Happy New Year, everybody. I hope you all enjoy the time with family and friends and I wish you all the success in the coming year. Thanks for reading, and coming back to the blog after my unplanned absence. 2011 was good, but 2012 promises to be the biggest year in my life (more on that later).

I'll be back tomorrow with an expanded look at my Twitter post in response to SRUChris's question. Until then, it was easy to pick the illustration for this post - my biggest pull from this, or any other year, a 1/1 Sandy Koufax!

See you all in 2012!

Let me start off this post with an apostasy: I have never been a big Dan Marino fan, and I don't rate him as highly as other great NFL quarterbacks. To me, Dan Marino doesn't belong in the same league as Joe Montana, or Terry Bradshaw, or Troy Aikman, for one simple reason. Dan Marino, for all his (former) records, all his gaudy statistics, all his legendary exploits, left the NFL with exactly zero championships and a single Super Bowl appearance, in his second season.

Drew Brees, by the way, was heading for an even worse fate than Marino. His was the Tale of Missed Potential.

Do you remember when Drew Brees was coming out of college? I do, because I happened to work with someone who was a proud Purdue alumnus, and could not stop talking about how great Brees was. Not that I didn't know that for myself. Here was a guy who, at age 21, had already done the seemingly impossible - lead the Purdue Boilermakers into the Rose Bowl. Big things were expected.

He wasn't the first quarterback selected - that was Michael Vick, and, frankly, who could blame the Falcons for trading up to get him. What's interesting is the team they traded with - San Diego. The Chargers could have had Vick for their own, but they preferred to trade down, drafting LaDanian Tomlinson, then Brees. However, Brees's five years in San Diego were a mixed bag, and he was considered enough of a disappointment that the Chargers felt the need to obtain Philip Rivers a mere three years after drafting Brees. Two more years in San Diego, and the label was complete. Missed Potential. Even worse, after shoulder surgery, he was also now an Injury Risk.

None of that mattered to Sean Payton. The former Cowboys assistant was finally getting his shot, and he was going to turn the Saints around the only way that made sense - a high-powered passing offense, similar to the ones he ran as a quarterback and assistant coach. But to be a success, Payton needed a quarterback who was comfortable throwing the ball many, many times, who could stay in the pocket while it was collapsing around him, who had a proven track record for fireworks. Someone who was a proven commodity - being the all-time Big Ten passing leader certainly wouldn't hurt. Luckily, that man was available.

Fast forward six years, and Drew Brees is the owner of 18 NFL records, including one of the most hallowed in football history, Most Yards Passing in a Single Season. It was a record he came so close (15 yards) to breaking three years previously. This time around, he will shatter it, because he broke the record with a game left in the season. Not only that, but in the same game against the Falcons last week, Brees also became the first person to notch up two 5,000-yard passing seasons in his career, and reached 40,000 yards for his career, effectively in ten seasons (he played but one game in his first year in the NFL). Were Brees to keep playing for as long as Marino, averaging 3,000 yards a season, that would put him at 61,000 yards. Marino's career total? 61,361.

Before you think that keeping up a 3,000 yard pace is unreasonable, let me share with you Dan Marino's last six seasons, starting with age 33 (Brees, by the way, is 31 this year):

(In Marino's Age 32 season, he was injured and only played in five games. He ended up throwing for 1,218 yards, which pro-rates to a 3,898-yard season over sixteen games.)

The average of Marino's last six seasons, when he is at the age Brees is going into? 3,440 yards. Throw in the pro-rated total for 1993 and it jumps up to 3,506 yards. So a 3,000-yard average for Brees, should he keep playing for seven more years, is certainly reasonable. If he were to average 3,500 yards for the last seven years of his career, just like Dan Marino did, that would put him past Marino and close to the 65,000 yard mark. That's Brett Favre territory, and Favre didn't retire until he was 41.

Am I saying that Drew Brees is the best quarterback in the history of the NFL? No, because his career has yet to be fully written. However, he is a lock for the Hall of Fame, based on all he has accomplished thus far. What's more remarkable, to me, is that unlike Marino, and to a lesser extent Favre, Brees found the most profit in the second act of his career. He truly turned things around after linking up with Sean Payton and the Saints, and long may it continue. As they say in Brees's adopted home town, laissez les bons temps rouler!

Finally, bringing things back to where they were at the beginning of the column, Drew Brees has something Dan Marino does not - a Super Bowl Championship. Want to bet against him getting another? I sure don't.

When I was last in America, I purchased the Strat-o-Matic baseball board game because I was intrigued. I have played, and enjoyed, the game so far. I know that I'll never play a whole season - I don't have enough time to do something like that. So I've been trying to figure out the best way to play my game.

Made-up teams seem like the best - because I have no interest playing with teams that have half of their players on other teams, thanks to trades, free agency and the like. Best to start fresh with whole new rosters. My initial plan - a 24-team league (to incorporate all the players in the game in 40-man rosters) would have resulted in more than 2000 games! (remember, I said I didn't have the time for that?). Then, when I was watching the opening weekend of Australia's new Twenty20 cricket league, it hit me.

Twenty20 cricket, for those of you who don't know, is a relatively new form of the game that compresses the sport from five days down to 3 hours. It's designed to be TV-friendly and appeal to a wider range of people. Purists say that it takes all the strategy away from the traditional game and reduces it to smashing the ball as hard as you can. Think of it as the Home Run Derby of cricket.

So this is my new idea: a fantasy world where, under the auspices of Major League Baseball, the existing Australian Baseball League (ABL) is transformed from a winter development league (a la the Arizona Fall League) into a way for the best players in baseball to stay in shape, make some extra coin, and enjoy the great weather. Over a two-month period (December and January), ten teams will play a 54-game schedule (six games against each other team, home and away). The top four teams make the finals, with best-of-one semi-finals and best-of-three finals (because spring training is soon upon us).

To save pitchers' arms, and in keeping with the sped-up, Twenty20-inspired feel, games will be six innings long instead of nine. Starters will be limited to three innings maximum, and four days' rest is strictly enforced. The ten teams will have a 40-man roster, but only 25 can be selected to be eligible for each three-game series. At 270 games in total, even if I only play one game a day, I can be finished by next year's World Series (and start the next season of the ABL on time).

As there's only six real-life ABL teams, I've had to add four new ones. Again, I took a page out of the Twenty20 league, which faced the same problem when expanding from six to eight. They responded by putting a second team in Sydney and Melbourne. Seems like sound reasoning to me. So here's the ten ABL teams, at least in my universe:

Adelaide Bite
An existing ABL team, named after the Great Australian Bight.

Brisbane Bandits
An existing ABL team, of which there is nothing interesting to say.

Canberra Cavalry
An existing ABL team. Their mascot is a moustachioed cavalryman named Sarge

Geelong Baycats
I put Melbourne's second team on the other side of Port Phillip Bay so that I could use Geelong Baseball Park, one of the nicest stadiums in Australia. The Baycats name is the actual name of the amateur Geelong Baseball Club, so I kept it.

Gold Coast Clippers
The Clippers name was historically used by Queensland teams in the old ABL. The Gold Coast (which despite its name, is actually a large city) is home to the MLB Australian Academy. It seemed like a good fit to put a team here.

Hobart Hurricanes
Name and logo shamelessly stolen from the Twenty20 cricket team. They don't play baseball in Tasmania, apparently, so I didn't have much to work with. Besides, I needed a purple team.

Melbourne Aces
An existing ABL team. The Victoria Aces were the most successful state team in the Claxton Shield, aka the Stanley Cup of Australian baseball.

Perth Heat
The most awesome real-life ABL team ever! Current champions. It will be hard not to rig the draft in their favor.

Sydney Blue Sox
An existing ABL team. An artificial construction when the league re-launched in 2009, to be remedied with my second Sydney team

Western Sydney Patriots
The NSW Patriots were the historic name for New South Wales baseball, but unlike the Perth Heat and Melbourne Aces, that history was abandoned when the ABL arrived in 2009. Placing a team in Western Sydney and giving it the "Patriots" name was a logical move. Let the rivalry begin!

I don't plan on bombarding you with fictional ABL updates. In fact, this may be the only post I make on the subject. I'm in the process of loading the players in the SOM set into my copy of Out of the Park baseball - purely to run a draft and stock the teams in the fairest way I know how. After the teams are set (OOTP can also build a schedule for me), I'll start playing them. Maybe I'll play the whole season out. Maybe I'll get bored. The fun is in finding out.

Source:
The six real-life ABL team logos are from the ABL
The Geelong Baycats logo is from Geelong Baseball Club
The Gold Coast Clippers logo is from the Columbus Clippers
The Hobart Hurricanes logo is from the Big Bash T20 cricket league
The Western Sydney logo is from AZTarHeel, an online OOTP baseball player

Last year, I wished you all a happy Rickey Henderson's birthday. This year, it's time to keep the tradition going.

Hideki Okajima says, Merry Christmas everyone! Oh, and happy Rickey Henderson's birthday, too.

Well, the bidding is over and the Nippon Ham Fighters totally ignored my advice. They waited until the last possible moment to announce they were accepting the Rangers' $51.7 million posting bid for Yu Darvish. Now the fun begins.

You see, Darvish likes to portray himself as a sort of iconoclast. From getting caught engaging in underage smoking and gambling, to outspoken comments, he tries to cultivate an image as someone who bucks the system. Though I'm not sure how marrying and then divorcing an actress and pinup model fits into his rebel persona. That sounds more Beckhamish to me, and he's nobody's rebel.

Darvish has been an outspoken critic of the posting system. He says it's unfair to players, and I have to agree, I'm not a fan of it either. There's been some rumblings that, the higher the winning bid, the less likely Darvish would sign with the MLB team that ponied up the cash. He would view his stance as a condemnation of the system and a refusal to play the powers-that-be's little game. Of course, that's why he hired superagent Arn Tellem, right? Let's face it - Tellem didn't get where he is by tilting at windmills. My guess is that he'll knock some sense into Darvish and we'll see him in Ranger blue next year. I also believe that Darvish's favourite colour is green.

Now I'd like to turn my attention to the newly-minted Reds pitching ace, Mat Latos. It's commonly accepted wisdom that if you have the chance to trade for proven performance in exchange for prospects, you make the trade. Exactly how much proven performance Latos brings is up for debate, but the prospect status of Yonder Alsono, Yasmani Grandal and Brad Boxberger is beyond dispute.

The general consensus is that the Reds gave up too much in this trade. But that consensus is also predicated on several factors, none of which is a slam-dunk certainty. For example:

1. The Reds will lose Joey Votto to free agency, and they just traded away his ready-made replacement.
2. Alonso will be happy sitting on the bench waiting for Votto to depart, because the Reds have tried (and failed) to find another place for him.
3. Yasmani Grandal will be a better catcher than Devin Mesoraco, and the Reds just traded him away.
4. Brad Boxberger will develop into a shutdown major league closer, and the Reds never gave him a chance.

I look at this trade, as many small-to-mid market teams and fans do, in terms of control. In other words, is four years of Mat Latos worth trading away four years of Alonso and six years of Grandal? I don't know, but I'm certainly not going to evaluate it on the basis of "four years of Latos being a head case vs. four all-star seasons from Alonso and six years of Grandal being the next Pudge Rodriguez" like the naysayers have decided will happen. The reason these players are called prospects is because we don't know what will happen with their careers. Alonso might develop into the next Joey Votto, then again, he might not. Grandal might be the better catcher, but maybe Mesoraco is. We don't know what their future career holds, but we have a better idea of what Latos is likely to do, and the future looks pretty damn bright for him.


As a side note, I don't count Edinson Volquez in this trade because, frankly, I'm glad to see the back of him. Likewise, I don't count Boxberger because, if projecting a ballplayer's potential is a fool's errand, then the phrase "closer prospect" is downright farcical. The hand-wringing over his inclusion in the trade smacks of lingering regret over Trevor Hoffman's exposure in the 1993(!) expansion draft.

People have all but written off the Reds chances of retaining Joey Votto once he becomes a free agent, but I'm not so sure. The only team I really fear getting their hands on Votto is his hometown Blue Jays, suddenly resurgent and seemingly keeping their powder dry for a run at Votto in two years. However, I do worry that signing Votto to a big contract significantly reduces the chances of keeping Latos four years hence, unless the Reds can lock him up to a Cleveland Indians/Tampa Bay Rays-style below market contract. However, if at the end of 2015 the Reds have no Votto, no Latos, no real hardware to speak of and only a handful of compensatory draft picks, then what will we think of the trade?

(By the way, yes, I am collecting the 2011 Lineage set)

Dear Nippon Ham Fighters,

You already have the coolest name in all of professional baseball, so please don't do anything that will endanger all of that goodwill. You have already publicly stated that you will accept the highest bid for Yu Darvish. Well, the bids are all in, you know what they are (heck, we even know that the highest bid is a monster), and we all know you're gonna take the cash.

Please don't make us wait until the Tuesday deadline. Just announce, today, that you have accepted the bid, and then we can all find out who massively overpaid for the next Daisuke Matsuzaka.

Sincerely yours,
JonathanRGB

P.S. My money's on the Rangers

I couldn't post pictures to my blog when using my phone. But now we have moved back into the house (yay!) and the computer and internet connections are set up. So I've added the pictures I wanted to have in the Travels with Raleigh post in the first place. Here's a link to the posts - Raleigh is a damn cute dog, if I do say so myself.

Day 1 (Derby to Port Hedland)
Day 2 (Port Hedland to Carnarvon)
Day 3 (Carnarvon to Perth)

Other good news - most of my cards have been unpacked already (priorities, don't you know!) At some point on the trip, when thinking about Raleigh and his brother, Charlie, I realised that I subconsciously lifted the title of this series from John Steinbeck's book Travels with Charley. Thanks again for indulging my inner Steinbeck.