I like Johnny Damon.  I really do.  He’s been a perfectly good player, or better, for a lot of years.  But as much as I like Johnny Damon, I love the Hall of Fame much more.  I love the Hall of Fame even though it refuses to love me back, what with its induction of Jim Rice, its refusal to tell BBWAA voters that PEDs were far too pervasive to ban an entire generation, and its inconvenient location preventing yearly pilgrimages.  I love the Hall of Fame, so I will defend it from Johnny Damon.

Johnny Damon's biggest supporter for the Hall of Fame, interestingly enough, is Johnny Damon.  Damon told Tyler Kepner, "I think even if you look at my numbers now, how high I am on the runs list [33rd], how high I am on the doubles list [43rd], and you also have to take into account the ballparks that I've played in.  I've played in some pretty tough ones for left-handers.  If I played in Yankee Stadium my whole career, my 230 home runs turn into 300, easy.” He is also 56th all-time with 2,730 hits.  Damon also makes "a case for being a clean player in our generation." 

I have a confession.  I suppose it’s not a very juicy confession.  But all the same, I feel like I need to confess that I love All-Time teams.  Or, at least, I used to love them.  I used to make them when I was bored in school in the backs of my notebooks.  All-Time Twins.  All-Time Yankees.  All-Time Guys Named Mike.  And I was a sucker for other people’s All-Time teams too.  Babe Ruth made a team of what he thought were the greatest players in baseball history back in the 1930s and named Hal Chase and Ray Schalk to it.  Walter Johnson, and Rogers Hornsby and Ty Cobb published their dream teams too.  Cobb put Buck Weaver at third base, while The Big Train honored both Chase and Johnny Kling.  One of my first baseball books I owned as a kid was an old library book from 1963 that listed Pie Traynor as the greatest 3B in history.  I’d read any of that stuff.

Which is why I was excited to hear about Graham Womack’s All-Time Dream Project, which asked fans to vote on the greatest players in baseball history and got heavy-hitting writers like Craig Calcaterra, Josh Wilker, and Dan Szymborski to write about them.  Graham’s project, which is also raising money to run journalism workshops for kids, is great.  And I don’t want to take anything away from it.  But in the afterglow, Craig wrote about how the results illustrated that we may be overvaluing the past, saying “We get locked into older things first, and it’s that much harder for us to appreciate more recent greatness….  I think [voters] pick Rogers Hornsby over Joe Morgan because their father said he was the best and because the pictures of him are in black and white and, boy, if that ain’t history, I don’t know what is.”  

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Mark Saxon is reporting that after tweeting out former batterymate Mike Napoli’s phone number over the weekend, CJ Wilson has decided to take a little break from Twitter. It’s probably a smart decision for him to take some time to cool down, to reconsider what he did, maybe to apologize to Napoli and pay a fine to Major League Baseball.

Twitter is a wonderful medium for networking, for sharing instant reactions to news and events, and for trying out material. Interacting with other fans enriches the experience of watching games. It’s like being at a bar with a thousand or so of your closest friends, but without the hassle of actually having to meet anyone. It’s the best way for fans to interact with their favorite players and to build interest in the game on both a local and national level.

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Bobby Valentine was kind enough to spend a few minutes in front of a microphone on Tuesday, which he is usually reluctant to do, and proceeded to cast aspersions in the way of the Yankees, Derek Jeter, and the Captain’s famous 2001 flip to Jorge Posada to beat Jeremy Giambi. “We’ll never practice that,” Valentine told reporters. “We’ll never practice that. I think he was out of position and I think the ball gets him out if he doesn’t touch it, personally. But the Jeter-like simulation today is the [establish] what the first baseman and third baseman do as the ball is coming in.” So, in one foul swoop, Valentine essentially called Jeter’s defining moment unnecessary and questioned whether Jeter was even in the right place.

I’m aware that this borders on baseball sacrilege, but it’s conceivable that Bobby is right. Jeter does seem to be way out of position, and it’s also possible that the throw would have come through in time, given that it seems to be relatively on-line. That shouldn’t diminish the fact that it was a very athletic play, and it may very well have saved the Yankees’ bacon in 2001, but it may be represent an unnecessary embroidering of the Jeter legend.

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Yesterday on the Twitters, word spread like wildfire of Baseball Boyfriends, a new CBS Fantasy Sports app that “is a single draftee fantasy sports mini game designed for girls. Pick your boyfriend for the season, dump him if he can't perform and pick up a new BBBF. Boyfriends [sic] earn you points daily. Girl with the most points at the end wins.”

I was disappointed to find out that men, gay or straight, did not seem to be welcome in this fantasy league.  Also, as the father of a very young girl, I was a more than a little concerned about the way that the stats are presented to women, as if they assume that the women who play their game can’t handle statistics that aren’t on crumpled notebook paper covered in hearts.  After all, there are women who play in my leagues, which tend to have a very stark presentation of the players and relevant stats, and these women regularly kick my ass. What a shame that the opportunity to pick a baseball boyfriend wasn’t afforded to me as well.

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