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If you consider Aaron, Mays, Robinson, and Bonds to be Junior's "birthright" comps ... you find out, wow.  Those guys were great at 39, and real good at 40. But as we all know, Griff has had problemos in his 30's.  Where is he at right now? . Q.  Can he stay healthy any more? A. Actually, Griffey was hurt at 32, 33, and 34, three years in a row.  But from ages 35 to 38, he stayed healthy! Maybe you remember that at ages 30 and 31, Edgar suffered two straight lost seasons.  He moved to DH and was healthy from then on.   At this point, you have to figure that Junior will pretty much wind up in Edgar's category:  hit 30 and realize you have to watch it. . Q.  Has he played well since age 35? A. Griffey was an MVP candidate at age 35, and the last three seasons, he has certainly performed below par for somebody in the Mays-Aaron-Robbie camp. At 36 he was dinged up some; at 37 he hit .277/.372/.496 with an 85/99 eye ratio and made the All-Star team; last year he posted a 101 OPS+ despite a terrific 78/89 eye ratio. . Q.  Is that because he has a slow bat? A. :rolling eyes:  If there's one thing in the world I don't trust people on, any more, it's whether a guy has a quick bat or a slow bat. I seriously doubt that many people even understand what bat speed is.  See the Clement And Bat Speed article.  Does anybody really understand the difference between quickness-to-launch and throughspeed?  Does anybody really understand that swinging weirdly behind a fastball is NOT a cue that your bat is slow? Anyway, they *all* tell you Griffey's bat is slow.  They all told you Clement's was, too.  It's the quick way to fill out the form.   To me, Mark Teixeira's swing looks the same as Griffey's now:  it kind of glides, and the ball goes 400 feet when he squares it up.  What does anybody else think about batspeed?  Everybody's got an opinion.  Take a numbah. Not saying his bat *isn't* slow.  But if it is, why it should be, is a mystery to me.  Why wasn't Willie Mays' bat slow at the same age? . Q.  What do the peripherals say? A. As follows.

1.  Eye ratio is the best it's ever been. 2.  His flyball ratio is trending up.  His GB's have gone from 42% to 35% the last few years. 3.  He's having troubles against LH, and has for years, which perhaps does suggest a problem with the reflexes... 4.  Griffey's ISO used to be .300 and now is around .200, suggesting either (a) that his arms have gotten weak, as Olerud's did for us, creating a bunch of warning-track fly balls, (b) that he's just been unlucky on the HR/F, or (c) that he's been popping them up while going all-out. 5.  His HR/F over the last  several years:  17%, 18%, 17%, 13%, 10% (Cin).

. === Bearing Down === Ever since he was young, Griffey has had a tendency to get wild at the plate when overconfident -- expanding his strike zone, trying to yank the ball, and getting it in the air too much. When he's bearing down, he tightens his strike zone, gets on top of the ball, and lines it around the park.  That's been the case since his first AB in the big leagues, a double the other way against Dave Stewart. Interestingly, Griffey actually did try to get on top of the ball more when he went to the White Sox:  his LD% went wayyyyyy up, his HR's wayyyyyy down, and it did not work out well in 40 games, at least:  .260/.350/.400. The peripherals do suggest that Griffey's aging:  he's stalking his pitch, taking his walks, does better with the platoon advantage (as most lefties do), and some of the homers are landing on the warning track. Let's not get carried away, though:  Griffey's RC/27 the last four years have been 7.8, 5.0, 6.6, and 5.2, compared to his career of 7.4.  Griffey has skiied downhill since his prime, but he still draws walks and hits home runs. How much a Safeco buzz, and a renewed joy for the game, would inject is the big question. Cheers, jemanji

The Wooden Shjips are a band that you should have heard of by now. Their music is the intersection of repetitive motifs, blurry psych, droney organs and punk melodicism. They’ve been releasing music for the better part of five years or so, put out a full length and this past year a compilation disc on Holy Mountain collecting their singles tracks.

And since they’re such good guys, the quartet have a present for you. Originally, the band produced a limited quantity of a tape only single for the holidays. It was only made up of a scant two tracks, but both were aimed at keeping listeners in the holiday spirits. It’s odd though that even with that holiday intention, the Shjips were able to maintain their trademark sound on a couple of seasonal tracks.

Each song clocking in at around eight minutes allows for them to stretch their improve muscle, as it were. And while doing so, the songs (“Auld Lang Syne” and “O Tannenbaum”) end up sounding as if they both could have fit on the Wooden Shjips album from 2007.

In this time of money troubles, uncertainty and trouble – regardless of what you say about the President-Elect – it’s refreshing to have people within the music industry that have no problem giving away what could be sold. I’m sure that those tapes are sooner or later going to wind up on E-bay, but now you might have less of a reason to fork over an exorbitant price for it.

The anti-Bedard 100 pitches grousing is more old-school than a 98-year-old Dodger scout, to paraphrase a friend of mine. I know nobody asked me, but if anybody did, I'm all for pitchers refusing to pitch when they don't feel right.  And mistaking Erik Bedard's intelligence, for weakness, should have been a mistake that was phased out with the turn of a century. ………………… 1.  Did it ever help the Mariners that Pedro Martinez was a 100-pitch guy?  That David Cone was?  That Mike Mussina was? 2.  How much difference are we talking here?  If Bedard threw 108 pitches, we'd be happy? 3.  If Sandy Koufax had said "thanks but no thanks" to the 160-pitch "FINISH WHAT YOU START!" philosophy of his day, history would have recorded that he did the right thing. In the same way, I APPLAUD any pitcher who has the good judgment to step out of the game when he knows his shoulder has had it. Come ON.  The guy steps out right before that one hitter too many, and he (1) avoids the labrum surgery, and (2) avoids the 5.50 ERA that a starter runs after he's gassed.  Knowing when to hand off is a plus. …………………. 98% chance of using the pen when Bedard pitches?  Um, how many CG's did the Mariners have in 2008?  Four. ………………….. It would be one thing if Bedard were a "five and dive" pansy.  But because he's great, those 100 pitches get him to the short relievers.  Check it out:  in 2007, Bedard got into the 7th-8th innings in 23 of 28 starts …. and it was 5.2 IP or more in 25 of 28. Bedard is 34-20 the last three years, pitching for lost causes.  He hands the ball to your short guys with a lead.  Except when he's getting squeezed by the ump, because this sorry franchise gets zero respect from blue. . === A Pleasure To Have In Class, Dept. === From a competitive standpoint, you LIKE Bedard's "forget you" attitude, kiddies.  Bedard is "forget you" down to the nanocells of his body.  And it is why he says "forget you" to the Yankees when he's in New York!   It is why he will say "forget you" to the NL champions, if this franchise ever had the common sense to give the steering wheel to somebody who could drive. Athletes can be high-maintenance.  It is the main reason that the Mariners flushed Randy Johnson, for those of you who didn't know.  He was a pain in the mudflaps to be around.  Cool.  Some org employees and reporters got to live their lives without coming into contact with Randy Johnson from 1998-2007, and 500,000 Mariner fans got to live their lives without watching an inner-circle HOF'er. …………….. Every Mariner who was ever here long-term …. Dan Wilson, Edgar, Bone, Moyer, Junior, etc … was a person who was very pleasant to be around.   Excellent players who were annoying to be around, have always found a way of winding up playing for somebody else. Finding a reason to get rid of Bedard — 100 pitches, or the glory of "admitting a mistake," or whatever — would be the quintessential Soccer Mom / Mariner / Seattle thing to do.  In other cities, they put up with Manny and Pedro and Rocket and ARod and the Big Unit.  That's because in other cities, the pennant race is about the, um, pennant. I'll be verrrrrrrrrrry interested what Jack Zduriencik and Don Wakamatsu wind up doing with Erik Bedard... . === If not Erikkkk, then who? Dept. === Would somebody explain to me, in one-syllable words, who you are going to spend your money on in 2010? If you'd had Randy Johnson in 1993, and planned to win in 1995, did that mean you should powerflush Johnson and then go wandering around looking for a pitcher two years on?   Which 1995 pitcher, exactly, would you have spent Randy's salary on?  (Hint:  no such opportunity emerged.)  Which 2010 pitcher, exactly, are you going to spend Erik's salary on? ………………… By the same logic, should you deal Felix for history's greatest prospect package right now? Let's deal Bedard and Felix, both, for the Angels' farm system.   The division's a writeoff anyway, for the forseeable future.  Why not underline it?   Spend the next five years trying to beat Erik Bedard in Angels' series openers.  :- ) ……………….. Bedard is a high-K, high-GB lefty in Safeco. Why not build around him as well as around Felix? Cheers, Dr D

I've been putting it off. I've known I have to do it, but I just didn't want to. Christmas has come and because apparently I was naughty this year, I got some coal in my stocking in the shape of Britney Spears's new album Circus. Now that it's here, I have to review it and attempt at some kind of objectivity. It's hard to believe that Britney's been in our pop culture consciousness for more than a decade now. It's been a rough few years for the bubblegum princess. Back in my high school days, I was like many young men who wished bad things on Britney Spears because of the ubiquity of her grating, over-produced pop. But when bad things actually started happening to her, I felt like Chris Crocker- I wanted everyone to leave Britney alone. It's bad enough to be bald, divorced, in failing health and deemed unfit to raise your own children. Being hounded by every papparazzo and his mother is just overkill. Now Britney's got hair again and possession of her kids. Also, an album that has done well on the charts, to say the least. So, how does it fare as, ya know, actual music? Not as bad as it should be but also not as good as it could be. The album opens up with two songs you would expect from Spears. "Womanizer" and "Circus" are both intricately constructed singles fodder. They play like slightly sanitized club R&B and Spears's voice is predictably awash in electronic fiddling. What follows is an interminable ballad in "Out From Under" and yet another dancefloor track, "Kill the Lights", that might actually pass a Faint-like electro-industrial track if it were given some more bite. There's a similar story in many of the other tracks, and I call them "tracks" not "songs" because there's no conceivable way these sounds could be replicated with anything short of a room full of Moogs. Brit's attempt at cheekiness, "If U Seek Amy" sounds like a slowed-down version of something you might find accompanying a hyper anime video on 4chan, when it has the potential to be a rough, dirty glitch track. "Phonography" is crunk-lite with a bad Nelly Furtado impression. Etc, etc. This is the tragedy of pop diva music. An obviously talented producer goes to great lengths to churn out ornate but generic versions of whatever pop detritus comes his way, then puts a pretty face in front of it who pretends to sing. If Circus aspired to be anything more than just one more forgettable McLP it could actually be passable. In a strange turn of events, I actually found myself rooting for Britney this time around. I had hopes that the ugly years of her life would inspire her to take this opportunity to make an album stripped of so much of the machinery that made her a commodity in the first place. At the very least, she could have pulled a Depeche Mode, dropping smiley pop sounds for something darker and more introspective. In the end, Circus is just history repeating itself.