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Ten Things I Didn’t Know Last Week

Andres Galarraga has retired, nearly twenty years after his major league debut.

It will be the year of Nomar in Chicago

The guys who park cars at HoHoKam are known as "Ho's."

First round goes to Lee.

Jon Stewart apologized to Barry Bonds.

We're going to talk little bit about baseball. By way of an apology, Barry Bonds, star slugger for the San Francisco Giants, is having a bit of a rough offseason. He had surgery on his knee last week and as you know he's suspected of steroid use, which he's never actually denied, but a woman last week claiming that he was his mistress for nine years has just testified under oath that Barry said he had been taking steroids since 2000. So it's really starting to pile up on him and yesterday he held an impromptu press conference to take some accountability and put the blame for his troubles where it belonged.

[Cut to Bonds]

Bonds: You guys wanted to hurt me badly enough. You finally got there.

Reporter off camera: You say you guys. Who do you mean?

Bonds (pointing): You. You. You. You. The media. Everybody

[Cut to Stewart, with eyes downcast and looking regretful] Sorry. And I am sorry. I do take responsibility. I do remember, this was years ago, when I saw Barry Bonds for the first time and I remember saying to him, "You're skinny. And very weak. You might want to do a little (mimes sticking a needle in his arm)." So I do take responsibility for convincing him to do steroids for a long, long time. And about having a mistress, again, I should never have begged him to f*** someone outside of his marriage.

• Nixon mentioned his children and their dog Checkers in a nationally televised speech in a bid for sympathy, Bonds did the same thing with his son.
• Nixon's VP called the media "nattering nabobs of negativism." Bonds has called them something similar, though less alliterative.
• Nixon had Watergate, Bonds has Steroidsgate.
• Nixon was forced to retire early. Bonds???

There have been a lot of funky game delays in baseball history.

Billy Beane affirms the obvious: starting pitching is too expensive.

Blez: How much did the insane contracts, forgive my editorializing, for starting pitchers like Benson and Wright affect your decision to go ahead and move Hudson and Mulder? In other words, were you just taking an opportunity to move players who happened to play in a position that is suddenly overvalued?

BB: There were a ton of things that went into the decision. As a general manager, to put it simply, I'm given a certain amount of ingredients to put together a team. In other words, I'm given, "this is what you have to spend." My job is to manage those resources I'm given, that being in terms of dollars. To put it bluntly, we weren't going to be able to return the entire team we had in 2004 and not be far above our means. We not only aim to put a competitive team on the field, but one that will be getting progressively better, which is the trick for us. One of the things we realized about the free agent market this year, and it wasn't like it was new to us but it became even more evident this year, is that the one thing we couldn't put ourselves in the position to do--like say with Jason Giambi or even Miguel Tejada which was even tougher-- what we knew is that if these pitchers left, we had to have an answer for them. And the answer wasn't going to come via the free agent market.

Blez: Because of the cost, is what you're saying?

BB: Exactly, and not only that, but in many cases cost for mediocrity. Ordinary pitchers that we neither had the resources nor the desire to pay them that much. Once again, understand that we're operating within a budget. Myself and David (Forst), we have a certain amount to work with and we've got to work with that. One thing you can't rely on is that you're going to draft five pitchers to replace five guys. It isn't that predictable. In our market, pitching is the hardest thing to acquire and impossible for us to sign in the open market. For the health of our franchise, we had to make sure that if we traded these guys that what we got in return was at least someone that could go into our rotation for X number of years, preferably as many as possible.

Bill James affirms the obvious: major league teams carry too many pitchers on their rosters, at the expense of potentially valuable platoon and bench players.

What has happened in the last fifteen years is that the expansion of the bullpens has all but eliminated platooning. Teams used to carry nine pitchers, not 15 years ago but 35 years ago. You have nine pitchers on a 25-man roster, that’s leaves 16 players for eight positions, and you can platoon at three or four positions. Bobby Cox in Toronto in the early eighties was platooning at five positions. Now, teams carry 12 pitchers. You’ve got 13 position players for nine positions, you’ve got a backup catcher and a utility infielder, your options for platooning are very limited.

But what we’re doing now doesn’t make any sense, because you can gain many more runs by platooning than you can save by having an extra left-hander in the bullpen. Eventually, people will realize that what we’re doing now doesn’t make any sense, and then they’ll start cutting back the pitching staffs and expanding the benches, and then we’ll go the other way for 30 or 40 years until something else happens and history tears off on some other tangent.

If you line up all the teams in the American League in alphabetical order, all the AL Central teams are in a row.

You can make a wallet out of duct tape.