I wrote recently about the persistent thinking among some old-school baseball folks that amateur baseball players shouldn’t use agents or care about money, but I wasn’t expecting to find a concrete example so quickly. A Baseball America article on the recent meeting between some college coaches and MLB scouting directors featured this anachronistic beauty from American Baseball Coaches Association executive director Dave Keilitz:

“This has kind of become a phenomenon in the last 15 years or so—every kid seems to have his advisor, not just advising him on pro issues but on where to go to college and what position to play and all of that stuff, and that has really come into being in the last few years,” Keilitz said. “It’s a total frustration to many baseball programs and coaches, and it certainly is with the pro people. It’s almost a shame when you call a kid that you think you’re interested in and he refers you to his advisor—some 16- or 17-year-old kid and he has an advisor.”

It’s a shame? A shame that what – these kids are actually seeing their interests represented properly at the negotiating table? That they’re getting advice from a professional with (usually) previous experience in the draft? The typical first-round pick out of high school and his family are engaging in the biggest financial negotiation of their lives. God forbid they get some help.

Oh, I get it. It’s a shame that colleges and MLB teams can’t bend these kids and their parents over like they used to. No, wait, that’s not a shame. That’s fantastic. The shame is that Keilitz is openly wishing it was still 1965.

Note that as of Monday, 12/31, I’ve moved the updated counts to a new thread.

UPDATED: Monday, 12/31, 10:45 am EST.

At this point, with at least 10% of the total ballots counted, I feel pretty comfortable calling Gossage’s election. It’s too soon for me to call Blyleven, Dawson, or Rice either way.

I’ve found or received 75 Hall of Fame ballots from official voters so far, and tallied up the results:

If you find another ballot, post the link in the comments below and I’ll update the tally as needed.

Several friends within MLB told me that the New Yorker profile of Scott Boras was a must-read, but I just stumbled upon it today. They were right – it is a must-read, and I give Ben McGrath credit for being balanced on a subject that (who) unbalances a lot of people.

I’ve never been down with the demonization of Boras. He’s serving his clients’ interests, and if he wasn’t doing so and there was no other agent filling this role, then MLB owners would be making a lot more money and the game would be no better off. The so-called haves/have-nots structure has nothing to do with Boras or with players in general trying to earn market salaries. And people who demonize him seem to forget that his aggressive strategies work, and that there are no style points in negotiations.

Couple of quotes that stood out:

At one point while I was in his office, Boras took a phone call, and explained afterward, “The draft is looming.” I asked if he planned to travel to Orlando, where the draft was being held. He smiled. “I think the draft is here,” he said. “It’s not in Orlando. We’re in the room”—he pointed up, toward the war room—”and we’re telling teams who they can draft, who they can’t. That’s basically how the thing goes.”

I would bet that the folks at MLB headquarters went apeshit when they saw that. But Scott’s not exactly wrong here, as I wrote before the draft, saying he was “the one man who might have the most say in how the first round unfolds.”

“The scouting director for the Twins was a very abrupt man,” Boras recalled in his office, referring to George Brophy, who died a few years ago. “He went public, saying, ‘It’s disgusting that these kids are being represented. They’re draft picks.’ All these antiquated thought processes. I kept on saying, ‘He’s a young man in a negotiation against a system, which requires him to sign a professional sports contract, which is governed by a collective-bargaining agreement. Why wouldn’t he need a lawyer?’ I said, ‘Why do your teams have lawyers who draft all these things up? You’ve unilaterally imposed all these rules.’ He sat there, looked at me, and goes, ‘I’m not a lawyer. I’m just talking to you about baseball. That’s not how we do things.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re changing. We’re changing for the betterment of the game. The great athletes aren’t going to come to baseball if you keep the bonuses at this level, because some owner will pay for that talent. It just happens to be in a different sport. Baseball players play football and basketball, too.’ “

I’m sorry to say that Brophy’s mentality still exists within the industry. There’s a sense that these kids should just be honored that anyone is willing to pay them to play baseball. Needless to say, I think that’s bullshit.

Critics of Boras call him a “compulsive liar,” or a “congenital liar,” while also granting that he, at least, seems to believe what he says. I prefer to think of it primarily as optimistic, adversarial embellishment…

I’m with McGrath here. I have talked to Boras a handful of times and don’t think I’ve ever felt that he was lying to me or caught him in an inaccuracy. He pushes the truth, which is one way in which he is like every other agent I’ve ever met, but I’m comfortable with that because it’s part of an agent’s job.

This ballot counts for nothing except the Hall of Fame in my head. I’d vote for:

Tim Raines
Bert Blyleven
Rich Gossage
Alan Trammell
Mark McGwire

That’s it. Post your hypothetical ballots – remember, yours count as much as mine does! – in the comments.

So I was at my in-laws this Sunday and was roped into spending the late afternoon in the living room in front of the TV with the family. No football, although my father-in-law is a fan; there were three figure skating events on their DVR, and someone made the decision to hold a marathon viewing of all three, by which point I was already duct-taped to the sofa and couldn’t escape. As a result, I’m going to try to explain this bizarre series of competitions called the ISU Grand Prix, second only to the BCS in needless complexity.

The Grand Prix comprises six events, one held each weekend for six weeks, to qualify skaters for a seventh event, the Grand Prix final, which moves every year. The six qualifying events are held in the U.S. (“Skate America”), Russia (“Cup of Russia”), China (“Cup of China” – aren’t we so fucking clever), France (named after some French guy), Japan (“NHK Trophy”), and Canada (I forget). There was a German competition until 2003 when the ISU realized that the Germans sucked at figure skating. The Germans should stick to things they’re good at, like killing bloggers. (Or beer. They’d probably rather be known for beer.) Anyway, that’s when the Cup of China started up, although judging by all the empty seats, I’m going to say that figure skating has not quite grabbed the interest of the Chinese public yet.

As an aside, the Grand Prix events are by and large held in really cool places to visit. This year’s qualifying events were held in Moscow, Paris, Harbin, Tokyo, Québec city, and … Reading, Pennsyvlania. Really? That’s the best that we could offer? What, Camden was booked? My wife said Reading was better than Detroit … I’m not sure I have a witty comeback for that. She makes a good point.

So each skater or pair of skaters enters two of the six events, and after all six are held, the ISU looks at the combined points totals (not the actual scores) of all skaters (or pairs) and chooses the top six in each category – men’s, women’s, pairs, and “ice dancing” – not making this up, people – to go to the finals. The winner at each competition gets 15 points. As far as I can tell, the runner-up gets 13, the bronze medalist gets 11, but then at some point the points stop dropping by two for each spot and drop by one. It doesn’t matter if your score led the competition by 0.01 points or by 30 – you get two more Grand-Prix points than the runner-up. No one actually explained this in any of the telecasts, and you can’t tell at any point who’s leading or who has already qualified; if you’ve got 28 points already, you’re in the finals, but I never saw any standings or heard any indication of who had how many points. Then there’s the actual scoring of skating, which is never explained and seems to me to be purposefully obtuse so that casual fans can’t obviously spot official corruption, as they did in the last Winter Olympics (prompting a big overhaul of the scoring system). There’s no such things as a perfect score. The announcers obsess over who got a “personal best,” except that there are no awards for getting a “personal best,” only for getting the best score in the damn competition.

The worst part is that a skater (or pair) who skates in two separate competitions in this series uses the same routine both times. This makes for dreadful television. We were also treated to lengthy explanations of the “meaning” – again, not making this up – of various skaters’ and dancers’ routines. When the (very attractive) Tanith Belbin and her partner started up one of their ice dances, the female announcer started to explain that the routine is about “love and…” which is where I fell asleep, and when I woke up an hour later, she was still explaining what the routine was about. Really? It’s about love? I thought ice dancing was about skating in circles and waving your arms like you’re playing charades and the word is “seagull.” But I could be wrong.

I did learn a few things about what’s important in figure skating and ice dancing:

• It’s important that your skating is “sincere.”
• It’s important to “believe” in your abilities.
• And it’s really important to not fall on your ass. Or, if all of your competitors fall on their asses, just to fall on your ass less often than they do.

Another major problem, at least in terms of getting men to watch skating without having someone prop my eyelids open and tie me to the couch, is the fact that the best female skaters in the world are all either teenagers or just look like them. The top American skaters were Kimmie Meissner, who is about 16 and looks 14; and Caroline Zhang, who is 14, looks about 10, and sounds like she’s 8. Even Sasha Cohen, now in her early 20s (and not in any of these events), still has the figure of a preteen. This is not appealing.

Other than Belben, who is definitely good-looking, the hottest skater in any of the three events I was forced to endure was Finnish skater Kiira Korpi, who’s just 19 but has a great figure and is pretty in that sort of generic-Nordic-blonde way. (Nothing wrong with that.). Sadly, she’s not that good, finishing in 16th in the last Olympics and finishing well out of the money in the two Grand Prix events in which she skater. (To be fair, she suffered from a “stomach ailment” all summer, so she may not be on her game right now. Still looks hot, though.) But she identified, for me, the real reason for the lack of sex appeal at these events: There are no Swedes. Or, for that matter, no Danes, Norwegians, or even Icelandic skaters. If MLB is willing to pour money into China or Africa or South America to try to develop baseball there, shouldn’t the ISU be willing to pour money into the Nordic countries to try to develop some hot female skaters to give (straight) men a reason to watch this crap? The fact is that the countries currently producing skaters are not producing their fair share of attractive female skaters. This must be addressed.

Here’s what is about to happen in college football, recast with a baseball analogy.

Imagine that a team in the weakest division in the majors – we’ll call it the “NL Menstrual” – was able to set its own schedule. They decided to play 108 games within their cupcake division. Then they added 40 games against teams from the International League (that’s AAA for you non-baseball fans). Then, just to be good sports, they decided to add 14 games against the second-worst team from another major-league division, one that’s better than their own. And, of course, they rack up a pretty strong record against that competition.

So now imagine that, due to the fact that everyone recognizes that the NL Menstrual isn’t playing the same caliber of ball as the other divisions, our mystery team is told on October 1st that their services won’t really be required for the rest of the year. Several other teams playing tougher schedules go into the postseason and beat the crap out of each other for two weeks, at the end of which, it’s not really clear who the best team is. (The fact that someone knocked off the “best” team – and that this has happened twice – doesn’t matter.) So the powers that be – we’ll call them the Network for Cheating Amateur Athletes – decide to call up our mystery team before the World Series starts and ask them to participate. Our mystery team hasn’t won or even played a game in several weeks, so how could they be better now than they were when their season ended?

This is what’s about to happen with Ohio State. Playing the 43rd-strongest schedule in Division I-A – excuse me, the Football Bowl Subdivision – they beat the snot out of several weak opponents, beat an unranked Michigan State team by one score, and lost to Illinois. They never played a team ranked in the top 20 in the country. Their nonconference games were a joke: Washington, the last-place team in the Pac 10; Akron and Kent State, the bottom two teams in the Mid-American Conference’s East Division; and Youngstown State, which I can’t even find on the Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision standings page … oh, wait, they’re not in that division at all! They’re the 16th-ranked team in the next division down! Isn’t that like a big-league club playing a team from the Midwest League?

I don’t like college football and I don’t follow it, so maybe everything I wrote above is wrong. Maybe Ohio State actually is one of the two best teams in the country, even if they’re too scared to try to prove it by scheduling a halfway decent opponent every now and then. But tell me this: If playing a weak-assed schedule isn’t that big of a problem, why not just put Hawai’i – who played an even weaker schedule, ranked 118th in the country, but who always have scheduling problems due to cost and distance – in the damn championship game? At least they had the courtesy to not lose.

I readily admit to being one of the least supportive alumni when it comes to my alma mater’s athletics, but I’m going to pretend that’s not true and take a moment to gloat over my many friends who went to the University of Eastern Western Central Michigan: Harvard 62, Michigan 51. Attaboy, Tommy!

So over on the blog Vandermint Auditorium there’s a snarky piece that makes the argument that because Lance Armstrong consistently beat cyclists who later admitted to or were caught doping, he must have doped as well. (The piece doesn’t make this argument directly, but instead is written in a sarcastic way that makes the writer’s intent pretty clear to me. And it comes off as snarky.)

But he doesn’t mention this interesting study done on Armstrong’s body, which found that his heart can pump an abnormally large amount of oxygen, that he increased his muscle-efficiency rate through an intensive training regimen, and that his muscles produce abnormally low amounts of lactic acid. While I suppose that that doesn’t prove that Armstrong was clean, it does put the lie to the VA argument that Armstrong couldn’t have possibly beaten cyclists who doped unless he doped himself.