The other day I mused offhandedly about how cool it would be to own a baseball team, and also how completely impossible. And that made me think of minor-league or independent-league team ownership, which is still kind of a possibility for mere mortals – and which, these days, has a lot more room for quirk. Given the choice between two clubs, as a general rule of thumb, you’re probably better off joining the one that doesn’t require Bud Selig’s approval.

Back in the fall I read Neal Karlen’s Slouching Towards Fargo, which is an affectionate portrait of the St. Paul Saints circa 1996 and 1997, an independent Northern League team owned in part by Bill Veeck’s son Mike (decades after his Disco Demolition Night debacle) that boasts a pig delivering baseballs to the mound, a nun in the stands  offering massages, appearances by part-owner Bill Murray, sumo-wrestling contests for opposing managers between innings, and much more. “Fun Is Good,” is the Saints’ motto, and it’s refreshing to watch a team that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Bless the Yankees, but you know it would do them good to lighten up once in a while). Daryl Strawberry, who redeemed himself with the Saints shortly before joining the Yankees and salvaging his career, serves as something of a focal point in the book, representing the Saints’ function as a haven of second- and third-chances for baseball types and locals; there are also draft holdouts, washups, career minor leaguers and female pitcher Ila Borders. The Saints have room for just about everyone.

Author Neal Karlen also tries to tell the story of his own sort of redemption, as he was initially sent to Saint Paul by Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner to dig up mud and write a story eviscerating Bill Murray and Strawberry. But there’s little suspense or originality in the story of how he ultimately grows a conscience once away from the big city. This part of the book was less successful, for me – partly because Karlen’s writing (and, to be fair, editing – the book is very unevenly paced) is not up to the standards of his material, and partly because his view of cynical and immoral New York City media types vs. big-hearted Midwesterners struck me as overly pat. He frequently brings up petty grudges against other writers or media-world denizens, and he’s too on-the-nose when writing about how baseball and the Saints will heal us all; it’s a theme that would have benefited from subtlety. Still, Karlen does a good job of chronicling the fascinating collection of individuals who cluster around the Saints, a haven for nonconformists, and whatever his flaws as a writer, they don’t prevent the charm of the team itself from coming through loud and clear.

Jeb Stewart–known around these parts as “Evil Empire”–penned this cool piece about the legendary Rickwood Field.

Dig.

[Photo Credit: Mike Moody]

Remember when there were all those rumors swirling about how much money the Mets had invested with Bernie Madoff, and how that could impact their ability to run the team? And the Wilpons kept saying, nope, it would have no effect at all? Well, today they issued a statement:

As Sterling Equities announced in December, we are engaged in discussions to settle a lawsuit brought against us and other Sterling partners and members ofour families by the Trustee in the Madoff bankruptcy. We are not permitted to comment on these confidential negotiations while they are ongoing.

However, to address the air of uncertainty created by this lawsuit, and to provide additional assurance that the New York Mets will continue to have the necessary resources to fully compete and win, we are looking at a number ofpotential options including the addition of one or more strategic partners. To explore this, we have retained Steve Greenberg, a Managing Director at Allen & Company, as our advisor.

Regardless of the outcome of this exploration, Sterling will remain the principal ownership group of the Mets and continue to control and manage the team’s operations. The Mets have been a major part of our families for more than 30 years and that is not going to change.

As Craig at Hardball Talk notes, this is pretty similar to what Tom Hicks said about his Rangers back in the day – and things didn’t quite work out the way he’d planned. Can the Mets find someone who’ll be willing to invest significant amounts of money without gaining any control? If not, would they consider selling the team outright, if they got the right offer?

Depending, of course, on who they might theoretically sell the team to, it could actually end up being a good thing for the Mets – the team has had certain issues over the years, with organization and finance and general PR, that have persisted regardless of who the GM or manager was. But in the short term, it’s not good news – it’s very hard for an organization to make bold moves, or to spend much money, when ownership is uncertain.

Start saving your money, gang! If we all put in $100…

Actually, I’ve had a longstanding fantasy about what I would do if I owned a baseball team. Note that even if I were to win the lottery, I STILL wouldn’t be able to afford to do that, but we’re just daydreaming here. I’d move a team to Brooklyn, where the Nets’ new eyesore of a Stadium is going (as long as we’re fantasizing), and keep ticket prices low, and have weird funny Bill Veeck-like promotions and giveaways, and sell lots of women’s team gear that wasn’t pink or sparkly, and hire as many knuckleballers and players with amusing names as possible, and…

Sorry, I got distracted. Point is, things will likely be pretty challenging in Flushing for the next few years.

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Photo via Real Clear Sports

Good stuff from Joel Sherman today in the Post. First, from his column:

Look, next month is 22 years at The Post for me, so I like a juicy rogue general manager story as much as the next tabloid nut. I just wish the facts — not appearances — corroborated the story du jour that goes like this: Cashman has gone off the pinstriped reservation because he wants to get himself fired or to end up as a small-market GM to prove he can win big without a huge payroll.

Cashman insisted to me he does not want out. His friends insisted to me that he does not want out. A few weeks back, this guy rappelled down the side of a building for his kids. So if the conspiracy theories are now to be believed, that same guy now is willing to pull his kids from school in Connecticut — and his wife away from her beloved twin sister — all in the name of having, what, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ payroll?

And from this exclusive with Baby Boss Hal Steinbrenner:

As for the Soriano matter, Steinbrenner said he listened to Cashman, but decided to authorize the signing because he felt the club needed an “impact” move this offseason. However, he blessed Cashman’s behavior at the press conference.

“I value his opinion and his advice,” Steinbrenner said. “That does not mean I am always going to go with that advice and all of my VPs know that I might go a different way. There are no hard feelings between Cash and I. There never was. Reasonable men can differ in opinions.

“I keep reading about dissension and discord. We are a well-functioning company. The bosses have a decision to make. Sometimes people don’t agree with those decisions. So I told him, ‘You are always honest with the media, be honest now. Tell them what you have to tell them.’ I was already onto the next decision. I told him, ‘You and I are fine. Answer in any way you want.’ We are not always going to be on the same page. It is my job to think what is best for the family, partners and company.”

Over at Deadspin, Katie Baker has a very good post up about her teenage life online, when she constructed an elaborate fake identity on a Usenet newsgroup as a Harvard-bound 18-year-old: “I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait.”

The Flyers newgroup was my favorite by far.

I’m not sure when I started to lie, but it seemed like no big deal. Upholding a cherished tradition among so many high-school-aged girls throughout history, I shrugged and added two years to my age. Fifteen became seventeen. The truth just sounds different.

But the more I lied, the more I lied more, creating extraneous backstories to flesh out the details of my fictional life. I was about to graduate, I blithely allowed, scattering fibs around various posts like so much confetti. I had Rangers season tickets. I had gone to the 1999 NHL Draft party, I reported in one post, and boy,had I been surprised by all the boos for Jamie Lundmark!

On and on, each lie more pathologically gratuitous than the last. I explained that I was taking a year off before going to college at, wait for it, Harvard. It remains a great embarrassment to me that I would be so unimaginative with the location of my faux matriculation, but I more than made up for it in conjuring a whole cadre of fake older brothers whom I credited for both my love of sports and, having been knocked around by them for years, my own physical toughness at the hockey rink. I did play hockey, at least. “The Chick with the Hockey Stick,” my signature file read, one of the very few things that was actually true.

It’s a well-written piece, an an interesting story – if not a common one, at least one that I’d expect many of us can relate to. I never had any lie become as elaborate as Bakers’ eventually did, or spill over into my “real life” like hers, but my friends and I messed around on AOL chat rooms all the time, making up different identities. On several occasions a friend and I, when we were maybe 13, signed onto AOL in the guise of an 18-year-old named “sexpot69” or something equally silly, and giggled to each other while random guys (who, in fact, were quite possibly also 13) asked us into private chat rooms and narrated their masturbation. We thought it was hilarious. We would read for a few minutes, type occasional semi-encouragement or immature jokes, laugh hysterically, then sign off in a rush and delete all traces of sexpot69 from the computer.

I suppose this is exactly what parents are afraid their kids are doing online, but really, it never did us any harm – we were smart enough never to give out any addresses or phone numbers or personal details; the guys (if they even were guys) involved were gross and awkward but never scary. In retrospect, it was a pretty safe way to feed our curiosity. In fact, as in Katie Baker’s story, in the end it may have been harder on the guys involved than on us.

Jonah Keri had me on his podcast last night. Check it out and hear to me blab on about my stint in the movie business and life as a blogging dinosaur. I had a good time. Jonah is good peoples.

Sugar came out in 2009 to excellent reviews and relatively small audiences. Somehow, despite the fact that baseball movies are something of an obsession with me, I only just got around to seeing it – and, wow. It’s an understated movie, but never uninteresting, beautifully made, and more honest about the game than all but a handful of films have ever been. I liked it significantly more than Field of Dreams and about five million times more than The Natural, and though I can’t imagine that Sugar will ever get the kind of mass audience that those movies did, I still hope it manages to stick in the cultural consciousness.

In its outlines, the story is a familiar one to serious baseball fans: kid from the Dominican Republic signs with a major league team, struggles to deal with culture shock and professional competition in a small minor-league city. We’ve all read articles and interviews with international players that fit that profile, and beyond that, nothing hugely dramatic happens in Sugar — except that this story in and of itself is, really, a pretty dramatic one, even if dozens or hundreds of players a year go through it. And while I don’t want to give away the ending, I will just say that it feels honest, and very refreshingly so for a sports movie. There is no Big Game that will make or break everything, no villains, no inspiring speech, just a series of events and decisions that together make a story.

The movie opens at the just-barely-fictional Kansas City Knights baseball academy in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic. It establishes the rhythms of the place, which is part school and mostly training facility – the camaraderie and competition between the players, the strict coaches, and life on the weekends at home in the town, where Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto, doing a good job in his only American film role to date) lives with his family. The scenes in the DR were some of my favorites, for their laid-back slice-of-life feel: peeling, brightly painted buildings, beaches, friends playing dominos, stray dogs, music, dancing, beer.

Sugar and an academy teammate finally get their long awaited call to Los Estados, attending spring training with the Kansas City Knights (who I assume were named after the New York Knights, Roy Hobbs’ team in The Natural). He and his Dominican teammates are taken under the wing of Jorge, a slightly older player who’s been slipping down the prospect lists after a knee injury – and who explains to them that you never drink the beer in the minibar, gives Sugar his old I.D. so he can get into bars, and takes the newcomers to a diner where, following his lead, they all order French toast. It takes weeks before Sugar, incredibly sick of French toast, figures out how to order eggs.

More than anything else, the movie does an excellent job of dramatizing the cultural disconnect and language barrier. There are no villains – some people are nicer than others, some are less helpful, but no one is evil. When Sugar gets assigned to the Knights’ single-A team in rural Iowa, he stays with a local couple, older farmers who live in the middle of cornfields. They are religious, reserved, extremely different from anything Sugar’s experienced before, and he feels deeply isolated living there – but they mean well. The movie is as much about finding a community in a new place as it is succeeding at baseball, and suggests that the latter may not be possible without the former, anyway.

If I had one issue, it’s that Sugar himself is a little bit of a cipher, as a character. I think partly this is by design – the character did not finish high school, has thought about almost nothing besides baseball for years, and once he reaches the U.S. is restricted by language and cultural differences – he’s quiet because he so often doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. Sugar’s favorite player is Robinson Cano; he’s never heard of Roberto Clemente. He loosens up a bit with the other Spanish speakers on the team, but even so the details of his personality come across only vaguely. Perhaps that makes it easier for the character to stand in for so many real-life immigrants.

The whole movie is excellent, but it’s the end that sets it apart for me – realistic and wistful without being depressing. He doesn’t make it to the Majors and throw a perfect game his first start out, and he doesn’t end up a drug addict with a life in ruins. The movie’s restraint doesn’t make it the least bit boring – on the contrary, because it rings true, it’s that much more engrossing.

Do you dream about baseball during the middle of winter? When it is grey and cold, chunks of ice on sidewalk, banks of snow against the buildings, do you picture long summer days, green grass, men spitting and laughing, the smell of beer and urine, the humidity, and the tension of even the most routine ball game? I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in a different part of the country, where it is warm and you can have a catch at any time of the year.

Here in the northeast, baseball is sleeping unless you go to an indoor hitting cage. The game seems distant now but thoughts of summer are never far away. I covet my fantasies and protect them as if wrapped in a blanket to protect them from the elements. I daydream about Mariano entering a game to his theme song and picture the grace and precision of Alex Rodriguez’s swing. I take comfort in knowing that Derek Jeter will bust ass down the first base line every chance he gets. Yet I am most excited about the unknown–which young player will make an impression, what will we see–even a minor detail–that we’ve never seen before?

I usually keep these thoughts to myself  but figured I’d share them with you since you might be dreaming too.

There are twenty days left before pitchers and catchers report to spring training for the Yankees.

[Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images]

Six years ago if you’d told me Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon would, in 2011, both sign relatively inexpensive one-year contracts with the Tampa Rays, it would have been jarring. Really, it’s still a bit jarring. Time and change come to us all, yet it’s odd to think how quickly yesterday’s superstars become today’s late-offseason bargains: Manny Ramirez made $20,000,000 last year, and last week he signed for $2,000,000. He didn’t get old overnight, but he started getting paid like an old player overnight. He is still only 38.

The real winners of this move are the few, the proud, the Tampa beat writers and columnists, whose clubhouse just got about 12 times more interesting: Damon is outgoing and easy to talk to and always sticks around to offer goofy quotes, and for a player who rarely talks to the media, Manny manages to provide plenty of material. Not that either new acquisition is destined to be useless, by any means. Damon had quite a lousy 2010, by his standards, but still produced more than the average left fielder, and is a clever enough hitter that he’ll be finding his hits here and there even after his bat speed and power deteriorate further; Manny fell off too, but I wouldn’t want to see him up against my team in the late innings with the game on the line, and I doubt too many pitchers would either. With that said, Damon was, even four or five years ago, not the best fielder- I remember bleacher fans at the Stadium joking about his “perfect 20-hoppers to first” – and hasn’t gotten better with wear and tear, which means right-handed visiting hitters may find their BABIP getting a nice boost in Tampa next year. Manny, of course, will probably not be seen in the outfield unless he jogs out there to urinate between innings.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Damon is getting paid more than twice as much as his brother-in-hair, even though he’s nowhere near twice as good a player as Ramirez, and just one year younger; I can only assume that Manny’s positive steroid test played a role, and perhaps the lingering ill-feeling after his acrimonious breakup with Boston (where he was more or less accused, at various times, of faking or exaggerating an injury, missing spring training to make promotional appearances, and shoving an elderly traveling secretary to the ground). When I mentioned these signings to a friend, her first thought was that Tampa might be looking for veteran leadership on their young team, and she wondered if it was really a good idea to have Manny try and full that role. But I don’t think any team’s management would view Man-Ram as that kind of figure, although you could do a lot worse that having young players watch the way he hits. I think he’s there for his pop, as well as his talents as a box-office draw and attention grabber. I have a hard time imagining that he won’t give the Rays their $two million’s worth.

For more analysis check out Jay Jaffe over at Pinstriped Bible, talking about how the additions of Damon and Ramirez give the Rays flexibility. I know it’s way too early to surmise anything, but on this frigid winter day I’m not loving the Yankees’ odds against Tampa or Boston.

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And speaking of old friends… Bill Clinton had dinner in Miami last week with Alex Rodriguez and Cameron Diaz. While none of those people are on my “If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?” list, I have to admit that, like the nymag.com headline, I’m curious about what they might have talked about. Other than “so, being incredibly rich: pretty cool, eh?”

Over at the Times, Janet Maslin reviews a new biography of Bobby Fischer by Frank Brady:

“Endgame” is a rapt, intimate book, greatly helped by its author’s long acquaintance with Fischer, who died in 2008, and his deep grounding in the world of chess. Mr. Brady was the founding editor of Chess Life, the official magazine of the United States Chess Federation, but his book is entirely accessible to readers who have never heard of that publication. Nor does “Endgame” require any prior knowledge of chess luminaries, chess strategies (no charts here) or chess tournament etiquette. It requires no expertise to appreciate a one-liner like the one the 19-year-old Fischer delivered after a visit to a brothel in Curaçao. “Chess is better,” Fischer said.

Mr. Brady, a biographer dangerously drawn to megalomania (he has also written books about Aristotle Onassis and Orson Welles), takes a demystifying approach to Fischer’s eccentricities. He sees the person behind the bluster, and he presents that person in a reasonably realistic light. Mr. Brady also makes use of unusually good source material, from Fischer’s own unpublished manuscript to 50 years’ worth of his own conversations with Fischer’s associates, mentors and relatives. Note the omission of the word “friends.” Fischer never had them.

Fischer was a genius as well as a madman. Do yourself a favor and check out Bill Nack’s terrific SI piece on his search for the reclusive Fischer: “To find him, to see him, had become a kind of crazy and delirious obsession, the kind of insanity that has hounded other men in search of, say, the Loch Ness monster.”

[Photo Credit: Times On-Line]

Engine room, bring me my drink.

Same ol’ Jets, indeed.

[Picture by Bags]

They’ve been here before…be nice to see the Jets finally make it to the Super Bowl. Whadda ya say, Green? Winner gets Green Bay.

It won’t be easy against the Steelers but we’ll be root-root-rootin’ them on!

And that’s word to Wesley Walker:

Game One: The Great Rivalry Continues…Nagurski, Nitschke, Butkus, Bears, Brats, Brews…You gotta love it.

Chow Down:

Word to Pete Rock:

[Photo Credit: How Cook Like a Wolf]

Well, sometimes you make a plan and while it might not be popular, you stick by the plan, you lay low, and then…you blow it all up. The Angels have been criticized this winter for not doing enough, but last night they went out and traded for Vernon Wells. Not just that, they are picking up the rest of his seemingly unmovable contract. MLB Trade Rumors collects some reactions to the deal; Hardball Talk has more.

What was it P.T. Barnum was supposed to have said?

Closer to home, old pals Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez have agreed to join the Rays. At least it’ll be fun to see them around more often this season.

Milton Bradley has such a fun name… why’s he have to keep ruining it by doing lousy things?

The latest incident – in which Bradley was arrested yesterday on felony charges for threatening an “unidentified woman” – is still firmly in the “alleged” category. No details have leaked out yet as to what precisely he’s charged with, beyond that, let alone evidence of anything. But it’s going to be an uphill battle for the public to keep an open mind, since half his Wikipedia page is taken up with “Controversies.” And that list isn’t even comprehensive – it does not  include, for example, a prior domestic violence allegation (although that  never led to an arrest, and in a separate incident Bradley was the one who called the police on his wife; the police were called to his home three times in a 33-day span). U.S.S. Mariner has a more detailed rundown of Bradley’s troubles over the years. The fact that he’s still in the majors and being paid $11,000,000 a year is a testament to both Bradley’s talent and the Cubs’ poor judgment.

The Mariners, who work with a number of Seattle women’s charities, were lauded in the past for their “zero-telerance” policy on domestic violence – which, as demonstrated by the mess of the Josh Leuke incident, turned out to be, really, more of a guideline. It will be interesting to see what action, if any, they take with Bradley when more facts are known. And although this is premature, it’s interesting to think about what we believe they should do.

It’s a complicated issue. As long as someone is legally free to work, after all, a team has a right to hire them. I appreciate that the Mariners care enough about domestic violence to draw up a policy against it… but with an issue that so often comes with conflicting information, changing stories and inconclusive evidence, it’s not simple to enforce. And if you’re not going to enforce it, what’s the point of having it – except as a PR tactic with a high chance of backfiring?

Of course, there’s a difference between finding yourself in a moral muddle and – as appears to have happened with Leuke – deciding that your farm system is more important than your ethical system. The former is understandable and maybe, with this kind of situation, unavoidable. The latter is pathetic.

Over at The Baseball Analysts, Rich chronicles his recent visit with Bert Blyleven:

Bert went out of his way to accommodate me as he had hip replacement surgery in October. Believe me, he can still zing it. Not shy, I told Bert that I wanted to compare curveballs. I threw him a spinner and he mocked me. “That’s your curveball?” Hey, it was the first one I had thrown in years and only then at a family picnic. He raised his arm and hand to a 12 o’clock position and said, “You’ve got to get it up here.” As someone who had a good curve through high school, I knew I was supposed to throw the ball over the barrel and shake hands with the center fielder (a visual that worked wonders for me). Nevertheless, at age 55, my shoulder wasn’t as cooperative as it once was. Bert, who is four years older than me, broke off a couple of tight ones. Impressive indeed.

My manager, Lee Stange, asked me what position I played. I told him pitcher but said I could also play first base. He kidded, “Everyone out here is a first baseman/DH.” Lee sent me to the bullpen to warm up. He liked what he saw enough to give me the start. The first two batters hit line-drive singles. Standing just outside our dugout on the third base side, Blyleven shouted, “Hey Rich! Try to get an out, why don’t you!” I smiled at him, took a deep breath, and got back to the task at hand. The next batter hit a slow roller to my right. I was thinking two but, then again, I thought I was 30-something rather than 50-something. My brain made the play with no problem, but my body failed me. The ball passed me and the shortstop had no play. A couple of runs later and Bert was now needling me again. “You’ve got an 18.00 ERA!” It was actually higher at that moment in time because I had not yet completed the inning. Thankfully, I did with no further damage.

[Photo Credit: Brian Hirten/Ft. Myers News-Press]

If you are a fan of the sports infographic representations of Flip Flop Fly Ball, then you might also enjoy a site called “MLB Trade Trees“.

From the site’s home page: “Find out how MLB trades evolved from a historian/baseball nerd in Iowa.”

The site isn’t splashy, but its quietly interesting, and the owner promises improvements.

The King of what? King of Style…

In case you missed it, Triumph recently reprinted Clyde Frazier’s classic fun time book, “Rockin’ Steady” (written with Ira Berkow).

The hits keep coming. My man Eric Nusbaum hipped me to these cherce selections from the Harry E. Winkler Collection of boxing photographs.

Jet win.