The HoF ballot came out recently, which means it won't be long before Dave Parker starts his annual campaign to get himself elected.

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To all my BucsDugout friends:

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I saw yesterday where Mike Tomlin said he took responsbility for the Steelers debacle on Sunday and I thought, "What a guy, huh? The head coach taking responsibility for a loss. How about that? Of COURSE you're responsbile for the loss, jagoff. Who ELSE do you think should be respon ..."

And that's when I remembered Jim Tracy.

And that's when I did a slow clap for Mike Tomlin.

*clap ... clap ... clap ... clap ...*

*sigh*

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Done for the year

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I ran an AP story in the paper today in which Dave Parker complains that if Jim Rice can be in the Hall, why can't he? Their offensive stats are somewhat similar, but of course Dave was a far superior defensive player. (I'd argue that if Jim Rice was no better than a guy who threw away five prime years of his career to being a fat druggie he doesn't belong in the Hall, but what's done is done.)

"There are very few who went in recently who were as important to the team as I was. I was always The Guy or one of The Guys ... I was probably one of the most instrumental guys as far as my team having success."

He's right about that, which I'll get to.

Dave's convinced, of course, that his dabbling in drugs is the reason he's being blackballed. I think he's right, but I also think he way understates his involvement. He kind of makes it sound like he was standing on the street one day and someone threw a bag of coke that hit him in the face and he accidentally inhaled.

Not quite. There was an open drug market running in the Pirates clubhouse in those days, and Dave Parker was, in fact, The Guy in that clubhouse. If he gave a sh*t about his career and life and the careers and lives of his teammates, not to mention the integrity of the game and the embarrassment that whole episode caused the team and the game, he could have been "instrumental" in putting a stop to it. He could have gone to management and told them what was going on, rather than facilitating the drug use and setting a fine example for his teammates who didn't have half his talent. He could have been The Guy.

But he didn't because he was right in the middle of it. So: No Hall for you, Dave. I don't care for Jim Rice (see below), who for all I know unloaded the greenie jar down his gullet before he took the field every day, but at the very least he didn't sully himself, his team and his game with the kind of sordid adventures Dave Parker did.

   BBN-NATIONALS-STRASBURG

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- Washington Nationals president Stan Kasten says the team has made
No. 1 overall draft pick Stephen Strasburg a record-breaking contract offer. Kasten
also tells The Associated Press there is a ``very real possibility, with 48 hours
to go, that Stephen may choose not to sign with us.''

Blah blah blah, need to add a bunch more wordfs cause I'm too lazy now to make this a FanShot instead.

"Give me 25 guys who fight. Give me that over talent."

I've seen a hue and cry in some places for the Pirates to keep Minky around as long as they can as a sort of coach on the field, to see if he can impart some of his fire and desire to the other guys on the team, and I'm OK with that, I guess, as long as he's still on the field.

But if he really believes what he said, I don't want him as a coach anywhere else, because he's full of brown stuff. This isn't football, where you can perhaps overcome your physical limitations by being more willing to throw yourself headlong into mayhem than the other guy.

(A side note, I was thinking the other day about a guy I knew in high school who started for our football team as a 5-foot-4, maybe 150-pound linebacker. Like a lot of little guys, he overcompensated: He had a Charles Atlas physique and was one tough sumbitch, but for all that he was never going to win a slam-dunk contest against Julius Erving -- and yeah, I know about Spud Webb, but never mind.)

Baseball's far more subtle than that, and really doesn't call for any physical interaction between opposing players. It requires hand-eye coordination, and timing, and patience, and some thought, and being willing to fight at the drop of a glove means nothing in those areas. There are a million morons in America who think they know how to fight (ask any cop how many he runs into on a weekend), and they can be entertaining to watch, but there are only a few hundred who can hit major league pitching with any consistency.

In short, give me talent, and if we're playing a team full of Minkys we'll kick their asses eight or nine out of 10 times. But I'm not sure Minky understands this. I'd fear that a coach Minky or, worse, a manager Minky would show a preference for guys like him over guys who can actually, you know, play ball well. And we'd have gritty David Eckstein at shortstop.

It's also why I don't get agitated as some of us do when guys like Tracy and Russell never leave the dugout to argue.  When someone can offer me more than anecdotal evidence that this sort of grandstanding actually wins ballgames, I'll join the chorus.

Found this in a piece on MLB.com about minor-league baseball announcers. I've often wanted to do this to Littlefield myself:

Landon Sears, the young Hickory Crawdads' announcer, saw his professional livelihood flash before his eyes during a recent game.

"At our home games, we do this between-inning promotion where our game-day employees throw Hamburger Helper into the crowd," explained Sears. "A lot of the time, they'll throw some up to me in the booth, and then I'll toss it back down to the crowd."

"Well, at a recent game we had [Pittsburgh Pirates general manager] Dave Littlefield in attendance, and he was nice enough to come on my broadcast for an interview. So, sure enough, as soon as we come back from break this packet of Hamburger Helper flies into the booth and smacks Littlefield right on the cheek. I just froze. I didn't know what to do. Fortunately, he took it stride. Just picked it up and placed it back up against his cheek. He even posed for a picture like that."