Why Do Villains Always Have the Antidote?

First off, the Cibao Aguilas won the Dominican League Winter Championship. The Aguilas swept the series against the Escogido Leones. Miguel Tejada went 4 for 6 with three RBI in the final game and had a .412 batting average through the series.


Second, a lawyer for the MLBPA has filed a request for management documents which could lead to a possible greivance against the owners for collusion.


It's a decent ploy; force the other side to gather all of their documents, get them in order, have meetings discussing the issue and taking more notes and creating more documents and it looks more compelling. If you just file a greivance you lose an opportunity to let someone else do all of your work for you.


The other side hasn't had a chance to ask the great question, "can this hurt us?"


The best part is when an organization writes a series of memos detailing how this might hurt them, what they did wrong and how to hide the evidence and then start passing them around the office with 'CONFIDENTIAL' stamped all over. Basically, even if they were naive enough not to be directly involved in the first place, they step in trying to clear things up.


When you hear of lower level people getting pushed in front of the throng of microphones and being forced to testify it's usually because they were foolish enough to take part after the fact. Enron was a good example; after the big suits cashed out they brought in the little suits and made sure the smell got on all of them as well trying to clean up the mess.


All the MLBPA lawyer has to do is put on a suit, catch a cab and hand over a few signed forms; most likely pre-published and for purchase at Staples.


Why not? Last time they got $280 million similar paper pushing. The problem; GM's, for the most part, make the deals and do the negotiating? Unless an owner was stupid enough to put down on inter-office documents "Let us, as an organization, support collusion to drive salaries down" there really isn't a whole lot to go on. Sure, the agents and union can watch the market and specualte. But so can the SEC on Wall Street.


It was a rallying cry this winter to slash payrolll unless your name was Steinbrenner. There has also been an influx of new blood into the front office staffs. Further, the free ganet pool was rather shallow thise year. Just because Alex Rodriguez signed for the equivalent of six hours of the U.S. Military sitting around in Kuwait (about $225 million) a few years ago, it doesn't mean a player's agent is going to hoodwink an organization every year.


Organizations, with the exception of Arizona and Chicago, are relying on turnover and youth to be served. It's just a rend in the market; GM's aren't that stupid anymore. Add in an economy that looks like we'll be trading Pez dispensors for barter in six months and you have MLB's current economic market.


You can't blame the union. Owners are still very stupid and you can probably scare $100 million out of them by just retaining a lawyer and talking about the content of their "Nacho Cheeze" sauce.