Arghh . . . Umps . . . Bud . . .

Orioles 6, Yankees 5

A brutal loss, especially with the prospect of two rainouts coming up. I hate to say it but I think Wang's shoulder is bothering him. Last night, for two innings he's unhittable, ground ball after ground ball. In the third, he loses the strike zone, loses the sinker, and it pretty much goes downhill from there. Apparently Wang's been working with Guidry on maintaining his arm angle. When his arm drops, the sinker doesn't sink. I'm thinking that the shoulder is bad again and that it hurts to maintain the proper arm angle. I hope I'm wrong, becasue losing Wang is something we can't afford. But if he's going to be ineffective . . .

I hate to talk about umpiring but I have to. In the third, the batter was out at first on the Jeter jump-throw play. Two runs scored on that play, three in the inning. With the proper call there no runs score. OK, it was a bang-bang play, and the batter made it closer than it should have been with the silly head-first slide into first. (When will these idiots figure out that that slows you down????) But still, bad call.

More infiuriating was the Matsui at-bat that ended the game. Down 6-5, bottom 9, bases loaded. The catcher pulls the 2-1 pitch down a good six inches. Called a strike. That's high-school stuff, pulling a pitch down that far. These "professional" umps can't see that? Then, on 3-2, Matsui is called out on a pitch that well, was pretty close but was a ball. Matsui gets thrown five balls , swings at none of them, and gets called out on strikes. Wonderful. Should Matsui have swung at that 3-2 pitch? Probably, but that doesn't alter the fact that the quality of umpiring started to decline badly last year and the slide continues this year. Already in Yankee games I've watched this season I've seen at last 10 egregiously bad calls in important situations. One can only hope they even out over time.

Overall, since Sandy Alderson left the MLB front office, the umpires have slowly reverted to their old ways. The "personal strike zone." The terrible positioning. The "I've got dinner plans" strike calls. I can't believe that Selig deosn't see that he needs to find a new Rotweiler to bring the umps back in line.


Selig to step down . . . in 2009!

This one just cracks me up. Can Selig/MLB do anything right, ever? Selig announces he's going to retire . . . three years from now? What the hell?

Are we to believe that the search process is going to take three years? Three years to find another shill for the owners? How about three weeks? I'm sure the owners already have a good list of potential lackeys lined up.

I can only assume that Bud wants the three years to help put a little time between himself and Barry Bonds, to clean up his legacy a bit. Sorry, Bud, but your legacy is pretty well set. You will be remembered forever as the Commissioner who:

1. Shook the pom-poms while drug abusers made a mockery of some of the most cherished records in the game.
2. Belatedly decides to "investigate" the steroids issue, but appoints perhaps the most conflicted person he could possibly think of to run said investigation.
3. Handed over control of playoff scheduling to Fox, thereby guaranteeing that no one under the age of 14 will ever see a World Series game beyond the fourth inning.
4. Abandoned all pretext of the Commissioner working on the behalf of the game, and gleefully embraced the idea of Commissioner as the owners' butt-boy.
5. Allowed greedy owners to simply pocket so-called "revenue-sharing" money while running their franchises into the ground. The Florida Marlins could draw ZERO fans this year and still make a profit.
6. Established the bogus World Baseball Classic.


The owners should just admit it's a farce and hire Donald Trump as the next Commissioner.
At least his hair is entertaining. And he might fire some people on national TV.