question of the day

as posed by d.r.w.: why is tim lincecum's contract figure so low?

the associated press reported that the cy young winner signed a one-year, $650,000 contract with the giants thursday. that's not even double the league minimum.

huh, you might wonder.

it seems that lincecum is probably more concerned about what happens post-2009. as the AP further reports, he is likely to be eligible for arbitration after this season.

read: BIG BUCKS.

if lincecum can post the sort of numbers he did this year, he stands to get a contract that might come close (but surely not all the way) to rivaling that of rotation-mate barry zito. so why not take the easy contract now with a team and pitching coach that he's comfortable with and go for the bigtime in a year?

still, it seems like he could have squeezed a little more out of the giants. is the kid just that nice? or is he pumped about a rotation that now features three cy young winners (lincecum, zito, and randy johnson)?

you may not be excited about lincecum or the giants, but you should sure as hell be excited that it's spring training. baseball is BACK.

_______________________

What is the sound of silence?

Pointless philosophical drivel? Sure. But also an important question when posed in reference to the A-Rod scandal. One of the biggest sports stories of the past few months at least, and three POB writers (and one guest writer!), one of them an avowed Yankees-hater, have remained conspicuously silent on the subject. What does this mean? That we all have lives--jobs, wives, kids, what have you--and are too busy to post? Sure, it means all of that. But it also means this: the A-Rod scandal is boring.

Go ahead, say it. It's okay to admit it. It doesn't take anything away from it; a story can be important and boring at the same time.  But even for A-Rod haters, what's interesting about this story? He took an illegal substance, but at this point, it's starting to seem like everyone did, at least among the great hitters of this era. We don't get an infuriating/entertaining denial a la Bonds/Clemens, or fun, evasive squirming a la Sosa/McGwire. We get a perfunctory apology and that's it. Baseball's cheaters have wised up, and in doing so, become less fun to hate. A-Rod seems as lifeless when reacting to a steroids scandal as he does playing in front of 40,000 home fans that hate him.

The big news--that 103 other people also failed drug tests--isn't even news, since we don't know who they are. And there don't seem to be any signs of Major League Baseball changing its policies. So, to sum up: we've confirmed the sneaking suspicion that everybody's been cheating, we're still not going to do anything about it, and A-Rod is sorry, but he promises that he only took substances that one time they were testing for them, and he's not even sure what they were, and he's totally sorry. Seriously, the most interesting part of this whole story was when A-Rod was bright orange for his entire confession and used the term "loosey-goosey" for some reason. When do actual baseball games start?