Via Honest Wagner, this bizarre piece by Myron Cope reads like it was written by a blogger. It's a fake dialogue between Dave Littlefield and Jim Tracy.
TRACY: Whaddaya mean, canceled it? A deal's a deal.
LITTLEFIELD: Now look, Jim. I laid it all out for you when I hired you last year. An extra hundred thou if you manage us to another losing season. Finish under .500, we each get $100,000.
TRACY: Multi-year. You gave me your word.
LITTLEFIELD: But not in writing. Geez, if it got out, it'd be bigger than when Pete Rose got caught betting. As it happens, the owners have changed their minds. The Nuttings decided while you were home in California for the off-season that now they want to win.
Crazy. These fake dialogues - and I've tried my hand at these - are interesting and enlightening, but for the wrong reasons. The thing is, you can try all day to make sense of Littlefield's actions, and it's impossible, because his actions didn't make lick of sense. It's possible to pick out general themes about shortsightedness, or about frugality - but then how do you make the Brian Giles trade consistent with the former, or the Matt Morris trade consistent with the latter? Anyway, this Cope piece would be pretty weird even if it were posted by a blogger. There are some good points and some off-base ones, and the premise of it is just so strange, and the piece itself so long, that's it's really odd that it exists. And yeah, I know that Cope is quite a character. But still.
-P- One more link - this list of "Organizational Rankings" by the ever-entertaining USS Mariner certainly is provacative. Here's their explanation of what it is:
Believe it or not, the Pirates rank ahead of three NL Central teams. There's no explanation given, so it's hard to tell if they're giving the new Pirates management the benefit of the doubt or if the rest of the NL Central has really gotten that bad.
By the way, Cleveland's ranked first, and Milwaukee is fourth.