendrick, made contributions to the Republicans totaling a staggering $1,023,527. The Kendricks follow in the footsteps of team founder and former owner Jerry Colangelo. Colangelo, along with other baseball executives and ex-players, launched a group called Battin’ 1000: a national campaign that uses baseball memorabilia to raise funds for a Campus for Life, the largest anti-choice student network in the country. Colangelo was also deputy chair of Bush/Cheney 2004 in Arizona, and his deep pockets created what was called the Presidential Prayer Team—a private evangelical group that claims to have signed up more than 1 million people to drop to their knees and pray daily for Bush.

As one of his commenters points out, though, fans in Arizona have been boycotting D-Backs games since 2003.

Cactus league hatred

I've often thought about Madam Cura and I taking a trip to the Cactus League in Arizona for Spring Training. I hear the weather's better than Florida and so are the prices. Now, I doubt it, even after they strike down the law as un-Constitutional.

Boston history

This is crazy. And, if you can believe Glenn Stout, really, really dumb.

Red Sox history – in fact the entire history of the city and the Commonwealth – are in these newspapers, in papers like the old Boston Post, where Paul Shannon was one of most colorful sportswriters the city has ever seen, in the Daily Record, where Dave “the Colonel” Egan drove Ted Williams batty and pushed for integration before it was popular, and in the Boston Chronicle, where my late, great old friend Doc Kountze covered the athletes the rest of the Boston press did not, African Americans like Malden sprinter Louise Stokes, the first African American woman to make the U.S. Olympic team, and semi-pro pitcher Will Jackman, who threw a submarine knuckleball and might have been as good as Satchel Page. That’s where the history lives, in those thousands of newspapers from every corner of the state.

I know this because when I worked at the Boston Public Library I spent years helping to administer millions of dollars in state and federal funds to film and preserve these collections. And in those collections I found my calling as a writer and author, a career that now spans more than two decades and nearly eighty books of one kind or another that have sold a couple million copies, most of which could not have been written without the resources of the Boston Public Library’s Microtext department.

But I digress. Red Sox history is being sent in exile. The city wants to close the Microtext Department at the BPL which cares for, services and houses newspapers and other collections on microfilm, the department that literally provides access to the history of not only the Red Sox, but the Bruins, the Patriots, the Boston Marathon, the Boston Garden, Fenway Park, the old Boston Arena, the Huntington Avenue Grounds, Harvard Stadium, Boston College, … you get the idea. The city wants to close the department, move some of the film to the hard to reach City of Boston Archive Center in West Roxbury, disperse the rest to other BPL departments, can the staff, squander decades of institutional knowledge, and use the space they recently spent gazillions renovating for the department, for, oh, I don’t know, weddings or cocktail parties. Once they do that the ability to do the kind of research it takes to write a serious book about Red Sox history becomes almost impossible – having the resources you need in one place, at one time, is invaluable and irreplaceable.

I know this not just from my own experience, but because when I was at the BPL I helped local sports writers like Steve Buckley and national guys like Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford use these resources. I remember one guy in particular I helped – named Halberstam. Won a Pulitzer Prize that helped stop the Vietnam War and wrote a really great book about the Red Sox - Summer of ’49. Ever heard of him?

He could not have written that book without the BPL, and neither could Dan Shaughnessy have written The Curse of the Bambino, Howard Bryant Shut Out, Richard Johnson and I Red Sox Century, Ed Linn Hitter, Leigh Montville The Big Bam or any other author, like Buckley or Bill Nowlin or Bill Reynolds, who have written anything worthwhile about Red Sox history. None of these books – none - could have been done without the newspapers on microfilm at the Boston Public Library. Fenway 1912, which I just finished and comes out next year, would have been impossible.

And here’s the really, really awful part. This is supposed to save the city money. But this department, like much the Library, actually earns back every dime a hundred times over. I am just one of thousands of writers who use or have used the Library, who make special trips to Boston just to use the library and end up spending money on a lot of other things, or have lived in Boston, in part, because the Library was one of the places that make Boston a place worth living. Every book written by any writer on any subject who has used the Library – we’re talking thousands of books that have sold millions and millions of copies, here – pours money right back into city coffers every day of every week.

Not to mention books about the history of Boston polish the city's luster, attracting tourist dollars, not just authors.

Via Banter.

Dominican baseball

The Times "Bats" blog has a great Q&A with Mark Kurlansky, author of books on salt, cod, and oysters, who has now turned his journalistic attention to the baseball pipeline that has long been San Pedro, Dominican Republic. And sugar.

Mark Kurlansky: Sugar is why baseball developed in San Pedro. Having fertile flat land and a well-located and well-sheltered port, San Pedro became the sugar center of the Dominican Republic during the sugar boom in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Between 1876 and 1916, eight sugar mills were established in San Pedro. They were all owned or operated by Americans and Cubans at a time when baseball was a near obsession in both Cuba and the United States. The mills found it difficult to find Dominican workers because most agrarian Dominicans would rather work a small but fertile plot by themselves than endure the abuse of a salaried job for the sugar companies.

So the mills brought in sugar workers from the British West Indies, islands where the sugar industry had never recovered from the abolition of slavery. Many of them were cricket players and had a great deal of time to play, since sugar mills have little work for about half of the year. So the Cuban and American executives formed their idle bat swinging workers into baseball teams.

Each of the eight mills had a team, so there was an eight-team sugar league that competed fiercely and developed a very high standard of baseball. Many of the town’s players who went on to the major leagues got their start in this sugar league. Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money. Why would anyone stuck working in a sugar mill not want to take a shot at being a professional baseball player instead?

Q.

Outlining the history of the Dominican Republic and San Pedro, you write, “It seemed that baseball was the one thing a small Latin American nation could gain from a U.S. invasion.” Explain.

A.

Dominicans, Nicaraguans and even the already highly skilled Cubans greatly improved their baseball skills when occupied by U.S. troops. The only acceptable resistance to a hated American presence was to try to beat them in baseball games.

Q.

How did the dictator Rafael Trujillo influence the development of baseball in the Dominican Republic? Was Trujillo a baseball fan?

A.

Trujillo was more of a merengue guy, not particularly interested in baseball, but his unstable brother and psychotic son were. And after he renamed the capitol after himself and combined the two Santo Domingo teams into one bearing his name, the Trujillo team had to win.

After San Pedro beat them for the championship in 1936, winning became an obsession. He opened up the treasury of stolen wealth and hired top Negro League stars, even kidnapped some from San Pedro. Trujillo won the 1937 championship but both teams had spent so much effort and money in the fight that it was the end of professional Dominican baseball until the 1950s.

Oh, fer christ's sake

MLB drug tests managers?

Back in the day, I stopped patronizing lens crafters when they built a marketing campaign boasting that they drug tested their employees. I was unimpressed. I'm less impressed by the idea of testing field managers for what they do in their personal lives.

Jim Bunning, labor activist

Jim Bunning hasn't always been a cranky nutcase Senator. He was as you so often hear, a very good pitcher. He was also instrumental in the hiring of Marvin Miller and the formation of the players' union.

Miller met with Bunning and the search committee in 1965. Free agency wasn't even a gleam in Andy Messersmith's eye yet, and the players' complaints at that point centered mostly on a pension plan that its union had long underfunded. "I was doing my level best to try and understand what their problems were," Miller says, "what they hoped their organization could become. I was having a terrible time, because whenever I would manage to steer the conversation that way, I would get responses about the pension plan and almost nothing else. Finally, I said, 'You know, there are other things to be concerned about.' At that point, Bunning opened up a little. He talked about scheduling problems, about back-to-back doubleheaders, getaway days, playing at night and having to take a plane in the middle of the night to another city and having to play the next day — all kinds of problems like that. And he was pretty voluble about such things once I primed the pump a little."

Of course, even then, says Miller, "He was way to the right."

And now?

Miller and Bunning remained friendly over the years, even after the latter entered politics. (He sought out Miller's advice when he was mulling a run for governor of Kentucky.) From afar, Miller followed Bunning's 2004 Senate campaign, during which the senator did just about everything short of howl naked at the moon. "Peculiar" is Miller's gentle characterization of his old friend's behavior. "I tell you," he says with a small sigh, "I'm a little worried about him."

Pulling back the curtain

Dems could have been...well, Dems...and quietly allowed Bunning to place his "objection" to the bill extending jobless benefits that will run out on Sunday. We would have seen the usual stories about how "Democrats fail to pass a jobless bill" -- in fact, early stories took just that lede. But they didn't. They stayed in session and forced Bunning to repeat his objection deep into the night. The result was putting a face on the Senate GOP's constant obstruction, and on a bill that everyone, everyone, knows simply has to be passed.

Democrats have been under pressure from their allies to be more aggressive and public in challenging Republican procedural tactics and to not quietly accept the fact that they have to consume days and produce 60 votes to move ahead on most subjects. Why not force all-night sessions? How about old-fashioned filibusters?

Despite ample frustrations, Democrats have been reluctant to embrace such ideas. From a practical standpoint, lawmakers have busy schedules, and forcing Republicans to stay around means Democrats must stay as well. They said the filibuster had been idealized in a Jimmy Stewart, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” fashion, when the rules make it easy for Republicans to sustain one without a single individual holding the floor for hours.

Then there is the fact that many senators are advanced in years and not eager to pull all-nighters.

But Democrats said they were finding that pulling back the Senate curtain a bit had its benefits. A few weeks ago, the leadership disclosed that Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, had placed holds preventing Senate votes on dozens of administration nominations to gain leverage for some home-state projects. The revelation generated significant media buzz, and Mr. Shelby backed off in a matter of days.

The situation with Mr. Bunning has yet to be resolved, but the showdown has already gotten plenty of attention. As they mixed it up on the Senate floor, Democrats said they found the airing of their grievances with Mr. Bunning cathartic and beneficial to the Senate.

“When Senator Bunning decided to do this, it came with a risk,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “And the risk was that there were going to be senators who were going to speak out about it.” She said that both parties had been at fault in the Senate, “but that it is time we try to make this place work better.”

“I think the Senate would be a healthier place if we did it more often,” she said.

About time. Bunning is generally despicable, but this is beyond the pale.

Grand

A lot of these guys, you get the sense their checking off their "community outreach" box. Granderson seems like the real deal.

Celia Bobrowsky, the director of community affairs for Major League Baseball, held the same position with the Tigers during Granderson’s first season, 2004. Her first impression of Granderson was that “the baseball god had arrived for the community of Detroit.”

“On one of his first school visits, he didn’t leave until he spoke with every single kid,” Bobrowsky said. “And I mean every single kid. He got down to their level, spoke eye to eye. They hugged him. He hugged them back.”

Getting traded to the Yankees tugged him from that embrace, from a city that overlooked his flaws as a player — high strikeout totals, struggles against left-handed pitching — and valued his qualities as a person. The Tigers have contended they made the deal as a cost-saving measure — Granderson will make nearly $24 million over the next three seasons — but it has been difficult convincing their fans that there wasn’t some way to retain their most popular player.

“Oh, no, what a mistake,” said Jalen Rose, the former N.B.A. star and a native Detroiter, who played in Granderson’s third annual celebrity basketball game in suburban Detroit last month. “He cared as much about Detroit and the people there as he did about the Tigers.”

In past off-seasons, Granderson has served as an ambassador for Major League Baseball, traveling to Italy, Britain, China and South Africa, but the trade disrupted his schedule. Now, for instance, he wanted to travel to Arizona for a tutorial with the Yankees’ hitting coach, Kevin Long.

But Granderson still found time to visit schools around Chicago and Detroit this winter, participate at sign-up day at his old Little League, run his celebrity basketball game, and host a rally at his old middle school in support of a referendum to restore such extracurricular activities as the science fair. (As an eighth grader, Granderson earned a spot in the state science fair with an experiment on the reaction of peanuts to light.)

Just last week, he stood beside Michelle Obama at the White House as it unveiled a campaign aimed at reducing obesity among children. Afterward, he spoke with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, for 10 minutes.

“People ask me all the time how I have time to do this, but I’m single and I don’t have any kids,” Granderson said. “I don’t have the responsibilities of teammates who are married. If I can find even an hour here or there to do something, I still have 23 hours to rest or see my friends and family. You look at it that way, it’s easy to find time.”

Granderson said he wanted to settle in New York before deciding how and when to get involved in the community. One potential initiative involves Rosetta Stone, the language-learning software, which Granderson would like to see used in schools. He also said he expected to play a big role in the Yankees’ Hope Week, which was initiated last season.

Ben Shpigel also knows better. Detroit didn't overlook his high K rate and struggles against left-handers because he's such a nice guy. They did so because he compensates for a lot of that with speed and great defense. The Yankees lost, potentially, a lot of offense with the departure of Damon, but they improved their outfield defense immensely.

Oh, and Evan Bayh is an asshole.

New York Sanitary Commission

As a public service announcement, Emma Spans has an important reminder:

The Yankees’ division lead is now at eight and a half, and they haven’t lost three games in a row in almost two months (that was against the Angels, of course). Enjoy the long weekend, gang – and don’t forget, Monday night is Hand Sanitizer Keychain Giveaway Day at the Stadium for the first 18,000 fans 21 and older, so be sure to get to the game early! God.

Now you can eat all you want at the game

Crisis narrowly averted.

WASHINGTON (AP) — ESPN and Major League Baseball have agreed to switch the starting time of a Yankees-Red Sox game to avoid conflicting with Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

[...]

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., had sent a letter to Selig and ESPN President George Bodenheimer urging the game be returned to its original afternoon start time.

"There's no reason why the largest Jewish community in the country should be punished for a last-minute scheduling swap," Weiner wrote in the letter.

Weiner told the AP that he had spoken with Selig earlier in the day. "He said he agreed, and that he had heard from his own rabbi, that this was a problem," Weiner said. "He said he was riding ESPN to change their position."

"It was a basic thing that they can do to be sensitive, and the right thing was done," he added.

Good guy to have a beer with

Remember how that was often posited as one of the central reasons to vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Yeah, future citizens will gasp at the thought of it, particularly when you consider that Bush was, supposedly, a reformed alcoholic.

Nice to have a president with whom one can really be comfortable having a beer.

That said, TPM's slide show does not clear up the mystery of "The Bounce," but, priceless.

Donald Fehr and the MLBPA

I meant to comment on Donald Fehr's announcement that he would be retiring next year, but I got busy yesterday. That's fortunate in a way because Joe Sheehan says it all way better then I would have.

There are jobs that demand of the person filling them that they be able to forgo popularity to do them well. No one likes public defenders. No one likes tax auditors. And no one likes the men who have chosen to represent baseball players as if they were a group of laborers in an industry long dominated by a paternalistic management and covered by an unquestioning press largely bought and paid for by the same.

Don Fehr took on this task and did it very well for a quarter-century. He did it as his peers in the NFL, NBA, and NHL all lost major labor battles and saw their unions weakened, or in the NFL's case completely broken and turned into a house union. The relative popularity of Fehr and his NFL counterpart, the late Gene Upshaw, ran in inverse proportion to how good each man was at his job of representing the athletes in their charge. Since 1983, when Fehr took over following the brief, unlamented stint of Ken Moffatt, the MLBPA has established itself as the most powerful players' association in sports, and one of the few successful unions in American labor. They won three grievances over collusion at a time when free agency was still in relative infancy. They beat management in the courts when necessary. Under Fehr's watch, we're into the longest stretch of labor peace since the players were serfs.

For this, Fehr became a reviled figure, first for not caving in to MLB's demands in 1994 and leading the players into a strike that lasted through the World Series, then for defending the principle of privacy, the right to refuse unwarranted searches, and the sanctity of collective bargaining, all as the public, management, and a grandstanding Congressional committee looked to trample all three.

[...]

To some extent, Fehr had no chance to build a legacy. Marvin Miller took the players from servitude to freedom. There's no follow-up act to that. Miller was up against Bowie Kuhn and a set of owners with a plantation mentality; Fehr faced off against Selig, who yanked all of the magnates in line and presented the first united front from management that the players had ever seen. Selig learned by facing off with Miller, and because of that he was a tougher adversary for Fehr.

Sure, you can point to the $3 billion the players will take home this season, but that's a slightly smaller piece of the pie then they've gotten in the past, in part because Fehr and his players lost the 2002 negotiations, which set terms for restrictions on the labor market—givebacks—that are now the structural framework for all negotiations. The summer of 2002, when the media openly contrasted the negotiations with the events of September 11, 2001, and the amount of economic illiteracy in the coverage of the issues reached a peak, would likely have played out much differently a generation prior. The 2002 players were not prepared to strike, and Fehr recognized that and made a deal; that's leadership, even if it's not remembered as such.

Read the entire piece if you're interested in recent MLB history. And if you don't think Don Fehr was a tremendous union leader, ask an NFL player.

Via LGM.

...made in Heaven

With all due respect to the Obama gearhead division, but a Jackson wedding merger of the automaking abilities of Chrysler and Fiat is like merging the baseball operations of the Washington Senators and the St. Louis Browns.

Smart guys

You can agree or disagree with Freeman Dyson's views on climate change ("It could be beneficial!"). You can criticize the New York Times Mag story about him for not presenting much in the way of arguments refuting his views, merely noting that he is considered "a crank" by the climate change "experts" Dyson so derides. But to criticize the writer -- or the Times editor's choice of the writer, I'm not sure which -- as Media Matters does, because the subject of his four books have mostly been about baseball, is absurd. Baseball and physics have always had a mutual admiration. And the story is more a profile of a brilliant, aging man who's always had some pretty loopy ideas, than about the science of climate change. Hia wife Imme, after all, gets the last word. And besides, one of writer Nicholas Dawidoff's books was about Moe Berg.

Beat the Mets...

This gives me an odd sense of satisfaction...



On a related note, word going around these parts is that the Mets intend to change the name of their new stadium, from Citifield to Debits Field.

UPDATE: Sure enough. First Madoff, now this. Fred Wilpon can't catch a break (and I won't even mention Ollie Perez).

Freezed agents

Inneresting times. Paul Volker meets with MLB's owners to scare em about the Financial End Times one week. A week later and it seems the free agent market ain't what it once was.

A review of baseball’s transaction history since 2001 showed that the only period featuring fewer signings in the first 12 days of open bidding than this year came in the 2002-3 off-season, when Jesse Orosco was the only free agent who had signed. Each of the last five free-agent off-seasons included at least six signings by this stage, led by the 2006 bonanza when Alfonso Soriano, Juan Pierre, Nomar Garciaparra, Gary Matthews Jr., Aramis Ramírez and Frank Thomas signed before Thanksgiving.

There is a similarly attractive group of free agents available this year — C. C. Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, Manny Ramírez and Francisco Rodríguez, for starters — but teams seem to be proceeding cautiously and dispensing fewer offers than in years past.

Some baseball executives have suggested that many teams, unsure of how long it will take for the economy to rebound, are reluctant to offer expensive multiyear deals.

It is unclear how well baseball is insulated from the country’s economic troubles, but it is clear that people in the sport are concerned. Commissioner Bud Selig invited the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, to speak to owners and executives last week. The Boston Red Sox, for the first time in 14 years, froze their regular-season ticket prices.

Meet the Mets

Never mind the sheer financial and civic insanity of the whole thing, do the New York Metropolitans, coming off yet another epic fail of a season, really want to open their new stadium with the Citi brand?