The WNBA puts eight teams into a playoff. Going into the last game of the year the Washington Mystics have a shot at winning a berth. It is possible that they can get in with a record of 13-19. If you allow a team with that record in, then you ought to have every team in for early rounds of "one-and-done" competition.

Unlike many people who dismiss the WNBA, I enjoy watching the better teams play, but the detractors are absolutely on target when it comes to the bad teams. No matter what the ads try to tell you (Fat guys playing in the driveway and the graphic says "they are better than you are.") the truth is that many of the WNBA teams are not good and most of them would lose to a top flight team of "pick-up players".

The Olympics propaganda machine is beginning to churn. Yesterday, some talking head uttered the phrase "Olympic movement" which is a juxtaposition of words only found in press releases from the Olympics gurus. There is no "Olympic movement" any more than there is a "Sparerib movement." If I were to try to create a metaphor for what an Olympic movement might look like, the tone here would become scatological very quickly.

Right now, the Olympics are merely a quadrennial athletic event where lots of irrelevant sports are manufactured and judged and where crooked executives try to find newer and bigger ways to get more money out of the US TV networks by making sure that drug enhanced competitors can indeed participate and make the competitions look important. Harsh? Yes. Absolutely untrue? Show me where.

Brian Grant has now said that he will not sign any contract with the Portland Trailblazers - whether or not it involves a sign-and-trade. In doing that, he has walked away from a $70M deal on the table for six years with some kind of "opt out" provision for the last year. I happen to think that this is the kind of situation that has led Jerry West to retire. No longer is a GM's job one of negotiating contracts and drafting players and making trades to get the best team together. Now it is like recruiting college players or like a sick version of the Dating Game where all contract offers are basically the same - thanx to the last Collective Bargaining Agreement - and now the players are picking who they will date for the next couple of years. I guess that's progress.

Julie Krone is being inducted into the Horse Racing Hall of Fame. Julie was not the first female jockey and not the first stakes winning female jockey, but she was clearly the best female jockey ever. And that is not damning by faint praise because she showed that she could compete with the top flight of male jockeys and she won over 3500 races in her career. She remains the only woman to win a Triple Crown race. Lots of times, elections to things like the Hall of Fame or the inclusion of someone on some list of Distinguished Whatevers is merely a gesture of political correctness. This one is absolutely not a gesture of any kind other than recognition of someone who deserves the honor.

Eric Swann now says as part of the media campaign to accompany his $3.5M grievance against the Arizona Cardinals that the team tried to throw him out in the garbage like an old can and tried to blackball him from the NFL by "sullying his reputation". Observations:

1. Cans don't belong in the garbage; they should be recycled.

2. Eric's agent wrote the part about "sullying his reputation". Eric thinks the verb "to sully" has something to do with Agent Scully and the horizontal rumba.

3. If Eric could find a way to play at least 14 games in a year any time soon, his reputation as a player who is easily injured and with a low tolerance for playing in pain would be set on a positive course.

The Yankees claimed Jose Canseco from waivers. How many DHs do they need?

Peter Asbestos' warmth and charm extended all the way to Rochester NY where the Orioles extended their minor league agreement with the Red Wings. This was in spite of a poll taken in the Rochester papers where 67% of those polled wanted the Red Wings to sign on with a different team. When Mr. Angelos walks in a room, it is like three people just left.

Eighty years ago today, the fastest nine inning game in the history of baseball happened. The Tigers beat the Yankees 1-0 in a game that took 1 hour and 13 minutes. It won't be long before that is the time consumed between innings as the various commercials and promotional announcements run on TV and radio.

Finally, on the local sports radio station, they said that Columbia beat Chevy chase in the "Annual Connecticut Avenue Caddie Classic". I must confess that I did not immediately think this was a golfing competition. I thought that this was some deal where groups of thugs - claiming amateur status so that they might qualify for the Olympics if this were to become a demonstration sport - competed to see who could break into and hot wire a Cadillac parked on Connecticut Avenue without attracting police or neighborhood attention. There are lots of practitioners of that art.

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...