This is amazing. Another appropriate title would be “why Gary Sheffield is a fool,” and we should all pity the fool.

ESPN.com has the story. Sheffield said that he “called it years ago … that you’re going to see more black faces, but there ain’t no English going to be coming out. … [It's about] being able to tell [Latin players] what to do — being able to control them. … So, if you’re equally good as this Latin player, guess who’s going to get sent home?”

The man needs to retire from both baseball and public speaking. Did he stop to think that far more Hispanics play baseball, throughout the Western hemisphere, than do African-Americans, who traditionally play more basketball and/or football?

Yikes.

I miss the days of Dale Murphy, when one of the best baseball players of the ’80s promised a disabled girl that he would hit a home-run for her and delivered on his promise by hitting two. Murphy, who mostly played for the Atlanta Braves (who stunk in the ’80s), was MVP twice in a row, won five consecutive Gold Glove awards, and led the National League from 1980 to 1991 in home runs and runs batted in. He was also outstanding off the field, refusing to allow his money or celebrity status to lead him to compromise his integrity. He never took illegal drugs; I don’t think he even drank.

Today, though, you’ve got Barry Bonds. I used to like Bonds — I readily recall the times when he would go “30-30″, hitting 30+ homers and stealing 30+ bases in the same season. Bonds used to be fast. Now he’s just juiced…I mean…big and slow.

With the recent Baseball Hall of Fame vote putting Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn into the Hall of Fame, the big news was not how deserving both of those players were at being selected. No, the big news was that Mark McGwire did not make it. Then, shortly after, Barry Bonds talks to reporters and says that he thinks that McGwire and the infamous, gambling Pete Rose belong in the Hall of Fame. Forget the fact that Rose was banned from playing baseball and that McGwire has brought more shame than fame to the previously venerable sport (well…mostly venerable, at least before the strikes of last decade).

What’s even sadder than Bonds’ view on those who have been excluded from the Hall of Fame — which makes sense given that he’ll face some of the same hurdles as McGwire does when he (Bonds) retires — is the seeming carelessness he displays about breaking Hank Aaron’s career home run record. Bonds has hit more homers than Babe Ruth and now is “sure [he is] going to break the record this year.” He only needs 22 more, so he likely will smash right through the record of 755. Given the current animosity toward McGwire for his obvious use of “performance-enhancing substances”, and the apparent presence of those same “substances” in the performance of Bonds, Bonds should expect to meet opposition to his induction into the Hall of Fame.

Bonds ought to just retire now and save us all the headache of dealing with the contradiction of disallowing baseball’s home run leader into baseball’s HoF. The other option will be to create a new room in the Hall of Fame and call it the “Room of Shame”. Then you could stick Bonds, McGwire, and Rose in there together, with exhibits on how much they tarnished the great pastime.

With the Braves 5.5 games out of the wildcard race in the National League and light-years behind the Mets in the NL East, this may be the first season in over a decade that Atlanta has not made the division championship series.

Hopefully we won’t have to go back to a 1990-like year, when the Braves were dead-last, to get to a 1991-like year, when the Braves almost won the World Series (they played amazingly and the championship was essentially stolen from them, if you consider the gaffe in Game 2, when the Twins’ Kent Hrbek lifted Ron Gant off of first base to tag him, and the ump actually called Gant out!). Even though Atlanta lost, that may have been the tightest, most exciting World Series ever.

In 1990, the Braves finished with a Win-Loss percentage of .401, the worst in baseball that season. Today they aren’t too close to .401; at .476 they would have to lose 23 games in a row to get there. It is possible, but let’s hope it doesn’t happen. My prayer is that something else will happen, besides lots of losing or another General Sherman, to light a fire under Atlanta.

With the end of the baseball season looming, this piece by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Chris De Luca really gets my goat. I’ll just say it: there is no mystique behind the New York Yankees: they are rich; they live out of their oh-so-deep pockets; they don’t build baseball teams — they buy them.

If a team like the Chicago White Sox (or the other Sox, even), want to be intimidated by that, that is their dumb choice. De Luca, though, and most other sportswriters are enthralled with the Yankees and their so-called “mystique”. It’s an obsession that they don’t seem capable of shaking off.

Even in this write-up, Lou Piniella says:

There really isn’t any [mystique] … The media creates mystique because they talk about it all the time.

Coming from a man who used to play and even manage the Yankees, it’s hard to find a more solid source for debunking the mystique myth. Yet De Luca plainly does not care about what Piniella thinks, going on to write, “Real or imagined, the Yankee mystique is hard to ignore.” Argh!!! If it’s imagined, then at least give the sheer intimidation factor of Yankee’s wealth another name, please!

The word “mystique” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as:

An aura of heightened value, interest, or meaning surrounding something, arising from attitudes and beliefs that impute special power or mystery to it

Yes, the Yankees have more monetary value than other Major League teams, but it there is no “special power” or “mystery” involved.

Perhaps this silly tendency to attribute mystery-outside-of-money to the team that has won more World Series championships than any other team stems from the supposed mysterious, mystical nature of baseball. Perhaps. Baseball may “90% mental”, but that’s no excuse for losing because you can’t deal with being intimided by your own obsession with one opponent’s fat payroll and with that payroll’s rewards.