Right now ESPN.com is like a high-school jock who has the guts to join the drama club because he truly loves acting, but still makes jokes about the "losers" in the club to his buddies on the football team. You're either in or you're out, and if you're in then you can't be too good for the club when it suits your needs. I'm proud of ESPN.com, but it'll be even better when they really make the jump.

Gammons' "reading" page includes a link to The Hardball Times (which was quite a thrill for me), but what I'm talking about is linking to a good Dodger Thoughts entry when Jon Weisman has something interesting to say about Ned Colletti or turning readers on to USS Mariner when David Cameron breaks down the greatness of Felix Hernandez after King Felix puts together a string of brilliant starts.

The line between old-school and new-school is blurring all the time and I commend ESPN.com for accepting a relatively new medium when many of their fellow mainstream outlets have been amazingly resistant to do so. We're not quite "there" yet, but for now being able to call myself a "blogger" and have Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark be included in that same club is pretty cool. Even if they probably still call us losers behind our backs.

Memo to fellow blogsmith Aaron Gleeman: I've never called you a loser, pal. We live in a media world now with virtually no limits, and that (we're pretty sure) is a great thing. Thanks to the blogosphere, we get to read all kinds of new voices who actually spend way too much of their lives devoting way too much creative thought to baseball, for little or zero compensation. Aaron Gleeman is one of those voices. Now that I've plunged into the futuristic dimensions of blog-o-space, I feel a newfound bond with my fellow bloggers. All 8.7 billion of you.

In the military, drill sergeants and other power mongers will set up little tests for you, make you do some stupid, irrational and painful thing just to find out how you react to it. If you pass their little test, then they'll always think you're OK, regardless of whether you're worth a hoot or not, because they have reached a prior conclusion that this is the moment at which they're going to find out about you.

I was at a game in [Kansas City] last May during which Barrett had a couple of hits early, just took pitches on the outside corner and guided them softly over the first baseman's head, the two hits being identical. When he came up the third time I was saying to myself that now they'll make him hit the inside pitch, and they did. The pitcher threw him two pitches on the inside corner, and he turned on the second one and hit the thing a mile (well, maybe 430 feet) for his first major league homer. I was really impressed by that, although logically I knew that it didn't mean any more than anybody else's first home run, because in my mind I had made a prior decision that this was Barrett's test as a major hitter.

I guess we look for personal tics in people who are smarter than we are. It's silly to see Einstein's not knowing his own phone number or not wearing socks as defining characteristics. But if you want to riff on the absent-minded-professor motiff, Bill mixes frugality and disorganization like a true genius. Rob Neyer says that when he was Bill's assistant, "For bookshelves, he had me buy long planks from the Oskaloosa lumber yard and a big pile of bricks from a Topeka brick seller.

[...]

I bought a second-hand office chair for myself back in 1990 or 1991. Almost immediately, I realized that there was a tiny hole in the leather, and thus a tiny spring kept poking through and putting tiny holes in the seats of my pants. I got around this by making sure I had a towel under me, and kept using the chair. Here's the punchline: I was in Bill's office last summer ... and the poky green office chair was still there!"

Reuben pops into the office. "I lost a tooth," he reports. "I swallowed it chewing gum."

"Was it a tooth you were supposed to lose?" Bill asks.

It was. Reuben then instigates a wrestling match with his dad. Bill is huge and Reuben is eleven, so they look like a clip from Animal Planet. That makes me think of a story Bill's most recent ex-assistant, Matthew Namee, told me. One day a column of ants came marching up the porch steps and under the front door. Bill broomed them away, but in a minute they were back. After repeating the action a few times, Bill mused, "You'd think the guys in the back would notice their buddies keep disappearing."

I always had a soft spot for "Matty Law" and I'm not sure why. I guess he was just a very solid all-around player who had a lot of nice moments as a Twin. Lawton and Brad Radke were sort of like the bridge from the Kirby Puckett/Chuck Knoblauch Twins to the current group.