For the second year running, we’re proud to bring you some Right Field rules to March Madness bracket picks. If you followed our rules from last year, you just might have found that magic touch that enabled you to not embarrass yourself in your colleagues’ eyes. This year, we can promise a similar level of competence.

Perfected and honed over decades, this year’s guide contains some of the classic rules — and some updates, as well.

1. Don’t fall in love with the upset. It can’t be said enough. It’s fun to root for the underdog (and you should do so with joy, even when it might bust your bracket), but Cinderella is rare for a reason. Fill out your bracket from the inside out to make sure you don’t end up with double-digit seeds competing for your national title. If you like Louisville (1) to win it all, start there and work backwards.

2. Brand-name coaches have brand names for a reason. You’ve probably heard of Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino, Roy Williams, Bill Self, and Tom Izzo. They’ve built great programs and they know how to win in March. That will make all the difference. If you think you’ve got a toss-up on your hands, go with the brand-name coach. (And never go against Tom Izzo.)

3. Chicks dig the long ball. A classic for any lower-ranked team looking for an upset: getting hot from beyond the three-point line will cause the big, powerful, methodical teams to go nuts. Lower-ranked schools with streaky shooters are fun upset picks. Harvard (14) and South Dakota State (13) were both top-ten in the NCAA in three-point percentage. (So were Duke and Indiana, but you’re already expecting them to win a few games.) Not that it means they’re a lock or will even pull off any upsets, but just know that they could cause some headaches.

4. Never bet on the West Coast. In the past 15 years, only two teams from the Mountain or Pacific time zones have made it to the final four: UCLA made it three straight times, from 2006 through 2008, and Arizona won the tournament in 1997 before making it back to the Final Four in 2001. Beware of Gonzaga (1) and New Mexico (3).

5. Unique teams have unique advantages. For some of the less-prestigious programs playing against other teams that are seeing them for the first time, gadgetry and trickery can be powerful allies. Look at Virginia Commonwealth University, for example: Their max-effort full-court trap defense is something that schools within their conference prepare to face for months. Schools that never expected to play against VCU will have, at most, a few days to prepare.

6. Matchups matter. For all we just wrote about the power of a unique attack, matchups still matter. Not many teams have seen Syracuse’s 2-3 zone defense, but Syracuse is susceptible to very good three-point shooting teams precisely because of their defensive system. Wisconsin plays a slowdown tempo that allows them to keep pace with superior competition, but it also makes them vulnerable to just a few good plays from lesser opponents.

7. Duke is always overrated. Just kidding. But they’re fun to hate. They’re actually very good and are generally a pretty good bet to win a few games. Just know this: They’ve been a 2-seed in four previous tourneys and made the Sweet 16 only once in those years.

8. Everything you know — including what we’re telling you right now — is wrong. Your brother could win it all by making predictions based on the color of Lego blocks his son picks. Your boss could win it even though she’s an NFL fan who thinks that Duke can’t possibly be good because there are no Dukies in the NFL. The office geek could win it based on what schools kinda sound like his favorite sci-fi heroes. (Marquette’s probably his pick.) Use your own system and have fun.

Oh, but don’t pick Duke. Everyone will hate you if you win.

— Kevin Glass is the managing editor of Townhall.com. Christopher Regal is a graduate student at George Mason University.

Winning the Super Bowl last month earned the Ravens the right to host the 2013 NFL season opener.

There’s just one itty-bitty problem: M&T Bank Stadium shares its parking facilities with nearby Orioles Park.

Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Biscotti said his team and the NFL are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the season opens at M&T Bank Stadium on Thursday, Sept. 5, so it’s up to the Baltimore Orioles to give a little themselves.

The Baltimore Sun reported that Biscotti has offered to cover any lost revenues the Orioles might incur if they agree to move their 7:05 p.m. ET game against the Chicago White Sox at Camden Yards to an afternoon start time.

“In fairness to Major League Baseball and the Angeloses, we’re trying to dump a pretty big problem on them and we’re asking them to make a lot of concessions that will benefit us and potentially harm them though it doesn’t necessarily harm them,” Bisciotti said, according to the newspaper. “The bottom line is if they wanted to do it, they would find a way to do it. From the Ravens and the NFL standpoint, we’ll do whatever we have to do in order to keep that tradition.”

The defending Super Bowl champion has opened the season on a Thursday night since 2004. . . .

The Orioles are scheduled to play the Indians in Cleveland on Sept. 4 at 7:05 p.m. Under baseball’s collective bargaining agreement, getaway games are not to be scheduled or rescheduled to start later than 5 p.m. if either club is required to travel for a day game, scheduled the next day, between cities in which the in-flight time is more than one and a half hours.

The rule can be waived by a vote by the players on the team it affects, in this case the Orioles.

The Ravens do not want to move the game to a day earlier, as was done last year to avoid conflict with President Obama’s Democratic Convention acceptance speech, because that would be September 4, the first night of Rosh Hashanah.

I suspect that, in addition to the issue collective-bargaining agreement noted above, Orioles owner Peter Angelos isn’t thrilled with the idea of scheduling a matinee during the first day of Rosh Hashanah, when many of his Jewish patrons will still be in synagogue.

“Jolly Old St. Nick Done Sink the Ship” made clear his thoughts on a related Baseball Think Factory thread:

The whole brouhaha stems from the NFL’s all-of-nine-year-old “tradition” that the season should open with a Thursday night marquee matchup at the home of the Super Bowl Champion. I sincerely hope that the Orioles just tell the NFL to stuff it, and I say that as a huge Ravens fan.

(Emphasis mine.)

No argument here, St. Nick.

Or, if the NFL values so much the idea that the season opener should be on a Thursday, let it relocate the game to Cleveland, where the Indians and the new Browns don’t have to share parking facilities.

Oh, and by the way, weren’t the baseball–football scheduling conflicts supposed to go the way of the dodo bird when we tore down all of the hideous multipurpose stadiums? What was Baltimore thinking when it elected to plop a 70,000-seat football stadium next to Orioles Park?

More here.

Fernando Rodney had quite a comeback season in 2012, and closing for the Dominican Republic’s squad in the World Baseball Classic this spring, he has been nearly unhittable. Last night, the birthday boy — the Rays’ reliever turned 36 — notched his sixth save of the tournament in a 4–1 semifinal victory over Curaçao the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Apparently, Rodney believes that plantains are at least partially responsible for his still-dominant fastball and wants everybody to know. And what better way from him to show off the lucky plantain than by having it, er, poke out of his pants during the game? (The protuberance is clearly visible below.)

Meanwhile, Rays skipper Joe Maddon is not all that amused at the frequency with which the D.R.’s manager, Yankees’ bench coach Tony Peña, is using Rodney. 

The problem is that Rodney is also Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon’s closer, and Maddon isn’t too keen on Rodney pitching so much.

“You’re pitching at such a high level, the way the Dominicans are dealing with this, it’s almost like a playoff situation so there’s a lot of amperage going on there,” Maddon told reporters Sunday. “We’ll see how this all plays out. . . . There’s going to be some kind of ‘woof’ after this whole thing’s over.”

Rodney and his Dominican teammates face off against Puerto Rico for all the marbles tonight at 9 p.m. EDT on MLB Network.

In preparation of the tenth anniversary of the 2003 Iraq War tomorrow, arte.tv has released a documentary called Iraq: 10 Years, 100 Viewpoints. The documentary shows several short videos of life in Iraq and will be releasing these videos every day up until May 1, President Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” statement. In this video, Trainer Bassam Raouf Hamid leads his 120 pupils, instilling in them the dangers of sectarianism, and “believes his club is an example of the ‘love, brotherhood and tolerance’ needed for Iraq’s peaceful future.”

Sports royalty’s latest power-couple.

Good morning.

Here are several links from the past week that will make the second Monday of March a bit more bearable:

• ESPN SweetSpot’s David Schoenfield congratulates the Puerto Rican squad in its WBC elimination-game triumph over the American team while bemoaning the inability of the U.S. squad to pull out a vicotry in the 4-3 affair.
• To say that the Astros, currently at 300-to-1 odds to win the 2013 World Series, are in rebuilding mode is an understatement. Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal shows how the current front office is going where few clubs have gone before:

Trading current wins for future wins isn’t a novel concept. And building through player development is an industrywide mantra. But most teams make at least some effort to ease their pain in the short term. . . .

The Astros are treating this season as a form of spring training—a time to evaluate young players. They’ll have the youngest team in the majors. “Are they going to be part of our core in four or five years?” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said of the kids. “We need to find out. If you take away their job and give it to a veteran, you delay finding it out. It doesn’t push the organization forward.”

Operating with such little regard for the current season is something other baseball executives likely fantasize about. If it weren’t for the annoying chore of appeasing fans in the interim, many teams could build a championship core within five years. But few have the gall to take the Astros’ approach.

“They’ve had, frankly, more nerve than I might have had in going 100 miles per hour in the direction they’re going in,” said Los Angeles Dodgers president Stan Kasten, who once looked into buying a piece of the Astros. Speaking at a conference last week, Kasten added, “They’ve had the fortitude to do it the right way.”

• According to Chris De Luca of the Chicago Sun-Times, White Sox broadcasters Ken “Hawk” Harrelson and Steve Stone have addressed the tension betwen them in the booth and the duo expect a much friendlier on-air rapport in the future.
• Jeff Sullivan, arguably the most talented team blogger in the business, has departed Mariners-centric Lookout Landing:

The bottom line is that it’s time to cut back. . . . I’m not leaving Lookout Landing for another opportunity. I’m just going to do less, and this has absolutely nothing to do with SB Nation or Vox Media. . . . This network is going to continue to grow and it’s going to accomplish spectacular things, and that progress isn’t going to stop just because they’re down a Mariners blogger. I don’t know where I’d be without SB Nation, and I owe those guys more than I can express.

But I started blogging about the Mariners in November 2003, when I was a freshman in college. Since then, almost every day, I’ve written about the Mariners. Since then, every regular season, I’ve stayed up to watch Mariners games and write too much about them too late at night. That’s nine regular seasons of midnight recaps — nine negative run differential regular seasons — spanning the entirety of my adulthood to date. It’s time to see what it’s like to be an adult without that responsibility. It’s time to try to become more of a well-rounded person. (#YOLO) You know what I don’t know about? Lots of things. I’d like to start changing that.

• An increasing number of Yankee fans are feeling uneasy about the 2013 season. Bruce Markusen of the Hardball Times thinks they have good reason to worry, as he sees shades of 1989 when looking over this year’s club. (The Bronx Bombers went from a 85-win team in 1988 to one that won only 74 games.)
• If the Orioles are planing for a return to the postseason, Beyond the Boxscore’s Blake Murphy writes in “One-Run Game Performance Is Unsustainable,” Baltimore had better not rely on another 29–9 record in those nail-biters.
• Gwen Knapp of Sports on Earth profiles the family of former closer Rod Beck, who died at age 38 from a drug overdose in 2007. In response to Beck’s passing, the family founded a non-profit organization to help children of substance abusers.

• Via Ben Lindbergh and Harry Pavlidis of Baseball Prospectus: Erick Aybar offers home-plate umpire Angel Hernandez some choice thoughts on Craig Kimbrel’s 1–1 pitch, which Pitch F/X data estimated at being a good eight inches outside. On the very next pitch, however, Aybar singled home what proved to be the winning run.

That’s it. Have a walk-off week!

“Right Field” contributor Corey Hall is at the hospital as I type awaiting the birth of his third daughter. Good luck Corey and Maggie!

At the Corner, Nat links to a video of Congressman Peter King’s boxing match against Josh Foley. The fight was good-natured, and King admitted that Foley was taking it easy on him.

Still, let’s take a closer look at the congressman’s fighting style.

It isn’t a high quality video, and we can’t see the congressman’s footwork, so let’s just focus on his hands.

The Good: The congressman seems to throw strong punches; one punch (at about 25 seconds in) manages to push Foley back a step. King has a nice one-two combo (at about 11 seconds in), which demonstrates basic boxing literacy. And best of all, King is clearly not fazed by Foley’s superior skill set. The congressman, true to his political persona, charges ahead.

The Bad: The congressman tends to drop his hands when throwing punches. After throwing a cross, a boxer should quickly return his dominant hand to his face for protection; King drops his hand to his ribcage. King also throws what looks like a left-hand hook (15 seconds in), but he drops his right hand to his waste. In a fight against a less charitable opponent, these lapses most certainly would have resulted in a knockout. 

Good morning.

Here are several links from the past week that will make the second Monday of March a bit more bearable:

• Bill Baer of ESPN’s SweetSpot examines Chris Sale’s contract extension and concludes that the White Sox got a bargain.
• Meanwhile, John Lackey returns to the Red Sox rotation after Tommy John surgery but Full Spectrum Baseball’s Will Emerson explains that is hardly reason for the Nation to cheer.

• A hockey match brawl broke out in the top of the ninth of the WBC first-round game between Canada and Mexico. Amazingly, the tournament organizers elected not to suspend any of the melee participants:

“Because at least one club — and potentially both — will not advance to the second round, WBCI has determined that disciplinary measures would not have a meaningful corrective impact,”

• Closer Mariano Rivera announced at a press conference that he will retire after the 2013 season. A couple of related threads at Baseball Think Factory feature occasionally intense exchanges about Rivera’s value to the Yankees as well as about the value of the closer role itself.
• As for the franchise, Rany Jazayerli of Grantland informs readers why “the end of the Yankees’ evil empire” is nearly upon us.
• In an interesting Q&A that David Laurila of Fangraphs had with Farhan Zaidi, the director of baseball operations for the A’s describes why proprietary information is so important to his club:

Analytics, today, is kind of like 30 guys with 30 radar guns: That’s not meant as disrespect to scouts. I go out and scout, and a lot of times I’m one of the guys holding up a gun. It’s more of an analogy to recognizing what data is commoditized, and what data really gives you a competitive advantage. Knowing that — knowing when you’re using data that other teams have access to, versus data that is legitimately proprietary — is an important point to be able to recognize.

Everybody is holding up the gun and everybody writes down the reading like everyone is collecting performance data and evaluating it. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that every team is doing individually, but really, much of that exercise is just running in place.

The question of what you’re doing that other teams aren’t is a tough question. You have to give your competitors respect. A lot of things you’re thought about, they probably have as well. You have to try to go a step beyond and do it better.

• Thanks to the research of Laurila’s colleague, Jeff Sullivan, we now know that Gio Gonzalez’s impressive 2012 campaign included the most strikeouts of opposing pitchers, 41, since 1972, when fellow southpaw Steve Carlton K-ed 44 and Nolan Ryan punched out 42.
• The Rawlings Sporting Goods Company and Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) have announced a new collaboration which will add an analytical dimension to the Gold Glove Awards. According to a SABR press release:

As part of the multi-year collaboration beginning with the 2013 season, SABR will develop an expanded statistical resource guide that will accompany the Rawlings Gold Glove Award ballots sent to major league-level managers and coaches each year. In addition, SABR will immediately establish a new Fielding Research Committee tasked to develop a proprietary new defensive analytic called the SABR Defensive Index™, or SDI™. The SDI will serve as an “apples-to-apples” metric to help determine the best defensive players in baseball exclusively for the Rawlings Gold Glove Award and Rawlings Platinum Glove Award selection processes. The collaboration also installs SABR as the presenting sponsor of the Rawlings Platinum Glove Award.

• Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason, is also an occasional contributor to Halos Heaven, a popular Angels blog. In his latest post, Welch excoriates a former sports editor of the Los Angeles Times for penning the “most inexcusably inaccurate, willfully ignorant, petulantly anti-journalistic columns I have ever read about the game of baseball.”

• For those who have yet to draft for their Rotisserie teams, Ray Guilfoyle of Fake Teams reveals his revised 2013 list of the top 200 players and features Ryan Braun at no. 1.

That’s it. Have a walk-off week!

ESPN New York’s Adam Rubin gives us the skinny on how the Mets are handling the death of Hugo Chávez:

Here’s how the Marlins responded, via Manny Navarro of the Miami Herald:

The Venezuelan national team, which lost to the Marlins 6-5 on Tuesday and will play the Cardinals on Wednesday afternoon before heading to Puerto Rico for WBC tournament pool play, requested a moment of silence and that the country’s flag be placed at half staff before Tuesday’s game in honor of their late president.

But after consulting with Major League Baseball officials, a Marlins spokesman said a joint decision was made not to do so because “there wasn’t enough time to honor the request.” The Venezuelan national flag stood at half staff for several minutes while the team took batting practice Tuesday. But the flag was eventually returned to full staff.

Really? “There wasn’t enough time to honor the request” that the Marlins observe a simple moment of silence?

Good BS, better PR, and yes, the right thing to do under the circumstances.

Are high-profile suspensions for use of performance-enhancing drugs about to rock MLB in 2013? Jordan Rabinowitz of SportsGrid takes note of a provocative Tweet:

Consider this the bombshell before the bombshell, should this prophecy eventually come true. Joe Bisceglie from Dog And Pony Show tweeted Monday afternoon that four of baseball’s biggest bats, including three New York Yankees and two formerly implicated players, will each be slapped with 50-game first-offense PED suspensions. They are, of course, Robinson Cano, Alex Rodriguez, Curtis Granderson, and Ryan Braun.

Before any despondent Yankee fan treks to the Bronx to take a Greg Louganis off the upper deck, please note the following caveat:

You’d be inclined to be skeptical, and for fair reason — Bisceglie doesn’t name his source. This kind of story is explosive, and deserves tender care before people start going on witch hunts and throwing names out there with no rationale.

On the other hand, please note this caveat to the original caveat:

But consider this: Bisceglie correctly prognosticated that Melky Cabrera would be suspended last season for a failed PED test almost a month before his suspension came.

That tweet was from July 18; the suspension came on Aug. 15. Bisceglie was understandably sour about the haters (can’t get no respect with no sources, dude), but to his credit, he’s been right about this thing before, the Nostra Damus of steroids, if you will.

More here (h/t Baseball Think Factory).

UPDATE: Jon Heyman of CBS Sports says it ain’t so.

McClatchy:

The National Rifle Association, a touchstone for gun-rights advocates in the national debate about gun control, is putting its name on the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway in April.

The NRA 500 will be the name of the race scheduled for April 13 at the 1.5-mile track, part of a one-year deal announced Monday by speedway president Eddie Gossage.

“This isn’t a political platform. This is a sports marketing opportunity,” Gossage said. “Demographically, it’s a perfect match.”

The NRA sponsored a NASCAR Nationwide Series race in Atlanta last September, the “NRA American Warrior 300.”

Gossage said this a one-year title sponsorship agreement with the NRA. He said that the track normally signs three-year deals with title sponsors, but that the NRA has options for the following seasons. He said the NRA approached the track last fall about a deal, but that it was not finalized until last week.

The announcement was made during Media Day at Texas Motor Speedway, where drivers Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Travis Pastrana and James Buescher met with reporters to promote the race weekend.

The rest here.

Good morning.

Here are several links from the past week that will make the first Monday of March a bit more bearable:

• Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports has a message for players who moan and groan about playing in the World Baseball Classic: “Get over yourselves, and think about your sport. . . . Everyone [except elite pitchers] needs to put aside their self-interest and contribute to the greater good of the sport.”
• Mike Trout, 21, was the 2012 AL Rookie of the Year and runner-up for Most Valuable Player, yet is slated to receive a measly $20,000 increase in salary for 2013. Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times provides details:

“During the process, on behalf of Mike, I asked only that the Angels compensate Mike fairly for his historic 2012 season, given his service time,” [Craig] Landis, who represents Trout, said in an email. “In my opinion, this contract falls well short of a ‘fair’ contract, and I have voiced this to the Angels throughout the process.”

Players with less than three years of major league service have virtually no leverage, and most will make close to the major league minimum, which rose from $480,000 in 2012 to $490,000 this season.

If a player and team can’t agree on a figure, the team can renew the player’s salary at or above the minimum, an outcome that can ruffle the feathers of some players and their agents, hindering future negotiations between the sides.

Some organizations reward young players for superb seasons. Derek Jeter was renewed after winning rookie of the year in 1996, when the New York Yankees more than tripled his salary, from $130,000 to $550,000.

After Albert Pujols was selected National League rookie of the year and finished fourth in MVP voting, the St. Louis Cardinals bumped his salary from $200,000 in 2001 to $600,000 in 2002.

The Angels, under second-year General Manager Jerry Dipoto, are obviously taking a different tack, as evidenced by their renewal of Trout’s contract. But that is their prerogative.

• Manny Ramirez looks to be playing professional baseball this spring and summer — in Taiwan. According to ESPN Deportes via MLB Trade Rumors, Manny and the EDA Rhinos have reached a verbal agreement to play with the Chinese Professional League team.
• Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria took out a full-page advertisement in three South Florida daily newspapers in an attempt to give fans a positive spin on the state of the franchise. (SB Nation’s Rob Neyer offered a Fire Joe Morgan–esque rebuttal.) In a subsequent press conference, reporters didn’t exactly go easy on Loria:

The letter you put out Sunday said the buck stops with you, that you can accept some of the blame. But it was followed up with a lot of buts. Where does the blame fall on you in all of this?

Loria: Where does it fall on me? I don’t know. Maybe from last year and the year before my thinking we could do it with what we had, and it didn’t work? And adding to it. I didn’t hesitate when it came to putting a $100 million payroll out there. But when you have that happen and nothing good happens on the field, I don’t know where the buck stops there because I can’t hit, I can’t run and I can’t throw anymore. But, you know, I’m responsible overall, so I guess the buck stops with me. However, it’s time to look ahead. My father used to say to me, ‘Jeffrey, you know why the windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror? Because the future is a lot brighter than the past.” That’s what we have. We have a bright future, and I would like us to rally around that.

Why did you take so long to come out and basically explain this?

Loria: “It’s kind of hard to stop a runaway train. The season ended and I decided it was time to decompress and let all that was going to be said, said. I felt the time was right recently just before spring training started. …

How do you expect fans to show up when they don’t know half the starting lineup?

Loria: “If they like baseball, they’ll come.”

They didn’t come last year with names that they knew . . .

Loria: “Yeah, because they were losing.” . . .

With all due respect, why should fans believe anything that you’re saying, given the history?

Loria: “You’ve said that question in four different ways, and my response to you is we have put together a championship caliber of young players, a large group of them. We’re going to field an excellent team in the next two or three years that you’re going to be proud of. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe what I think.”

Did you repair the image with the taxpayers, that it was kind of a con job with the stadium?

Loria: “Con job? I’m not even going to answer that question. Sorry.”

• Sports Illustrated’s Jay Jaffe contends that moving Aroldis Chapman to the starting rotation is the right move for the Reds.
• In “The Most Overrated Players of All-time,” James Gentile of Beyond the Boxscore awards top honors to perpetual RBI machine Joe Carter.
• Baseball Prospectus released its annual list of top 100 prospects. Interestingly, only one first baseman — 21-year-old Jonathan Singleton of the Astros organization — cracks the list.
• Also at Baseball Prospectus, former Diamondbacks and Expos pitcher Eric Knott pens a long column discussing his experiences with performance-enhancing drugs during his career in professional ball.

• J. P. Arencibia stupidly bravely went cupless in his offseason bullpen sessions with Toronto newcomer R. A. Dickey, according to Chris Jones of ESPN The Magazine.

That’s it. Have a walk-off week!

Should a diehard Mets fan be depressed that Cy Young Award winner and Tolkien fan R.A. Dickey is poised to become a Blue Jay?

Or should a diehard Mets fan be enthused that the Amazins are about to receive perhaps the no. 1 catching prospect around, Travis D’Arnaud, and a 20-year old pitching prospect John Sickels rates as an “A-,” Noah Syndergaard.

Why can’t both be true?

The 38-year old knuckleballer gave the beleaguered fanbase something to cheer about. After meandering through professional ball for 13 seasons, Dickey finally struck paydirt in 2010. After eight starts in Triple-A Buffalo, the Mets promoted him in mid-May and he never looked back. Over the past three years, his ERA+ has been 138, 112, and 140.

Dickey was under the Mets’ control for next season at a meager $5 million. Hoping to (finally) cash in on his success, Dickey went looking for a contract extension, eventually requesting . And yet, the Mets chose not to keep him, a signal that the Mets do not expect to be competitive until at least 2015 and/or the Wilpons reamin seriously cash-strapped.

As Tyler Kepner of the New York Times

Leave it to the Mets to botch something easy, like Luis Castillo dropping a pop-up with two outs in the ninth. When the best pitcher in the National League wants to stay with you for three more years, at a steep discount, you let him stay. Why is this so complicated?

Congrats, Jays fans. The offseason is hardly over, but barring any surprises, the Jays will enter the 2013 campaign as the plurality favorite to capture the American League East.

There’s a really great paper that’s being presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Conference this year on “Using Zone Entry Data To Separate Offensive, Neutral, And Defensive Zone Performance” in hockey. After analyzing a season’s worth of in-game data, the authors discovered that there is an overlooked aspect to winning in hockey — carrying the puck across the blue line versus just dumping the puck in:

Neutral zone success involves more than getting extra zone entries; since carrying the puck across the blue line generates more than twice as many shots, scoring chances, and goals as dumping the puck in, gaining the zone with possession is a major driver of success.

Based on their data, teams should look into switching their tactical approaches. The authors also studied the rate at which certain players succeeded at bringing the puck up the ice without turning it over. They used the Flyers as one of their main teams for study, and if the numbers are right, I’m sorry Flyers fans, but why is Wayne Simmonds ever allowed to bring the puck up instead of Danny Briere?

There’s a really great paper that’s being presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Conference this year on “Using Zone Entry Data To Separate Offensive, Neutral, And Defensive Zone Performance” in hockey. After analyzing a season’s worth of in-game data, the authors discovered that there is an overlooked aspect to winning in hockey — carrying the puck across the blue line versus just dumping the puck in:

Neutral zone success involves more than getting extra zone entries; since carrying the puck across the blue line generates more than twice as many shots, scoring chances, and goals as dumping the puck in, gaining the zone with possession is a major driver of success.

Based on their data, teams should look into switching their tactical approaches. The authors also studied the rate at which certain players succeeded at bringing the puck up the ice without turning it over. They used the Flyers as one of their main teams for study, and if the numbers are right: I’m sorry Flyers fans, but why is Wayne Simmonds ever allowed to bring the puck up instead of Danny Briere?

Seems like it worked out OK for him:

Who cares about the Super Bowl when it’s duck-hunting season?

That’s what “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson believes. He turned down a chance to play in the NFL to pursue his real passion: hunting. That later led to the formation of his business selling duck calls and other gear, which in turn led to his family being spotlighted on the A&E reality series.

Back in the late ’60s, Robertson was a quarterback at Louisiana Tech, starting ahead of a guy named Terry Bradshaw — who would later become a Hall of Famer with four Super Bowl rings.

As detailed in Sports Illustrated, Robertson turned down an offer from the Washington Redskins his junior year to concentrate on duck hunting.

“Throwing a touchdown pass to a guy running down the sideline, and he runs down with the ball for six, it was fun,” he reminisces. “However, in my case, it was much more fun to be standing down in some flooded timber with about 35 or 40 mallard ducks comin’ down on top of me in the woods. That did my heart more good than all the football in the world.”

Bradshaw recalls Robertson as someone who loved hunting more than football. In his autobiography, “It’s Only a Game,” the legendary quarterback wrote, “He’d come to practice directly from the woods, squirrel tails hanging out of his pockets, duck feathers on his clothes. Clearly he was a fine shot, so no one complained too much.”

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has the spicy details on the heretofore missing member of the Famous Klement’s Racing Sausages:

Guido, the Klement’s racing Italian sausage costume last seen a couple weeks ago adorning a bar hopper in Cedarburg, was returned Wednesday night after a day of media focus.

The hot sausage reportedly was dropped off at TJ Ryan’s bar in Cedarburg.

Two men — one wearing a hoodie pulled tight over his face — lugged the larger-than-life link into the bar just before 8 p.m. Wednesday, plopped him on a bar stool and warned staff, “You did not see anything,” said bartender Jen Mohney.

“Like I didn’t just see two guys plop a sausage on a bar stool,” Mohney said.

Mohney said the two left in less than a minute and she immediately called police. . . .

Until Wednesday night, the 7-foot get-up had been last seen Feb. 16. At a fundraiser at the Milwaukee Curling Club’s new Cedarburg location, a witness saw the sausage walk out the south door about 7:45 p.m., Cedarburg police Detective Jeff Vahsholtz said. The Italian sausage walked into TJ’s an hour later and also made an appearance around midnight at The Roadhouse Bar and Grill. . . .

Vahsholtz said before the return of the costume that he couldn’t say whether there would be charges for what seemed to be an elaborate prank.

More here.

Howard Megdal of Capital New York has more “You can’t make this stuff up” news from the tragically funny spectacle known as the Mets:

Amid fresh non-news that the Mets are still in debt, Amway, a business known for false promises of riches, has moved into a storefront at Citi Field.

The imagery isn’t great for the Mets, to say the least. Amway was busy settling a class action lawsuit alleging the company is a pyramid scheme at the same time Mets’ ownership group was fighting a lawsuit by the trustee for the Bernie Madoff victims over its role in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

But the cash-strapped Mets, who only recently contemplated putting a casino next to their stadium, seem to have made the calculation that whatever money they’re getting from the deal trumps any cosmetic problems that might stem from the association.

The Citi Field outpost is Amway’s first storefront in America.

On Saturday, Amway staged a grand opening (or “grand opening”: it got no coverage, as far as I can tell) with the Amway sign just a few feet away from a Mets ticket booth.

Amway is a multilevel marketing opportunity, to use the euphemism, or a pyramid scheme, to use the terminology of its critics. Individuals sign up as “Independent Business Owners”, or I.B.O.s, to sell an array of Amway products, buying them up front while simultaneously recruiting others to join Amway as well. . . .

When a class-action lawsuit against Amway’s now-defunct North American distribution arm, Quixtar, asserted that products were almost always sold to the next level of distributors, that Amway participants were asked to pay exorbitant up-front costs, that well over 99 percent of Amway participants lost money and that any effort to recoup losses were only possible in an expensive arbitration process, a judge allowed the lawsuit to go forward, calling the Amway contract stipluations ”a weapon to harass … and ultimately bankrupt their opponents.”

More here.

At the end of the first Men in Black movie, there’s an amusing scene where Will Smith’s character reveals that Dennis Rodman is actually an alien from the planet Solaxiant 9, and Linda Fiorentino’s character says, “Not much of a disguise.” Well, Rodman’s overlords have dispatched him on a new mission, a diplomatic one, to an equally alien culture. The man they called “The Worm” has slithered into Pyongyang with three members of the Harlem Globetrotters on a diplomatic outreach mission to unsuspecting North Koreans, using basketball’s popularity to build bridges between two peoples who know little else about each other. Said Globetrotter Buckets Blakes: “We use the basketball as a tool to build cultural ties, build bridges among countries. We’re all about happiness and joy and making people smile.”

When the people of the DPRK catch a glimpse of the tattooed, bejeweled, and bescarved Rodman, a shriek of horror is the more likely reaction. “He looks like a monster,” was one North Korean’s assessment on seeing a picture of Rodman in all his glory. On the surface, the whole thing screams “international incident.”

Unleashing Rodman as an ambassador of U.S. culture and values does seem like an odd choice; this experiment in hoops diplomacy may be the only contact with American citizens that many of these people will ever experience, and Rodman is the impression we want to leave them with?

On the other hand, for all his eccentricities (and that’s putting it kindly), Rodman is a pretty flawless representation of a uniquely American version of freedom, individualism, and self-expression. (Not to mention shameless self-promotion. And offensive rebounding.) Letting the North Koreans think we’re a nation of Rodmans seems like a pretty good deterrent against future saber-rattling. Worm, I say let your freak flag fly over Pyongyang.

— Rob Doster is senior editor for Athlon Sports.