I have no clue what to do. Kevin Kaduk of Big League Stew and I talked yesterday afternoon, and now half the conversation has been invalidated by the news that Cliff Lee is coming back to Philadelphia.
Still, I wanted to put the show up because there’s a lot of good stuff, and because it’s funny to listen to us talk about Lee potentially going to the Yankees and if that would make him the best Number Two starter in baseball history (Jon Heyman made that claim last week, save for Don Drysdale, but that was behind CC Sabathia. Does it still hold up in Philly behind Halladay?)
Kaduk starts the show with a pretty epic rant about the Legends and Leaders of the Big Ten and how much of an “ass clown” Jim Delaney is. We the spin to baseball, as as I mentioned, talk about the current Hot Stove, including a comparison to the Carl Crawford and Jayson Werth deals, wondering if people would feel differently about the contracts if the players swapped teams. Do the Red Sox, et al get the benefit of the doubt for high-priced contracts because they’re usually good? Is the Werth deal bad and the Crawford deal good because of who they signed with? And, what has this off-season done for parity in the sport?
We spend a good amount of time patting Dave Brown on the back for having the presence of mind to ask Luke Scott about Barack Obama. If you want to get the inside story of BLS’s interview with Scott, Kaduk gives the background on how Brown got it, the internal Yahoo discussions and how quickly the thing spread.
. And some people say the winter meetings are boring.
Kaduk and I get into the whole Twitter battle between writers to break news first, and the enormous amount of pressure they feel to not only break news, but get it right in a minefield of misdirection. Then you add in people making up fake Twitter accounts and it’s hard for anyone to navigate the landscape. I get Kaduk’s thoughts on the Heyman Hoax and then we get into the whole concept of reporters putting out Mystery teams as “scoops.”
Do the reporters know the team, but withhold at the behest of the agent (or the team) or are they going with Mystery team because they figure the agent will pay them off when the player does actually decide on a team? Which is better, and is it fair to even ask the question in terms of better or worse?
And, knowing now that a mystery team did sign Jayson Werth — and after the show was taped, Cliff Lee — do we have to back off on the ripping guys like Heyman who use the Mystery team line, or is it still questionable journalism?
So Kaduk and I talk about that, plus Cliff Lee maybe going to the Yankees. Plus TastyKakes and other fun stuff. Thanks for listening. Sorry some of it is out of date already.