Hooked 'em

SI's Stewart Mandel tweeted this photo of Roger Clemens at the national championship game. I didn't see one of Mindy McCready, though.

The Longhorns could give USC a run for the equivalent of the Lakers of college football with all their celebrity fans/alumni.

A brief college football aside

Temple's return to bowl play today in the EagleBank Bowl has stirred up a lot of mentions of the short-lived Garden State Bowl, which was played at the Meadowlands from 1978-81. I once had a program from one of those games saved to my watch list on eBay, yet never bothered to purchase it. I think it was only about $20, but I guess Temple's return has pushed sellers' hopes upward, perhaps thinking that Temple alums will eagerly want to commemorate the Owls' last bowl win before today's game.

Next fall, Yankee Stadium will host a college football game when Notre Dame and Army meet, and then in December, it will host a bowl game, the first in the New York area since those Garden State Bowls in the late '70s and early '80s. It's going to be quite a cold one if the weather's like it is today.

It'll be interesting to see how the Yankee Stadium bowl game -- date as yet unknown, however -- affects any plans for the NHL to plan a Winter Classic there. The last couple of years, when the game was played at Wrigley Field and Fenway Park (well, it will be on Friday), the rink has been set up before Christmas and opened to the public for skating. So maybe the Yankee Stadium bowl game -- at least next year -- will be several days before Christmas. Or maybe there won't be a public skating period.

Was Rollins even the Phillies' MVP?

This isn't me. I'm not whining here or spitting out sour grapes (or whatever that lame phrase is). Yeah, I thought Jimmy Rollins had an amazing year and seemed to be there in so many clutch situations for the Phillies down the stretch, but he's not even the MVP of the Phillies. That would be Chase Utley, in my mind. But Utley was overlooked because he didn't have the numbers, because he missed a month.

But for those of you into WARP and VORP, this might be interesting.

Personally, I think Rollins won because:

1.) He has a big mouth. He said in January the Phillies were the team to beat, and despite one of the NL's worst pitching staffs, they were.

2.) He plays shortstop.

3.) Voters might have filed their ballots before the final day of the season, and therefore missed Matt Holliday's central role in the Rockies' surge. True, they would've also missed the Mets' collapse, but I don't think Rollins' case was built around that as much. Ryan Howard won last year without the Phillies' reaching the postseason.

What the article also illuminates is the changing definition of "valuable," led by the new and innovative ways of looking at performance and statistics. Batting average and home runs (and wins and ERA) don't tell the whole story anymore, but so long as the voters are two sportswriters in each league city who have been on the baseball beat for two decades, those statistics are going to be the ones that carry the weight. They aren't going to look at VORP or WARP or ballpark factors (and I checked -- Holliday's and Rollins' numbers on the road were pretty similar; both were helped a bit by their home parks but also held up well in the gray unis).

At least with the MVP, "valuable" is part of the definition. The Cy Young Award carries no such caveat, so in some years, the wrong guy wins just because his team reached the postseason or his offense produced a lot of wins. And don't get me started on the Heisman, which has completely lost its luster and meaning and probably hasn't been the same award since they moved the ceremony from the Downtown Athletic Club to Midtown. The Heisman, by definition but not in name, is for the "most outstanding college football player." Not "the most outstanding or valuable player[you could even insert quarterback/running back here] on the best team." Troy Smith wasn't the most outstanding player last year; Darren McFadden was. The most outstanding player this year isn't necessarily a quarterback who throws for 3,000 yards and 30 TDs and leads his team to a BCS game; it's Tim Tebow, the first player IN HISTORY to score 20 TDs each passing and rushing. Or, as ESPN Magazine argued, it's perhaps LSU DT Glenn Dorsey. Sure, Tebow may be a product of Urban Meyer's system, but he still executes against some tough competition -- particularly some fast defenses. I wouldn't knock Colt Brennan (last year) for throwing 58 TDs because of the system (though I would question the competition).

Anyway, enough with the football. I got carried away there. It'll be interesting to see over the years if the baseball awards continue to be based on home runs and wins (Troy Tulowitzki was the most impressive NL rookie in 2007, because he played the field so much -- significantly so -- better than Ryan Braun, who had the worst fielding season for a third baseman in something like 80 years). Or will the new stats -- kind of like the "new math," whatever that was -- take hold and change the way we look at players. When you look at Rollins' OPS -- which seems to be the new stat most accepted into the mainstream -- he was way down at No. 22 in the NL. The top nine were legitimate MVP contenders: Chipper Jones, Prince Fielder, Holliday, Albert Pujols, Howard, Utley, Miguel Cabrera, David Wright and Hanley Ramirez. Ahead of Rollins were guys like Pat Burrell, Corey Hart and, even with him, Jeff Kent.

To end this on a more even note, when you use the question, "Where would [the team] have been without [the player]?" Rollins and Holliday come out pretty closely. Rollins started all 162 games and set a Major League record for plate appearances because the Phillies had no other shortstop. In a pinch, Abraham Nunez would've played there, but he's not much of a shortstop anymore. Rollins also set a Major League record for at-bats in a season because he doesn't walk enough and makes a lot of outs. So if you took him away from the Phillies, they had no shortstop, but you also only took away an .875 OPS.

But if you took Holliday away from the Rockies, you're taking away a 1.012 OPS, not to mention an NL-best 142.2 runs created (Rollins had 133.4, fifth in the league).

Still close, but Holliday seemed more valuable to me.

Another season done

Oy. So here we are, post-World Series. The Mets' injuries caught up to them and, despite pushing the Cardinals to a seventh game, their season ended five wins short of where it should have. The way the Tigers played in the World Series, that parade on Sunday would have been in New York.

My postseason predictions were blown up in the first round, so I didn't bother updating them, in part because it's not really fair to adjust on the fly, but also because work got so hectic -- and tiring -- that I was exhausted by the end of the NLCS. (The morning after which, I immediately got on a plane for Chicago, drove to South Bend, saw an amazing Notre Dame comeback victory over UCLA, flew back on Sunday and zipped to work for Game 2 of the World Series.) When we were throwing out our off-hand predictions at work, I did peg the Tigers to beat the A's, though in seven, not four. For the Series, however, considering the Tigers' tear through the Yankees and A's, their seemingly superior pitching and the rest it had, I questioned whether the Cardinals would even manage a lead for more than an inning or two in alluding to a four-game Tigers sweep. One guy at work went so far as to say, "Tigers in three."

But the Cardinals -- the worst World Series winner in history, if you go by win total (they had 83) -- proved, once again, that you don't have to be the best team to win, just the hottest team. That's no knock against them, either. Whatever it takes to get it done is fine by me. Had Game 7 in 1973 gone the other way, those '73 Mets would've owned the distinction -- even after this year -- of having the worst regular-season record of any Series champion.

The Cards got the Tigers to swing at everything and eeked out a few wins here and there, even getting Anthony Reyes -- who, in Game 4 against the Mets, looked like he belonged in the instructional league in Florida, not on a postseason roster -- to look like a Rookie of the Year candidate in Game 1. He faced, of course, the soon-to-be American League Rookie of the Year in Justin Verlander (my full predictions to come soon). Detroit managed one victory, but even that was stained -- literally -- by Kenny Rogers, a pitcher so reviled by fans of both New York teams that Tigers manager Jim Leyland was sure to set up his pitching rotation to make sure Rogers wouldn't pitch in Yankee Stadium in the ALDS or Shea Stadium in a potential Detroit-New York World Series. Even after Game 5 of the Series was pushed back a day because of rain, Leyland refused to pitch Rogers to try to get the Series back to Detroit for Game 6. Trying to explain it away by saying, "if it was one game left, I would pitch Kenny. But we've got to win three," Leyland also admitted that he didn't want to pitch Rogers in the environment of Busch Stadium, saying he felt Rogers responded better to the Comerica Park environment. Clearly, Rogers is such a narcisist that he prefers the adulations to the rush of quieting the jeers. Curt Schilling made no attempt to hide the joy he gets from shutting up 55,000 fans, as he did in New York in 2004.

So there goes 2006. It certainly turned out to have several surprises -- the Mets with the best record in baseball, the Tigers in the World Series, no 20-game winners, a catcher winning the American League batting title, the Marlins, Alfonso Soriano, Jonathan Papelbon and others. There'll be a lot coming up this offseason, but I'll get into that later.