As an homage to the public speaking concept of “Bottom Line Up Front”, or B.L.U.F., let’s start with the most important thing about the whole Manny Ramirez – Dodgers situation…Scott Boras is currently being out-maneuvered by Frank McCourt and Ned Colletti.  I’ll give you a quick second to read that one again.  Maybe one more time.  I’ll wait.

Make no mistake, Scott Boras has changed the game of baseball with his negotiating prowess.  I do not wish to use this forum to recount all the reasons why any change attributed to Boras is horrible for everyone associated with the game, except for Boras and his clients, and especially horrible for hardworking fans.  It really makes me angry to even think about it…I could only imagine my mood after writing that article.

Anyway, since I don’t have a heck of a lot of time to spend on this one, due to the recent launch of RPIBracket.com, I will keep it short and leave you with this very brief analysis.

I have a 4-year-old son at home that could never, ever, under any circumstances, be outmaneuvered, out-foxed, or out-anything-ed (except for being out-douched) by Frank McCourt and Ned Colletti.  Hell, I scraped some dog dookie off my shoe the other day that would stand on even intellectual footing with the current Dodgers brain trust (at least until you get to Joe Torre)…and somehow Mr. Super Agent is so far off his game that Manny is not playing ball yet for the only team that really wants and really needs him…and is, by the way, the absolute perfect situation for him.

I will always have a soft spot for Manny after all he did for me and my fellow Red Sox fans, but to see Boras floundering like this has got to be one of my best baseball memories since the shock and disappointment of “The Matt Garza Game” last October.

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We have finally started to get our act together regarding the RPI bracket.  That’s right – no more random blog posts here and there in between the other things I am blogging about.  You can now find it at RPIBracket.com. 

Don’t worry, this is where I will be doing my analysis of the bracket from time to time, and also where I will be crucifying this year’s bunch of incompetents on the selection committee.  I am not sure if we will be calling for their heads, like we did last year, but rest assured they will be held to task, at least by me.

Enjoy the new site over at RPIBracket.com as we gear up for March Madness!

-Mack

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I have decided that I would take my concept of the RPI being king to the next level this year.  Last year, I mentioned a simple approach in my Tournament Selection Review article.  Basically, here is how it works:  all you need to know is in the RPI.  Nothing else should ever matter.  The computers take every single variable into consideration and let you know the relative rankings for every single team.  If you ever want to see the daily RPI for your team or any other, head over to RealTimeRPI to take a look.

So, here are the basic rules of putting together the RPI Bracket. 

• The RPI is the king.  If your RPI is 5, like North Carolina this week, you are a #2 seed. 
• You first put all 31 automatic bids on the list, in RPI order.  This early in the season, we will just assume that one of the top 2 teams in the conference standings will win the Conference tournament.  Where it makes sense, such as Davidson winning the Southern Conference, I have tentatively crowned the conference champ and placed it in the bracket, according to the RPI. Cross those teams off the current RPI list.
• Once you have the automatic bids in there, you grab the current RPI list, start with the team ranked #1, and keep moving down the list, adding teams that are not yet crossed off the list, until you have the entire field of 65, listed in order of the RPI.
• Start at the top and move down the list of the 65 tournament teams, forming groups of 4 teams.  These are the seed groups.  Teams 1-4 are the #1 seeds, Teams 5-8 are the #2 seeds, etc.
• The #1 overall seed plays the worst #2 seed, the best #3 seed, the worst #4 seed, etc.
• The #2 overall seed plays the 2nd-worse #2 seed, the 2nd-best #3 seed, the 2nd-worst #4 seed, etc.
• The #3 overall seed plays the 2nd-best #2 seed, the 2nd-worst #3 seed, the 2nd-best #4 seed, etc.
• The #4 overall seed plays the best #2 seed, the worst #3 seed, the best #4 seed, etc.
• Once you have all the regions formed, you start with the #1 seed, and put each #1 seed in the remaining unassigned region where the regional final is closest to their school.

We can delve more and more into this as the season progresses.  At least for the next couple of weeks, it will be a weekly article, but it might get a little more frequent if necessary.  Now that I have a rudimentary spreadsheet set up that will crunch the numbers for me, it does not take a heck of a lot of work to get the latest bracket.

Anyway, here is the first RPI Bracket of the year…hope you enjoy it.

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Before the recent SI.com article, Alex Rodriguez was widely seen as baseball’s best hope to finally put the steroids mess in the rearview mirror once and for all.  The day that he broke Barry Bond’s tainted home run record was supposed to be a special day.

Well, I’m here to tell you that A-Rod is still baseball’s best hope, but there are several things that have just jumped out at me (some obvious, some not) over the past several days, and to me, those things, and how they are handled, will make all the difference.

• You Can’t Have it Both Ways, Alex.  After watching the Gammons interview, the first thing I noticed was the glaring contradiction whereby A-Rod starts by implying that it was a conscious effort on his part to take an active role in using performance enhancing drugs to “earn” his big fat new contract and cement his legacy as one of the greatest players of all time.  Then, later in the interview, he mentions that the “loosey-goosey” culture around baseball at the time was such that he just went with the flow, tried a few things, and could not even begin to tell you what he was on.  Well, which one is it?  I believe the scientific facts point to choice A, the one where he is a little less innocent.  He had the specific steroids and testosterone in his system, “stacked” in the specific proportions that would lead me to believe he was a habitual user, and knew exactly what he put into his system and when.  The sooner he admits this, the better off he will be…especially once the Feds come calling.  Bonds and Clemens and Tejada are going to jail.  A-Rod does not want to explore those kind of pinstripes.
• A-Rod’s Arrogance is the Most Damning Thing of All.  The first example of his arrogance here was during the Katie Couric interview.  I have included it below for easy reference.  After he says that he never used steroids and was never even tempted to do so, he goes on to say that it was because he has never felt overmatched on the baseball field and he is basically better than anyone else, not only because of how he plays, but because he did not take steroids.  I think perhaps a less egotistical answer may have served him well there.  Then, during the Gammons interview this week, he is trying to tell us that he thinks that the interview with Gammons is all that is required of him and he is ready to move on, so we should all move on as well.  In my opinion, he deserves everything that happens to him as a result of this…not because he used steroids when everyone else was using steroids, but because he was such an arrogant prick about it every step of the way.

• The New York Headline Question.  All in all, I think A-Rod did an excellent job during the Gammons interview.  Before piling on me for that last sentence, let’s remember that this is a guy that has seemed slick and coached during just about every interview I have ever seen…probably because he has 2 or 3 people on staff that coach him in those situations.  But not this time.  At least, it did not look that way.  It looked like he was genuinely not expecting any of the questions specifically, and he made an honest effort to be truthful without giving away the farm.  Let’s also remember that this dude is a ballplayer, not a Rhodes scholar.  I think he did well…except for the question about what he would like to be the headline in New York the following day.  I am trying to find it on YouTube and will change this text slightly once I do…but he basically dropped the ball and implied that the New York media was less than friendly.  The first time I saw it, as soon as the question was asked, I blurted out “A-Rod Apologizes to Fans”…think anyone might be thinking a little better of him if he had said that?
• Barack Obama is The Man.  I don’t care if you are the biggest racist redneck in the country, if you are a baseball fan, you have to know that we, as sports fans, finally have our President.  Sure, you could say it’s window dressing and he is just a brilliant orator, but take a quick look and listen below and let me know if you can think of another President since Lincoln that would have presented not only his feelings, but the feelings of an entire nation of baseball fans in such a nearly perfect manner.

• Tom Hicks Should Go Away.  For some reason, this rich guy that should have known better is on my TV talking about how he felt betrayed that A-Rod juiced up when he was with the Rangers.  Tom Hicks is way too smart to not know that at least half of his team, and every other team, was on the juice during that time.  I just wish he would go away…he has no dog in this fight, when you really look at it.  In fact, I think that A-Rod himself, or at least all Rangers fans, have been the ones that have been betrayed by Hicks.  So, let me get this straight…you had enough balls to give A-Rod the biggest deal in sports history, but not enough balls to extend yourself a little bit further and get him some teammates that didn’t suck?  How can some of these guys be so damn smart in their pre-baseball endeavors and so damn stupid once they own a team?
• Where the Eff is the Commissioner Hiding?  Speaking of stupid baseball owners, how come we have yet to hear from the Commissioner himself?  He is the single person in all of this that bears more responsibility for every inflated stat, wasted taxpayer dollar and dead-too-early-of-a-heart-attack former major leaguer that has happened and will happen in the future.  The blood is on his hands, and it always has been.  And how has he handled it?  Ignoring Barry Bonds during his run at Hank Aaron’s record.  Way to go, Mr. Commissioner.  What are you going to do now that your Ace in the Hole is dirty, too?  So far, to the surprise of no one, you have been absent from the public eye.  Every day that you have been commissioner has been an indictment against the entire league, but you are somehow getting worse at the time your game needs you to get better.  I am begging you as a baseball fan…can you please just have enough integrity and respect for the game you have destroyed to buy the Brewers back from your daughter and just run one franchise into the ground instead of the entire league?
• Conspiracy Theorists, The Line Forms Here. OK…I have no evidence of any of this whatsoever, but what if the “source” that leaked A-Rod’s name to Sports Illustrated was someone from the A-Rod camp?  Bear with me here, but A-Rod will forever be known as the first guy to come clean (Pettitte does not count) and has the potential to be known as the guy who brought baseball out of the steroid era…instead of Jose Canseco.  In fact, would you put it outside the realm of possibilities that this is all a creation of the Commissioner’s office, who would rather have A-Rod be known as the face of the steroid era and not Bonds and definitely not Ozzie’s brother…OK, probably a bad example when you have a commissioner that would have extreme difficulty pouring piss out of a boot, even if the instructions were written on the heel.  But, at this point, nothing would surprise me.  Let’s also not forget that A-Rod’s agent is the devil incarnate…anything is possible.
• Let’s Get ‘Em All.  The Feds have been talking about some crazy stuff lately, like not only dealing with the 104 positive tests, but also re-testing the 500+ negative samples they seized back in 2003, to determine if they were using, but were just further ahead of the testing technology of the day than A-Rod and the other 103 guys with hot samples.  I’m all in favor of it, but only because I think that the only way to actually quantify the Steroids Era is to get as much information about as many players as possible, and what they were using and what they were not.  There is a very easy way to accomplish this…an amnesty period, monitored by MLB.  Any player can come clean between now and March 31.  After that, if we or the Feds have to come to you, then you will be subject to a one-year suspension without pay.
• Statistical Relevance – Welcome to MLB Geeks.com.  I have purchased a domain name, started to gather my fellow geeks that love baseball, and hope to be launching an actual company soon that is dedicated to using cutting-edge technology to provide net positive value to our national pastime.  Watch our blog for more on this one later.

So, in conclusion, the only thing this blog entry has taught us is that I have had something to say regarding A-Rod and the steroids mess, and I have done so with my usual focus on conjecture and a total lack of sound journalistic research.  I hope you enjoyed my take on it and found something here that not every other idiot is saying about it.

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So, yet another Super Bowl has passed us by, and you know damn well that Mack is going to have something to say about it…especially when my most-hated NFL team of all was the winner.  That’s right, Pittsburgh won the game, and I am OK with that.  No sour grapes about the officiating on this one, since it was consistently bad all game.  Don’t worry though, the zebras will get plenty of non-flattering ink throughout the course of this entry, in case you couldn’t tell from the picture to the left, clear documentation of the most obvious missed penalty call in the history of the Super Bowl.

In order to make sure that I mention everything I want to mention, and stay under 10,000 words, I have decided to use the "Random Thoughts" format.  I have mentioned the advantages of that format in the past, so I will not re-hash them here, but I definitely like only having to come up with a sentence or two about each premise…even though each bulleted entry below could probably be its own blog entry.  Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of time to devote to the blog this week.  Maybe if you jokers would start clicking on the ads…

So, let’s get right to the thoughts:

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