The Mariners made some early noise with their nice start to the season, but the club could create a much bigger national story as an trader this summer. Unlike a vast majority of teams expected to straddle the buy/sell fence, the now 22-26 Mariners seem to understand their position as a rebuilding team. What's more, they have very decent, high-priced veteran talent to trade, including front-line, left-handed pitcher Erik Bedard, who should become an increasingly popular trade target.
If the Padres really want to rebuild their team, opposing executives say a trade of Jake Peavy pales in comparison to a trade of Adrian Gonzalez. The Padres don't like to use the "R" word in San Diego, and so far by keeping Gonzalez they don't appear to be completely embracing the rebuilding concept, either.
By the time a trade involving Jake Peavy is finally completed and Peavy is somewhere other than San Diego, there will have been more stories, more rumors and more anxiety connected to talks involving Peavy than any previous trade talks. That is the only prediction regarding Peavy that's safe now.
The Mets are probably going to need to trade for a first baseman (more on that below). But in the meantime, few scouts can understand why Daniel Murphy -- the former fair-haired boy -- isn't getting a full crack at first base in Carlos Delgado's absence.
Hall of Fame voting is a tricky thing.
Cliff Lee is pitching like it's 2008 again. He's rarely throwing pitches right over the middle of the plate, and when he is, he is disguising them well.
My favorite part of the Roger Clemens interview on the Mike & Mike in the Morning radio show on Tuesday came when he said steroids could be bad for him because of his family history, and then cited his stepfather's heart attack as evidence.
The managing careers of Bob Melvin and Clint Hurdle seemingly have run a parallel course out West, with the pair often appearing to rise and fall in unison but most apparently in the fall of 2007, when they met in the surprise Arizona-Colorado NLCS matchup of upstart teams.
Now that Manny Ramirez can no longer be considered that great feel-good story of the poor, goofy kid who rose from Washington Heights to become one of the greatest hitters of all-time, what are the best remaining feel-good stories in the game? Some might suggest Manny was never an honest-to-goodness feel-good story since he forced his way out of Boston with bad behavior, and there's a point to be made there. Yet, most folks still looked upon Manny as the happy-go-lucky hitting savant, not the conniving fool he was in Boston in early 2008. Anyway, here are the remaining contenders:
One of the last funny, happy stories in baseball is over. That previously mostly warm story died a very sad death on Thursday when Major League Baseball announced that Manny Ramirez had failed a test for a performance-enhancing drug.
Tony La Russa topped my list of best managers in the game two years ago. But last year I switched to Mike Scioscia. This year I am back to La Russa. It's nothing Scioscia has done wrong. In fact, under impossible and tragic circumstances he's kept his Angels team together as well as anyone possibly could have. I am just back to recognizing the true genius of La Russa.
It's time to separate the wheat from the sheet, the cream from the crud and the contenders from the pretenders. Well, you get the idea. There's a whole lotta supposed surprise teams (or at least five of 'em) a month into this season. A couple of these teams may continue to surprise. But others will sink to their predicted level, which is a lot lower than where they are now.
Pitch tipping has been around baseball since the Giants won the pennant 1951, at the very least, and probably a lot longer than that. The twist in the case of Alex Rodriguez, according to Selena Roberts' new A-Rod book, is that he was occasionally tipping players on the other team while he played with the Texas Rangers.
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