"The highest we can go is 2 years, $20 million." "Okay, okay, okay...I'll lower my demands to six years, $60 million. What?"

You gotta hand it to MLB free agents. The economy's in a free fall and non-Yankee owners aren't paying jack shit to anybody...but the jobless rigourously stick to their original demands, rigidly standing their ground against ideas like "compromise" or "adjusting for the market" or "holy fucking shit people are killing themselves and their entire families because of this economic crisis and you're still fucking demanding $14 million a year when you hit .230 last season." Some team comes in with an offer like 2 years, $45 million, which will make you richer than 99% of the rest of the people in the world? What an insult! It's 6 years/$150 million or nothin', pal!

This has been going on the entire winter, obviously, but I'm just now posting about it because one of my favorite salary-related stories broke this afternoon. Bobby Abreu, the guy who the Yankees declined to offer arbitration to and then basically said they didn't want, nevertheless believed that he deserved a 3-year, $48-million contract in November. In the two months since then, various teams have offered him contracts, usually in the 1-2 year range with an overall dollar value probably less than half of the $48 million he wanted, and therefore he's rejected them all. Today, he came out and said that he'd be willing to sign for less. Well, better late than never, I guess. Now he's just got to call the Mariners and say "yes" to that offer of like 2 years and $18 million or so, right?

Wrong. Apparently, Abreu has graciously lowered his demands to 3 years and $33 million:

http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/features/rumors

This offseason, I would have taken Pat Burrell over Bobby Abreu in a nanosecond, and Burrell got 2 years and $16 million. Apparently Abreu thinks his lesser offensive skills and slightly better defensive skills are worth double that. Stay classy, Bob, and remember how you once reluctantly, begrudgingly agreed to drop your salary from $16 million a year to $11 million a year the next time you watch a news story about a father killing himself and his six children because he lost his 80-hour-a-week job at the local warehouse. Trust me, what you do (basically playing a little kid's game for the entertainment of others) is unbelievably important in the grand scheme of things.

This just in: Edgerrin James grew up in Tampa!

There are some things you just have to love. Puppies. Barack Obama. People helping old ladies cross the street. Bruce. John Wooden. Rudy. Rocky. Keanu Reeves. U2 from Boy through Achtung Baby. Can't really explain it any further; these things just have an innate lovability about them.

And then there are things you just have to hate. I could make another list here, but that would be unnecessary because the clear #1 choice is: meaningless Super Bowl subplots that get beaten to death during the two-weeks-that-feels-like-two-centuries period between the end of Conference Championship weekend and the start of Super Bowl weekend. Any hardcore football fan has these phrases burned into their memory: "Jerome Bettis grew up in Detroit," "Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy are both black," "Corey Dillon just loves to be a part of a winning team," "The Panthers have sucked for a long time".....I mean, it's okay to hear these like twice, once during the Super Bowl preview on the Monday immediately following the Conference Championship games and once on the Saturday right before the Super Bowl. But unfortunately, there are 10 other days in this time period, which leaves ample room for hundreds of ESPN.com columns and Outside the Lines segments and Around the Horn arguments and NFL Network documentaries and completely uninformative interviews and basically everything possible to take your focus off the game itself and put it on these irrelevant stories that mean absolutely nothing as far as the potential outcome of the Super Bowl is concerned.

This year, we've got the always-enjoyable "player and coach at odds" subplot (Anquan Boldin's bizarre feud with Arizona's offensive coordinator), as well as the charming "so-and-so player is the new Rocky" story (Kurt Warner, who's once again brought himself up from the depths of nothingness to defy all odds and succeed beyond everyone's expectations), and the "tortured franchise finally looking for their big moment" scoop (the Cardinals haven't won a championship in like 500 years). So far, no predictions on who's going to win, no analysis of the two teams, and definitely no inside information that might help die-hard gamblers (who probably account for about 98% of the NFL's fanbase). I guess some things just never change.

Back in the saddle again

No, I'm not talking about my return to posting after a hibernation that Rip Van Winkle would consider long. I'm talking about the much-anticipated reunion between Guillermo Mota and the Los Angeles Dodgers:

http://www.insidesocal.com/dodgers/2009/01/terms-of-motas.html

Catfish pictures and Mike Piazza bobbleheads for everyone!