Heat Crazed

• There should be a law that if your school has to close early because it's too hot, maybe because it doesn't have a/c, then the school year is over right then. What a great day that would be.
  
• Lots of talk today about the Bucs scrap with the DBacks at PNC yesterday. First off, I like John Russell and think he has a chance to be at the helm of this team when they finally break through the .500 barrier at season's end. But let's not get carried away just yet. As noted historian Ron Cook writes, showing a fighting spirit in baseball will get you nowhere. Just ask Lloyd McClendon. And I'm not going overboard on Russell's job just yet because I was impressed with Jim Tracy for the first half of his first year, until he started blaming the players for everything abd and taking credit for all that was good. And look what happened to that train wreck. 31-33 still needs to be improved upon.
• Still, let me update the all-important standings:
  Yankees 32-32 - $209M
  Pirates 31-33 1.0 $49M
  Mets 30-32 1.0 $138M
  Tigers 26-37 5.5 $139M
• Bucs are 31-33 but what is reality and what is perception? Mike is generally right but wrong about a couple of facts that taint his article. For example, he says:
  

  See, the hallmark of most Pirate teams this decade have been long stretches of somewhat respectable numbers and records. For 5 out of the 6 months of the season, the Pirates have battled, fought and played pretty good ball. But then there's that one month. The one month where they win 3, 4 or 5 games, and lose the rest. The one month where they are 15 under in that month, and doom their season.

  Well, that's just not true. What is truer is that since 1993 they have played consistently badly but yet in several years managed to have one good or superior month that skews the perception.
  
  They have had plenty of bad months in that span including a 5-22 Sept mail it in to end in 1998, 4 8-20 months, one 8-21 in 2000 and one 7-19 in 2006.
  
  Let's look at it this way: to get to 90 wins and playoff contention a team has to play .555 baseball. To lose 100 games, a team has to play .383 ball. The number of months from 1993-May 2008 that the Bucs have played at these levels (combining Sept and Oct and out of 91 total):
  Playoff caliber, .555 and above: 8 (9% of total)
  Moderately Good, between .500 & .554: 18 (20%)
  Bad, between .383 and .499: 42 (46%)
  Horrible, below .383: 23 (25%)
  
  So there have definitely been some bad months of baseball, but it's almost equally balanced by the number of months where they play abouve .500 ball. Almost half the time, the Bucs have played at a level that is about where they finished.
  
• Mark Reynolds had quite a series especially considering he should have had another HR yesterday. I'm not sure how the umpires overruled the first base umpire considering that the TV replay was inconclusive as to whether the ball was going over the wall or bouncing off of it. It should have been an HR.
  
• The call for instant replay in baseball for helping with HR calls is simply adding a problem on top of another. The issue causing all these bad calls is the ballparks that have crazily drawn yellow lines as the HR demarcation line or that allow fans to reach over the fence to grab a ball. It's hard to argue with allowing paying fans to sit as close as posible to the field, bu for the ballpark architects to ignore the simple fact that there needs to more of a demarcation between what is an HR and what isn't than a yellow line is just dumb.
  
  Adding instant replay to try to correct this issue won't solve the problem. It may help in some cases, but there is no way that replays showed clearly reversible proof that Reynold's HR wasn't going over the wall. With replay, that call would have taken 15 minutes to clear up and I'm not sure which way they would have ruled.
  
  We can live with humans making the calls. All of them. Enough with replays adding 2/10ths of a second back onto a basketball time clock or the NFL's momentum-sucking, fan-deadening, under the hood fiasco.
• My early line has it this way: Fleury, Malkin and Staal get new contracts, Malone reups with the Pens, Hossa and Orpik leave. Also leaving, one way or another: Dupuis, Scary Gary, Ruutu & Conklin. Sticking around will also include: Hall, Laraque, Eaton and Tafffe.
  
  That's my early June heat crazed feeling. As of now.