eBay has secretly been one of the biggest boons for bloggers since Al Gore invented the Internet several thousand years ago. Whether it’s fans selling their fanhood, or Manny Ramirez selling his grill or our co-workers selling themselves for Super Bowl tickets … well, you get the point: endless fun.

But here’s a new one for you: the folks at Homer Derby bring word that one lucky smartass Brewers fan tried to actually sell Jeff Suppan on eBay. And, naturally, the starting bid was a penny.

Jeff Suppan For Sale - Worthless Pitcher from Brewers

Buy Suppan, Get Billy Hall for Free

Now, obviously, it’s not exactly legal to “traffic in humans” on the Internet (or anywhere, really) so eBay did the boring thing and took the auction down. I mean, it would have been at least mildly amusing to let this run for a few hours, right? Just to see how much Suppan could end up going for? It would have probably been closer to his equivalent value than what the Brewers are actually paying him, right?

But what would be awesome — as a possible result of this — is that some player really does buck up and say “If I underperform in this year or x month or whatever, I will will allow the team to sell me on eBay.” And, yeah, I know it’s not going to happen with anyone we care about, but how about a player like, say, Lastings Milledge, who just happens to be the perfect combo of “worthless” and “crazy” to make this happen.

The way the camera panned out on this puppy last night, it seemed like this was a home run for sure. But as it zoomed in, and you saw Reed Johnson — who really has had a knack for these type of catches since becoming a Cub a season ago — about to leap at the warning track, it was far from a done deal.

And boom, just like that, a grand slam off the bat of Prince Fielder become nothing more than a long sac fly. It saved the Cubs the game last night.

Reed Johnson had done it again.

The playoffs are here, and yet again, our collective reason and logic is clouded by sentiment. Over half the teams — Cubs, White Sox, Rays, Phillies, Brewers — are impossible to analyze for five seconds without pondering their emotional significance. This sentiment I feel, it’s a virus. It threatens to eat me up. It threatens to eat us all up.

It is time, friends, to invest our faith in numbers and find salvation in objective study. With the help of Baseball-Reference, I have compiled each playoff team’s adjusted OPS and adjusted ERA. Unfortunately, OPS+ is not as definitive a metric as ERA+, but it’s just about the closest thing. So we will sum the two metrics, and call the result the Index of Statistical Truth.

American League Divisional Series

White Sox: 102 OPS+, 111 ERA+
Index of Statistical Truth: 213

Rays: 103 OPS+, 114 ERA+
Index of Statistical Truth: 217

Infallible Projection: Rays over White Sox in five.

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When you perform in Miller Park for a living, you would think it would take a lot to get fired. You would actually be right. Unfortunately, “a lot” can include: playing a Chicago Cubs song. Which is what Ted Wulfers did. And naturally, lost his job as a result.

“It was not taken kindly by the Brewers fans,” said a spokeswoman for TGI Friday’s. “Friday’s and the Brewers made the decision not to have this band back this year.”

Wulfers, who sang the national anthem in May at Miller Park, said he had no idea Brewers fans would be upset with “just one chorus” from “Go Cubs Go.”

“Basically I had compared this to playing ‘Free Bird’—the crowd just kept asking for it,” he said, while conceding the crowd was mostly Cubs fans.

Now, losing your job at the Miller Park T.G.I. Fridays? Well, life could be worse. After all, it’s easy to grin when  your ship’s come in and you’ve got the stock market beat. But the man worthwhile is the man who can smile when the Brewers toss him out on his seat. Or something like that.

In reality, he played along with a crowd that consisted of primarily Cubs fans, and then tried to play it off like it was “Free Bird,” which it is not.

Miller Park is nice. I know a few fellow Cubs fans who have visited it — who have walked the spacious concourse and sat in a comfortable seat and enjoyed some superior food — who prefer it to Wrigley. Blasphemy, but true.

After visiting earlier this week, the Cubs are blaspheming, too:

After his no-hitter Sunday, Carlos Zambrano went as far as to say: “This is a beautiful ballpark. Gosh, I wish we could have a new ballpark.” Is Zambrano crazy, or should the Cubs abandon Wrigley Field and build a modern facility like Miller Park?

“Miller Park is beautiful,” center fielder Jim Edmonds said Tuesday before the Cubs’ game with the Brewers. “I have a much greater appreciation for that field now that we saw the other side. I don’t [know] what they should do with [Wrigley] because this is a great place, a place people have been coming to for almost 100 years. [...] “That’s what we have in front of us, and what we deal with,” Edmonds said. “I mean, I enjoy it, and I enjoy the history. Of course it’s always nice to have a new place. The weight room in Milwaukee is as big as our clubhouse, and they have whirlpool and weight rooms and batting cages, but it is what it is.”

I’ve long imagined that the Cubs players — more so than fans, owners, or community leaders in Chicago — would be unopposed to building a new field. That might seem like an outrage to those of us that pay $50 for a 400-level ticket, but think of it this way:

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A veteran of the Chicago beat reporting scene, David Schuster regularly writes about the sights and sounds of Chicago sports from the press box and locker room for MOUTHPIECE Blog.

Sometimes a professional athlete will veer away from the standard B.S. cliche and give a reporter the honest truth.

Such a thing happened at the beginning of the week in Milwaukee where the Cubs pretty much nailed down a divisional title while just about knocking the Astros out of the playoff picture.

As we all know, the two teams were forced to play in the (so-called) neutral city because of Hurricane Ike. All along Houston owner Drayton McLane insisted the games be played at Minute Maid Park. But it seemed silly. What about taking into account how the city had been ravished and that it would have been an injustice to ask fans to come to a ballpark when they were trying to (literally) put the pieces back together? McLane obviously was more worried about his pocketbook then anything else.

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Yesterday, baseball’s scoring review committee opted not to retroactively charge the Brewers’ CC Sabathia with an error in Sunday’s game against the Pirates. This is, of course, significant because if the official score were changed to an error, Sabathia would have a no-hitter rather than a one-hitter.

Sabathia tried to make a barehanded pickup of LaRoche’s softly hit grounder, but dropped it. Webb immediately ruled it a hit, explaining he watched LaRoche out of the batter’s box and the runner was two-thirds of the way down the line as Sabathia was picking the ball up.

…

On Wednesday, the committee viewed footage of the play in question and considered the documentation presented by the Brewers.

But the committee ruled that Webb’s judgment was not “clearly erroneous,” which is the standard set forth in Official Scoring Rule 10.01(a), and did not meet the criteria for reversal.

The fact that this is even an issue strikes me as sort of silly.  If Sabathia is credited with an error, he gets a no-hitter, but he suffers the loss of his no-hitter if he does not record an error?  In other words, he’s ultimately rewarded for having erred?  I understand that the no-hitter is an achievement relative solely to the actual act of pitching, but the nuances of the error make the term “no-hitter” a little less of an achievement and a little more of a statistical curiosity.

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