No catcher ever has won the Most Valuable Player Award unanimously, an honor Joe Mauer of Minnesota somehow was deprived of in the 2009 voting announced Monday by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Only one vote stood between Mauer and his rightful claim to history: a first-place vote for Miguel Cabrera, a powerful hitter, but a guy who played first base for a second-place Detroit team that coughed up a division title by finishing 1-4 while Cabrera went 3-for-20 and, on the last weekend of the season, was drunk and involved in a domestic violence episode. The vote was cast by Keizo Konishi of Kyodo News and the Seattle chapter of the BBWAA.
Free agency once was a yellow brick road to riches. Free agents could count on being wined and dined and enriched. Does anyone remember a recruiting tour of the country by Carl Pavano -- yes, Carl Pavano -- unofficially named Carlpalooza?
1. Sometimes Goliath wins, or, if you prefer the most appropriate analogy after World Series Game 6, Godzilla kicks butt.
1. So the World Series comes down to this: the old and familiar. Stop me if you have heard this before: a Yankees team with Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera trying to get through Pedro Martinez to a world championship. Game 5 barely was over in Philadelphia when even Jeter, rarely reflective, immediately understood that the World Series is reduced to a most familiar confrontation, an old narrative well told.
1. If Game 3 is the turning point of the World Series -- 68 percent of teams up 2-1 go on to win it -- then a Yankees championship began with one pitch from Cole Hamels that will be remembered as one of the great gaffes in recent Series history. The beginning of the end for Philadelphia was a first-pitch curveball Hamels threw New York pitcher Andy Pettitte with no understanding of basic baseball. When Pettitte stepped in, Hamels was working with a 3-2 lead, a runner at second base and -- here's the key part -- one out. Pettitte is a career .134 hitter who has come to bat a total of 12 times over the past three years. Hamels could dispose of him with fastballs, the way J.A. Happ would do the next inning, and he would be one out away from being out of the inning. Instead, Hamels threw a first-pitch curveball up, and Pettitte slapped a single to tie the game. Why in the world would he throw something slow -- and up, no less -- to an American League pitcher? "I made the right pitch to Pettitte," Hamels explained. "A pitcher doesn't hit an oh-and-oh curve in a bunting situation." I was incredulous. I had to follow up, and asked him, "Just to clarify, you thought Pettitte was bunting, so you threw a breaking ball up to try to get him to pop up a bunt?"
1. Unless you were Jimmy Rollins, you had to believe that this World Series was going to be a long one, as closely matched as are the Yankees and Phillies. So while Philadelphia lost Game 2, 3-1, to a stellar pitching effort by Yankees starter A.J. Burnett, they scored a small triumph that may pay dividends as the series is extended: they chipped away at the seemingly indestructible nature of Mariano Rivera.
1. The narrative has changed for New York Game 2 starter A.J. Burnett. He now gets the ball for his first World Series start knowing that the Yankees don't want to head to Philadelphia down two games to none. It's not a must-win situation for the Yankees, but... In best-of-seven World Series play, the visiting team has won the first two games 14 times. Those teams went on to win the series 11 of those 14 times.
1. Why are the Phillies starting Pedro Martinez in Game 2 rather than Cole Hamels? Officially, they relied on two very good reasons, according to pitching coach Rich Dubee: They didn't want left-handers Cliff Lee and Hamels pitching back-to-back games, and they trust Martinez on the big stage, believing the hostility and energy of Yankee Stadium will bring out the best in him.
1. As the postseason began, Cardinals pitcher John Smoltz gave me a stunning piece of advice about how to stop the Yankees this October. Remember, it was the powerful New York lineup that knocked Smoltz clear out of the American League and very nearly all the way into retirement with a resounding thumping back in August.
1. Let's be honest: The Angels didn't show well in New York. In three games at Yankee Stadium, Los Angeles went 0-3, committed seven errors, walked 17 batters and looked jittery. I am starting to believe that there really is something to my East Coast Baseball theory. West Coast teams went 1-6 this postseason in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. That makes West Coast teams 3-19 (.136) when they come to the Northeast for postseason baseball since 2003, and 10-38 (.208) in the wild-card era. The advantage may be that Northeast teams play in postseason-type environments all year long, where baseball means so much to the fan base that every 0-for-12 streak is a two-hour talk radio rant.
1. The Phillies suddenly are big fans of the Angels and The Weather Channel. It's not that Philadelphia would rather play Los Angeles than New York in the World Series. It's that the Phillies would benefit from both teams extending their pitching and, if rain in New York washes out Game 6 on Saturday, giving the American League champion less time to set up its pitching for the World Series.
1. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada made his answer doubly clear when asked why the Yankees are on a 5-1 postseason run after going 4-13 in their previous 17 postseason games. The difference? "Pitching. Pitching," Posada said.
1. I generally don't get too wrapped up in mistakes by umpires in the postseason. The men in blue get right an enormous percentage of their calls, and the ones they do miss get a tremendous amount of attention, especially with high-definition cameras, super-slow motion replays and other technological advances of broadcasts. It has become an old story: Every year people get up in arms about the decline in the quality of umpiring and the need for more instant replay, when really, nothing changes but the intensity of the complaints.
1. The Yankees are still in command of the ALCS. They give the ball on Tuesday night to a red-hot CC Sabathia, and, given that the Angels have no one like Sabathia, Mariano Rivera or Alex Rodriguez, New York is still likely to win the series. Joe Girardi hopes so, anyway. The Yankees manager needs to make ALCS Game 3 moot, because that game has his fingerprints, many as they are, all over it.
1. Angels manager Mike Scioscia has a problem. He no longer has an established closer. Maybe that should have been obvious in the second half of the season, when his nominal closer, Brian Fuentes, had more walks (15) than strikeouts (12). Fuentes struck out seven right-handed batters after the All-Star break. Seven.
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