I didn't say it was THE reason, I said it was one of many. And of course the most important one is that baseball is a sport you excelled at in high school. Goes without saying. I was pretty fair myself, but who doesn't know that.

But I can't agree that umps blow as many calls as refs do in basketball and football. Yes, every borderline pitch can be called either way, but according to pitch tracker, the umps get about 90% of those right and it's incredibly rare for a single pitch to make any difference in a game, unlike, say Hochuli's call in the Broncos-Chargers game.

More importantly, what constitutes offensive or defensive holding, for example, is apparently entirely arbitrary. How many times do you see a defensive back hold a receiver more than 5 yards downfield? Every play? Well, pretty close to every play. How about offensive linemen grabbing jersey with one arm outstretched? Not every play, just evey pass play. And sometimes those things are called and sometimes they're not. The charging/blocking foul issue in basketball is even more of a crapshoot. Why not just flip a coin?

Also, umpires can almost always see what they're calling. The call is where the ball is, they know what's coming and can position themselves to make the call. Again, even on really close plays, they usually get it right. In football, there are so many players stacked in such a small space, the refs generally can't see much. The defensive pass interference in the Dallas-Eagles game last night was a perfect example. It was clearly an offensive penalty, but the ref couldn't see it. John Stockton did pretty much what the Eagles receiver did most of his career and was rewarded by the refs for the same reason - they couldn't see him grabbing the defender's jersey and pulling him into a foul.

Further, referees in football and basketball have innumerable possible calls to make on any given play while umpires generally have only one, if that. Ball or strike, swing or take, safe or out, catch or no catch. That's pretty much all they have to call, there's only one call at a time, everyone knows where the call is to be made and which ump is to make the call. And about 90% of the calls they have to make are clear and easy. It's usually obvious whether the outfielder caught the fly, and the throw to first usually beats the runner by at least a step. Really tough calls are relatively rare.

It's a simpler game to call with the consequence that it's a better called game.

slugged it out all night and the Pokes won. The way it looks now, either the Eagles or the Cowboys will represent the NFC in the Super Bowl. I mean, who else? Oh yeah, the Giants. Cough.

Yep, the Cowboys had too many penalties and yep Romo had back to back boneheaded plays. But the defenses weren't so much bad as the offenses were good. The Cowboy defense can't be rated on either its performance against a great Philadelphia team or a mediocre Cleveland one. Next week in Green Bay will begin to tell us if it can get them to the Super Bowl.

First, if the federal government really does take over the vast pool of bad mortgages these companies contracted for, we can all count on one thing - that when they get all the mortgages sorted out, there will be some that can pay and those will be re-privatized at scandalously low rates to whatever private entities can pony up the bucks. So the "private profit/public loss" scenario hasn't played out yet. Watch for it.

Second and more important, this is absolutely part of the continuing Republican scheme to do as much damage to the federal government as possible. Grover Norquist announced the policy 25 or so years ago as reducing the size of the federal government to where we could "drown it in the bathtub." The pattern is (1)deregulate a certain industry, (2) make enormous sums of money off the deregulation, (3) when the deregulated house of cards collapses, get bailed out by the taxpayers, which (4) increases federal government deficits which requires (5) a reduction in the size of the federal government.

Reagan did it with the S&L deregulation/bailout in the 80s, but this puts that effort to shame. We're talking, what? $1 trillion or so? We're already running huge deficits thanks to tax cuts and the wars. (Note that no one, and I mean not a soul, is suggesting that this necessitates stopping those costly and feckless enterprizes.) So what are we going to do? Start right in with, oh say, $600-$800B deficits? It's not possible; the Japanese, Chinese and others who fund our lifestyle with their purchases of U.S. bonds won't buy into that deal, so what's a president to do? Make major cuts in spending and that means Medicare at least.

Make book on it.

so that makes it one of Clinton's contributions to this current digrace.

The regular season is over and neither the Mets nor the Yankees are in the playoffs. That means that, for maybe as long as a month, ESPN won't talk incessantly about those teams. I guess they'll fill in with Brett Favre.

but I have several hundred magazines to read.

is cutting back loans to prospective purchasers of GM cars and trucks? Why? This is the same question I've been asking about other lending institutions. Why are they refusing to lend to good credit risks? Has the default rate on GMAC's previous vehicle loans been sufficient to warrant the cutback? Why are banks refusing to lend to businesses and individuals who have good credit histories? That's what we're being told is happening, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. That's how banks and other lenders make money; they make loans at interest. Now they're not. Why?