Well, my prediction that the Tigers would win the World Series in 6 games is now mathematically impossible. It surely looks as if the Cards will win the Series at this point. So what would be worse:

Having to read and hear about the genius of Tony LaRussa ad infinitum?

Having to endure more of the platitudinous wisdom of Jim Leyland - which sounds more and more like the Earthly version of the wisdom and teachings of Obi Won Kenobe?

Please recall a couple of years ago when Latrell Spreewell was righteously indignant that he'd been offered a mere $10M a year to play NBA basketball and sniffed that he couldn't accept such an offer because he had to feed his family. Now that he's out of the game, his family apparently isn't starving so the only conclusion I can draw is that they qualified for food stamps. That strain of silliness has clearly become contagious and threatens to swamp the sporting world. Consider…

Gary Sheffield is in a snit with the Yankees because the Yankees want him to play first base. Let's get this straight; playing first base for a major league team is not nearly the same thing as serving a life sentence without parole in a prison where Darth Vader would be "a submissive". Sheffield said that this demand by the Yankees would make it difficult for him "to feed his family". Excuse me Mr. Sheffield; but with your guaranteed contract, you will be able to feed your family so long as you are not caught on video tape forcing an underage human to "do the nasty" with a household pet.

Virtually concurrent with Sheffield's outrageous statements, Warren Sapp felt the irresistible urge to flap his gums and stick his nose into the Raiders/Jerry Porter spitting match. Who knows? Maybe this is what Sapp considers "leadership" for the rudderless Raiders. Sapp expressed his concern and amazement that the Raiders would "take food off a man's table" by doing something as callous as suspending Jerry Porter. Wow, another reference to starving athletes; I can only conclude from Sappls omission about taking food from Porter's family is that Porter isn't married and has spawned no children out of wedlock…

Let's get this straight. Pro athletes in the US playing any of the major sports are not starving and neither are their families. They'd have to have invested every dime of their net worth in Enron back on 2001 for them to be "short" in any financial sense in 2006. It's these kinds of statements that assure that the average fan will never be able to understand - or empathize with - pro athletes making millions of dollars a year. Average fans might actually have to worry about the ability to feed there families once in a while; but average fans know that given several million a year in salary for a few years, those worries would vanish into meaninglessness. There are three other items in the news now that are related to football that demand commentary. The first is a report that Al Davis confronted Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle and told Ostler that if he [Davis] were 20 years younger, he [Davis] would beat Ostler down. These remarks came in response to a column Ostler wrote a month ago about Davis and the Raiders and the remarks came from a man who needs to use a walker to get around. I have three observations here:

1. There is an old adage that it is never smart to pick a fight with a person who buys ink by the barrel and newsprint by the boxcar load.

2. If you are going to threaten someone with a beat-down, it is dangerous to do so while holding onto a walker in order to remain upright.

3. If you are going to get into a verbal confrontation with Scott Ostler, you are most likely going to be taking a knife to a gunfight. Scott Ostler is probably an even money choice in a verbal jousting contest with Winston Churchill, Mark Twain and/or George Bernard Shaw. Al Davis might be able to hold his own with Ed McMahon or Bob Saget. I said MIGHT…

The NFL owners met and decided that it would be a good idea to play a couple of regular season games a year in overseas venues. This is all a part of "globalizing the brand" of the NFL and it might or might not be a good business decision. But it does mean that teams will have to forego home dates once in a while to play games in a far off venue. That will mean a revenue loss and might have some legal ramifications for those teams who may have sold PSLs to fans. Those PSLs may carry with them the assurance of a given number of regular season NFL games for their viewing pleasure. Owners might be willing to forego a home date if the league will provide an alternate revenue stream to them but I doubt that owners want fans who bought PSLs suing them for non-performance of that contract.

Please notice that the NFL owners abandoned this meeting with no decision and no movement toward having an NFL franchise residing in Los Angeles. The "LA problem" is really very simple. Media folks cannot comprehend how a major US sports enterprise can possibly hope to succeed without "exposure" in LA, which is the #2 market in the US. What they fail to see is that the NFL has been wildly and hugely successful ever since they left LA - two teams split town because they got better deals elsewhere. Meanwhile, the local governments in California and the state government continue to demand that the NFL pay for any and all stadium constructions and renovations that they deem to be necessary in order to put a profitable franchise in LA. The owners may be dumb but they're not stupid; they recognize that if they do that in LA, they will lose all of their leverage to get other cities to build them new facilities at taxpayer expense anywhere else.

It doesn't matter who you think is "right" or "ethical" in this matter. Here's what matters. The NFL has the franchises and if LA/southern California wants one, they'll have to pay some if not all of the costs to create the facilities that the NFL will play in. That's like the ante in a poker game; if you don't cough it up, you don't get any cards to play with.

Shawne Merriman continues his appeal for his four game suspension for failing a drug/steroid test. Forget all the rhetoric and all the excuses; an arbitrator will deal with all of that in a week or so. The real problem here is that Shawne Merriman almost assuredly unknowingly ran afoul of the Megan Marshak Rule, i.e. Don't get caught doing something you wouldn't get caught dead doing.

For those too young to remember, Megan Marshak was the staffer and mistress of former US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. He died in her apartment in the midst of a sexual encounter with her. After an unseemly pause that lasted about 2-3 hours, Ms. Marshak called the authorities who arrived to find the former Veep dead as a stone. He was cremated and his ashes spread in a couple of days; and according to legend, one of the reasons might have been that the physical state in which he was found by the paramedics would not have allowed for a mortician to have closed a casket - - if you get my drift here. Hence the rule cited above: Don't get caught …

Shawne Merriman got caught with a steroid in his system; it doesn't really matter how it got there; it was there when the tests were done. Unless he can convince the arbitrator that some aliens from the Planet Zeembo were doing a rectal probe on him and had some of that steroid stuff attached to their electro-optic probe, he's in a world of hurt. I presume Ms. Marshak is still alive and kicking; perhaps she should counsel Mr. Merriman about how to weather this storm and wait for calmer times ahead.

Finally, since I referred to Scott Ostler and his newly minted feud with Al Davis earlier, here's a comment from Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle to which Al Davis did not seem to take offense:

"Maybe a new Raiders slogan should be, 'Just try not to do things that will inspire global ridicule.' "

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

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