The NFL's Free Ride

The Keith Fitzhugh story got me thinking. In case you haven't heard, Fitzhugh is the 24-year-old who told the New York Jets "thanks, but no thanks" when they offered him a practice squad slot after two defensive backs were injured this week.

What kind of fool says "no" to the NFL? Well, Fitzhugh has a real job and real-life responsibilities. His father's disabled and the family needs a steady paycheck, which Fitzhugh is earning working on the Norfolk and Southern Railroad.

Still, couldn't he bank some big money just spending a few weeks in the NFL? After all, you read about those massive contracts in pro sports. The truth is this: the NFL pays its practice-squad players $5,200 a week. There are no fringe benefits and the work is week-to-week. Even if a player spends the whole season on the practice squad, he's made $88,400 and may well be back on the street when it's over.

Remember, the NFL is a $7 billion a year business. Unlike the other major North American sports leagues, it spends nothing on minor leagues to develop players. In fact, the NFL relies on the NCAA to provide its raw material, without compensation.

In fact, it's worse than that. Who pays for the scholarships which attract star athletes to college programs which groom them for the NFL? Why, it's (to a degree) you and me. Our tax dollars, the tuition checks we write for our kids, and our contributions to dear old Alma Mater end up supporting college athletics.

The wealthy-beyond-belief NFL should step up and fund a true developmental league so players like Keith Fitzhugh can make a living playing football.

Oddly, the NFL might wind up having to do this for a different reason: it's having a harder and harder time finding pro-ready quarterbacks. As the college game moves toward spread offenses and Cam Newton-style QB's, the NFL is finding fewer quarterbacks trained for the pro-style game. John Madden told me during our on-air segment the other day that he thinks the answer is a minor league.

If you do see an NFL D-league, you can bet it won't be so the Keith Fitzhughs of the world are treated more decently. But that might be the net effect, and it would be a good thing.

Beneath Their Dignity

Ottawa is Canada's capital city. It's a pretty place with an interesting history.

But the way the locals reacted to the arrival of the San Jose Sharks' Dany Heatley, you'd think Ottawa had changed its name to Podunkville.

Heatley was traded from Ottawa to San Jose before the 2009-10 NHL season. Far be it from me to explain the whole situation, but suffice it to say Heatley wanted out of Ottawa (and away from coach Cory Clouston). He managed to enrage not only the fans in Ottawa for demanding a trade, but also the folks in Edmonton for refusing to be traded to the Oilers.

Last night's game between the Sharks and Senators marked Heatley's first visit to Ottawa since the ugly breakup. It happened to be the same night that LeBron James came back to Cleveland for the first time since jilting the Cavaliers, and King James of the Miami Heat didn't take any more heat than the Heater took in Ottawa.

Heatley got not only the ritual booing whenever he touched the puck (a common NHL fan behavior), but an earful of chanting and an eyeful of angry posters. Among the clever chants: "Heatley Sucks!", "Trai--tor!", and "F-U Heatley!" The posters weren't any better, and one enterprising group of Ottawans disrupted the game by heaving a bunch of Senators jerseys bearing Heatley's name and number onto the ice.

I guess I expected this sort of thing from Cleveland, a city with an inferiority complex wider than the formerly-flaming Cuyahoga River. But Ottawa? I thought you were a little above that sort of thing.

Oh, by the way: Heatley had an assist, drew two penalties leading to Sharks power-play goals, and had the last laugh in a 4-0 Sharks win. By the end of the game, the booing was not for Heatley, but for the home team. A perusal of the fan comments on Internet bulletin boards suggests the real anger in Ottawa is with the Senators, who are limping along, closer to last place in the conference standings than first.

Juan Gone

OK, it hurts. Juan Uribe has left the building, and to jam the salt even deeper into the wound, he's signed with the Dodgers. Eew.

Of course, he'll be missed. Uribe's larger-than-life clubhouse presence is a very real thing, even though it can't be measured with the statistical precision baseball so dearly loves.

Uribe had a flair for the dramatic. The photo shows a typical Uribe pose--unloading the bat as if it's scalding his hands after torching another late-game home run. As long as Giants fans talk about the magical 2010 season, they'll tell the story of his game-ending sacrifice fly in Game 4 of the NLCS--maybe the most thrilling game ever played at AT&T Park.

But let's all take a deep breath here. The guy the Giants did re-sign, Aubrey Huff, is really the heart and soul of the Giants offense. He's a gritty, funny, hard-working SOB, and he's back for at least 2 years (with a team option for a third). The team remains deep in leaders: Huff, Buster Posey, Freddy Sanchez, Andres Torres...the list goes on.

"But," you say. "Uribe's numbers are going to be impossible to replace." True, he did hit 24 homers and drive in 85 runs last year (to say nothing of his postseason heroics). But dig a little deeper, and you find Juan Uribe to be a little less than spectacular.

Stat-heads toss around terms like WAR (Wins Above Replacement Player) and oWAR (Offensive Wins Above Replacement Player). These stats attempt to measure a player's worth versus a mythical average replacement (the WAR stat factors in defense; the oWAR looks only at offense).

When you look at Uribe through this lens, he becomes a little more, well, ordinary. In 2010, despite career highs in HR's and RBI's, Uribe's oWAR was 1.8 and his WAR 2.0. That makes him better than the average player, true. But not an awful lot better.

By comparison: Pat Burrell's 2010 season produced an oWAR of 1.9 and a WAR of 3.0, both better than Uribe's figures. Nobody's offering Burrell a $21 million 3-year deal. And comparing Uribe to Huff produces an even more glaring disparity: Huff's oWAR in 2010 was 4.4 and his WAR 5.9. That 5.9 is All-Star quality, according to Baseball-Reference.com.

The Giants will certainly miss Uribe. His infectious personality and late-inning heroics are true losses. But like many mythical figures, the perception may be greater than the reality. Did the Dodgers overpay? Who knows? We'll have to wait until April to start finding out.

Winning The Right Way

A wild weekend for college football: Auburn's crazy comeback, Nevada's bursting of Boise State's bubble, Stanford's continued march toward immortality.

So leave it to me to focus on a game that got almost zero nationwide attention. I'd like to salute Washington Huskies coach Steve Sarkisian for his all-in decision on the final play of U-W's 16-13 win at Cal.

The game matched a couple of disappointing Pac-10 teams simply hoping to salvage a mediocre season with a 6th win (and thus, a bowl game). Washington needed to beat Cal and also win next week's game against Washington State. Cal just needed to end its regular season by beating the Huskies in the final game before a massive renovation of Berkeley's crumbling Memorial Stadium.

Cal's anemic offense couldn't score a touchdown, yet the Bears clung to a 13-10 lead as Washington got the ball for the last time. Jake Locker's 46-yard completion to Jermaine Kearse put the ball deep in Cal territory and a game-tying field goal attempt seemed likely.

But the Huskies didn't settle for the crapshoot of overtime. Locker, playing with a broken rib, ran three times from inside the 10-yard line, and with 2 seconds left, the ball was still a foot away from the goal line. 4th and goal. Last play. Down 3 points.

And that's when Sarkisian called time, gathered the whole team in a giant huddle, and told the Huskies he was going for it. All or nothing. Win or lose, right here, right now.

Look: I'm a Cal fan. My grandfather played for the Bears back when they built Memorial Stadium, so I'd have been thrilled to see them win the last game in the old facility. But I absolutely love to see coaches let their players play.

Washington's Chris Polk barged into the end zone for the game-winning TD, and the Husky dogpile was an expression of pure joy. OK, maybe not the two best teams in America. Maybe not the best game of the weekend.

But for my money, as great an example of what college sports should be all about as you'll find anywhere. Bravo, Huskies. Bravo, Steve Sarkisian.

A Final Exorcism

Like most Giants fans, I continue to wander in the wilderness, unsure of how to handle the sudden reversal of a lifetime of misfortune. Part of our collective reality has always been this: we love a team that never wins it all. But now they have won it all, so how do we recalibrate?

My cousin Bob and I have concluded that the right answer is to sweep away the best in a tangible, real way. We will assemble a pile of baseball cards representing the players who helped build the Giants' 52 years of San Francisco failure, and perform a ritual burning.

So who makes the list. Stop it right there: Johnnie LeMaster is too easy. Besides, I was at Candlestick Park on the September day in 1975 when LeMaster joined an elite list, homering in his first major league at-bat. Sure, it was a blooper that kangaroo-hopped over the head of a hapless Dodger centerfielder named John Hale, but it was still exciting.

Anyway. Names have been flying back and forth. To make my list, a guy has to represent the sort of mediocrity that always seemed to drag the Giants down short of real success.

Guys like Rich Robertson. Pitched for the Giants between 1966 and 1971 and compiled a 13-14 record and a career 4.94 ERA. One year, they let him start a bunch of games and he responded by leading the league with 18 wild pitches. That's the kind of Giant I mean.

Don Mason. Frank Johnson. Steve Ontiveros. Jim Duffalo. David Green. Rennie Stennett. Sam McDowell. Ricky Ledee.

Some of these guys you've heard of. Others are obscure. Some represented wasted trades. Others were just guys who never quite made it.

Nothing personal here (in most cases). These are the ghosts of the Giants' past, and they must be exorcised so that we can complete our transformation.

Bob and I figure we'll stage our ceremony in the windy parking lot at Candlestick Park. True to the ancient tradition, the crowd should be small and well-protected against the weather.

Just Plain Obscene

I've always been ambivalent when the arguments start about the need for a college football national championship playoff. It never really mattered that much to me; I was OK with the traditional bowls/polls approach.

But something was starting to smell bad in recent years as the BCS system oozed under the door and solidified. The big boys were getting bigger and the little guys were scrambling to get a spot at the table.

And then I read the eye-opening story in the latest Sports Illustrated. Go out and grab a copy and get ready to get outraged. SI's Austin Murphy and Yahoo's Dan Wetzel lay bare the filthy truth about the college bowl games: they exist to make a bunch of fats cat even fatter.

What stunned me was the revelation that colleges often lose money by accepting a bowl invitation. How? Because the bowls pull stunts like this: they require participating schools to buy large blocks of tickets at face value (and those tickets often go unsold). Because they require State U's marching band to pay its own way to the game and provide free entertainment--and then pay for game tickets to boot! And on and on...

Meanwhile, the "non-profits" that run the bowls pay their honchos handsomely. Gary Cavalli, the former Stanford sports information director, pulls down $377,000 a year running the second-tier (and awkwardly-named) "Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl" at San Francisco's AT&T Park. Before you start tasting bile, understand that plenty of other bowl bosses do better at the pay window than Cavalli.

Look, I don't begrudge anyone making a fat paycheck. If Cavalli and company can get a sponsorship deal and a TV contract and stage a football game for which people will buy tickets and there's enough left over to pay a nice salary, swell. But it needs to be an honest profit--not the result of a shakedown.

When colleges are sucked into the bowl vortex and actually lose money on the deal, something is very rotten in Denmark. The SI article quotes the former Michigan athletic director as saying the Wolverines' failure to get a bowl bid for two consecutive years was a good thing financially--it meant they made money those years! Trust me on this: when it's better for a storied program with a huge alumni base like the U of M to stay home than go to a bowl, the system is broken.

Is a national championship playoff the fix? I don't know. But I do know the current system has to be dismantled. There's a chance the U. S. Department of Justice will start that process; meetings have already been held about an antitrust investigation. Another possibility is to strip the bowls of their non-profit status, revealing them for what they really are..

But at the end of the day, I must conclude that the only real answer is to toss the whole stinking mess out and draw up a college football playoff plan. It would have to be run by the NCAA--itself not my favorite organization--but better the NCAA than the pirates who now plunder college football.

An Argument I Never Thought I'd Make

A special veterans committee is considering a dozen names from baseball's Expansion Era for Hall of Fame consideration. After some research, I've concluded that most don't belong in the Hall, but a few do. And at the top of the list is a guy I never figured I'd champion: Steve Garvey.

The longtime Dodger and Padre first baseman was certainly never a Bay Area fan favorite. Choose your reason: 1) He was a Dodger 2) He looked too smug and clean cut 3) He was a Dodger 4) He wore the Giants out.

Garvey was a .294 career hitter who won an MVP award (1974), 4 Gold Gloves, and put up some stunning postseason numbers (a .338 average, 31 RBI, and 22 extra-base hits in 55 games). And if you look at the 7-year core of Garvey's career, 1974-1980, you'll see why I now think he belongs in the Hall. Over those years, Garvey hit .311 and averaged 104 RBI a year. He was the best first baseman in the NL in that era, and I think his body of work stacks up very favorably against that of Eddie Murray, who's already in the Hall.

Why is Garvey's fate being decided by a special veterans committee and not by the Baseball Writers Association of America, whose members handle the bulk of Hall of Fame choices? Good question. Garvey never got more than 42.6% of the BBWAA vote (75% required), and some think it's because the writers found fault with Garvey's personal life (his ex-wife Cyndi alleged numerous infidelities).

Sorry, but that doesn't work for me. From Ty Cobb on down, the Hall of Fame has accepted all sorts of less-than-perfect humans who played the game well. Put Garvey in.

As for the others being considered, let's take a look:

• Vida Blue Sorry, no. If there was a "most amazing year" wing in Cooperstown, Vida would be in for that 1971 season (24-8, 301 K's, Cy Young, MVP). But it doesn't work that way and despite 3 20-win seasons, I just don't see it for Vida (though I love the guy).
• Ron Guidry No again. And again, that year. In his case, 1978: 25-3, 1.74 ERA, 16 complete games, Cy Young. But Guidry had a number of middling years, too, and never got more than 8.8% of the BBWAA vote.
• Tommy John A prime example of baseball's fascination with pretty good players who hang around forever. Yes, he won 288 games, but there were only a few really strong years in there. Heck, John once gave up 287 hits in a season. It's enough that the surgery named after him has saved so many careers; leave him out of the Hall.
• Dave Concepcion Great team (Big Red Machine), solid player. HoF? Nope. He's been on the BBWAA ballot for 15 years and maxed out at 16.2%.
• Al Oliver At first glance, you say, "Wow!" 18 seasons and a career .303 batting average. And then you realize that "Scoop" never finished higher than 3rd in MVP voting, and only showed up once in the BBWAA voting (and with just 4.3%, at that). No.
• Ted Simmons Sorry, but I can't see "Simba" in Cooperstown, either. Another guy with a long career (21 years) and decent numbers (.285 career BA). Simmons spent many years catching. Extra points for that, but he wasn't even the best catcher of his generation (see Bench, Johnny) and thus we have another near-miss.
• Rusty Staub Ah, how I'd love to be able to recommend Le Grand Orange. But it's just not there. Staub did have some terrific years, but he had the misfortune of playing in an era with stars like Aaron, Clemente, McCovey, Rose, Bench and Santo (the last of whom probably should be in the Hall). Je suis desolee, mon ami, mais non.
• Billy Martin Oh, boy. 16 years as a manager (5 teams, some more than once). 1 World Series title, another AL pennant, and three other division titles. Aggressive, hard-nosed baseball. But can you really say he's Hall of Fame-worthy? I could be convinced, but I'm leaning "no".
• Pat Gillick They're trying to throw a bone to Canada here. No.
• George Steinbrenner Absolutely. You may not like The Boss, but the man changed baseball (for better or worse, depending on your perspective).
• Marvin Miller Same answer as above, only more so. Can you imagine someone touring the Hall in a hundred years and not learning about the free-agency era and the man behind it?