With that out of the way, we can now move to the abjectly outrageous part of the baseball sports news today. The Mets - not exactly a small market team with tight purse strings - announced that they are not going to participate in the "Alex Rodriguez Auction" - which will soon become the "Alex Rodriguez Tour Across America". In addition to his request for a contract that approaches a guaranteed $200M over the life of the contract, Rodriguez has retained the services of Scott Boras who never saw a situation where he had enough edges to get a great deal. In addition to the $200M, Boras is "demanding" office space in the stadium of whatever team signs Rodriguez so that a representational team for Rodriguez can work there and take care of some business items like run a charter jet service for Alex and his family and friends and like manage the sale of A-Rod paraphernalia separate and distinct from whatever the team wants to try to sell.

Memo to Scott Boras: With $200M in hand, I am fairly sure I could find a way to take care of minor items like office space for my "peeps" to take care of my business matters.

The Atlanta Braves have signed Jim Fregosi to be the special assistant to GM John Schuerholtz. Since it is not immediately obvious that things are going poorly in the front office of the Atlanta Braves, one must wonder why this has been done. Very often in baseball, jobs are offered to people on the basis of whom they roomed with at Quad Cities during the sixties. Perhaps the case here?

Pedro Astacio had been charged with some version of domestic battery. He pled guilty to harassment and prosecutors dropped the charges that he actually hit his incumbent but estranged wife. (No mystery to me the cause of the estrangement.) One of the outcomes here is that Pedro has to complete a "domestic violence treatment program". I wonder how often those things really work.

Maybe we can put the efficacy of these things to a test here. It seems that Michael Spinks has just entered the domestic violence tunnel. He was arrested and charged with second degree assault in the beating of his girlfriend. (What is the difference in the degrees of assault here? Leaving permanent marks? Broken bones?) Michael already had an outstanding "family court warrant" which means that it is possible - although by no means certain - that something similar to this has happened before. Now if we put him in one of these domestic violence treatment programs and it does not work, then maybe we can put the people who think these programs are actually a form of rehabilitation in a boxing ring with Michael for a couple of rounds. And if Michael prefers, he can substitute his namesake, Michael Tyson, as the gentleman with whom these people need to communicate for three minutes at a time. But that is not likely to happen if Spinks retains Scott Boras as his agent because that would lead to a demand that Spinks be ceded a spot in the foyer of the courthouse where he can sign autographs - for a fee of course - and offer taxi services to the folks who come there for other personal business.

As I've been noting here, there will be a boatload of college football jobs opening up at the end of this year. Auburn has been in a resurgence under the tutelage of Tommy Tuberville and obviously does not want to have him lured away by a better offer somewhere else - and particularly not by Alabama who will be in the market for a coach. So they just extended Tuberville's contract for 5 more years and upped the ante to about $1.3M per year. Good thing Scott Boras is not the agent here or he might have also demanded space in the bookstore where Tommy and his representatives can sell posters and coffee mugs with Tommy's face on them.

Meanwhile, Bucknell has just named Aimee Barrett volunteer assistant softball coach. She needed Scott Boras to represent her. Had he been there, she would have gotten space at the volunteer fire department where she could have held bake sales and signed autographs to provide her with some modest level of income for this gig.

Pre-season NCAA basketball polls had Michigan State in various spots in the Top Five but you had to wonder if this was a "carry-over" from the championship status of last year or if they really had something cooking up there. After all, they lost two NBA first round picks from that team and usually those kinds of players are not easy to replace. Well, last night the Spartans snapped the 1270 game winning streak of the Harlem Globetrotters, so they must have something going on up there. I wonder if Red Klotz was anywhere in the building??? There have been loads of "Elvis sightings" but I've never heard any mention of a Red Klotz sighting.

Thurman Thomas has a torn ligament in his knee and may have to retire. He will miss the rest of the season and will work on rehab for a while to see if surgery is required. At age 34 and with twelve full seasons behind him, this may be a long hill for him to climb.

I found out where Chadron State is. It is in Nebraska. The way I found out is that I saw the pairings for the Division II football playoffs and Chadron State (Neb) is traveling to University of California - Davis for a first round match. I looked carefully at the Division II and Division III pairings, and I see that Electoral College has not made it to the playoffs once again.

The Raiders/Broncos game last night was outstanding. It was worth brewing up a big pot of Starbucks to be able to see the whole thing. Oakland trailed by 14 with about 7 minutes to play and engineered two TDs to tie the game with 1:14 left in the game. Brian Griese moved the Broncos down the field methodically to set up a field goal by Jason Elam from 40 yards that was dead perfect and hit the back net just as the game clock showed 0:00. That reduces Oakland's lead to 1.5 games in the AFC West because Denver has beaten Oakland twice this year and owns the tie breaker if the records come out the same. It looks to me like Denver will have to win out for the season to create such a tie because they have four losses already. Oakland has lost two - both to Denver - and appears to have only three challenging games left. So it would take a complete fold on the part of Oakland to put Denver back on top of the AFC West, but the Raiders have done that kind of fold before. We shall see.

In Pattaya City, Thailand, they are holding the Volvo Women's Open Tennis Tournament. Silvia Farina (Italy) defeated Silvija Talaja (Croatia) in first round action. If Scott Boras had been there, he would have demanded that these women be given space in the back end of a Volvo Station Wagon so that they could have sold souvenirs of their match and promoted it as "The Battle of the Silvias" or maybe "Silvia Squared". Too bad he missed out on all these opportunities that we have chronicled here. Maybe he needs to hire someone to look out for those business opportunities that slip by without his notice as he concentrates on the stable of clients that he already has. For the record, I'm available - - for $200M guaranteed over the next 10 years. And - not to worry - I'll spring for the office rent.

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