If anyone is interested in really getting to the heart of the difference between Jason Bay and Manny Ramirez, one need only look as far as this interview of Bay with ESPN the Magazine:

How many ticket requests did you turn down?

"It's actually been easy because, unbeknownst to me, we don't get tickets. During the season you get so many tickets provided. During the playoffs, you have to request before that you need this many tickets. I didn't know that, so when people asked me, I said, 'Sorry, I don't have any.'"

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A couple of weeks ago, Eric Young retired as a member of the Colorado Rockies. Now J.T. Snow is retiring as a San Francisco Giant:

The team signed Snow to a one-day contract so he can wear No. 6 a final time and retire as a Giant, providing the closure that eluded him as his career ended quietly with Boston in 2006 . . . It is a real contract, not ceremonial, that will pay him about $2,100, a one-day portion of the big-league minimum.

General manager Brian Sabean said he informed the commissioner's office of the Giants' plan for Snow and the rest of the team to take the field a few minutes early Saturday. Snow then would be replaced before the game begins.

What's up with this? We've seen this "retire-as-a-whatever" meme in the NFL for several years now, but why in baseball, and why with these guys? Did Sam Beckett from "Quantum Leap" show up and determine that having slightly above-average roster fodder like Young and Snow retire with undesirable teams throw history so out-of-whack that the wrongs needed to be righted? If we still sleep well at night with Babe Ruth the Brave, Willie Mays the Met, and Henry Aaron the Brewer, why must the J.T. Snows and Eric Youngs of the world be returned to whatever team it is they consider to be their spiritual home?

But I suppose that's just nit-picking on my part when, in fact, this particular move poses an actual serious risk. I mean, given that this is Brian Sabean pulling the strings, Giants fans shouldn't be too sure that Snow won't start the remaining four games this season and be extended through 2010.

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Wally Joyner, a member of two Padres teams that reached the playoffs, has stepped down as the club's hitting coach. Joyner gave his resignation letter to General Manager Kevin Towers on Monday.

"It bothers me a lot that I have come to the point where it is clear that I need to move on," Joyner said. "I came to the job hoping to put my experience and ideas to good use in teaching and coaching the Padres' hitters, but it has become obvious to me in the past few months that the organization's approach is different from mine."

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William Neukom will have many important items on his agenda when he becomes the Giants' managing general partner Oct. 1, but it appears his to-do list will not include a general manager search. Numerous team insiders say they expect Neukom to retain Brian Sabean for the final year of his contract.

They stressed that no decisions have been finalized ahead of Neukom's official ascension to the No. 1 chair, but he is leaning strongly toward retaining Sabean for a 13th season as general manager.

The Giants' downfall after eight straight winning seasons stemmed from an overplayed strategy of building around Barry Bonds. Those above Sabean in the front office were culpable, too, so the blame cannot fall entirely on the GM even if he made some poor choices along the way.

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Some British historians claim to have confirmed that baseball has its roots in British bat-and-ball sports:

Local historians in Surrey have confirmed evidence that baseball was played in the UK more than 20 years before American independence. A diary that documents a game being played in Guildford in 1755 has been verified by Surrey History Centre. William Bray, a Surrey diarist and historian from Shere, wrote about the game when he was still a teenager. Major League Baseball, the governing body of the game in the US, has been informed of the discovery.

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You never know what's gonna happen when you're a pitcher. You could go on a two-month slump out of nowhere. Steve Blass disease could rear its ugly head. You could suddenly become close personal friends with Dr. James Andrews. There are no sure things, really, but if you're Cliff Lee or Brandon Webb, you can probably start making space on your shelf for a Cy Young Award.

Webb gave up one run on six hits against the Braves yesterday, boosting his record to 17-4 and lowering his ERA to 2.88. He's head and shoulders above everyone in the NL in wins and at the moment trails only Tim Lincecum, Jake Peavy, and Johan Santana in the ERA race. But not by much, and more important to the win-crazy BBWAA writers, none of those guys are going to match his win totals when it's all said and done. What's more, two of those three are certain to be watching the playoffs from home this October, and Santana's Mets stand a worse chance of playing in the postseason right now than Webb's Diamondbacks. Out of all of the challengers I think Linceucm poses the biggest threat in that two stellar months for him might have older voters reminiscing about Steve Carlton wining 27 games for a pathetic Phillies team in 1972, but this is really Webb's award to lose at this point.

Cliff Lee was even more impressive yesterday, shutting out the Blue Jays over eight innings. Lee is leading the AL in wins and ERA, and none of the three guys trailing him in the latter category -- Justin Duchscherer, Roy Halladay, or Felix Hernandez -- are playing for winning teams, ensuring that only Lee truly has a shot at both titles. Yet somehow Lee seems less of a lock for a Cy Young than Webb does, for the simple reason that Francisco Rodriguez is likely to break the saves record for the best team in baseball. AL voters haven't given a Cy Young to a closer since Dennis Eckersley got it in 1992 -- and the early season K-Rod buzz is certainly dying down -- but the save, she is a seductive stat, and to the extent Lee falters down the stretch, the writers have a fallback option in Rodriguez.

But it's not a smart option, because Lee, as Webb, have been dominant this year. And though it's only August 11th, we haven't had a a clearer choice for Cy Young this early in recent memory.

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Jim Lefebvre was fired from his job as Mariners' manager back in 1991 because he couldn't get along with Woody Woodward and kept airing the Mariners' dirty laundry in public. Lefebvre is now the manager of the Chinese Olympic baseball team, and he still hasn't learned his lesson:

Chinese officials have put a gag order on their athletes and coaches, leading up to the Olympic Games, but ordering Lefebvre to stop talking baseball is harder than asking him to stop breathing . . .

. . . "With the Olympics about to begin, the Chinese officials have come to me and said no coach, or player, or manager can talk to the media," Lefebvre said. "So this, what I'm doing now, is against their policy. I asked them why we can't talk and they told me they didn't want to put a focus on their team and I told them, 'You know, that bothers me.'

Good for Lefebvre for standing up to silly authoritarian restrictions like that. Of course, the Chinese government is a bit tougher than Woody Woodward -- there are something like 70 crimes in China that are punishable by death, including white-collar stuff like embezzlement and tax fraud -- so maybe he should be a little careful until he's done with the Olympics gig.

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If you're like most baseball fans I know, Gaylord Perry's presence in the Hall of Fame doesn't bother you, but Barry Bonds' induction would send you into fits of apoplexy. You laugh at Graig Nettles' Superball incident, but will hold Sammy Sosa's cork against him for the rest of your life. You have no problem with the home team's grounds crew keeping the grass long when a small ball team comes to town, but you'd demand a Congressional investigation if you learned that they moved the fences back in the dark of night before a homestand against a bunch of sluggers.

Sure, you may try to construct some black-and-white reasons for your inconsistency on these points, but ultimately it comes down to your gut, your emotions, and your biases. I'm the same way. Ethics is a hard enough business on its own, so it's totally understandable if the passion and nostalgia of baseball serves to flummox our moral compasses even more than they're usually flummoxed.

Thank goodness, then, that someone is around to study this stuff academically. That someone is Professor Willy Stern, who taught a course in Baseball Ethics this past semester at Carleton College. The coolest thing about it? Lectures weren't the centerpiece. Instead, everyone in the class got to play ethics police:

During the intensive course, students were given, by way of assigned readings, a list of 133 specific ethical incidents throughout baseball's history. Over the six-week course, students were required to rank these incidents from least ethically acceptable to most ethically acceptable. Quick example: Which was worse-the murder of minor-league ump Samuel White in 1899 by a player who didn't like one of the ump's calls and smashed the poor man over the head with his bat, or the decision to exclude African-Americans from organized baseball for decades?

The best part is that, thanks to The Hardball Times, you get to play too.

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After spending all day thinking that the Pirates' unrealistic demands for prospects were derailing a Manny Ramirez deal, we learn that maybe the Marlins were the problem:

Manny Ramirez has been traded to the Dodgers in a three-team blockbuster, pending the approval of the commissioner's office, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

Pirates outfielder Jason Bay is headed to the Red Sox. The Pirates will receive third baseman Andy LaRoche and Class-A right-hander Bryan Morris from the Dodgers and outfielder Brandon Moss and reliever Craig Hansen from the Red Sox.

The Red Sox will pay all of the approximately $7 million remaining on Ramirez's contract.

We weren't expecting that, now, were we?

Instant analysis: a major traffic jam in the Dodgers outfield is going to have to result in the benching of either Juan Pierre or Andruw Jones. In other words, even if Manny goes on the biggest slump of his career once he gets to L.A., the Dodgers will be a better team for it.

For those of you who are more dynastically-oriented, you will be happy to know that the LaRoche brothers are now united in Pittsburgh as God and nature intended.

Most eyes, however, will be on Boston, as Jason Bay will attempt to fill Manny's eccentric shoes. Bay is having a fabulous season -- pretty close to Manny's, actually, once you adjust for the ballparks in which they play -- but the fact is Bay has never sniffed a playoff race or felt a modicum of the media pressure he is about to face. Upshot: if the Sox don't make the playoffs and Bay is anything less than spectacular, he will be feeling a lot of heat for not (altogether now) being Manny.

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That Brian Sabean still has a job after allowing the Giants to crater the way they have over the past few years is fairly inexplicable. Sure, some of his defenders (there are a few, right?) may point to the fact that he had no choice but to delay rebuilding as long as Barry Bonds was on the roster, but that ignores the fact that, even with Bonds, the Giants couldn't break .500 between 2005 and 2007. Even setting aside the fact that the Home Run King was in disgrace, he was certainly in decline, and only the most delusional of general managers would have put off laying the groundwork for the next good Giants team beyond the 87-loss 2005 season during which the world got a pretty good glimpse of what the post-Bonds world would look like.

But Sabean did delay rebuilding, and instead took flyers on all manner of quasi-geriatric retreads such as Reggie Sanders, Marquis Grissom, Michael Tucker, Omar Vizquel, Moises Alou, Mike Matheny, Steve Finley, Randy Winn, J.T. Snow, Matt Morris, Armando Benitez, and Tim Worrell. Clearly that strategy didn't work. Clearly, after an all-too-long delay, Sabean would certainly begin to rebuild his team through the draft and the canny acquisition of young players still subject to team control, wouldn't he?

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Years after agreeing to subsidize the living bejesus out of the New York Yankees for their new stadium, someone in New York government has finally woken up and started asking questions:

New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky wants the New York Yankees to disclose how many jobs the team's new publicly financed stadium will create and what it will do to make games accessible to ``people of all economic levels" . . .

The assemblyman also seeks details on how the team plans to assure that people of all economic means can go to games, the cost and value of a luxury suite for city officials and an explanation for discrepancies over the assessed value of land the stadium will be built on.

This is pandering, of course. If Brodsky or anyone else had any interest in really investigating what the taxpayers are getting for their money, they would have asked these kinds of questions long ago. Now, as it becomes crystal clear how much of a boondoggle New Yankee Stadium is -- how posh, how exclusive, and how inaccessible the place will be for working stiffs -- many like Brodsky will work hard to evade the backlash and say that they were in the minority of voices trying to protect the good people of New York. The same Dick Brodsky who, according to the article, cast many votes in favor of the project over the past several years.

How about this: the next time a billion dollar business like the Yankees comes asking the government for billions more in subsidies, someone think to ask what's in it for the taxpayers first.

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