The Infield Dirt with T.S. O'Connell - Wednesday, July 07, 2010

   I had never much pondered the question of what it would take to get me to root for the Texas Rangers, so naturally I was surprised to find out that simply signing my favorite player as a free agent would do the trick nicely.

   As I write this the Rangers are 41/2 games atop the American League West, which is no doubt rarefied air for a club that has struggled mightily over the years, and the arrival of Vlad Guerrero is a big part of that story.

   Being in the baseball card/memorabilia business, the tendency to cling to that which is old, tried and true is almost unavoidable, and so I’ve been a Vlad Guerrero fan virtually from the start of his career.

   Given the teams he’s played for, that’s been a pretty good trick. Even though I lived not far from Montreal for the better part of a decade in the 1970’s, I was never able to get the hang of actually rooting for them; ditto with the Los Angeles/Anaheim/Orange County Angels or whatever the hell their name is.

   But I’ll be rooting for the Rangers this time, with the underlying hope that I’d get to watch him again in the postseason. Guerrero reminds me so much of the great Roberto Clemente that it’s just extra fun to watch him at the plate.

   When he filed for free agency, there were a lot of naysayers who solemnly opined that he was too old, too injured and too undisciplined to make placing a bet on him a good idea. Uh, huh.

   At the moment, as he awaits the 2010 All-Star Game in his former digs, Anaheim or whatever, he’s batting .328 with 18 home runs and a remarkable 70 RBI in only 78 games.

   On a vaguely related note, I’m going to have to try to get in touch with a guy who posts regularly on the Collectors Universe Baseball Card and Memorabilia Forum. His cyber name is VladGuerreroCollector, but that’s not why I want to talk to him.

http://forums.collectors.com/categories.cfm?catid=11

   The little picture thingy that goes along with his forum posts – is that called an avatar? – is almost certainly a grainy old photo of a man who was once one of my dearest friends in the world. I am convinced it was the photo used with this man’s obituary; he died 20 years ago.

I know it should be relatively simple to contact VladGuerreroCollector, but I’m not a registered member of the forum and the thought of having to remember yet another password and login name, etc., is more than I can handle right now.

   Besides, you know the old W.C. Fields line about refusing to join any club that would consider having someone like me for a member.

   If it turns out that I am right about who the guy is in the picture/avatar, I’ll share some stories about “Captain Al,” or at least the ones that will pass muster with the censors. Think those old Reader’s Digest “Unforgettable Character” features.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010 3:21:54 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Tales of Ultimate Fighting, weenies and Tiger ...
Posted by T.S.

   For a guy who doesn’t mind being linked to the odd childish and silly things – I do edit a magazine about baseball cards, after all – you would think I would take great pains to avoid sounding like an old geezer,

   Maybe I do at that, but I don’t hesitate to offer observations like this: There’s no place in our ostensibly civilized society for things like Ultimate Fighting or competitive eating. Odd linkage, sure, but there it is.

   To be consistent I probably should include boxing in the pronouncement, since many more people have died in the squared circle than in those grotesque Ultimate Fighting stages. But I also know that boxing is called the “Sweet Science” for good reason, and that though it shares many of the same barbaric elements as Ultimate Fighting, there is a good deal of beauty and even majesty to the sport at times. In Ultimate Fighting, I see only the barbarism.

   And I concede I am stupendously late to the dance, this question of the suitability of this “sport” seeming to have been debated and decided long ago. Swell.

   All I know is that when I watch it – a result of compulsive channel surfing, not by design – I cringe at what I am seeing and I come away convinced that a civilized society ought not put official sanction to it.

   Such horror is not precisely what I feel when I watch somebody shove 60 hot dogs down his throat in 10 minutes, but I do feel embarrassed that I live in a society that decides such monstrous excess constitutes entertainment of some fashion.

   This is not an anti-weenie thing, either. I love Nathan’s franks, which I can’t get out here in the Midwest, and frequently settle for Hebrew National, which is not the same thing. I’ll go to great lengths to get a great weenie – try a Clare & Carl’s Texas Red Hot in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and you’ll see what I mean – but that’s not the same thing as rooting on the sidelines as we exult gluttony at these freak shows.

   I don’t think my old friends at Clare & Carl’s will object to my views on competitive hot dog eating: they encourage having the extra Red Hot or two, but nothing so excessive as that Nathan’s debacle.

   As for my friends at Topps, which makes Ultimate Fighting cards, I assume we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

   Off Topic: I saw where Tiger Woods player in a pro-am event in Ireland after the AT & T PGA event where he never contended, and I got a kick out of a reference in the story about a little Irish girl from County Cork in a pink windbreaker and a red ribbon in her hair.

   Six-year-old Ava Mulhall – from the same county in Ireland as my great grandparents – scooted under the security rope and onto the fairway and planted herself in front of Tiger. As is his custom – and probably understandable given his situation – he had studiously avoided signing for fans, but cornered in this fashion added his name to a souvenir program that already included nearly two dozen other golfers.

   My God, doesn’t she know that she’d have been better off getting Tiger’s signature individually rather than mixed in with the PGA riffraff?

   At the end of that Associated Press story, it noted that Tiger has struggled with his short game, repeatedly hitting the ball too softly or hooking putts wide. And then this: “He also accidentally struck a spectator with his tee shot on the par-5, 551-yard 12th.”

   Really? It’s come to this has it, when we are writing about the disgraced Woods? A writer felt a need to add the qualifier “accidentally” when alluding to one of his 300-yard bombs off the tee?

   Silly me, I would have just assumed it was an accident.

Shameless Plug – If I can take the space to try to sell Clare & Carl's weenies, I probably better accord a bit of salesmanship to our some of our literary morsels as well.

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Tuesday, July 06, 2010 2:28:04 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, July 02, 2010

There used to be a ballpark right here ...
Posted by T.S.

Duke Snider.jpg

It must be a testimony to what a cyber hipster I’ve become that I’m willing – to say nothing of able – to send readers to a You Tube site to listen to my favorite baseball song of all time.

   What prompts this meandering is the arrival of the Fourth of July Weekend, which typically conjures up images of major league ballparks – OK, Shea and old Yankee Stadium – for me, just as I suspect it does for other fans and their respective teams.

   And so I gleefully suggest Googling “There Used to Be a Ballpark,” the classic Frank Sinatra song that was written by Joe Raposo and recorded on Sinatra’s 1973 album, “Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back.”

(For me, any excuse to picture Charles De Simone's incredible artwork is a good one.)

   Younger fans will likely link it to the 2007 HBO Documentary “Brooklyn Dodgers: Ghosts of Flatbush,” but my memory of the song – and typically attendant video of the Dodgers and Ebbets Field – goes way back to the 1980s, though I can’t remember exactly where.

   Naturally, I saw the HBO documentary three years ago, but the fun really started I think a year after that when I was doing research for the book on Yankee Stadium that we published in 2009. That’s when I came across this version of the song, not actually sung by The Chairman of the Board, but nicely done nonetheless, and featuring cool video of the Yankees from across the generations and the Stadium as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF_cV-2SmGA

   Now, I don’t usually recommend reprints when the original is available, but in this case it’s probably warranted. You can also find versions of Sinatra singing it as well, but at least in the one I found the video portion wasn’t as well done. And wouldn’t you know it, on Frank's version the clips are of my Beloved Metsies and that once resplendent – to me as a kid, anyway – but ultimately grimy Shea, in a You Tube piece with a bit more of a homemade quality.

   I am sure my initial exposure to it was with Ebbets Field video, and the link to the loss of the Dodgers due to the malfeasance of Walter O’Malley is probably the one that sticks for most fans.

    As the anonymous sages at Wikipedia note: The song can also be seen as a metaphor for any kind of loss, as suggested by the next-to-last line in the song, which is not necessarily connected with baseball: “And the sky has got so cloudy, when it used to be so clear ...”

   So my advice is, find the version of your choice on Google, play it a couple of times and then shut off the dang computer for the rest of the holiday weekend. And if you’re one of the lucky ones who ends up at a major league game over the weekend, I promise you that you won’t be able to shake the images of those long-since-demolished ballparks – or the mystical lyrics – out of your head.

   Even if you’re sitting at something called U.S. Cellular Field.

Friday, July 02, 2010 3:12:10 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Thursday, July 01, 2010

Yankee haters are heard from ...
Posted by T.S.

   For several months now in the Feedback section of Sports Collectors Digest, we’ve gotten the occasional missive lamenting that our once-a-month coverage offered in the form of the Complete Guide to Mickey Mantle Collectibles is way too much of an admittedly good thing.

   Well, more candidly, I suppose I should concede that not everyone thinks it’s a good thing. Some of the commentary is clearly from Yankee Haters, as noble and deeply entrenched of a fan subgroup as exists on the major league scene. When the group includes the elderly, many of whom grew up in the period of the 1950s and early 1960s when the whole American League played a supporting role to the Yankees’ star turn, such hostility is easily understandable.

   Likewise, for another whole generation of fans or more who have endured the last 15 years of renewed Bronx dominance, it’s easy to see why they might be a little sensitive about coverage so extensive devoted to a single team.

   Technically, though, the coverage is not devoted to the Yankees but rather to one Yankee: Mickey Mantle. We regard Mantle’s stature within the hobby to be so extraordinary and unique that the commitment of space seems to us justified.

   When the idea about the Collectibles Guide was pitched to us by Kelly Eisenhauer a couple of years ago, there was no way of knowing just how extensive it would ultimately be. Within the first few months of its launch last year, it had already become the largest ongoing editorial series ever produced in SCD. Now, as it reached Part XX in this week’s issue of SCD (July 23), it’s evolved into a major piece of hobby reference material, unmatched in its scope and breadth.

   And though I am sure I probably can’t talk anybody into it, I could also point out that as a percentage of overall editorial space, the Mickey Mantle coverage is significantly less today in the smaller-format SCD than it was in 2009 when the magazine was in the larger format.

   There have been 13 issues produced in the new smaller-format size, yielding roughly 400 pages of editorial copy over that span. About 25 pages have been Mantle-related over that period, or 8 percent of the total.

   That’s significant and unprecedented but not – in our view – out of line for something as weighty as what Eisenhauer has produced.

   Next year is the 60th anniversary of Mantle’s rookie season, the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest teams in postwar history from the historic 1961 season and will also mark what would have been his 80th birthday. Mickey Mantle nostalgia is going to be everywhere you can imagine and then some, and we’re just glad to have anticipated all of this by a couple of years or so.

And now – since I used this blog as yet another shameless opportunity to plug our book about the Yankees – comes another word from our sponsor ...

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Thursday, July 01, 2010 4:25:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Gee, five student-athletes taken in first round ...
Posted by T.S.

   I was floored the other day to learn that five University of Kentucky players had been drafted in the first round of the NBA’s much ballyhooed draft.

   Naturally, my first concern was for Ashley Judd, who I assumed was distraught about her beloved Wildcats losing four freshman to the siren call of the National Basketball Association. But then I got past that as I read that Kentucky has four of the top two dozen scholastic standouts in the country penciled in for Lexington in the fall.

   But it gets back to the initial amazement that a team that didn’t win the NCAA title could have so many players taken so early in a single draft year. Kind of makes you wonder if these are truly student-athletes or more precisely pieces in a grand bit of smoke and mirrors that big-time college athletics foists on an admittedly eager American public every year.

   I should make it clear that I am not talking specifically about the five Kentucky guys, but rather addressing a larger question. And that question is: Given all the hysterical hypocrisy that engulfs college sports at that level, is it defensible that a university – any university – would recruit players every year based on their suitability for the National Basketball Association rather than the theoretically more lofty aspiration of providing an undergraduate education?

   It seems to me that big-time college basketball coaches have to make strategic decisions about whether to recruit the best athlete – which may often mean NBA-worthy and maybe more likely to depart the ivy-covered campus prematurely and sans degree – or to try to scour the vast high school wilderness to find the best talent that might also be inclined to stick with the program for three, or, dare we say it, four years.

   While the strategic implications are significant, they are certainly not all-encompassing, and obviously the big-name coaches dabble in both arenas, so to speak. But I sure do like looking at the various programs at the upper-rung of the NCAA circus and try to determine if the coach looks for the big dogs with the NBA dreams or perhaps a spectacular high school star who may have just enough talent – and physical stature – to perform at the highest level in college but not at the professional level.

   I guess it’s just differences in philosophies, but it sure would be fun to be privy to some of the secret deliberations to know if the coaches really look at it in those terms.

   I’ll still be following Kentucky occasionally, largely because of my, uh, regard for the aforementioned Ms. Judd. I stopped actually rooting for them when Pat Riley finished up a few decades ago.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010 2:48:02 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Justice Sotomayor will not sign baseballs ...
Posted by T.S.

   There was a report in the Washington Post about our newest Supreme Court Associate Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, taking part in the surrounding festivities of a Congressional Women’s Softball Game in early June.

   The game between female lawmakers and reporters was a fundraiser for a breast cancer charity, and the new Justice signed autographs for fans as she mingled in the congressional-side dugout. According to the Post, she would sign lots of stuff – programs, wristbands and T-shirts were mentioned – but balked at attaching her signature to a softball.

   “Oh, I can’t sign that,” she told them, “because of the baseball case.” She added that she would sign anything else – just not a ball.

   Sotomayor, as a federal district court judge in 1995, is widely credited with “saving baseball” when she ruled in favor of the players in the spring of 1995, ending the disastrous seven-month labor impasse that had so severely stained the game.

   President Obama took note of her role in rescuing the 1995 season, citing it as a landmark achievement as he announced her selection as a nominee to the high court.

   The Post story said that the new Justice didn’t precisely explain why she wouldn’t sign a ball, but the combination of her “because of the baseball case” quote and the historical context was more than enough to posit the surmise that she didn’t want a signed baseball with her signature showing up in an online auction.

   The intrepid Post reporter even got confirmation of that conclusion from a spokeswoman from the Supreme Court. I would have tried to contact the Court for the same kind of confirmation, but they haven’t exactly been taking my calls since I tried to get Clarence Thomas to take the Coke-Pepsi Challenge with me in 1991. I thought the restraining order was a little over the top, but I guess I can take a hint.

   Anyway, the Post story took the next logical step and went to the expert, Brandon Steiner of Steiner Sports Memorabilia, to ask what a Sotomayor-signed ball might fetch. Steiner opined that if there were only a couple, they might bring $599-$600 each; if she only signed one, it might go as high as $3,000.

   To provide some context for the uninitiated, he said a Babe Ruth ball sells for $75,000-$80,000; a Derek Jeter ball could be found on the www.steinersports.com website for all of $514.99.

   Ever the entrepreneur, he pitched his own idea for the new Justice: a limited-edition signing of, say, 500 balls that might sell for $50 to $100 apiece, with the proceeds going to charity.

   “We’d be more than happy to help her expedite that, by the way,” the Post reported Steiner as volunteering.

   I wonder if any of those Congressional knuckleheads now ostensibly playing hardball with Elena Kagan will think to ask her about her sports memorabilia signing habits. At least it would be something for which she could presumably provide a straight answer.

   Meanwhile, the Democrats await their turn in anticipation of tossing Kagan some of those very same softballs that her fellow Justice, Sotomayor, won’t sign.

   Golly, I love it when politics and the sports memorabilia hobby get all mixed up. Anybody want to buy my Pete Rose signed copy of the Dowd Report?

Tuesday, June 29, 2010 4:22:41 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, June 25, 2010

Firing the manager is often excruciating nonsense ...
Posted by T.S.

   With the All-Star Game approaching, we obviously have entered that silliest of seasons when major league teams start unceremoniously whacking the manager as an ostensible means of jump-starting their particular moribund and presumably under-performing ball club.

   I’ve been annoyed by this ridiculous kabuki dance since long before I was old enough to articulate my dismay. There no doubt are times when offing the skipper is something that is required by circumstances, but I’d venture to say that only the tiniest of percentages of the annual firings would fall under that legitimate category.

   I guess what riles me most is all of the group participation that goes on to support this. Agitated readers froth in letters to the editor – or more precisely nowadays in online venues, and the ham sandwich brigade of sportswriters fulminate right along with them, everyone alternately retching and mewling about how the skipper can’t perform even the most rudimentary of tactical maneuvers.

   And so the manager gets fired and a new guy brought in and the cliches and platitudes get rolled out once again the same way your Uncle Ned and Aunt Louise go to the attic every year in early December and rustle up all the Christmas crap for the holiday season. The analogy is sound as far as it goes, but it could be noted that gathering up the ornaments and such is a more useful – even rational – undertaking than firing your baseball team’s manager is.

   Hardly anyone ever seems to bother to point out that all the swell things the GM is saying about the new guy are almost word-for-word what he said three years ago about the poor sap about to be kicked in the rump.

   Ultimately, I think the process is demeaning and embarrassing for everyone involved. If indeed the manager has turned out to be something less than originally advertised – it happens – then shouldn’t the guy who hired him get spanked in some fashion as well? That guy is getting paid to make those kinds of decisions.

   The merry-go-round approach to managerial hiring diminishes the genuine accomplishments of some of the truly great managers who somehow avoid the silliness for longer periods than the rest of the mere mortals.

   So the club is 18 games under .500 as the Home Run Derby festivities get underway, the manager gets dumped two days after the All-Star Game and the club suddenly responds by winning 11 of the next 14 games. Whoopee.

   In a game so exquisitely constructed to reward the application of long-term, sustained consistency and often excellence, firing the manager for shabby public relations reasons becomes the MLB equivalent of trying to teach a pig to dance.

   It doesn’t work and it supremely annoys the pig. And me, too.

Friday, June 25, 2010 3:04:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Jughead would love this Strasburg mania ...
Posted by T.S.

   Unless my cognitive abilities are even more impaired than I fear, I saw that those two amazing Stephen Strasburg cards were creating more market hysteria than we’ve seen in many a year.

   As I write this, the Strasburg Superfractor (I giggle every time I type that word) Red Autograph card is above $100,000, and the guy who paid $16,000 for the unsigned 1/1 Superfractor has decided to sell his after owning it for about a week or so. I just get the vapors when our hobby reaches such dizzying heights.

   And I can’t help but think back to the lawsuits that the card companies dodged maybe 10 years or so ago when it was alleged that what they were actually selling was more akin to lottery tickets than baseball cards.

   If I remember that bit of legal wrangling correctly, the card companies escaped a nasty mess by asserting that consumers (collectors) were getting precisely what they bargained for: baseball cards, with whatever intrinsic value that suggested, whereas people who buy lottery tickets ended up with zilch if the particular lottery ticket they bought ended up without any winners.

   That sounds like good lawyer talk, as they say, but it seems to me the picture of somebody buying a pack of baseball cards and finding something ostensibly worth $100,000 or more is a bit more compelling. See, I’m not protesting about what intuitively to me seems like insanity, since I understand to a degree about supply and demand and the effects of a kind of group hysteria. But I just can’t shake the similarly intuitive notion that spending that kind of money on something so recently manufactured is just an incredibly risky proposition.

   And I also keep thinking back to one of the last comic books I ever read as a kid, probably about 50 years ago or thereabouts. Jughead comes up with this grand plan to create the sheerest pantyhose known in all of the civilized world, which in this case amounted to nothing more than a black string that ran up the back of the legs. As I recall, he did very well with it, at least initially.

   For whatever reason, whenever I hear of new cards selling for the price of a Buick or even a small condominium in Little Rock, I think about Jughead.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 4:11:39 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Guy wants the Super Bowl to come to Green Bay ...
Posted by T.S.

   I should have suspected this would happen when the NFL awarded the Super Bowl to The Meadowlands in New Jersey for 2014. Now, somebody has stepped up and urged that the NFL designate the 2016 Super Bowl – the 50th anniversary of our gala sports bacchanalia – for Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

   I am treading on really thin ice by writing anything snarky about such a fantasy, since I have lived and worked in Wisconsin for the past 17 years or so. If nothing else, the waitresses at my favorite Sunday morning breakfast place – each adorned in a different Packer jersey – might “accidentally” dump my cream of wheat onto my lap. However, I am pretty sure they don’t read my blog.

   An outside contributor pitched the idea of the Super Bowl for Lambeau in a op-ed piece on the front of the Opinion Section of this week’s Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Which means, I think, that it was done with a straight face.

   But the fanciful nature of the suggestion leaves me breathless, if for no other reason than it was made in a newspaper home-ported in a city with a domed stadium that might more conceivably be able to host such an event.

   If I read the piece correctly, the principal reasons would be two-fold: it would be a cool (literally) way to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 NFL Championship Game, more commonly lovingly referred to as “The Ice Bowl.” And the other principal argument why the NFL should award the game to the Frozen Tundra would be because they had established the precedent of sending the 2014 game to New Jersey.

   Since the jury is still out on whether that was a particularly adroit stratagem or maybe a world-class goof, I don’t know if basing your argument in that fashion is the best plan.

   The writer notes that more than half of the NFL Playoff games since 2002 have been played in temperatures of 50 degrees or colder. This I would regard as a fairly clever pitch, not unlike suggesting that Phyllis Diller and Sophia Loren might be similarly desirable choices for a blind date, since both are women.

   The guy, God love him, also tries to dismiss the anticipated concern about Green Bay having an adequate number of hotel rooms by noting that if Milwaukee were included in the discussion, there would be rooms aplenty.

   He apparently didn’t think that one all the way through to what might be its logical conclusion: if the Super Bowl were somehow awarded to Green Bay, you might have tens of thousands of fans traveling two hours to watch a game in 10 degree weather with a handsomely domed stadium blinking incessantly in the rear-view mirror where their hotel rooms were located.

   As a transplanted New Yorker living reasonably peaceably with the indigenous people of Wisconsin, I know I am opening myself up to some heat for suggesting this op-ed piece is quaint but ultimately silly, but I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen.

   But, of course, I was a little surprised by the Meadowlands decision, too.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:53:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, June 21, 2010

Oil-soaked congressman opines on the BCS ...
Posted by T.S.

   A Texas congressman the Associated Press described as “one of the most powerful advocates of a college football playoff system,” offered his view that the Big 12’s “brush with death might eventually help doom the BCS.”

   I’ll run the AP passages verbatim, in part because I wouldn’t want anything that the Hon. Joe Barton said misunderstood or taken out of context:

   “It’s not going to happen right away,” said Texas Rep. Joe Barton. “But the promise of renewed television riches that persuaded the Big 12’s major football members to reject overtures from the Pac-10 has shone the spotlight on the huge financial jackpot awaiting a playoff.
   “The reason the Big 12 stayed together is the commissioner was able to put together a deal that enabled Texas and Texas A&M to go from about $8 million-$12 million a year to around $20 million a year” apiece, the Republican said. “I don’t really have a dog in the hunt as to how the conferences ought to be aligned. But I do think this moves us toward a playoff because we now know where the money is.”

   He could have added – though it may have sounded a bit unseemly – that his vast and onerous responsibilities as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives may not permit him adequate time to devote his attention to truly significant stuff like the arrangements for a college football playoff system.

   Of course, there is that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that seems to be much in the news, and Rep. Barton offered up his street cred as a sage observer of that environmental disaster by apologizing to BP, which naturally makes him someone I want to listen closely to as he describes how we should deal with the thorny BCS Playoff question.

   The Associated Press took note of same by pointing out that Barton has introduced a bill that would make it illegal to market something as a national football championship unless every eligible team was given a fair opportunity to win it.

   One can presume that in the absence of such vital legislation – it’s not like our federal legislators have any other pressing problems in need of their attention – Barton could be counted upon to issue an apology to the duly maligned university that might be unfairly left out of the collegial postseason antics.

   Hey, this apology thing just might catch on. Maybe we can muster up something for Bernie Madoff, the gang at Wall Street or even Milli Vanilli. We have been awful tough on all of them, what with revoking – in order – his freedom, their illusory status as contributing members of society and their Grammy.

   I’ll leave the apology to Madoff to Sandy Koufax, but first thing tomorrow, I’m going to apologize to my neighbor, who ran over my cat last week.

   I owe him that much at least.

Be sure to check out our other blogs and videos:
7th Inning Stretch
http://blog.tuffstuff.com/7thinning/

Bustin' Wax
http://blog.tuffstuff.com/bustinwax/

For Pricing information, check out these sports price guides
http://www.tuffstuff.com/priceguides/

Check out our sports-related books
http://shop.collect.com/category/sports-cards

Monday, June 21, 2010 2:22:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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