Let's give 'em nothing to talk about

I'm starting to wonder about ESPN. I mean, when you're the sports leader, you find yourself breaking most of the news there is to break. But what if there isn't much news to break? You wouldn't... make something up, would you?

Oh. You might.

I'm not necessarily saying ESPN fabricated this story out of whole cloth. But it's attributed only to anonymous sources and everyone even tangentially involved has denied it to the hilt. Regardless, I think there's one major thing we need to get clear here.

If the discussions only took place within the Phillies organization, this is not news.

Let's think about this for a second.

1. If the Phillies didn't propose the trade to the Cardinals, who fucking cares? The idea that one team might have said "Hey, do you think we could trade for player X?" is not news at all. This probably happens every day in every organization.

2. Presumably this is supposed to be news because Ryan Howard is also a star player. But the very fact that the Phillies were supposedly proposing to trade him for Pujols should tip you off to something. And that is... of COURSE the Phillies would trade Ryan Howard for Albert Pujols. They'd be crazy not to.

I mean, no offense to Ryan Howard, but he's not Albert Pujols. Here are Ryan Howard's 162-game averages for his career:

.279/.376/.586, 142 OPS+, 49 HR, 142 RBI, 348 TB, 90 BB, 194 K

Very good player. Sure, he's worse than useless against left-handed pitching (.226/.310/.444), but he sure creams everyone else. He can play on my team any day.*

*Except days when the opposing pitcher is left-handed.

Then, of course, there's Albert Pujols' 162-game averages:

.334/.427/.628, 172 OPS+, 42 HR, 129 RBI, 374 TB, 94 BB, 66 K

Um. Do you see what I'm talking about here? Howard gives up 55 points of BA to Pujols, 51 points of OBP, and even 42 points of slugging in spite of the fact that he is basically only known for being a monster slugger. He does have an edge in homers, yet Pujols still easily outdistances him in total bases, and Pujols walks more while also striking out one-third as much. And of course, Pujols' OPS+ is 30 points higher, meaning he's 30% better than Howard by that measure.

More advanced statistics just make this more of a blowout. Pujols' career EqA is .347; Howard's is .313. Howard has just one season over 5 wins above replacement (6.7 in his MVP year of 2006); Pujols has two above ten and only one under 8 in nine seasons (6.1 in 2002). Sure, Howard's only played four full seasons... but he's also two months older than Pujols. Pujols is 20-30 runs better than Howard in the field. Et cetera.

I say all this not to denigrate Howard, but rather to point out how good Pujols is. If you just take his stats against right-handed pitching - which, to be fair, still is most of the league - Howard is a beast. And yet Pujols' numbers against everyone are still much better. He's the best player in baseball virtually beyond a shadow of a doubt.

So the real question is... why wouldn't the Phillies want to trade for him? OF COURSE THEY WOULD! Anyone would. There are maybe 2-3 position players in the entire game I can imagine not being traded for Albert Pujols if the Cardinals called and said, "Hey, we're trading Pujols, can we have so-and-so in exchange?" One is Joe Mauer. Another is Derek Jeter, although given his age I think the Yankees would think long and hard about this one. (And frankly I think most Yankees fans would bite the bullet and do it, in spite of the fact that they worship the ground on which Jeter walks.) Anyone else? The only reason you wouldn't do that trade is if you couldn't afford Pujols. Take money out of the equation and basically everyone would do it. And they should. Pujols is the best player in the game and a first-ballot Hall of Famer unless he gets hit by a bus tomorrow. The only thing that's even a possible negative is if somehow he's a couple years older than he says he is - but even then you're still getting at least four or five more really good years out of him if you get him right now.

In other words, you do the Howard-Pujols deal 100 times out of 100. And that's why this isn't news. Because the deal is such an obvious slam dunk for the Phillies that there is no way the Cardinals would ever do it. And unless there's some chance of that, there's no reason to report what otherwise amounts to idle chatter.

Explain to me what the Cardinals would gain from this trade. So, they're going to trade one of the best players in history, and the face of their franchise, for one other guy, who:

(a) plays the same position, but less well;
(b) is older;
(c) makes seven million dollars more the next two seasons;
(d) is 30% less offensively valuable;
(e) is FROM ST. LOUIS OMG OMG OMG

I mean, that's the only reason this fake, non-news story has even the slightest bit of traction, right? Because Howard is from St. Louis and therefore if the Cardinals somehow felt obliged to trade Pujols (God only knows why they would, but sure), they could still sell tickets with a local superstar.

Read part (c) again, though. Howard makes $19 million this year and $20 million the next. Pujols makes $16m this year and has a club option for $16m in 2011. Howard, who we've is established is much less good than Pujols, is also MORE EXPENSIVE. I mean, my God. In what universe does this trade make sense for the Cardinals? This is like hearing that the Cubs were talking about trading Alfonso Soriano for Joe Mauer.

There's certainly been speculation that the Cardinals won't be able to afford Pujols' contract demands come 2012. But that's 2012. If you're the Cardinals, and you're the best team in your division and one of the best in your league, you're not looking for ways to dump your best player before you have to. There's really no point in trying to trade Pujols, in my opinion. Sure, if you can't afford him after 2011 and he walks you get nothing... but without him you are not as good. You aren't getting equivalent value for him; it's impossible. You might as well take two shots at the World Series, make your best offer, and wish him well if he leaves. And more to the point, if the reason you're trading him is money, trading him for a guy who makes more than he does is FUCKING INSANE.

Yet here's ESPN, milking this story, even though at this point the only thing in the story is everyone on the Cardinals and Phillies telling any reporter who asks that they're completely deranged for asking. Honestly, ESPN, aren't there any real stories you have to talk about? I'd prefer a fantasy preview to this nonsensical garbage.

Diplomatic immunity

I often start posts of this variety by saying something like, "One thing I've been doing a lot recently..." And in fact I was about to do just that until I thought about it and realized how completely inaccurate that would be in the case of Diplomacy. I mean, relative to the rest of my life? Sure, I've been playing Diplomacy a lot recently. But I played it for the first time last April and for, I believe, just the fourth time last night. So, does once every three months count as "a lot"? Probably not.

However, this is more due to the difficulty in rounding up at least five people for a game on anything approaching a regular basis than due to a lack of desire in playing more regularly on the part of some of the principals, myself included. I would very easily play at least once a month - while Diplomacy, like other games of its general ilk, can suck away an entire day quite speedily (Wikipedia lists its playing time as "4-12 hours"), I really find myself enjoying it, and I really have no other social outlet that involves an actual group of people.

The basic principle behind Diplomacy, for those of you who might be unfamiliar, is that you are tasked with playing as one of seven primary powers in 1901 Europe - England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. The aim of the game is to control supply centers - each nation starts with three (except Russia, which due to its size starts with four), and there are various unaffiliated areas on the board which can be controlled (Iberia, Scandinavia and the Balkans in particular) to add supply centers and therefore be able to build more armies. The ultimate aim of the game is to control 18 supply centers (half of the 34 total, plus one).

The reason the game is called Diplomacy is that between each round, you have to negotiate with the other players in (usually) private, one-on-one meetings. If you're England, for example, and you need to commit the majority of your resources to invading Scandinavia, you're probably going to have to negotiate with France not to invade your territory while you're busy moving most of your pieces out of it. You can use these meetings to divvy up neutral territory and thus avoid (for a time) conflict, you can partner with another nation against a common enemy, etc. The trick, of course, is that all of these negotiations are made with the tacit understanding that alliances can be and are broken at any time, sometimes with no warning. Really, the trick of the game is doing the best balancing act between getting people to think you're cooperating while actually not cooperating that much.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, I suppose. But for those who it is, I did look online today and there are quite a few sites that feature online versions of the game, which sounds great - a single game could be sustained until an actual end this way (as it stands we've never played in person to an actual 18-depot winner). I guess I'd put the pros and cons pretty much thusly:

PROS: Should be fairly easy to get a full seven-player game together; no need to spend an entire day playing when you can just do the kind of e-mail/Facebook checking you'd already be doing and only occasionally have to log onto the site to submit orders; the style of the game means that general gameplay would change very little in online form.

CONS: Possibly the most fun point of any game is during the period where everyone reads out their orders for that turn, and this is also the part that would be pretty much entirely lost in online form.

The point is, I'm up for some online Diplomacy. Anyone else?