With Gettleman seeming to be finally heading for the hills, many Giants fans are calling for a similar fate for head coach Joe Judge and quarterback Daniel Jones. With a highly consequential off-season looming, it’s worth looking at how the Giants should consider proceeding.

At this point, reports from East Rutherford indicate that the Giants ownership are inclined to hold on to both Judge and Jones as they hunt for a new general manager. But should they be making that decision without the input of their new GM, whomever that might end up being?

Starting with Jones, it seems clear enough that he has only occasionally had the opportunity to succeed in his first three seasons. The main reason for that is the offensive line. While some argue that injuries to the Giants’ playmakers should also be considered, I’d contend that those playmakers are overrated, and that there have been enough receivers active for most of Jones’ games that he should have been able to show more than he has.

No, it’s the line that has been consistently terrible. Behind that line, Jones has managed to flash signs of competence, although he has been very inconsistent. Jones has not, for the most part, seemed overwhelmed by the job or completely incapable of handling it, as Mike Glennon has looked, or as, to use a nearby example, young Jets quarterbacks like Sam Darnold and Zach Wilson have looked at various times in their brief careers.

On the other hand, Jones even at his best has not shown the potential for stardom. Think of Eli Manning in 2004. He came in and got brutalized by some of the best defenses in the league at the time. But in a week 15 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers –who would end up going 15-1 that year—Manning flashed some of the excellence and moxie that would define his success in the years to come. In three seasons, Jones has not done that. Even in his best games, he’s looked like a good, solid quarterback, not a budding star.

In Jones’ first start in 2019, the Giants put up 32 points. They have broken 30 behind Jones only twice since. That is surely not entirely Jones’ fault, but he must shoulder a great deal of the blame for it.

Does that mean the Giants should just dump Jones? Actually, no, it doesn’t, especially not right now.

While the Giants are likely to have two picks in the top 10 of the 2022 draft, this is not a good year for quarterbacks. The last thing they need to do is repeat the mistake Gettleman made when he reached at number 6 in 2019 to take Jones.

Other scenarios, such as the Giants trading for Seattle’s Russell Wilson, make even less sense. Big Blue’s offense is broken and it can’t be addressed with a quick fix mentality. Giving up the sort of draft capital Wilson or any star-level vet would cost is the wrong approach for the Giants. This team needs to draft and draft well, something they haven’t done in a very long time. There is no other way to fix an offense this bad.

And it is bad. Even aside from the offensive line, there is a lot more wrong with this offense. While there is a mantra floating around about the Giants having an impressive array of offensive weapons, the reality is vastly different. People can imagine that Saquon Barkley will once again be the electrifying running back he was in 2018, but that is a fantasy. Injuries have robbed him of his explosiveness, and he was never as good as people thought he was. While he was a highly dynamic playmaker, he was also extremely prone to negative plays, as he would dance around behind the line of scrimmage, often allowing the defense to converge on him. Yes, he was good for a huge play in nearly every game, but he also put the Giants in a lot of third and longs.

The injuries have robbed Barkley of his dynamism and it’s not coming back. He’s not an Adrian Peterson who can make up for losing a step with his ability to run between the tackles and push the pile. Barkley is a good running back, but his days as a great one were short, and they’re now in the past.

Kenny Golladay and Kadarius Toney have both shown that they can’t be relied on, and Golladay was not able to develop any chemistry with Jones even when he was on the field. Evan Engram presents a tough matchup for defensive coordinators, but if the defenders fail, Engram has proven beyond doubt that his hands will mean fumbles, tipped interceptions, and lots of plain old dropped passes. Sterling Shepard and Darius Slayton are good pieces, but Shepard is largely extraneous if Toney is on the field, and Slayton is no better than a fourth receiver.

In all, this is not the arsenal it is made out to be. While the skill players are not the sort of horrible problem the offensive line is, they’re not a strength either.

With all of that, the Giants should not be desperate to replace Jones, who can competently manage the offense. Better to build the offense until there is an opportunity to get a quarterback who can lead this team to real contention for a long time to come. If the Giants decide there is someone who has that sort of potential in this year’s draft, fine. If not, there are other, more pressing matters that make it unnecessary to rush Jones out the door.

With Jones, the Giants need to decide whether they should guarantee his fifth year. It seems clear they shouldn’t, but also that they should keep the door open for him to step up and seize the job long term. But what of Joe Judge? He has apparently been assured that he will be the coach in 2022. This assurance is a lot more questionable.

When Judge stepped in for Pat Shurmur, he did seem to bring a greater sense of pride to the team. Despite all the losing, it’s clear to anyone watching that the Giants have not quit on Judge and continue to play hard for him. And that’s great; it means something.

But the inescapable fact is that Judge has won 10 games in two seasons. He has followed up a 6-10 campaign with one which will likely end with a 4-13 record, maybe 5-12. Judge can rant all he wants about internal and cultural progress, but that’s stepping backward, not forward.

Sure, the Giants have faced a lot of injuries. But so has very other NFL team. Yes, the Giants were hit especially hard, but there’s only so far that excuse can go. The game against Chicago illustrated the problem.

Mike Glennon may not be a good quarterback, but he is a veteran who, in his career, has thrown 47 touchdowns against 33 interceptions. He’s only won six games of the 30 he has started, but he did win those six. He shouldn’t be completely incapable of throwing a pass at all, as he was on Sunday. He went out there, as he has since Jones got hurt, and looked completely overwhelmed. That should not happen to an eight-year veteran.

When Glennon struggled, the Giants, who have nothing to lose, went into a shell and refused to pass, hobbling an already crippled offense. Judge is not just conservative, he has coached scared on many occasions. He has punted in situations that called for aggression (once even saying he wanted to get the punter “involved” early—and he wasn’t joking) and frequently called for third-down runs rather than trying more aggressively to move the football.

Judge comes from a special teams background. That’s unusual but not unprecedented. Yet it should mean that a disastrously stupid move like Pharoh Cooper allowing a kickoff to bounce around in the hope it would bounce into the end zone should not happen.

Yet it did. And when it did, the Giants called consecutive running plays up the middle sandwiched around a false start which all totaled a loss of five yards and cost them a safety, because Chicago, despite being poor defensively against the run, knew the Giants would not pass.

Judge’s performance in this game was not out of the ordinary. While Freddie Kitchens is technically calling the plays, we know it’s Judge that sets the tone; that’s especially clear since the Giants’ play-calling is so wildly different than what Kitchens employed in Cleveland, when he also had a sputtering offense.

Judge loves to lecture about culture, yet he’s also the guy who has routinely blamed everyone except himself for the team’s woes and last year had the gall to whine publicly because another team didn’t do enough to get his pathetic 6-10 squad into the playoffs.

So should Judge be fired?

As bad as the Giants organization has become, I am glad that John Mara at least remans reluctant to become the sort of owner who fires his coach every two years. Judge may yet turn this thing around and build on the promise he seemed to bring with him at the beginning of 2020.

But what should be of paramount importance right now to the Giants is their new general manager. This roster has been devastated by a GM who cannot judge talent, who doesn’t understand that the NFL of 2021 is very different from the NFL of 1986, and who has been incredibly resistant, from all accounts, to input from others.

After years of bad drafts from Jerry Reese, Gettleman made things much worse. He squandered the #2 overall pick on a running back, reached for a mediocre quarterback with the 6th pick, and took the worst of four available left tackles in his third draft (though, in fairness, Andrew Thomas has improved substantially since his poor rookie season, even if he is still clearly not as talented as the other tackles in that draft). In 2021 he passed on Micah Parsons—a player who is a throwback to the days when the Giants dominated the NFC East with their linebacking crew—and ended up taking the brittle Kadarius Toney instead. That decision is still open, since Gettleman did get a second first-round pick for trading back that day, so it may yet work out.

Bottom line, the roster is weak because of years of bad drafts and the free agents and trade acquisitions that have filled that gap have mostly either been inconsistent (Leonard Williams), too old to be on the next contending Giants team (Logan Ryan), or outright busts (Nate Solder). Big Blue absolutely cannot fail in their quest for a better GM.

That means they must not hamper their search by forcing any new GM to accept a coach who has a poor track record and a questionable temperament like Judge.

All things being equal, I’d give Judge one more year to show some results on the field and demonstrate that he’s capable of coaxing something more out of his players than the ability to lose a dozen or more games without punching one another. It’s concerning that this last result is something Judge apparently thinks is a point of pride.

But things are not equal. The clown show that is Dave Gettleman is finally about to end and the Giants must overcome the damage he’s done. Whoever they feel can do that must be hired and keeping Judge cannot be a factor in that decision at all. If a new GM wants him, fine. I can see someone feeling Judge has potential and, if that’s the view, there is value in consistency as well. But if the new GM wants his own guy, there should be no question that he will get him.

Giants ownership with John Mara has gone from the ridiculous to the pathetic. To say John is not the football man his father was is the understatement of the century. But there is no chance of change there, so Giants fans have to hope that his next decision is better than most of his previous ones. The new GM must be given free reign to decide on his coach, and the future of the entire roster, including the quarterback. The fact that Mara seems to want to pre-empt that decision is a real cause for concern.

Tom Seaver was likely the best pitcher it was ever my privilege to watch. His fastball, powered by the bets use of powerful legs of any pitcher ever, was dominant, and he threw it with such consistency and accuracy that a hitter who wasn’t aggressive at the plate against him would find himself in an 0–2 hole very quickly.

But try and gear up for that fastball, and he’d throw a slider that looked for all the world like a mistake pitch right down the middle until it seemed to dive into the dirt. Seaver also had an outstanding 12-to-6 curveball that forced hitters to bend the knee, and something sort of like a knuckle curve, a slow and deceptive pitch that seemed to tease its way past a hitter.

There’s a reason Tom Seaver struck out 3,640 hitters and led the league in strikeouts five times.

Pitching from 1967 to 1986, Seaver’s career bridged the last era of the great starting pitchers and the beginning of the age of the closer. Four-man rotations were still the norm, but when there was no off day for a while, many teams had a “swingman” who would be slotted in for the occasional start, along with his duties as a reliever.

The best starters still completed many of their games (Seaver would not have a season of less than ten complete games until his twelfth year in the league, 1978), but it was no longer expected that starting pitchers would “finish what they started” lest their outing be considered a failure.

Seaver’s strikeout total is remarkable on its own, and in context. When he retired, he was third all-time on the strikeout list, behind only Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, two of his contemporaries. What makes the totals for all three men interesting is that when they pitched, strikeouts were less common than they are in the current game.

The top 30 seasons for strikeouts by a better have all come after Seaver retired. In 2019, the average team struck out 8.81 times per game. In 1986, Seaver’s last season, that number was 5.87. Over the course of his career, it varied between 4.75 per game and 5.99. Hitters simply played more to contact in those days, simply trying to put the ball in play. It was an era where hitters were sharply divided between sluggers and contact hitters, when small ball was practiced much more widely. Love it or hate it, strikeouts were certainly harder to come by. But Seaver racked up more than any pitcher who had come before him.

Unfairly Maligned in the Post-Season

I was just about to turn three years old when the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. But I was old enough by 1973 to watch the Mets pull off another upset, beating the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds, in the National League Championship Series (when Pete Rose, already showing what a total jackass he was, sucker-punched Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson, who was roughly half his size) and damn near beating the dynasty Oakland A’s, taking them to seven games before finally succumbing to what was a far more talented team.

Seaver was unfairly labeled by some as a guy who wasn’t a “big game pitcher” because he was the so-called “losing pitcher” (sorry, but pitchers don’t win or lose games, teams do, but that’s a debate for another day) in Game 6, when the Mets had a chance to put the A’s away and take the Series. This was added to the fact that Seaver had also “lost” Game 1 in 1969, the only game the Baltimore Orioles won in that Series. He had also “lost” Game 1 of the 1973 NL Championship Series.

This was, of course, sheer nonsense. In 1969, it’s true that a 25-year old Seaver got hit pretty hard in Game 1 of the World Series, but he came back in Game 5 to pitch ten innings of 1-run ball against an Orioles team that featured Frank Robinson and Boog Powell, among other strong hitters.

In 1973, against the Reds in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, Seaver pitched the whole game, striking out 13 with no walks issued. He shut out the dominant Reds lineup for seven innings, and even knocked in the Mets’ only run in that game with a second inning double. Leading 1–0 in the bottom of the eighth, however, Seaver started to tire and surrendered a homerun to Pete Rose. With the score tied 1–1 in the bottom of the ninth, and Seaver due to bat third in the following inning if it got that far, manager Yogi Berra stuck with his ace. But Seaver gave up a game-ending homerun to Johnny Bench.

Baseball is a funny game, though. Seaver got to come back against the Reds in Game 5, with a chance to send his team to the World Series. He didn’t pitch nearly as well as he had in Game 1, issuing five walks, and only striking out four, but also only allowing two runs, and the Mets coasted to a 7–2 victory.

In the World Series, Seaver started Game 3, and the Mets lost, but you could hardly blame him. Against a powerhouse A’s lineup (and it bears mentioning that, while the Mets had some good hitters like Rusty Staub, Cleon Jones, and John Milner, they were not a very good offensive team), Seaver went eight innings, giving up only two runs, striking out 12 and walking just one. The A’s would eventually win 3–2 in 11 innings when Campy Campaneris drove in Ted Kubiak with a single off Harry Parker.

Seaver would start Game 6, and the Mets would lose, but Seaver still allowed only two runs in seven innings. Catfish Hunter didn’t exactly pitch better than Seaver, but he faced a much weaker lineup and so surrendered only one run.

Seaver pitched well again in his only post-season appearance for a team other than the Mets, but only got into the one game as the 1979 “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates swept the Reds out of the NLCS.

It is entirely unfair to look negatively at Seaver’s post-season performance. In 61.1 post-season innings, he posted an ERA of 2.77 (plus one so-called “unearned” run — another subject for another day), struck out 51 and walked only 16 batters. He went up against some of the most potent offenses of his era in the 1969 Atlanta Braves, 1969 Orioles, 1973 Reds, 1973 A’s, and 1979 Pirates and still put up those numbers.

Defining the Mets

For me, growing up in New York City in the 1970s, Tom Seaver was Mr. Met, much more so than that stupid-looking mascot they have. As a Yankee fan, this was not something that endeared Seaver to me.

But the greatness of Seaver on the mound was unmistakable, even to a child, and, yes, even to a child who loathed the Mets. At that time, watching anything other than Yankees games was less of a thrill for me. I liked baseball in general, but it just wasn’t the same without a rooting interest. But if I looked at the pitching matchups that day and saw that Seaver was taking the mound, the next thing I went to check was whether Channel 9 was showing the Mets game. Yes, kids, in those days, not all the local games were televised.

If Seaver’s greatness epitomized the Miracle Mets of 1969 and the “Ya Gotta Believe” Mets who, despite going just 82–79 in the regular season beat one historically great team to get to the World Series and came within a hair of beating another one to win it all, his departure from Queens epitomized the down side of the Mets too.

In 1977, the Mets had fallen on hard times. Their manager, Joe Frazier, was fired when the Mets started the season 15–30, replaced by 36-year old Joe Torre, who was not prepared for the job. An offense that had never been the team’s strength was descending into horror, as veterans like Jerry Grote and Ed Kranepool saw their skills decline and young players like Lee Mazzilli and Mike Vail disappointed. The middle infielders, Felix Millan and Bud Harrelson stopped hitting entirely. But it was the pitching staff that was the biggest disappointment. Jon Matlack had a terrible year, Jerry Koosman pitched fairly well, but inconsistently, and Craig Swan got hit regularly. Young Nino Espinosa showed some promise and Seaver was his usual steady self, but it simply wasn’t enough to overcome a lineup that would see three players tie for the team lead in homeruns…with 12.

On June 15, general manager M. Donald Grant became perhaps the most reviled figure in Mets’ history. He looked at his team and recognized that there was not enough talent there, and not much in the minors on the way. So, he decided to use his greatest asset to acquire a bevy of young talent. He traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for pitcher Pat Zachry, second baseman Doug Flynn, and outfielders Steve Henderson and Dan Norman. He also traded away all-or-nothing slugger Dave Kingman, in what was known as the “Midnight Massacre.”

All of New York was outraged, even the Yankee fans. Seaver was traded for a guy who had tied for the Rookie of the Year award the year before, and a bunch of no-names. Shea Stadium was nicknamed “Grant’s Tomb.” The Mets would finish 1977 with 98 losses, an angry fan base, and a dismal future.

Although the 32-year old Seaver was leaning toward the downside of his career by 1977, he was still one of the top pitchers in all of baseball. For the rest of the year, he pitched like his classic self, posting a 2.34 ERA, and Mets fans did a slow burn as his quality pitching combined with a potent Reds lineup to give him a 14–3 record in Cincinnati. He was never again the truly incredible pitcher he had been in his best years with the Mets, but he gave the Reds a few good seasons, and even had one more flash of greatness in 1985 with the Chicago White Sox.

The truth is, Grant really didn’t make a bad deal. Seaver and the Mets were wrangling over Seaver’s contract, a situation that was fraught due to the new free agency system that team were still adjusting to. Grant might not be remembered so badly if the worst-case scenario of this deal hadn’t come about.

The deal didn’t look bad on paper. Zachry was coming off a very promising rookie year, and although he had gotten off to a poor start in ’77, he was only 25. In fact, he was a slightly above average pitcher for most of his Mets career, but the awful teams he pitched for meant his won-loss record didn’t reflect it. Flynn was an outstanding fielder and looked like a reasonably capable slap hitter. This was an age when most middle infielders didn’t hit much, and Flynn had posted fairly good batting averages in both 1975 and ’76 in limited playing time behind Joe Morgan, Dave Concepcion, and Pete Rose. His bat simply fell off a cliff in New York and never recovered.

Dan Norman was a roll of the dice, but he was only 22 and there was some hope that he might develop significant major league power, something the Mets were desperate for. It never happened, but again, Norman was the least important cog in this deal. The big one was the other outfielder, Steve Henderson, and for a while, it seemed like he was just what the Mets were hoping for.

Henderson looked like a dynamic player with star potential. He had a solid batting eye, a bit of power that could develop into a 20-homerun type (a strong benchmark in those days) and reasonable athleticism, which, the Mets hoped, would mean his defense would improve with time.

But it never came together for him. He was unable to stay healthy and played in 100 games only four times in his 12-year career. He was always a good hitter, but never a great one. He was not a natural power hitter and often went into slumps when the Mets tried to push him to hit more homeruns, which didn’t help with fans who saw Seaver every time they looked at Henderson. His defense remained terrible. When the Mets finally gave up on him in 1981, they traded him to the Cubs to get Dave Kingman back. That ending was appropriately poetic in a darkly comic way that suited the Mets of that era perfectly.

All the players the Mets got for Seaver were huge disappointments, but this is always the gamble with young players. Whether it’s scouting or stats, the future can never be fully predicted. Still, the outcome of the Seaver deal for the Mets was the worst-case scenario, and it really was reasonable to expect to those four guys to be a decent return for Seaver, just in terms of overall player quality. It just didn’t work out that way, and that’s why you don’t trade a generational talent, especially when he’s all your fans have to cling to.

Tom Seaver would briefly return to the Mets in 1983. By this time, he was a league-average pitcher, but the move was about repairing the breach with the fans that was still scarring the franchise, six years later. Unfortunately, even that got screwed up when the Mets left him unprotected in the free agent compensation pool and he was drafted away by the Chicago White Sox, for whom he’d have the aforementioned one last very good year in 1985.

Is he the greatest?

Seaver must be on any short list of candidates for the greatest pitcher ever. He does very well by the standard old-school metrics. He also is in the inner inner circle in advanced metrics.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen four of the top 10 pitchers in pitching Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Seaver, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, and Greg Maddux. Seaver is behind only Roger Clemens in WAR. In Win Probability Added, I’ve seen seven of the top 10, the four I mentioned, plus Jim Palmer, Pedro Martinez, and Mariano Rivera. Seaver is fourth behind Clemens, Maddux, and Rivera.

Leaving Rivera aside (he’s just a completely different category from the starters), Pedro doesn’t have the longevity to match Seaver, and Palmer wasn’t nearly in his class. Clemens, Maddux, and Johnson could all make the case with Seaver. In my view, Clemens was the best of this bunch, but that brings up the whole PED issue (still waiting for any actual evidence against Clemens on that score, but that is also a debate for another day). For me, Seaver edges out Johnson and Maddux, but a reasonable case can be made for any of them.

Seaver was the pitcher of my youth. I watched Clemens, Maddux, Martinez, Johnson, and certainly Rivera a good deal more than Seaver just because I could with expanded TV coverage. But I saw Seaver as a kid, and I saw him in an era of baseball that was, for my money, a far superior one in terms of enjoying the game. And that’s why I’ll stick with Tom Seaver as the greatest pitcher I’ve ever seen.

Few are naïve enough to think that the National Football League is ever going to honestly give a damn about the domestic violence that has plagued it. Every time the issue has come up, it has been all about covering it up and, failing that, doing damage control. I don’t expect that to change.

But the latest ugly incident of domestic violence involving an NFL player has exposed the core of indifference to the issue in the league, and has also hit me personally because my team is the one acting in a most shameful manner.

Josh Brown, the kicker for my very own New York Giants confessed, in documents released earlier this week, to very serious and numerous incidents of domestic violence. He has now, finally, been placed on the commissioner’s exempt list. That means he is still collecting his salary until the league decides what to do with him. Given their shameful response to the matter thus far, that is probably enough for the Giants to wash their hands of the matter.

But let’s not let either the NFL or the Giants off the hook that easily. They have both acted horribly throughout from the beginning and continue to do so. The NFL has shown that they have learned nothing from the Ray Rice incident or any of the far too numerous cases of abuse of women involving NFL players. And the Giants, for their part, have made it clear that, if John Mara has not betrayed the dignity that characterized his family’s reputation in running this team through the years, then perhaps that reputation was never deserved in the first place.

Brown was arrested for domestic on May 22, 2015. Eventually, the charges were dropped. That’s not unusual, of course, in domestic violence cases. Earlier this year, Brown was mysteriously suspended for one game by the NFL, and it was only then that his arrest in 2015 was made public. The league claimed that they could not speak to Molly, who was, by that time, Brown’s ex-wife (and I don’t know what her last name is now, or whether it’s still Brown, hence I only use her first) nor get information from the police. So, they were only suspending Brown for one game. The Giants, from ownership to the head coach to the quarterback, all stood by Brown.

The implication, of course, was that they presumed Brown’s general innocence, that this was a one-time incident where tempers flared. Even aside from the fact that even one incident of domestic violence is one too many, that’s an inadequate explanation in and of itself; in 2014, in the wake of the Ray Rice assault case, the NFL sent the following letter to all the teams: “Effective immediately, violations of the Personal Conduct Policy regarding assault, battery, domestic violence or sexual assault that involve physical force, will be subject to a suspension without pay of six games for a first offense, with consideration given to mitigating factors as well as a longer suspension when circumstances warrant.” Obviously, they didn’t follow that policy in Brown’s case. He got one game.

The Giants come off no better. When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell put John Mara, along with Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney, in charge of overseeing the FBI’s investigation of the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice case, Mara said, “Many of us were dissatisfied with the original two-game suspension of Ray Rice. The commissioner took responsibility for that in his Aug. 28th memo to the owners when he stated, ‘I didn’t get it right. Simply put, we have to do better. And we will.’ He then took appropriate steps to address this matter.”

Mara didn’t do better when it was up to him. Despite being aware of the charges against Brown, he signed the kicker to a two-year deal worth $4 million. This is a kicker, and, unlike other players, they are easily replaced. Yet Mara went forward.

Can that decision be excused by the possibility that this was a one-time lapse of temper by Brown? Even if one accepts such reasoning, and I absolutely do not, it is simply not true that the Giants believed this was a one-time incident. While they may have been unaware that there was a pattern of spousal abuse by Brown since 2009, they knew this was not a one-time incident. How? Because of an incident at the Pro Bowl earlier this year, well before the Giants re-signed Brown. The kicker was drunk and tried to break into his wife’s room (they were staying in separate rooms, which says a lot in and of itself). Earlier in the day, he was verbally abusive to her and took her phone to inspect her texts. Eventually, NFL and hotel security dragged Brown away and moved his estranged wife and her children, one of whom was Brown’s own child, who were in the room with her at the time to a new room.

So let’s cut out the nonsense that the Giants or the NFL thought Brown’s arrest was an anomaly. They knew this man was an abuser and they didn’t care.

Maybe, one might argue, they knew Brown had issues, but they were trying to support him in therapy and get him to work through his problems. After all, one could argue, if he’s really working and making progress on his issues, taking his livelihood away from him is likely to be counterproductive.

Again, that’s a weak line of argument. If that’s how things are being approached, he should still have faced the full six game suspension Goodell committed to. Moreover, the Giants needed to say that this was their approach in their words of support for Brown back in August to avoid the appearance of condoning domestic violence. But none of that happened.

And here matters get even worse. After Brown got the one-game suspension that was widely condemned as too light, this was his response: “I’m not going to go into detail about anything. My major concern is my three kids and the things that are put out there and the things that are being said. This moment happened over a year ago. The case was dropped five days after the moment happened. We’ve moved on with our lives at this point. While I’m not OK with the decision, I have to respect it. So I look forward to a 15-game season and moving forward with my teammates.”

Does that sound to you like a man who realizes he did something wrong? No, it’s more like a man who felt that getting a much lighter sentence than he supposed to was still an injustice done to him! And he was supported in this by his teammates and team.

Jason Pierre-Paul was asked in August if Brown should be cut. “No,” he said. “Why should we cut him? Every guy needs a chance.”

Justin Pugh had this to say: “Obviously, it’s a sad situation he’s been going through, and obviously, you have to be there for your team teammate. It’s definitely something that is tough. I don’t want to get too into it because I don’t know all the details either. So that is something that — I know Josh has spoken with everybody and settled that — but all we can do is support our teammate and make sure we’re there for him. It’s definitely a tough thing to go through.”

After Brown came back from his week off, quarterback Eli Manning said “I’m glad to have Josh back. Support him and support your teammates through everything that goes on. Good to have him back on the team and kicking for us this week. Just saw him and said, ‘hey, good to have you back.’ That’s about it. Move on.” Given some of the things Eli’s father and brother have been accused of, I guess he has a good deal of practice with that.

Head Coach Ben McAdoo said “I do support Josh as a man, a father, and a player.”

Now, with the allegations out, little has changed. On WFAN yesterday, I listened as Giants owner John Mara continued to double-talk about this, with his “waiting until we have all the facts” nonsense. But when host Mike Francesa asked if, given what we now know, Mara felt hoodwinked by Brown, Mara wasted not one heartbeat before saying firmly, “Absolutely not.” So, Mara seems to have known plenty before. He just didn’t care, because, after all, it was just some woman and one who was already divorcing his player.

McAdoo? He says “we’re not going to turn our back on Josh.”

Keep in mind, this is a player who has not shown the briefest glimpse of remorse or the slightest indication that he ever did anything wrong. Getting 1/6 of the penalty he was supposed to get for this horrific crime was deemed an injustice by him.

Nothing has changed in the NFL. And the ironic part is, in the end, Josh Brown is probably the worse off for it. Had the league done the right thing in the first place and waited until the police investigation was closed and these documents released, then given him the full six game suspension that Goodell had committed to, there’s every chance Brown could have made a public apology, served his suspension and been, albeit grudgingly by some like me, given a second chance, having paid a price for his crime.

Instead, Brown’s career is almost certainly over. The Giants have moved on with Robbie Gould. But justice has not been served. Nothing has changed. No message was sent. The NFL still thinks that as long as they put some pink shoes on the players a few times a year and turn one or two of their TV ads into pathetic and self-interested pandering to women they don’t need to address the culture of their sport which, from high school on up, is infused with a misogynistic disdain for women as anything other than sex toys.

And the Giants? Their image as a class organization has weathered some hits over the years, but most of the scandals associated with players on their team occurred after those players had left (Lawrence Taylor, Dave Meggett, Mark Ingram) or caused their departure (Plaxico Burress). This was an instance of the Giants coddling and, one could argue, even condoning spousal abuse. This will forever tarnish the team’s image.

And me? I’ll still root for the Giants on Sunday. But it will be less enthusiastic than it has been in the past, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to support this team the way I have in the past. I can tell you, I will never again purchase a piece of Giants merchandise until the Mara family sells the team, and that probably does indeed mean never.

It’s frankly pathetic to read the bloggers at ESPN’s web site talking about how the Jets “recognized” that they needed to Revis, one even going so far as to say the Jets were an 8-8 team without him, but with him have a legitimate shot at the Super Bowl. Rich Cimini, at least, got it right.

What utter nonsense. No cornerback (and Revis is, indeed, the best) can make that big a difference. No one player outside a quarterback can, and even there, it’s got less to do with how good the player is than how big the gulf between him and his backup is.

Without Revis, the jets still had a formidable backfield. Last year they lost the guy everyone thought was their best defensive player. Anyone recall how that worked out?

But the really sad part is that these guys seem unable to do simple math.

We’re not even talking fractions, here, just basic addition, subtraction and a little division. Let’s break it down.

Coming into camp, Revis was upset that he would make only $1 million this year. But his contract had three years left in it and the Jets would obviously have picked up his option, guaranteeing the rest of the money, which was $20 million. That’s $21 million guaranteed over three years, or $ 7 million per year.

Revis’ new contract gets him $32 million guaranteed and potentially up to $46 million. And it adds a fourth year. That, folks, is a long, long, LONG distance away from the contract he was seeking. His request for 10 years and $162 million was never serious, just a start for negotiations. But you can bet he was serious about being paid like Nnamdi Asomugha. And he isn’t even close.

Asomugha is getting roughly $15 million per year guaranteed. If Revis gets every non-guaranteed cent of his new deal, he will have made $11.5 million per year.

But here’s the better point: Revis already had 3 years and $21 million guaranteed. Now he has 4 years and $32 million guaranteed. He’s committed for another year, and for that extra year only got $11 million in commitment from the Jets. Does anyone seriously believe that this holdout was performed so that Revis could attach some non-guaranteed money, another $11 million guaranteed but at the cost of another year’s service time to his existing contract?

No one in their right mind believes that.

What happened looks very simple, and it was exactly the opposite of what is being written about the end of this soap opera.

Revis knew the Jets still had a very good defense without him, especially given the additions of Antonio Cromartie and Kyle Wilson. No, it would not have been nearly as good as it will be with Revis, but Rex Ryan is a master at working with what he has. Revis understood the dangers. The 2009 Jets were 9-7 and made a terrific playoff run, and Revis was the star. The 2010 Jets were a very good bet to improve on that record without him and quite possibly go at least as far in the playoffs, and maybe farther.

Revis knows he’s the best. Unlike ESPN’s writers, he also knows that really great teams can make up for losing even their best, non-quarterback players if they play an area that is strong for the team and the team is well-rounded. That is why Darrelle Revis, on the eve of Opening Day completely caved in to the Jets. It’s quite likely what Woody Johnson and Rex Ryan told him over the weekend.

The other narrative simply doesn’t fit the facts. There was far too little gained by Revis over what he would have had to justify this holdout. That’s particularly so since he probably turned off more than one team that might look at him four years from now by holding out and making the demands he did.

Revis comes out of this a huge loser. If the Jets’ performance in games matches the way they’ve dealt with Revis, they’ll be the top seed in the playoffs and Super Bowl winners. As Jets fans know all too well, I just jinxed them to miss the playoffs. But if so, they’ll still have won this rather stunning victory, albeit over their own superstar.

Some say that the Jets have a legit shot at a Super Bowl with Revis, but not really without him. I disagree, but I’ll let their fans debate that one. But others contend that Revis’ demands are reasonable, that he’s the best corner in the league, that he’s “outplayed his contract” and that he deserves to be paid at least as much as Nnamdi Asomugha.

I beg to differ. Not with all of those points, only with the conclusion.

Is Revis being reasonable? That depends on how one analyzes the situation, of course, and is a matter of opinion.

Is he the best corner in the league? Some might argue the point, but I say yes, he is.

Has Revis outplayed his contract? Yes.

But does that mean the Jets should be expected to give him a long-term deal commensurate with Asomugha’s? Keeping in mind that the Raiders were widely viewed to have overpaid Asomugha, let’s use him as a benchmark.

Thanks to my brother who did some research to find these numbers (source: USA Today’s salary database), we can look at what Asomugha made in his first six years. Revis has played three.

Year 1 $3,575,000 (2003)

Year 2 $470,100

Year 3 $560,720

Year 4 $650,280

Year 5 $1,240,760

Year 6 (Opted out of contract and was franchised.  Jets can’t franchise Revis)

Got $9,765,000

Total:  $16,351,860
Now, let’s look at what Revis has made and would be due on the remainder of his contract.

Year 1 $5,319,000 (2007)

Year 2 $2,670,000

Year 3 $6,260,000

Year 4 $1,000,000

Year 5 $5,000,000

Year 6 $15,000,000

Total: $35,249,000

Now, to be sure, the market has changed, and defensive backs have become more highly valued in the past few years. And Revis became one of the top two or three corners faster than Asomugha did. Still, if Revis plays the same 6 years Asomugha did and becomes a free agent, he will have earned more than double what Asomugha did in his first 6 years.

Now, I never want to blame an NFL player for trying to get as much as he can as soon as he can. Plenty of players give their teams a great few years at a relative bargain price then sustain a career-ending injury and are unceremoniously cut without so much as a cheesy gold watch. So I can understand why Revis is trying to get his payday now.

But the whining about how Revis is only going to make a paltry $1 million in 2010 is disingenuous. He made $5.3M in his rookie year and $6.26M last year. That’s a pretty sweet contract for a rookie deal, and Asomugha took the first four years of his career to match what Revis made in his rookie year alone.

That’s how salaries work in the NFL. I’m not sure it’s such a good system, because a player feels underpaid in the year he is making the low amount, as Revis surely does, and it’s human nature that the money he made in the best, far from making him feel better about that, only accentuates how “little” he is getting now. That’s understandable.

And it’s understandable that Revis, knowing that he risks ending his career every time he steps on the field, tries to get as much guaranteed money as he can right now.

But Revis is asking the Jets to give him a new contract that would establish not only a new benchmark in salaries (he is said to be asking for Asomugha’s annual salary over 7-10 years, while Asomugha signed only a 3-year deal, 2/3 of which was guaranteed) but a shift in the way teams do business. Sometimes teams do such things, but it’s hardly penny-pinching of the Jets to be reluctant to sink that much money – and, of more immediate concern to Jets fans, cap space—into a guy whose contract is more than reasonable by NFL standards.

Let’s keep in mind that Revis will make $20M for the last two years of his deal. And then he hits the open market.

The Jets have, I think, shown that they are willing to lock their guys up with respectable contracts with the deals given to Eric Mangold and D’Brickashaw Ferguson. They spent a good chunk of change this off-season, while few NFL teams did so. They’re not a cheap franchise, whatever else they might be.

If Revis thinks he can win this battle, more power to him. An NFL player is treated worse than any professional in any other major team sport, by far. Get what you can. But fans should be a little more thoughtful about these situations, since, for better or worse, part of these negotiations get played out in the public arena.

The Jets have reason not to give Revis what he wants. Since we don’t know for certain what the Jets really have offered him, we can’t know for sure if they’re negotiating reasonably. But Revis’ demands are pretty outlandish. He’s asking for Asomugha’s annual salary for twice the length of Asomugha’s contract while having done less than half as Asomugha did to earn it through paying his dues.

I’ll give all due respect to Revis, who is by all accounts a good guy and is certainly an incredible player. But his whining about how the Jets are mistreating or under-appreciating him if he plays out his contract is nonsense. By the standards of NFL salaries and in the context of service time, he is being paid well. It’s too bad the media don’t seem to want to be bothered with facts.

Bonds has clearly fallen from grace and his accomplishments have been tainted in everyone’s minds. Now, Clemens faces a similar fate.

But for the life of me, I don’t understand why.

I’m not going to contend that Clemens is telling the truth and never took HGH or steroids. I have no idea whether he did or didn’t. But that’s really the point—I have no idea. And I can’t see how anyone outside of Clemens, Brian McNamee and anyone who might have actually seen McNamee inject Clemens with something they knew beyond a doubt was a Performance Enhancing Drug (PED) can claim to either.

I’m not surprised that most fans have already convicted Clemens. He’s an unappealing figure, the whole steroids era has seriously bruised baseball fans, and the media have spent over a decade now whipping up a self-righteous frenzy over the issue to such an extent that any accusation of use is immediately treated as conclusive proof that the player used.

What I do find so puzzling, though, is that not only does the government seem to think they have a strong case for perjury against Clemens, the legal experts who are weighing in on the issue are giving Clemens only a tiny chance of beating the rap.

I’m not a lawyer, so I can only assume I’m missing something here, but whatever it is must be gargantuan and I wish one of these lawyers would explain what it is.

The Case Against Clemens

As far as I am aware, the case against Clemens comes down to three things: Brian McNamee’s testimony, Andy Pettitte’s testimony and McNamee’s stored syringes which he claims he used to inject Clemens with PEDs.

Let’s start with McNamee. Many have said that the Congressional Committee before which Clemens and McNamee testified found McNamee more believable than Clemens.

I watched that hearing. Someone really should explain to Clemens that he is a lousy public speaker (and I say this as someone who has, in part, made his living as a public speaker). McNamee, on the other hand, is a former police officer and has been thoroughly trained and, one assumes, has had some significant experience in testifying in legal proceedings.

It requires only the smallest crumb of critical thinking then to understand that of course McNamee’s going to appear more credible than Clemens. It’s a given, no matter which one of them is lying that, barring some clear inconsistency in their testimony, McNamee is going to come off better. This cannot reasonably be considered a factor. The fact that both Chuck Knoblauch and Andy Pettitte said McNamee told the truth about them also amounts to nothing: most people don’t lie about every single thing and their telling the truth about X tells us nothing about whether they’re telling the truth about Y. Again, this is all very basic logic.

Then there’s McNamee’s so-called “evidence.” This is the one piece the legal commentators have generally dismissed, though I think not forcefully enough.

McNamee supposedly kept these syringes in a soda can in his basement for years. That immediately invalidates them as their purity, cleanliness and veracity can’t be verified. But there’s more to it than that.

McNamee, before he ever mentioned the name “Roger Clemens” to investigators had already been caught red-handed distributing controlled substances illegally. Is it a stretch to think that any person in such a situation, fearing that names like Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch might not be big enough fish, might want to implicate an all-time great like Clemens? Again, I’m not saying he did so, but it’s an obvious possibility that undermines McNamee’s evidence as well as the credibility of his testimony.

In any case, that evidence is worthless. Frankly, I can’t see how McNamee’s testimony is worth any more, under the circumstances. Indeed, former Rep. Tom Davis, the leading Republican on that committee, made it clear that if it was only McNamee, even though they found him more credible than Clemens, they would not have pursued perjury charges. The key was Pettitte.

Now, I certainly understand that Pettitte is a very credible witness. But can we really convict a man of perjury just because someone who strikes us as credible says he’s lying? I sure hope not. And, as I understand it (again, I’m no lawyer, so if some legal expert wants to say different, I will certainly stand corrected), this is precisely the reason that perjury charges are not brought as often as one might think: because it’s hard to prove someone is knowingly lying when concrete evidence is needed, not just the word of someone you believe more than the accused.

And just what is Pettitte’s testimony that is so damning to Roger Clemens? In 2008, he testified that eight or nine years prior, Clemens told him that he had used HGH. Pettitte then said that in 2005, that prior conversation had come up again and Clemens said he had been referring to his wife. Pettitte, by this time five years removed from the event, may have felt that Clemens was updating his story now that the whole PED thing had grown so big.

But what if Clemens was indeed talking about his wife, a professional bodybuilder who has used HGH and admits to doing so? What if Pettitte really didn’t hear him correctly, never got clarification, and went home and told his wife “Roger used HGH, oh my God!”?

That strikes me as an entirely credible scenario. How many times have we gotten upset about something we thought our friend, spouse, parent said only to find out, after a long shouting match, that we had not heard or understood them correctly?

And the seeds for this going badly were planted very early on. Consider the very poor thinking reflected in the remarks of Henry Waxman (at least I believe it was Waxman, the web site does not specify who was speaking, but Waxman was deeply involved with this and is Chair of the committee) regarding whether Clemens may have been referring to his wife: “What they (Clemens and McNamee) do agree upon, however, is that these injections(of Clemens’ wife)  occurred in 2003. That makes it impossible that Mr. Clemens, when he spoke to Mr. Pettitte in 1999 or 2000, could have been referring to the injections of Mrs. Clemens.”

No, Mr. Waxman, it does not, because Clemens had not, according to Pettitte, told him where he or his wife had gotten the HGH. From Pettitte’s deposition as entered into the record: “In 1999 or 2000, I had a conversation with Roger Clemens in which Roger told me that he had taken human growth hormone. This conversation occurred at his gym in Memorial, Texas. He did not tell me where he got the HGH or from whom, but he did tell me that it helped the body recover.” (emphasis mine)

Waxman implies that Clemens is being dishonest or lying about what he said in 1999, but all we can glean from Pettitte’s testimony is that McNamee was probably not the one who gave Mrs. Clemens thee HGH. In no way does it impugn Clemens’ version of events. Whether one believes Clemens or not, the most elementary logic shows that Waxman’s point is clueless and invalid.

And that’s the real problem here. There is no fact-based case against Clemens, yet everyone is acting as if there is. This is not an academic point. It matters.

It matters to baseball as yet another of its all-time greats is being tainted. More importantly, it matters to our system of justice and democracy. Perjury is a serious charge and carries with it stiff penalties including potentially significant jail time. We in the public can believe what we like, but a conviction for perjury should be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. From what has been demonstrated to the public, there is no significant proof at all.

Look, if Roger Clemens is lying, I hope the government can build a legitimate case against him. If he is guilty then he willfully sought out the opportunity to commit this crime. He was not subpoenaed, he came voluntarily and if he did it because he arrogantly thought he could lie to Congress to clear his name of steroid accusations, he deserves everything he might get.

But the evidence that we have is not at all convincing, even as a matter of personal opinion. I don’t know if Clemens is guilty or not. And neither does anyone but Clemens or McNamee. Unless a lot more evidence is unearthed, if Roger Clemens is convicted of perjury it will be a serious miscarriage of justice. And we’d all do well to calm down about this steroid hysteria and try to be a little fair.

A few years ago, that master of anti-marketing his own product, Bud Selig, made the absurd statement that in any given year, fans of more than half of the teams in MLB don’t have any “hope and faith” due to the imbalanced market.

The statement was false on its face. In all of baseball history, no era has come close to matching the competitive balance that has existed in baseball since the free agent era began. Facile evidence supporting Selig’s claim at the time was available in the Yankees’ string of world championships from 1996-2000 (like that hadn’t happened before), missing a beat only in 1997. But since the Yankee run ended, only one team has more than one world championship and they hadn’t won since 1918. Plenty of teams on tight budgets have won and made the playoffs in the past 20 years.

That said, there is some serious bifurcation in MLB on 2008. The disparity between the vastly superior American League and the weaker Senior Circuit remains very pronounced. And while the NL, in part due to its overall mediocrity, is a pretty wide open affair, the AL has five teams who seem likely to contend for the four playoff spots, and really only two or three others who could possibly edge into the race with big years and some help from injuries or surprising collapses from the Big Five. Those five would be the Yankees, Red Sox, Indians, Tigers and Angels.

One can make some sort of case that the Mariners might challenge the Angels if the Halos falter and the M’s can show that their having won 88 games despite being outscored was a matter of their getting lucky despite performances which will improve in ’08 sufficiently so that a step up from Felix Hernandez and the addition of Erik Bedard can boost them over 90 wins. I’m not holding my breath.

The Blue Jays are always on the outer rim of contention, and they won 83 games last year despite terrible seasons from Lyle Overbay, Vernon Wells and Adam Lind. But even if those guys rebound (and that’s pretty likely) the Jays have already lost a key reliever in Casey Janssen, and cannot reasonably count on AJ Burnett to be healthy all season. They also can’t bank on Frank Thomas continuing to produce at 40, and he wasn’t great last year either; nor on Scott Rolen being able to play on the turf in Toronto and stay healthy. The Jays still have a mediocre lineup supporting a very good pitching staff. That’s enough to make them an Interesting Team this year, because if the Big Hurt does come through again, Lind, Wells and Overbay all play like they are capable, Rolen and Burnett do stay healthy and Dustin McGowan takes the next step up to being a solid front of the rotation starter, this team could win 90 or more games and put heat on the Yankees and Red Sox. That’s an awful lot of ifs, though. Again, no breath is being held here.

With all the bereavement over the loss of Johan Santana (merited though it is, particularly considering the relatively paltry package they got for him) it is entirely possible that the Twins’ pitching could be just as good as it was in 2007. The Twins were fourth in the AL in runs allowed in ’07. Losing Santana is no small thing, but would it really be all that shocking to see Francisco Liriano approximate Santana’s ’07 production. Granted, that’s a lot to ask, but it wouldn’t really floor you if Liriano had an ERA in the mid-3s, would it?

The Twins have a solid young staff behind Liriano, and while Livan Hernandez is probably a bad idea, he’s not as bad as last year’s waste of innings on the likes of Ramon Ortiz and Sidney Ponson. They also still have a very good looking bullpen, especially if they don’t unload Joe Nathan. Even if they do (and they should), there are several hurlers out there who can take over the closer role and they have the depth to continue to sport a solid pen even without Nathan.

Most interesting in Minnesota is that they have finally moved to address their woefully imbalanced lineup. Adam Everett will still provide them with a lot of harmful plate appearances, but at least he makes up for it by being arguably the best defensive shortstop since Ozzie Smith. But the Twins have plugged in Mike Lamb at third who, while not a great hitter should provide some kind of production that has been sorely lacking from the hot corner in Minny for years. Brendan Harris at second won’t make any Twins fan forget the glory days of Chuck Knoblauch’s youth, much less the heady days of Rod Carew, he is a capable stick at the keystone.

The outfield/DH area is still weak, but improving. Michael Cuddyer, Jason Kubel and Delmon Young are all at least decent hitters for their spots, and it’s only matter of time before Young starts racking up all-star appearances. That time might be 2008, and solid contributions from Cuddyer and Kubel are not pipe dreams. The Twins seem intent on giving Carlos Gomez the centerfield job, even though he looked very much like a player who needed more minor league time last year. But they like him and if they’re right that he’s ready to at least get on base at an acceptable clip, putting all this together with the Twins’ M&M Boys (Mauer and Morneau) could turn out a pretty decent lineup. Like the Jays, a lot has to fall into place, but if it does, the Twins could squeak into the margins of the wild card race. That makes them an Interesting Team.

Given the state of the White Sox minor league system and the age of its roster, I don’t blame them for trying to go for it this year. But sorry, Pale Hose fans, I’m not drinking the kool-aid on this one. Too many erratic pitchers, too many aging or infirm position players…bringing in Nick Swisher and Carlos Quentin doesn’t strike me as nearly enough to make this team Interesting in 2008.

The A’s upside is .500 or a little better, the Rangers’ not even that. The Royals seem to have turned a corner in building a credible organization, but they have a long way to go before they’re Interesting, much less contenders. Some say the same about the Orioles, but I’m not sold that Peter Angelos will be able to stand losing for a few more years while Andy MacPhail rebuilds the farm system. They’re your winners in the “No Hope and Faith” Derby.

So, five teams are the cream of the crop (New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and Los Angeles), five are clear also-rans (Oakland, Texas, Baltimore, Chicago and Kansas City) and I’ve named three (Minnesota, Seattle and Toronto) as Interesting.

There’s one more team I’d call Interesting in 2008, even though, unlike the other three, I see no chance for them to compete for a playoff spot this year. But they are building a most intriguing team going forward with some great drafting and smart trades, they look much improved for this year and they have a TON more talent coming up the pipeline. Amazingly, that team is the Tampa Bay Rays, sans Devil.

After they acquired Matt Garza from the Twins, the Rays suddenly had three starters who could easily go toe-to-toe with the top threes of New York, Boston, Cleveland and the Angels. True, there’s a steep drop after them and the bullpen, while significantly improved, is still a liability. But there will be a lot more days in 2008 when the Rays pitch well than in 2007. They won’t win with their pitching, but they’ll be a decent team when you look at their lineup.

Before moving on to that, a word about Tampa’s defense. In 2007, it was truly awful, very much compounding the pitching problems they were having. With Evan Longoria moving Akinori Iwamura over to second (where he’s still likely to stink, but perhaps just a little less), which was a defensive problem for Tampa last year anyway, and Jason Bartlett replacing Brendan Harris at short, the Tampa defense should leap forward. Carl Crawford is the best defensive left fielder in the game, and while BJ Upton is not likely to ever remind anyone of Richie Ashburn, centerfield is easily his best position and he’ll have a year of experience under his belt. If Rocco Baldelli can actually play a significant number of games in right (a big if, especially when the options are two statues out there, Jonny Gomes and Cliff Floyd) the Rays could have an above average outfield as well. If that happens, their pitching will get a big boost after playing in front of one of the game’s worst fielding teams last year. If Scott Kazmir and James Shields don’t feel they have to strike guys out to get out of an inning, it can only help their health, confidence and effectiveness.

Last year, Tampa was a decent eighth in the AL in runs. With the injection of Longoria into the lineup, Upton being comfortable in his position for the first time ever, Crawford continuing to improve, Carlos Pena having finally found himself, and a decent crop of complimentary hitters in Floyd, Gomes, Iwamura, Bartlett and Baldelli, the Rays should step up despite having traded Delmon Young. Catcher Dioner Navarro (who I’ve been rooting for for years) may have finally hit his stride in the second half last year, when he hit .285/.340/.475. While this isn’t (yet) a lineup that can compete with New York, Boston and Detroit, it may well be a lineup with no serious holes, one which can score consistently even if it is not quite spectacular.

Tampa has tons of young talent in both the high and low minors, so if some guys falter or get some boo-boos they have the resources to replenish the tank in-season without jeopardizing their future. They have a smart front office and, in Joe Maddon, one of the game’s better managers. There’s an awful lot to like here and, while the Rays won’t be showing up in rear-view mirrors in Boston and New York yet, there’s a lot to like here. I don’t think a .500 record is out of the question for 2008, and for the first time in Rays history. I definitely see them well out-pacing the woeful Orioles and possibly even putting some serious heat on Toronto. Third place is not out of the question for the Rays, and given this team’s abysmal history and the fact that they look like they’[re going to be a lot of fun to watch, they are the one non-contender that makes the Interesting Team list. And they do it with a bullet.

As the Hot Stove League season winds down and gives way to the annual rebirth that is spring training, writers start to assess who the winners and losers were in the off-season. I’m not going to do that, but if I were to, I think I’d be putting a team in the winner’s column with a bullet that most others would rank as losers. That team is the Oakland Athletics.

But wait, you say, the A’s traded their best pitcher and their best position player for a bunch of guys we’ve never heard of. How can that be a win for the A’s? It can be and it was, but to understand it, you have to step back and do a sober analysis of where the A’s were at the end of 2007.

Coming off their first ever playoff victory in 2006, the ’07 A’s rolled the dice with a lot of iffy and unhealthy players and it came up snake eyes, a 76-86 record, a third place finish and the first losing season for the franchise since 1998. In and of itself, that’s no reason to panic. Teams have down years where the injury bug and a few problems dog them down.

But this team had no future. Several players who were supposed to form the core of the A’s franchise for years had faltered. Eric Chavez’s back problems have led to spiraling production three years in a row and it doesn’t look like he is physically capable of being the player he once promised to be, or even once was. Rich Harden had the best stuff of any pitcher the A’s have developed in recent years, but after three years of constant injury, it is clear he cannot be relied on. Bobby Crosby has proven not only to be unhealthy, but also not to be anywhere near the player, offensively or defensively, that the A”s thought he would be when they let Miguel Tejada walk.

Couple those things with several poor drafts which left the A’s once-envied minor league system with only a few prospects who had any sort of major-league future, and you start to see what Billy Beane saw. Sure, with guys like Nick Swisher, Dan Haren, Joe Blanton, Huston Street, Travis Buck and Daric Barton they had the core of a decent team, and a few shrewd moves and lucky breaks could put them on the outside track for wild card contention for a few years.

But the simple fact was they had no chance to put together a team that was a legitimate contender within the next few years. Most GMs would flail about, finding a few players to plug in who could help boost the team above .500. And, if the A’s played in the National League, where the best teams are not nearly as good as the best of the AL, Beane might have done that. But if he had, that would have been because he would have had sufficient resources to field a team that could have challenged the best in the league.

The resources to do that in the AL, where you not only have the huge financial powerhouses in the Bronx and Boston, but also have teams in Los Angeles, Cleveland and Detroit that are loaded for bear for the next few years, the best Beane could have done was make Oakland a decent, scrappy team that might, might sneak into the playoffs once or twice if the big boys faltered. That’s not what Beane tries to do. Despite the fiscal limitations under which he works, Beane’s goal is to build a legitimate contender, one that, like the teams from 2001-3 and 2006, stacked up well against the bullies from the East.

The trades of Haren, Swisher and Mark Kotsay had nothing to do with the A’s being a low-budget team, as some think. Haren will make $4 million 2008 and $5.5 million in 2009, and has a club option for $6.75 million in 2010. Those are bargain-basement prices for a pitcher of Haren’s caliber. Swisher will make $3.5 million in ’08, $5.3 million in ’09, $6.75 million in ’10 and $9 million in ’11. Again, that is an eminently affordable contract, even for the A’s (who, incidentally, are now in baseball’s lower-middle-class in any case).

What Beane recognized was that he had a choice—be a decent team for the next few years and probably miss the playoffs in all or most of them or try to rebuild his system and work on building a legitimate contender for the 20-teens decade. Most GMs would choose the former, but then most GMs have neither the vision nor the job security that Beane has.

I admit I wasn’t wild about the package the A’s got for Swisher. The potential gem in the deal is Fautino De Los Santos, a 22-year old right-hander from the Dominican Republic who just completed his first year of professional ball in the US. The kid has absolutely filthy stuff, as evidenced by his 153 strikeouts in only 122 innings last year. But his control needs work, and while he was unhittable in low-A last year (he surrendered almost exactly 0.5 hits per inning), he was also pretty old for that level. He looked more human, though he was still quite good, at high-A, and has a good deal of work to do before he can compete in the bigs. Still, he’s on a fast track and if his development continues at this pace, he could well make this deal worthwhile all by himself. But young pitching is always a gamble.

Ryan Sweeney is a 23-year old outfielder who was once considered a pretty good prospect, but whose bat just hasn’t developed. He can play all three outfield positions, but that’s his best selling point unless his hitting takes a big step forward. He has demonstrated decent patience and makes consistent contact, but he is neither a .300-type hitter nor has he shown significant power. He doesn’t have much speed either, and his track record screams Triple-A lifer. We’ll see if the A’s can coax more than that out of him, but it’s not promising.

Gio Gonzalez has now been traded three times and is only 22. He’s a power lefty with control issues. He did a good deal better in his second year at AA in ’07 than he did in his first. His upside is a solid #3 starter in the majors. He’ll certainly get his fair shot, as hard-throwing lefties are a valued commodity and, if it all works out, he could be a solid starter for years for the A’s, but he has little star potential.

It seems like the A’s could have gotten more for Swisher, a young outfielder who, while not a great glove man anywhere in the outfield, can still handle all three outfield slots acceptably (he’s not really an everyday centerfielder, but he can certainly play there in a pinch without embarrassing himself). But the test of such trades, ultimately, comes a few years down the road, and there’s every possibility that this will look like a pretty good one for the A’s at that point.

The Haren deal, on the other hand, was a coup. Chris Carter, 21, is a hulking slugger who can’t field very well, but whose bat could well carry him to significant major league career. Aaron Cunningham, 22, can play all three outfield positions fairly well, doesn’t have much power, but is a good contact hitter and projects as a solid fourth outfielder. Dana Eveland, 24, and Greg Smith, 24, are both major-league-ready lefties who project as back of the rotation starters. But the two prizes in the deal were Brett Anderson and Carlos Gonzalez.

Anderson, only 20, is yet another left-hander (which itself really adds some spice to this trade for Oakland) but he projects more as a #2 starter. He doesn’t have a great fastball, but his curve is said to be devastating. Scouts say he has great command a great feel for pitching. Sounds a lot like a lefty A’s fans knew well before he crossed the Bay.

Gonzalez, 22, still has some refinement work to do, but has a very high ceiling to his potential. He plays centerfield right now, but it’s not clear he can play there in the majors. He’s shown very good power, but he is not a disciplined hitter and is easily fooled with breaking balls. He creams fastballs, though, and could be a decent hitter for average, but he needs to walk more and learn to lay off the breaking stuff. If he does, he’s an all-star.

That’s a heckuva swag, a good measure more than the Twins got for Johan Santana, more than the marlins got for Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis (at least when you take into account that the Fish had to trade two marketable commodities for their package) and arguably a bit more even than the Orioles got for Erik Bedard.

And they got that for Haren, a pitcher who is not of the same caliber as Bedard, much less Santana. Haren may be one of the most overrated players in the game today. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fine pitcher, a solid #2 starter, but he’s not a #1 and his 2007 season, which got everyone all agog, was not quite as good as it appeared.

Haren is a very durable innings-muncher. Last year, his strikeouts were up only very slightly, his walks down very slightly. His homeruns allowed were down more significantly, but, at 24 given up, nothing superstarish. I believe that 2007 was as good as Haren will get, and, when that was combined with a very good defense behind him and a very forgiving ballpark both at home and in two of the three other parks in his division, he became a Cy Young candidate.

Still, even at that, he was the 6th best pitcher in the AL, behind CC Sabathia, Fausto Carmona, Josh Beckett, Santana and Bedard. The 15 unearned runs he surrendered (a very high number) mostly happened early and helped him to the ERA lead in the first half. His “fade” in the second half was as much the result of more of the runs he gave up being earned as anything else.

Beane sold high on both of these players, correctly seeing that the market was placing a premium value on young players signed through their arbitration years to affordable contracts. And in so doing, he rebuilt a largely barren minor league system.

Beane would not settle for putting together a decent but unspectacular team. He is interested in building a winner. He looked at what he had and made the right call. Of course, it may not work out; at the time, signing Eric Chavez long term and letting Miguel Tejada walk away was the right move. Baseball is harsh—making the right move doesn’t always work.

But Beane did what he had to do, what few other GMs would have the nerve to do. And, once again, he leveraged the market as best he could to maximize the return for his team. What more a GM can do, I can’t imagine, and that’s why the A’s are winners this winter. They actually have enough still with the club to top .500, though I strongly suspect that Joe Blanton and Huston Street will be elsewhere by August, meaning the A’s will probably fall short of the standard of mediocrity. But they weren’t going to have much of a present anyway, and now they have a much brighter future. That sounds like a good winter to me.

I’ve found it interesting to see the change in the view of Hughes since Joba Chamberlain hit the scene. Hughes was once regarded by some as the top pitching prospect in all of baseball. He didn’t make the immediate impact Chamberlain did, and now it’s Chamberlain who is the next big thing.

That may not be such a bad thing. In Spring Training last year, Hughes seemed to be feeling the pressure and pitched poorly. This resulted in his starting the year back in the minors. When he was called up in late April, he pitched two games before getting hurt and staying out until August. In his second May start, he pitched 6 1/3 innings of no-hit ball, striking out six and walking three before leaving with a hamstring injury.

When Hughes returned it took a while for him to find his legs again. But in September, he appeared to right the ship and made it on to the Yankees’ post-season roster. It was here that we finally saw again what we had seen in that second start, as he looked every bit as advertised against Cleveland. In two relief appearances in the ALDS, Hughes tossed 5 2/3 innings, surrendering one run on a solo homer, striking out six and not walking a batter. If this was his arrival, we’ll know it soon enough of course.

I think I’m higher on Hughes than most. But what strikes me is how many of those writing in sports media and the blogosphere have revised their view of Hughes.

One who didn’t do that was Keith Law of ESPN and Scouts, Inc. Law always liked Hughes, but was also more tempered than most, seeing Hughes’ ceiling as more a #2 starter than a #1. I have the utmost respect for Law, who has the rare ability to combine smart and modern analysis with the true scouting acumen that so many pretend they have. But, as I’m sure he’d the first to admit, that doesn’t mean he’s right about every player. No one is.

As an aside, I’ll say here that I don’t pretend to have any kind of scouting ability. I’ve watched thousands of hours of baseball, live and on TV and I’ve coached kids. I’ve seen every level of the game, from Little League, to adult amateurs to MLB. And I’ve studied as carefully as I could. But I am not a scout. Those people are absolutely amazing in their ability see what a player has in potential, diagnose the mechanics of a pitching motion or a swing on the spot, and recognize when a bad performance is just a bad day and when it is indicative of a bigger problem. I’m amazed by scouts, and the fact that every baseball fan and baseball writer thinks they can be one is insulting, frankly, to these incredibly skilled professionals. It is in that context that I offer this opinion.

Law has always said when asked that Hughes has very good stuff, just not #1 starter stuff. That’s hardly a knock—that means he sees Hughes as an excellent prospect, just not quite as good as Joba or Clay Buchholz. That’s a fair assessment, and Law was saying it when Hughes was the next big thing, unlike the many writers who have wavered in their view of Hughes. I have no problem with changing an assessment as more data becomes available. But it seems like it’s only Chamberlain’s emergence that has really changed the view of Hughes for so many. That’s why I respect Law’s opinion on this.

Nonetheless, I differ with it. True, Hughes’ stuff is very good, not quite great. He has two fastballs: a four seamer that is routinely in the mid-90s and can hit 97 or even 98 on occasion, and a two seamer that has nice downward motion and sits comfortably in the 92-94 range. His curveball can be devastating when he’s ahead in the count, breaking sharply down and away from right-handed batters.

Hughes had trouble last year against lefties, who hit him at a .264/.358/.488 clip. He needs to either improve his changeup or develop his slider (a pitch he’s largely abandoned) to bring those numbers down.

So what is it I like so much about Hughes? What I’m particularly fond of is the excellent command he shows for one so young. It might surprise some people that Hughes is actually a few months younger than Chamberlain. He’s both the veteran and the baby of the young Yankee hurlers. While he doesn’t have Chamberlain’s explosiveness on his fastball, he locates it a lot better. I think I’m more of a sucker for good command than most scouts are.

Command and control are not the same thing, so Hughes’ walk rate last year of 3.59 per 9 innings doesn’t reflect the command I’m talking about. But it’s perhaps too easy to forget what this young man did in the minor leagues.

Hughes pitched 275 innings in the minors. In those innings, he was nigh untouchable, surrendering only 171 hits, only 6 (!) of which were homeruns. He walked 66 (2.16 per 9) and struck out 311 (10.18 per 9) in those innings and posted an ERA of 2.09. He did that while being relatively young for his league at every level.
Chamberlain, by comparison, tossed 88 1/3 minor league innings, having been drafted at 21, compared to Hughes having been 18. Joba ruled, to be sure, but he had nothing on Hughes. In those 88.1 innings, he gave up 62 hits, including four homers, walked 27 (2.75 per 9) and whiffed 135 (13.75 per 9). The strikeout numbers are what really pop the eyes, but Hughes did better with the walks and homers and gave up fewer hits.

None of this is meant to knock Joba, of course. But he had some real advantages when it comes to capturing the imagination.

One, Chamberlain is clearly a starting pitcher who was put in the bullpen. Particularly given the way that he was used, Joba was able to put everything he had into every pitch. He throws harder than Hughes to begin with, and being unleashed in this way only magnified, all the more so since Hughes had no such luxury. Even in the ALDS, Hughes was brought in for long relief and still had to conserve his strength to some extent.

Two, Chamberlain is a character. He’s very animated on the mound, pumping his fists and shouting. Hughes is more a quiet worker. Joba fires up the crowd and gives the writers a little more ink. Hughes just goes about his business.

Those two add up to three, that Chamberlain had a lot more early success than Hughes. Thus, much greater excitement.

I don’t know who is going to be the better of these two. It’s a nice question to be able to ask. I do, though, have some personal preferences.

I’m not terribly keen on guys who hop around the mound like Joba. Pitching, and hitting for that matter, do not require the flow of adrenaline that a linebacker needs, but rather the focus and concentration that a surgeon requires. When things don’t go right, these excitable types have a tendency to implode. That is, of course, what Joba did against Cleveland, although those circumstances were such that many a seasoned veteran might have a hard time maintaining his focus (Joe Torre really should have insisted the game be stopped until the gnats could be dispersed).

More to the point, Chamberlain’s rear back and throw style won’t work as a starter. He’ll have to go back to pitching in a more sustainable manner, as he did in the minors. And here is where I think Hughes has the advantage. Chamberlain throws harder, but he doesn’t have Hughes’ command (not that his is bad either, and it may yet improve, but it’s not at Hughes’ level yet). And should Chamberlain remain in the pen, it’s well to note that flame-throwers like him do not tend to have very long careers in relief. They tend instead to burn out after a few years at most.

Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecasts project a 3.39 ERA for Chamberlain and a 4.42 for Hughes. Some of that discrepancy is based on the projection that Joba will spend significant time in the bullpen, which lowers the ERA (a pitcher will generally have an ERA considerably lower as a reliever than as a starter). I’m not going to say that I’d bet that Hughes will be better than Joba, even only as a starter.

But since this is the season for bold statements and predictions, I’ll go on record now saying that I do think Hughes, if healthy, will beat that PECOTA projection handily, and will come in with an ERA under 4. Unfortunately for Hughes, the off-season rumors that had him going to Minnesota in a trade for Johan Santana will raise some expectations of him. Obviously, anyone who holds any pitcher to the standard of Santana is a numbskull. But the media works in mysterious ways.

So, I’m officially on the bandwagon, the one so many jumped off of when Joba saved the Yankee bullpen from the bleak desert that is Kyle Farnsworth. I remain firmly in the Phil Hughes fan club. It’s a good club, and I think it will get more fun as Hughes gets more experience. I’ll trade a few mph off a fastball for greater command and superior pitchability. And I think Hughes has those qualities. It’s a bright future.