I was hoping to write about some of the free-agent signings in baseball, but since not much is happening yet on that front here are a few musings on some other topics.
• I'm not the least bit upset that the Phillies' Ryan Howard finished second in the MVP voting to the Cardinals' Albert Pujols. I doubt Howard cares either, because he's getting a World Series ring instead.
It's sort of ironic, though, that when Howard beat out Pujols for the award two seasons ago, some people complained that the St. Louis first baseman should've gotten it because his team won the World Series while the Phillies weren't even in the playoffs.
The voting takes place before the postseason, however, so that's an irrelevant argument.
The bottom line? Howard absolutely deserved the MVP when he won it in '06, and Pujols is a very worthy recipient this year.
• Phillies infield prospect Jason Donald, who batted .307 at Class AA Reading and was the best hitter on the U.S. Olympic bronze-medal-winning baseball team in Beijing, is getting a look at third base in the Arizona Fall League.
That could mean the Phils view him as a possible replacement for Pedro Feliz, who has one more year on his contract. Because he normally plays shortstop, a position that Gold Glover Jimmy Rollins is entrenched in for years, Donald had been mentioned as nothing more than a utility player if he ever made the majors.
But his stock appears to be rising.
A third-round draft pick out of the University of Arizona in 2006, Donald, 24, is currently tearing up the Arizona Fall League, which is chock full of hotshot prospects.
As of midweek, he was hitting .414 with 36 hits, five home runs, 22 runs scored and 17 RBIs in 24 games for the Mesa Solar Sox.
Among the other Phils minor-leaguers playing with Mesa in the ASL, 24-year-old outfielder Quintin Berry (who'll probably be at Reading this year) is hitting .318; top catching prospect Lou Marson, 22, is batting .310; and 26-year-old outfielder Jeremy Slayden is hitting .293 with 23 RBIs in 24 games.
• I have a football pet peeve that's been nagging at me for some time, and after watching the Eagles' hideous performance against the pitiful Bengals, I finally have to bring it up.
When it's third-and-6, for example, why do receivers run 5-yard routes and inevitably get tackled short of the first down?
This drives my dad up the wall, too. Don't the wideouts know where the first-down marker is? Doesn't it make more sense to have a route that's 1 or 2 yards longer than what you need for a first down, so if you get tackled immediately you've still gained enough to move the chains?
Perhaps there's something obvious I'm missing here, but I just don't get it.
• At this point, most of planet Earth's 6.72 billion people probably know about Donovan McNabb's overtime gaffe.
Actually, he wasn't the only guilty party on the Eagles. Several other players apparently were unaware that overtime games in the NFL end in a tie if no one scores in the extra quarter.
I was surprised when I saw McNabb admit in his postgame press conference that he didn't know the rules (and I give him points for honesty), but I didn't think anyone outside Philadelphia would really care.
But then I turned on ESPN Monday, and they couldn't stop talking about it.
Great, I thought. It's bad enough the Birds couldn't manage to beat one of the worst teams in the league. Now the whole world knows they're not just mediocre, but embarrassingly dysfunctional, too.
Paula Wolf, a sports enthusiast who uses a wheelchair because of rheumatoid arthritis, is a staff writer for the Sunday News. E-mail her at pwolf@lnpnews.com.
