MLB

So, it turns out the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum won't have new competition from Baltimore after all.

A story in the Baltimore Sun this week detailing "the first East Coast museum devoted to Negro League baseball teams and players" caused concern around Kansas City from some about how much the project would compete with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum here.

The $200 million Yankees screamed and hugged and waved championship flags on the field of the $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium, the celebration spilling out to the streets, and this is going to sound weird, but it's the absolute truth:

The whole thing was a little unimpressive.

I don't mean the Yankees, who made their case as one of the very best teams in a generation, or the new stadium, which is amazing, but the celebration, which was, eh.

So, close readers of this blog may remember my occasional point about Kansas City having a bit of an inferiority complex in relation to St. Louis and, well, lots of other stuff.

It bugs me at times. Kansas City is a terrific place, for a lot of reasons, and sometimes I wish we as a whole were just a little more secure about that.

But I do have to point out that I hope we never swing the other way, and develop a jaw-dropping superiority complex.

Joe Girardi is the manager of a team that won 103 games, so that's what matters, and who is this little blog to challenge that?

Except that Girardi is apparently set to go with a three-man rotation in the ALCS, despite evidence that suggests modern big league pitchers just aren't effective on three days rest.

We should pause for a quick moment here and point out that Girardi knows his team, um, better than some idiot newspaper guy wearing sweats at his kitchen table. The Yankees are paying CC Sabathia $160 million, so, you know, get your money's worth.

Totally stole this idea from Ball Don't Lie, the terrific NBA blog on Yahoo sports.

Lists like this are made for conversation, made for disagreements, so don't be shy.

I struggled a bit with how to look at these things, the steroids issue obviously being the biggest. As you can see, I mostly took the numbers at face value, vaguely trying to put them in context for that particular season, which has the benefit of probably being both unfair and impossible. But how else can you do it?

One of the little things some of us like to do before games is to go down each team's lineup, and see which guy you'd rather have.

As you can imagine, this usually doesn't turn out too well for the Royals, but I can't remember one like tonight. You be the judge:

Catcher: Victor Martinez vs. John Buck. Blowout.

First base: Kevin Youkilis vs. Billy Butler. Butler really is having a historical season, batting .299 entering tonight's game with 49 doubles. Seven players have hit 50 doubles in a season by the age of 23. Three of them are in the Hall of Fame. The other four are Pujols, A-Rod, Grady Sizemore and Miguel Cabrera.

Happy Greinke Day, and hopefully we'll have some more Greinke-ganda up this afternoon after Zack's start.

With that in mind, something a little different this morning. Joe Posnanski, my journalism idol, friend, and now semi-colleague, took some e-mail time to talk about The Machine, his book about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, which is officially available and doing very well.

For today, let's forget that the defense playing behind Zack Greinke is the worst in the American League.

Let's forget about their 94 errors, or that their collective Ultimate Zone Rating (-42.1) is about 25 percent worse than the next-worst AL team, which means that even Greinke's league-leading ERA is unfairly inflated.

* If you'll pardon the imperfect analogy, that's the difference between the production of Albert Pujols (1.104 OPS) and Casey Blake (.828 OPS) this season.

So, now we wait.

We wait for Aaron Crow, the right-handed pitching stud from Missouri selected 12th overall by the Royals.

We wait for Hendricks Sports Management, the advising team that convinced Crow to turn down $3.5 million from the Natinals as the 9th pick last year.

And we wait for the Royals, who desperately need pitching in their farm system and have shown the willingness and ability to overpay for top draft talent.

You may have seen where Poz recommended a bunch of terrific Sports Illustrated stories, including this one about Bill James.

It's a fascinating story, perhaps even more with nearly 30 years of perspective about the progress of understanding and evaluating baseball statistics.

Separate but related revolutions are beginning in the giant underbellies of major league baseball and the NFL. How each is handled will tell us a lot about the power of each league’s players union.

The issue is compensation for draft picks, particularly the elite.

In the NFL, Matt Stafford’s contract includes the largest guarantee in NFL history -- even more than the extension about to be signed by Eli Manning, who, you may remember, won a Super Bowl.

We are left without emotion. A shrug of the shoulders, maybe. The New York Times reports that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez tested positive back in 2003? Eh.

Then if we’re hungry, we go make a sandwich or something.

We are drained, to the point of apathy. We had denial during the summer of McGwire and Sosa. We had sadness when we heard Ken Caminiti’s struggles. We had confusion when we tried to sort out what it all meant, and we had disgust when finger-wagging Rafael Palmeiro turned out a cheater.

We start with two easy and undeniable facts:

The stats on Jack Wilson's Baseball-Reference page look a whole lot like the stats on Yuniesky Betancourt's Baseball-Reference page.

Wilson is four years older than Betancourt.

Betancourt has also been hitting in the tougher league, against the tougher pitching, and in a ballpark that's traditionally tough on hitters, though Betancourt had a weird split while in Seattle where he hit much better at Safeco than on the road.

You may have seen a mention in Peter Gammons' blog the other day about MLB threatening to pull the 2012 All-Star game from Kansas City if the Royals sign a few draft picks for significantly more than the commissioner's slot recommendations.

It was almost an off-hand line trying to make a bigger point, but because Gammons is Gammons, the sentence has caused a bit of an underground scare around Royals fans.

Some programming notes before we go off topic:

Please look for a story about Zack Greinke in Sunday's paper. I hope you'll find it worth your time.

Also, please keep those "Why We Still Care" e-mails coming to kcballstar@gmail.com.

On the subject of e-mails, there have been enough unsolicited rants to smellinger@kcstar.com -- the e-mail address they print in the paper -- that we might put together something like a "best of" next week. So if you want to be included, let 'er rip. I like funny and clever.