Night #1 with no internet

The cable guy isn't coming until Wednesday morning. I was too lazy to a) call far enough ahead to get a better appointment date for the new apartment, and b) go to Starbucks last night before it closed, where I could have taken advantage of the Wi-Fi. Tonight will probably be more of the same, although I'll probably walk the 100 yards to a sports bar to watch the Angels, I'd imagine.

Anyway, I'm trying to avoid doing actual work, and Jen (who has a great blog if, like me, you spend a fair amount of time at bars, but are interested in seeing it from the bartender's perspective once in a while) asked for a comment on Raffy, so here goes.

I've never been a huge Palmeiro fan (well, except for Orlando Palmeiro, of course), but I've never been a big detractor of his either. He's always just kind of been there, playing for teams I've neither liked nor hated, except maybe when he was with the Rangers, and they always had more hateworthy guys back then. It was tough to focus on one guy when EVERYONE on that team could mash. Quite frankly, over the last year or so, before this news came out, I was a little surprised at the "will he or won't he" hall talk. His numbers, in a vacuum, are more than hall worthy, despite the lack or awards and post-season heroics. But now, I think he's out. Both for the stigma associated with steroids, and the increasingly likely possibility that he lied to Congress (assuming both that we are indeed talking about steroids, and that he didn't start juicing the day after his testimony). Which isn't to say that I wouldn't vote him in. I just don't think the writers will.

I've made my position pretty clear on Primer over the last couple of years, but in my book, if it's not illegal, and not against the rules of baseball, it's not cheating. Obviously, it is against the rules now (the legality is questionable based on facts not known), but it's pretty clear that without false positives or any such nonsense, Palmeiro was cheating this year. I feel a little cleaner knowing that I never took him off of my bench before trading him in my fantasy league. But now that I think about it, let's take a look at something. Here are Palmeiro's splits this year, April through July:

AB	H	2B	HR	AVG	OBP	SLG
77	19	3	1	247	298	325
86	26	4	6	302	412	558
93	25	3	5	269	317	462
87	26	2	6	299	379	529

So what do we learn from this? Well, nothing really. But I *did* learn how to make tables in HTML, so for that, I think this little bit was instructive. Also, we learned that he's a much better hitter than Darin Erstad, but I'm guessing most of us already knew that. I would note that over the last three years, he hasn't been a slow starter, so that April is out of line with what he's accomplished in the past. Maybe he started juicing after his Erstadian start to the season.

And by the way, how much schadenfreude (which, as I've learned from t-shirts, is a dish best served warm) is Ryne Sandberg feeling? I mean, the week just keeps getting better for him. First he gets inducted into the hall, then he finds out that the guy who was banging his wife 15 years ago gets busted for roids. If I'm Ryno, I'm heading down to the 7-11 to buy some lottery tickets.


And as a parting shot, the Onion really is scraping the bottom of the barrel for pictures these days, aren't they? I mean what's up with this guy? At least make it believable. If he's 28, I'm 15.