Perspective

By Robby Wellington – Staff Writer

I was recently mocked by a furious owner in my league for offering him Randy Wolf and Aaron Hill for Randy Johnson. Now, I’m not going to argue that it was a great deal, Dalton has already pointed out that Aaron Hill has a limited track record of hitting home runs or swiping bags, but it certainly wasn’t a bad one. I, for one, think that Randy Wolf has a very good shot of outperforming The Big Unit this year.

Now, this brings us to a bigger issue. How early in the season do you start taking stock in a player’s performance and ignore their previous body of work. Should you trade Albert Pujols for Miguel Cabrera (no)? Is Alex Rodriguez more valuable than Alfonso Soriano (sadly for me, the answer is yes)? The obvious answer is that it depends. But the moral of the story is that there are always those in your league who put too much stock in past performance (like my nameless competitor) and those who put too much faith in fast starts (the Chris Shelton lovers). The key is figuring out who these owners are and exploiting them.

Additionally of note:

I was flipping through the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition this morning and, although I know it came out a couple of months ago, I would be remiss if I didn’t make a couple of quick comments.

1. Marisa Miller has been holding it down as top dog for quite some time now. I’m not sure why she hasn’t been in a bunch of movies yet. At least give the lady her own cover.

2. I’m actually pretty underwhelmed with the other gals in the magazine. Maybe it’s because there are so many other mediums for “entertainment” these days, and the magazine no longer spends months at a time under my mattress, but it seems like the golden era of the late 90s has passed. Bar Rafaeli put in a pretty solid rookie effort, though.

3. I’m kind of over the body painting. It is a cool concept, and I liked it when it first came out, but now it just looks kind of weird. The 3-D glasses are far and away the best recent innovation.

I played my first game of pickup hoops in a while at the park across the street from my apartment. When the game before me broke down into a five minute argument over whether the score was 1-1 or 1-0, I knew I was in for a long day. After one guy threatened to “shoot the whole place up” if his little cousin (who was about 11) didn’t get to play next, he used the following flawless logic: “This is how MJ came up learning how to play, this is how Kobe learned how to play and this is how I learned the game!” When his team won on a controversial call, I was fortunate enough to be matched up with a guy who was literally foaming at the mouth and talked like DMX with a bad cold. He stormed off the court after two minutes, frustrated with a touch foul (it fortunately wasn’t me) and screaming how he couldn’t “drop” one of my teammates because then he would be the one locked up. Life’s unfair sometimes.