Split-squad games are unique to spring training. Too bad. Wouldn't it be great to keep an extra contingent of Mets on hand for those occasions when they could be helpful? Let's say it's one of those days when the Mets and Yankees are both home and we'd like to help out whoever's visiting the Bronx. We could dispatch Auxiliary Mets, and suddenly the Orioles are enhanced. Or if it's September and we desperately need to make up ground on the Braves. We play our usual game while Auxiliary Mets fly into, say, Colorado to hit home runs.

And no, nobody else can take advantage of this innovation.

Andres Galarraga is older than Darryl Strawberry. Galarraga is still playing. Darryl claims it was Davey Johnson who urged him this winter to get back into baseball. “He told me I played the game right,” he said on Channel 2 last night. Darryl famously grabbed his back to skulk out of a late-season game against the Expos one year and then straightened up as soon as the manager was out of view. But it's nice to remember things differently.

There was a Mary Tyler Moore in which it appeared Ted Baxter would be fired. Lou and Mary had mixed emotions. Mary said she once had this wart that she couldn't stand, but when it was gone, it was strange — do you understand what I mean, Mr. Grant? Yeah, he said.

“If I didn't miss that wart, why should I miss Ted?”

Hence the dilemma over the drumbeat that has Joe McEwing unlikely to make the Mets. We've all seen far too much of Joe McEwing for the past three seasons, but that's not Joe's fault. It's the Mets' fault for being in the position of having to play him. For a couple of years, Super Joe may have been the best utility player we ever had. He was versatile, he hustled, he owned (or leased) Randy Johnson, he had an attitude to die for, he got a few big hits, he drove a forklift when Shea served as a staging area after 9/11. Super Joe was super.

Now Super Joe is excess. Better backup guys are crawling all over Tradition Field. McEwing may be McGone any day now. And it doesn't feel right. Joe's second on the team in tenure. Mike is first. Mike has been a Met longer than Keith Hernandez was. I'm surprised to realize that.

I heard a reference to Beltran earlier today and thought “Rigo?” I was really surprised to think that.

Been reluctantly listening to “Mike & The Mad Dog” because they're live from camp. They interview each player via remote, kiss up to him, and then when the player disconnects, they discuss why that player isn't so good.

Todd Van Poppel, we didn't know ya at all. If he were capable of pitching, he'd be a Brave. But having suited up, he didn't set the record for Met & Run. That would be held by non-roster invitee Kevin Stocker who, in 2001, journeyed all the way from Washington state to his St. Lucie-area hotel before deciding to give up baseball altogether, not even bothering to report. He came to spring training but he didn't come to play. Jeff Pearlman, then with Sports Illustrated, recorded this underreported quote from assistant GM Jim Duquette: “If you're a minor leaguer, you quit. But since he was a veteran, he retired.”

It was 10 years ago tonight, after working a week of absolutely insane even for me hours, I hopped on the Meadowbrook Parkway going south. All at once, in the middle of rush-hour traffic, I desperately wanted to stop the world and get off –­ total vapor lock. I struggled the last few miles of my trip, chalking it up to fatigue. But I never again got wholly comfortable behind the wheel, especially on highways, which are roads I avoid like Robin Ventura skillfully avoided tags. Maybe someday. Until then, thank goodness for the LIRR and the 7, and thanks to anybody and everybody who's given me a ride home from Shea over the past decade.

Ah, the first cutdown day. Philip Humber, Yusmeiro Petit, Jose Rosado

and Grant Roberts were all sent to minor-league camp, while Todd Van

Poppel retired. Or at least the consensus is that he retired — he left

camp, at any rate. (If his hatchback's just broke down outside of

Okeechobee, he's going to be PO'ed at Omar Minaya.)

Turns out young Mr. Humber pronounces his name “Umber” — the “H” is

silent. Who knew? Perhaps one day he'll be the pitcher to finally make

the “H” column silent for us in a game. Not that I'm getting ahead of

myself or anything. No pressure, Philip. Easygoing town.

The first cutdown day is always entertaining because it tells you

nothing about the makeup of the roster; the players pack their bags to

go about 300 yards; and half of them reappear in the latter frames of

some late-March split-squad affair, though one hopes not while Piazza

is chasing Dodger relievers around Port St. Lucie.

I have to wonder about Todd Van Poppel's spring training. As far as I

know he never got the chance to throw a pitch in anger — or even in pique,

it being March and all. So what was the assessment that led to his

retirement? Did he throw BP somewhere? Could he or the brass tell

anything from his throwing BP when some guys haven't even debuted all

their pitches? Did he look sluggish in the shuttle run? I'm sure there

are at least relatively sound reasons behind his packing it in, but for

all the talk of New York's 11 million papers and relentless media

spotlight, I don't know what they are.

We got beat by the Braves, 5-0. Thirty days from now this won't be

something tossed in at the end of  ruminations about  a

potential setup guy.

Maybe Van Poppel decided he just really wanted to grow a beard and blast some Joe Cocker.

After I am elevated to the position of Maximum Leader Regarding All Things Baseball Or At Least Those That Interest Me, my first act will be to decree Gil Hodges inducted into the Hall of Fame. If some heretic waving a list of “similar players” who came along later dares to dissent, I, as a benevolent Maximum Leader, will not seek vengeance upon the heretic. Instead, I will explain that Gil Hodges earned a place in the Hall of Fame for his seven consecutive 100+ RBI seasons; his statistical standing among the greats of the game at the time of his retirement; his stellar defense; his performance and presence on one of the greatest teams ever; his exemplary conduct and the uncommon reverence it evoked among his contemporaries; and his managerial magic over eight seasons in Washington and New York. The problem with the Hall of Fame as it stands now is you get in as a player or you get in as a manager. Gil Hodges deserves the honor for a career in full.

Once I've seen to it that Cooperstown is lucky enough to receive Gil Hodges, I'll then move Cooperstown to Valley Stream or somewhere that won't be such a schlep for me to get to.

Having corrected this glaring oversight, your Maximum Leader will then codify into the promotion schedule of every Major League Baseball team an Old-Timers Weekend or something like it. Each franchise will be mandated to acknowledge its past heroes and even its past demi-heroes on at least an annual basis. And all former players who participate in the pension program will be required to accept invitations to such events.

We will institute this homage and we will institute it immediately. Respecting the past is urgent so as to avoid what's plagued certain organizations too often or too long.

We're getting our spate of The Boys Are Back In Town stories again regarding the 1986ers. By my count, it's the ninth consecutive spring that we've been told that the Mets are finally reaching out to their last and, in terms of accomplishment, best champions. During Bobby Valentine's first camp, he made a point of bringing in Mookie as a coach and Mex as an instructor and said it's about time the Mets have Mets around. That was 1997. The number of those vintage Mets on hand has trickled up since then. We seem to have reached critical mass with, by the count in Monday's Newsday, fully a third of the 24-man Series roster connected to the team in 2005.

Yet if there really are that many Mets of yore making the St. Lucie and Shea scenes, why does it seem that their impact hasn't really stuck? Why has it been such a struggle to link the aspirational Mets of the present with the presumably inspirational Mets of 19 summers past?

There's no one reason, but we know all the major threads to the storyline: the scum bunch; the hard living; the messy plane; the disappointments; the underachieving; the overreaction; the annual quest to wipe the slate clean. Really, it started in 1987 when amid the turmoil of the team's final St. Petersburg spring, the Mets were continually insisting that whatever problems they were having they were putting behind them. It led the great George Vecsey to write that the team should replace “Baseball Like It Oughta Be” with “We're Putting It Behind Us”.

Frank Cashen, as quoted in Sunday's News, still carries a grudge against Doc and Darryl, which is sad. I don't know how many second- and third-generation acolytes of Cashen — whose GM tenure resembled a Robert Moses arc of great works early, outmoded thinking with dire consequences later — still carry sway at 126th and Roosevelt. Omar, like Duquette, was an assistant to Phillips, who worked under McIlvane, who, like Harazin, was a lieutenant to The Bowtie. I've always had the feeling that a quarter-century in, this has remained Frank Cashen's front office even if Cashen himself is retired. Seeing as how Minaya left town and came back with his own ideas, maybe the spell has been broken (though ultimately that's up to Fred Wilpon).

Remember when the Mets altered their uniforms in 1993? They ditched the racing stripe and came out with something resembling but not matching the pinstripe look of the '60s. When asked why they didn't just go back and do retro right, Harazin said something like, oh, tradition is for the Yankees. We're supposed to be new and modern.

In a tenure laced with stupid pronouncements, this was the dern stupidest yet. The Mets were more than 30 years old then. Now they're over 40 and seem to be catching on that there is a history to them and that their fans care about it.

Yet when I read something, as I did in the News Sunday, that the Mets have ditched Old-Timers Day because it doesn't sell, I can't help but think the ghost of Harazin has infiltrated the water coolers.

Though they haven't called it Old-Timers Day for a long time, celebrations of Mets history have sold well recently. You were there for the All-Amazin' Team's unveiling in 2002. That drew more than 50,000 who didn't care that the current Mets were stinking up August left and right. They got close to 46,000 on a drizzly Sunday for the Ten Greatest Moments ceremony in 2000, us among them. Don't tell me they don't draw.

For years, the Mets had this brain-dead habit of starting their Old-Timers festivities about two hours before game time, which is fine if you push back game time. Only in the last five years did they realize nobody was showing up at 11:30 in the morning. All it takes is a little observation and followup action to make these things viable. Both in 2000 and 2002, they started their ceremonies at the announced game time, thus avoiding embarrassing acres of empty orange seats.

Does it help the team to have old Mets around? I dunno. Bobby Ojeda was pretty vocal about how he thinks the '86ers are brought around as window dressing but they're not taken seriously. He had an unhappy experience as a minor-league pitching coach in the Mets' system and he's entitled to his opinion. Just because he was 18-5 one year doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't mean it's wrong, either.

But it's not about old Mets helping new Mets, though that would be great. It's about the fans. It's about the opportunity for people like us to, once a year, go to Shea and applaud not just Tom Seaver (who was also unpardonably estranged for the longest time) but Tom Hausman. Bring back as many Mets as you can. Bring back the '86 stars and the '96 scrubs and the '76 trombones. I know they do these Mets Alumni signings somewhere by the Nickelodeon Burial Ground on weekends, but make more of it for more of us.

As part of my Maximum Leader ruling on this topic, I also declare Doc Gooden welcome back at Shea Stadium for the mandatory Old-Timer's Weekend. He can make a living in Tampa, do what he has to do, but let's stop pretending that the second-greatest pitcher in Mets history — and the greatest Met ever for a single season — didn't exist. He did and he does. Sure, he disappointed Wilpon and Cashen and loads of us (probably more for the no-hitter than for the drugs), but the statute of grudges has run out. I decree it so.

I've adopted Heath Bell as my first sentimental favorite of 2005. Part

of it's reading about him rollerblading with his daughter in the

driveway, which I thought was a sweet story. More than that, though, is

the fact that he's straight out of the Moneyball template.

One of my favorite parts of Moneyball

is the chapter on Chad Bradford, the reliever with the delivery so

strange that smug scouts dubbed him “the Creature” and ignored him

despite success on every level, until Billy Beane looked at the numbers

and grabbed him. I can only imagine Bell would also qualify for

Creaturehood from those who evaluate baseball players as if they were

selling jeans, as Moneyball puts it. Heck, as you know, I've made fun of poor Heath myself in that vein.

“What is that on the mound? Look at

that big rear and that belly. And what size are his shoes, a 4? I bet

he can't even see those tiny little feet under that big belly of his.

Wait, he's going into his motion. What is he doing? What kind of motion

is that? Is he mincing? I think ya gotta call whatever it is he's doing mincing. That body, that motion … I tell ya, it's unnatural.”

So here's a link to what was probably my favorite baseball story from last summer: Alan Schwarz's Aug. 15 New York Times article on judging relievers by inherited runs prevented — a measure thought up, as I understand it, by Baseball Prospectus.

Schwarz's overview is a great primer, and Mike Stanton is one of its

key figures. And it reveals just how sucky he'd been to that point: a

3.75 ERA, but third-worst in baseball in preventing inherited runners

from scoring.

That led me to dig up Baseball Prospectus' stats for reliever performance

in 2004. The sabermetrical waters get deep here, but the important

column is INR — inherited runners prevented. Stanton got better after

being outed in the Times, finishing with a -4.2 INR, good for only 14th

worst in baseball. Way to go, Mike. (Felix Heredia's stats with the

Yankees? -2.6. Bad, but not Stantonesque in their horror.) Rick

Peterson can lay claim to having helped Mike DeJean — DeJean's Orioles

INR was a putrid -7.9, but with the Mets he recorded a -0.2. Bartolome

Fortunato recorded a 0.5 — while the less-celebrated Orber Moreno had

a pretty decent 3.1 and the now-vanished Ricky Bottalico had a 3.5,

second-best on the team. But the best INR? 3.6. And it belonged to …

Heath Bell.

(I swear I didn't know that when I started this entry. But I'm smiling nonetheless.)

But how much do you want to bet some retread like Roberto Hernandez

(2004 INR -3.8) or Scott Stewart (-4.5) makes the team instead? We'll

be told they've thrown the ball really well and have experience.

Experience at what? Being sucky?

Heresy alert: I don't think Gil Hodges belongs in the Hall of Fame. I

know, I should be rubbed in shoe polish, set afire and wreathed in blue

and orange flames, and I've tried to change my own mind, but I don't. Here are the stats

— scroll down and look at the “similar batters.” Sure, you remember

all these guys, but are they Cooperstown material? Would we let in Gil

if we knew Tino Martinez would follow?

But he was the Gary Cooper of the Miracle Mets!

I know he was, and while I was just four months old when Cleon dropped to one knee

(Mom and Dad assure me I did see it), I grew up reading every

account of '69 I could find, until it became Holy Writ, which is as it

should be. Had Hodges lived, I firmly believe he would have entered

Cooperstown as a manager. (And our 1970s might look a whole lot better,

Seaver would never have become a Red, Koosman a Twin…no, stop, that

way lies madness.) But he didn't live. He died young, tragically young,

and so the doors are closed there too.

A Met Hall of Famer, sure — he's on the outfield wall where he

belongs, and it's right and proper that all managers who have followed

him or will do so will be measured against him. But I can't see

Cooperstown. I've tried. But I just can't.

Don't let Time Warner and Jim Dolan and Fran Healy bring you down on your first day of spring-training watching. You did something Harvey Haddix couldn't do in 1967: You made Al Schmelz into something resembling a Major League pitcher.

I hope Leiter, Delgado and the agent who came in through the bathroom window are very happy together at Pro Pimp True Playa Dolphins Stadium Park, the only place where they leave gigantic sacks of fertilizer in the dugouts, which themselves appear to be tiled like men's rooms. The whole lot of them deserve each other. They talk more than Omar, which we didn't think was possible five months ago.

Hey, we won another pretend game. We're still oh and oh. But with Carlos Beltran providing Leadership in the form of a home run and Willie Randolph having his eyes opened by Heath Roller Bell (then Fran corrected himself: “Willie always has his eyes open”), it's better than being labeled $100 MILLION BUSTS on an inside page of the News tomorrow. Not the back page. That's for GIAMBI USES Q-TIP or something similarly Newsworthy.

Howie Rose says the Mets were “phenomenal” in the bullpen Saturday. Maybe, but bullpens are tricky to gauge anytime. We're all gonna be down on Bell or Fortunato or whichever sap is lucky enough to earn sixth- and seventh-inning duty as soon as he coughs up a tie. There is nothing more thankless is this man's game than middle relief. Nobody's very good at it for very long. If you are, you become a setup man or a closer and you're replaced by lesser pitchers. Even the relatively effective ones, like Turk back in the day, get used to death and are bound to have a bad outing at the wrong time.

Y'know what's phenomenal? That the 1986 Mets carried nine pitchers through the post-season on a 24-man roster (remember those?) and two of them, Sisk and Niemann, only made token appearances, thank goodness. This was with three extra-inning games all won by the good guys. Last I read, Willie was going to take 11 pitchers north. That sounds light by today's standards but it would be refreshing.

Along those lines, did I hear Ted Robinson right at the end of the cablecast, that in 2005, for the first time since 1964, the Mets will play no games on artificial turf? You mean if you wait long enough, some injustices are corrected? Imagine if artificial turf were never invented. Imagine Vince Coleman was forced to stick to his punting career and thus never able to do damage to us from within and without. It's easy if you try.

Imagine Gil Hodges in the Hall of Fame. That's what I'll do from now on. It's a shame our manager of record can't catch a break no matter how they adjust the voting and it's a shame for Joan Hodges who seems to be waiting on her late husband's induction. But I take comfort in an idea that caught fire among my e-mail pals back in January: Let's just build our own wing in our own minds for who we want honored. Guys who made a difference and guys who made us happy. Gil Hodges is in the charter class.

Since it's my Hall, Ron Hodges won't be far behind. Talk about your very model of a modern backup catcher. He peaked as a rookie (laying the tag on Richie Zisk to end the Ball Off the Wall play and then driving in the winning run in the bottom of the inning to win that must-win game against the Pirates) and then hung around like crazy for another 11 years. Never had more than 250 ABs. Had a lifetime BA of .240. Came up a Met, went away a Met. Spanned Yogi to Davey. Spent considerable time on the DL in 1980, when after maybe a month, I ran into a guy who asked me, “Whatever happened to Ron Hodges?”

I think I just wrote his plaque.

Maybe it's just the years of trouble and embarrassment — or my own paranoia — but I can feel the controversies and woes swarming us like horseflies on a fishing trip, trying to land and draw some blood. So far no bites, but the buzzing is making me edgy. 

Was 60 pitches too many on a cold day for Pedro and his shoulder? Does Felix Heredia have an aneurysm? What did we do to Carlos Delgado, anyway? Will I ever watch Jose Reyes do anything without feeling panic creeping up my throat? And will I get to watch the boys play?

The last is the most infuriating. I think you're unaffected by this, but Cablevision is up to its old tricks again, threatening to yank the Mets (and the Knicks, whoever they are) off Time Warner unless they're paid more blood money. Now, it's not like Time Warner Cable is run by sweethearts, but it's the way Cablevision is going about it that's so disgusting: They run this whining message every other inning about how mean Time Warner is, then follow that between innings with stand-up interviews with angry Time Warner subscribers — interviews framed so that most of the time you can't see that Dolan henchmen are standing just off-camera with pistols aimed at the heads of those subscribers' children and pets. To this, add Cablevision's singularly disingenuous campaign against the West Side Stadium. There are lots of reasons to oppose the stadium, but preserving the Dolans' monopoly on arena events shouldn't be one of them — particularly since they can't run a franchise and the Garden is such a hideous rat trap.

(By the way, what is it about being a Met fan that your life winds up entangled with that of horrid scions of parental empires? Jeff Wilpon, meet James Dolan. Come to think of it, I've got nothing against Sandy Alomar. Is Bobby Bonilla Jr. moving up the corporate ladder at Aramark as I type?)

I'm annoyed with myself for letting the latest Dolan jihad take some of the joy out of the first day where I got to lie on the couch and watch spring training. It's just that with the Mets bolting to their own network next year, I foresee a lot more such disputes this summer. Doesn't baseball have enough outside-the-white-lines unhappiness these days without my having to worry about whether or not I can see it? 

Think positive. Think positive. Pedro looked strong. Nobody thinks there's anything seriously wrong with Heredia. Reyes just stole a base without his hamstring flying off. We'll always have FAN, and baseball on the radio is often more fun anyway. Delgado doesn't even play for us, so who cares about his insane agent's latest hijinks?

Actually, I find David Sloane really funny. “HOW DARE YOU CALL ME! I AM AT THE JOE COCKER CONCERT! HERE, LISTEN! HE IS SPASTICALLY CONTORTING HIMSELF THROUGH 'YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL' RIGHT NOW, AND I AM MISSING IT — BECAUSE OF YOU!” Joe Cocker? Is David Sloane marching against Vietnam, too? Every other day, Delgado has to answer questions he doesn't want to be asked about his presumably private conversations. Isn't your agent supposed to keep that from happening?

Oh well. It was surprisingly nice to hear Fran Healy accentuating any positive he could detect. And it's ELECTRIC here in Port St. Lucie! Uh-huh, Fran. If you're lucky enough to come down, make sure you stop by Chili's for a DELICIOUS meal! Right, Fran. 

With Jeff Gannon gone, doesn't Talon News have a spot available for Fran? The man can spin anything. I talked to some folks up in Baquoba, and they say those car bombs have really enhanced their agility! Sure, Fran.

Time to accentuate my own positive: Watching Carlos Beltran and David Wright swing the bat is a beautiful thing. I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch anything else.

A rainout?! On March 3? For the first telecast taking place outside work hours? That hurt. All rainouts before the last week of April are cruel, but when it's the second day of the exhibition season and New York resembles the surface of Pluto, that's twisting the knife something fierce. I sulked, bi-doop bi-doop bi-dooped my way through a little TiVo, then went out and got drunk.

The scribes' player du jour is Philip Humber, now being cast for the role of Guy Who Should Go North According to Insane Fans Calling WFAN. Granted, a cursory inspection of young Mr. Humber reveals plenty to ooh and ahh about: big dude whose fastball hits 97, 12-to-6 curve, change-up, splitter. And his fanning Miguel Cairo on a 3-2 hook before having an inning of pro ball under his belt was pretty impressive, even if no one really saw it but a few guys in blue, orange, black and white and some egrets. I'm most impressed that he managed to hit 42 guys at Rice — not because I'm bloodthirsty, but because these days aluminum bats make most college and high-school pitchers positively allergic to pitching inside. One less thing to learn climbing the ladder.

Then there's that old mystic chords of memory thing that you and I are suckers for. The other day Humber asked Pedro for a little tutorial on the circle change, which Pedro was apparently happy to offer. Pedro's circle change, as we've heard many times by now, was taught to him by Guy Conti, who in turn learned it from Johnny Podres, who earned our spiritual ancestors' eternal gratitude by using it to ruin the Yankees in 1955.

Closer to home, Humber's coach at Rice was Wayne Graham, collector of 33 at-bats (three of them hits) with the '64 Mets. .091, but still one of ours, darn it. I can hear the Ken Burns music now.

I sent Pussy to this doctor. The guy gives him the works. MRIs, CAT Scans, dog scans, you name it. And he says there's not a fucking thing wrong with his back. Then again, he says, when it comes to backs, nobody knows anything really.
–Paulie Walnuts

The phalanx of columnists, analysts and scouts — unnamed scouts, of course — is what brings us spring training. Yeah, it's the players we're interested in, but the exhibition games don't come until two weeks are gone and after a week of them, they're just a big tease. Unless the Mets Network is going to run B-roll footage of footwork drills, or Super Joe calls us, tells us what's going on and then hands the phone to his buddy Diamond Dave (and I wouldn't rule this out yet), we depend on an all-knowing filter to tell us what we think we wanna know.

But the filter is overrated.

Nobody knows anything really. It goes beyond the gang profiles we talked about before. Those are just the beat guys being sheep in an environment that apparently encourages herding and grazing. It's the columnists whose pages we open or click on like we're going to learn something. It's the insider analysts who promise dollops of info we can't get anywhere else. And it's the unnamed scout who can tell you why or why not something's a bad idea before it's happens.

They don't know anything. I've become convinced of that. In Wednesday's News, John Harper, who's always seemed like a solid if unremarkable in-print citizen, wrote a piece about the piece he wrote in which a scout told him Carlos Beltran would be a poor investment. Because Carlos Beltran is moody. Now, Harper said, I don't know if that scout was right because look at what a leader Carlos Beltran has already become.

What's wrong with this picture? Harper relied on an anonymous source to downgrade Beltran in the first place. By doing so, Harper poisoned the well for Beltran before he ever got here. Then Harper decides, no, the scout didn't know what he was talking about because a first-hand look at Beltran impresses him very much. What's that based on? A couple of weeks in Port St. Lucie, not that New York tinderbox that was supposedly going to make Carlos Beltran too moody to sign in the first place.

In other words, John Harper, a reasonably name-brand columnist (I see it's his byline, I assume I can trust there's knowledge behind it) and just my example for the moment, has no idea what he's talking about. Maybe Beltran was the wrong guy. No, wait, he's definitely the right guy. It's the nature of the spring training beast in this market that it has to be fed over and over again, not unlike my cat Bernie. And let's be glad we live somewhere where baseball matters that much. (Can you imagine expending this much thought on NASCAR?) But geez, give me something I can use. Six weeks from now, if Beltran is batting is batting .203, John Harper or one of his brethren will tell us it's because the centerfielder is putting too much pressure on himself to be a leader. And when Beltran says “nah, that's not it” for the 48th time, he'll be labeled moody.

On the Saturday morning before the Saturday night when we were going to learn whether Carlos Beltran would opt to return to Houston, I read three separate definitive reports from three legitimate baseball writers. One said he's close to the Mets. One said he's not leaving the Astros. The other said this is where the Yankees will swoop in. Each story had it on a very good source.

The columnists, for the most part, have their own agendas, their own pets, their own enemies on the field and in the front office. (Mostly they kiss up to success.) At least they put their names to their work. The scouts, the unnamed scouts, don't do that. Their job isn't to be quoted. Their job is to scout. But what's the point of getting a scout to say something like “Pedro's done,” when you can just as easily get another scout to say “Pedro's fine”? Some scout feeds some columnist dirt on some player the scout doesn't like and maybe the columnist doesn't like and the cycle takes off at warp speed. Plus, what the scout says isn't necessarily right. Just because he's paid to watch baseball games and file reports doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about.

Ditto for Peter Gammons and his ilk. For years I'd watch Baseball Tonight breathlessly waiting for Gammons or Jayson Stark or whoever to give me the insight I couldn't possibly glean anywhere else. It took me quite a while to understand they were telling me nothing at all. This is a typical analyst analysis: The Royals have won four in a row. The anchor says, hey Peter, what's going on with the Royals? Peter will talk over a bunch of highlights of the Royals executing well and note how well they're executing. He'll throw in some hint (“I talked to one American League GM”) of a trade for the one position where they're suspect and maybe mention a hot minor leaguer they have. Bam — Peter Gammons sure knows his Royals.

When you get right down to it, baseball coverage and political coverage are pretty much on a par. We look to a bunch of experts to bring us inside when in fact the experts have no idea what's going on inside. They feed off each other's rumors and speculations and personal prejudices and then take care to look like they know what they're talking about. And in both realms, talk radio abounds to amplify their shallow takes and dumb them down further. Those of us who consider ourselves aficionados of one or both lap it up anyway, despite our slowly building conviction that we know we shouldn't.

This morning I was watching an old This Week In Baseball on ESPN Classic. It was from August '82 when the big story was the Dodgers surging and overtaking the Braves in the NL West. In separate interviews, Phil Niekro, whose team was in free-fall, and Rick Monday, whose team was on the rise, said the same thing: We just want to get out there and play ball and not listen to what the guys in the papers and on TV are saying. Twenty-three years later, I'm beginning to see their point.