World Baseball Classic predictions

First Round:

Pool A: Japan and Cuba
Pool B: South Korea and Taiwan
Pool C: Venezuela and Dominican Republic
Pool D: United States and Mexico

Second Round:

Pool 1: Japan and South Korea
Pool 2: United States and Venezuela

Semifinals:

Venezuela over Japan
United States over South Korea

Final:

Venezuela 6, United States 3

Tournament MVP: Miguel Cabrera

Newsletter Extra: HEY A-ROD, IF THE POPE CAN DO IT, YOU CAN TOO

Special to The New York Daily Postday

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Now, there's really no excuse.

Monday's news that Pope Benedict XVI will be stepping down for health reasons provides Alex Rodriguez with the perfect example of self-sacrifice in the face of adversity. The Pontiff, with years to go on a lifetime deal, walks away from a gig far greater than that of "part-time Yankee third baseman," putting the Catholic Church ahead of his own ego.

If the Pope, the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, can walk away, then so can A-Rod, the disgraced and despised roider at the center of the Biogenesis scandal. Perhaps in doing so, A-Roid can regain a fraction of the respect and dignity he has sacrificed at the point of a needle.

Sources in the Yankees' front office who are unauthorized to speak on the record backed the idea. "If this doesn't point the way, I don't know what will. I mean, the Church isn't the Yankees, but it's close enough. And Pope Benedict has more mobility right now than A-Rod does."

"I mean, there are ways to raise the heat. We could play 'Ave Maria' in the clubhouse. Maybe bring back Chad Curtis. But it's up to him."

Rodriguez has been under enormous pressure to leave the game over the past month. On the heels of a humiliating postseason in which he single-handedly torpedoed the Yankee offense in an ALCS sweep at the hands of the Tigers, Rodriguez underwent a left hip arthroscopy last month. He is, at best, expected to miss half the season and could miss all of it. The Yankees have signed Kevin Youkilis to play third base while A-Rod recovers, meaning they're spending $40 million on aging third basemen this year, all in the name of the most unpopular baseball player since A-Rod's fellow cheater Barry Bonds retired.

A source close to A-Rod dismissed the idea. "Alex wants to get healthy and get back on the field, to earn both the money he's owed and the respect of Yankee fans everywhere."

That's small-minded and weak. Neither Yankee fans nor the Yankee front office nor MLB wants to see Alex Rodriguez don pinstripes again. Pope Benedict XVI was as beloved as A-Rod is despised, and he still found it within himself to set ego aside and resign.

It will, as so many things with cheating ballplayers do, come down to money. Rodriguez is owed $114 million for the five years remaining on his contract, and, unlike Benedict, he hasn't taken a vow of poverty.

Then again, what A-Rod could do would be, in many ways, greater than what Pope Benedict did. After all, Pope Benedict is backed by a deep bench of Cardinals and a Church with both an unlimited budget and no luxury-tax concerns. The Yankees are hamstrung by their desire to get under the tax threshold for 2014, a move that would save the Steinbrenner brothers millions in tax penalties for years after that.

This isn't really about money, though. Pope Benedict has lit the way for Rodriguez to regain his good name. If he were to come clean about his steroid use, cite his bad hips and his desire to leave the record books unsullied by his tainted numbers, and walk away now, Rodriguez might regain a measure of the respect he's lost over the past five years. He'll always be a cheater to some, but to others, a move like this might be enough to reconsider his career by the time his name comes up for the Hall of Fame five years down the road.

It's your move, Alex.

Newsletter Extra: Momentum

As you surely know, Sunday's Super Bowl was interrupted early in the third quarter when about half the Superdome's lights went out. The game was delayed for 34 minutes, and from the time the game resumed to the end, the San Francisco 49ers played better than they had prior to that point. For most, this made the loss of lighting a key trigger event in the game. I spent some time on Twitter yesterday pointing out how silly this was -- even over and above the bullshit dump that is "momentum" -- but it's worth spelling it out in greater detail.

The game resumed with the 49ers in a third-and-14 spot at their own 40-yard line. Colin Kaepernick was chased and completed a short pass to Delanie Walker well short of the marker. Down 28-6, facing fourth-and-seven from their own 46, the Niners elected to punt, a pretty bad decision that went largely unnoticed. Andy Lee punted the ball into the end zone, and the Ravens took over at their own 20. Joe Flacco immediately completed a pass to Torrey Smith for a first down.

Full stop.

At this point, both teams' units have been on the field since the delay. The Niners offense ran a give-up play, their punter managed to miss the red zone from his own 30 or so, and their defense allowed an immediate first down. The aftermath of the blackout delay was that the game was going exactly as it had gone from the opening kickoff. Even if momentum existed the way the entire sports-media community insists that it does, it had not moved following the blackout delay.

The Ravens proceeded to run three more plays on this drive, falling short of a first down by about a yard, maybe less, and electing to punt on fourth-and-1 from their own 44. (Again, a bad decision, but cowardly punting is the way the big, strong manly football of the NFL is played.) Sam Koch followed Andy Lee's lead and kicked the ball into the end zone.

Now we're on the third possession, the eighth snap, about two minutes of game time and maybe ten minutes of real time into the post-delay football game. Now is when the game did change. Kaepernick scrambled twice for a total of 20 yards, and the Niners' comeback was on.

Two theories:

1) The game changed when the delay happened and momentum shifted, only it waited until the Niners failed and then the Ravens averaged six yards a play on their drive and executed a bad idea of a punt, to make that clear.

2) The Ravens punting on fourth-and-1 gave the Niners an opportunity, and Kaepernick's two scrambles -- he had one in the entire game to that point -- opened up an element of the offense that made it incredibly hard to defend.

You can listen to a thousand football players and a million sportswriters, but there's an infinitely better argument to be made that the fourth-down punt at midfield was what changed the game, rather than the delay. Here's the thing, though: nothing changed the game. Two good football teams played, and at some moments, one team played better than the other one did.

I find the "momentum" discussion painful because it diminishes the game and the athletes who play it. The desperate need to find reasons for everything that happens and to assign meaning to small streaks of events is disrespectful to the talented men on the field. The difference, the real difference, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers is measured in tenths of a percent. Play that game 10,000 times and no team will win more than 5100 of them. Outcomes are what they are not because of some mystical force that -- according to its own adherents -- comes and goes unpredictably, but by the effort and execution of absurdly talented men. There's just enough randomness in the form of bounces and officiating -- where NFL refs have a lot more leeway to affect a game than do their MLB counterparts -- so that the entire construct rests shakily, like that couch at grandma's no one will dare sit on.

If you can't appreciate the football game you watched last night on its merits, if you need to parse the events just so to fit a narrative, have at it. But when you do, get it right: the fourth-and-1 punt, not the blackout, was the hinge on which the two teams' play swung.

Newsletter Extra: Breakdown

Reader Travis Leleu did an analysis of the newsletter's content…I'll let him explain:

I visited each of your newsletter articles (453) available on your website and looked how frequently you mentioned teams and players. Each team/player only counted once per article, i.e., an article mentioning the Yankees twice only counted once.

To the results: you wrote about the Yankees and Rangers a lot, nearly three times as frequently as the Astros, Blue Jays, Marlins, and a few other teams.  Your most commonly mentioned player was Cliff Lee (makes sense; he's been a big trade deadline / free agent / superstar pitcher over the sample period).

This analysis was done last fall, so it's slightly out of date. (That's on me, not Travis, as I've been sitting on this for a while.) But it's fun to share, and I hope you'll get a kick out of it. Thanks to Travis for doing the work.

Cliff Lee: 70 (15%)
Albert Pujols: 49 (10%)
Ron Washington: 44 (9%)
Derek Jeter: 42 (9%)
Buster Posey: 35 (7%)
Josh Hamilton: 33 (7%)
Ryan Howard: 33 (7%)
Mariano Rivera: 31 (6%)
Alex Rodriguez: 31 (6%)
Mike Napoli: 30 (6%)
Tim Lincecum: 29 (6%)
Adrian Gonzalez: 29 (6%)
Tony La Russa: 29 (6%)
Neftali Feliz: 29 (6%)
Carl Crawford: 29 (6%)
Ryan Braun: 28 (6%)
Chase Utley: 28 (6%)
David Price: 28 (6%)
Evan Longoria: 28 (6%)
Lance Berkman: 27 (5%)
Ian Kinsler: 27 (5%)
Michael Young: 27 (5%)
Mark Teixeira: 27 (5%)
Felix Hernandez: 27 (5%)
Jayson Werth: 27 (5%)
Jonathan Papelbon: 26 (5%)
Justin Verlander: 25 (5%)
Miguel Cabrera: 25 (5%)
Edwin Jackson: 25 (5%)
Stephen Strasburg: 24 (5%)
Aubrey Huff: 24 (5%)
Roy Oswalt: 24 (5%)
Bruce Bochy: 23 (5%)
Hunter Pence: 23 (5%)
Clayton Kershaw: 23 (5%)
Matt Kemp: 23 (5%)
Adrian Beltre: 23 (5%)
Jose Bautista: 23 (5%)
Jason Heyward: 22 (4%)
Joe Mauer: 22 (4%)
David Ortiz: 21 (4%)
Shane Victorino: 21 (4%)
Jorge Posada: 21 (4%)
Adam Dunn: 21 (4%)
Zack Greinke: 20 (4%)
Elvis Andrus: 20 (4%)
Kevin Youkilis: 20 (4%)
Charlie Manuel: 20 (4%)
Cole Hamels: 20 (4%)

Newsletter Extra: There Is No "Clean"

Lance Armstrong, it turns out, was a walking biology experiment.

This doesn't bother me as much as it does others. The things we call "medicine" today would have been called "witchcraft" 50 years ago, and the things we call "cheating" today will be "medicine" 50 years from now. Where the lines are drawn are more about politics than anything else, and I don't have faith in politicians to get politics right, much less science or anything else of actual import.

The thing is, Armstrong denied any bad behavior right up to the point he couldn't any longer. The reason he couldn't continue to deny it was that -- despite his saying it was about his son defending him -- there was a mountain of evidence against him, the product of tens of millions of dollars spent investigating his use of sports drugs and the practice of blood doping. Armstrong is one of the people who, due to their success and their high profile, have been targeted by individuals, such as journalists, and organizations, such as the US Anti-Doping Agency. There has been more time, money and effort put into researching the history of what Lance Armstrong put into his body than there has for your average biker.

Similarly, in baseball, we have Barry Bonds. Bonds was the subject of a best-selling book, Game of Shadows, that attempted to answer the questions of whether and when he used sports drugs. On the heels of that, Bonds was the target of an investigation by various government agencies as to whether he used sports drugs and subsequently lied about it to a grand jury. As with Armstrong, we have some idea of what Bonds used and when because of the staggering sums that were poured into finding out the information.

In baseball, we also have the Mitchell Report, a prosecutorial brief that cost $30 million and was built largely on publicly-available information and the testimony of a couple of drug dealers looking for leniency. It produced names that were helpful in feeding the media beast, but little else of import. At that, most of the names have been forgotten.

Think about these processes. In Armstrong's case, a man operated a bike-race-winning drug ring for years, became a folk hero and only confessed at the end of a decade-long effort by multiple organizations the cost of which may have topped out at $100 million. With Bonds, you had a book by two respected investigative journalists and a witch hunt by a federal government operating almost with impunity, producing, in the end, only a very shaky conviction on a count of felony dissembling. The Mitchell Report? You could have lit three million hundred-dollar bills on fire in Times Square for all the useful, reliable, consistent, actionable information it produced.

So if that's what you get when you put hundreds of millions of dollars and enormous amounts of manpower into investigations of sports-drug use, then how can we ever say that anyone is clean?

We just went through a Hall of Fame voting cycle that indicted a number of players' careers on a variety of shaky evidence, from a failed drug test in a final season to a confession of use to "just look at him". Next year, however, a number of players will hit the ballot who come into the conversation with a presumption of cleanliness, such as Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas. That presumption, which is granted based largely on whether your stats were "good, but not too good" and whether you had an acceptable relationship with the media, is utterly ridiculous. We've seen what time and money produces, which isn't very much. If you cloned Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams an infinite number of times and set them loose on every single player who played from 1985 to today, what would they find? If you told Jeff Novitzky that the MLBPA had issued a press release saying his mother wears army boots, what would we learn about everyone?

The biggest lie of the so-called "steroid era" -- and the intellectually bankrupt way in which the media has convicted the approved villains of that era -- is that we know who didn't use. We do not and we never will. Assumptions that Thomas or Maddux or Jim Thome or Ken Griffey Jr. or Derek Jeter are "clean" are as meaningless as assumptions that Jeff Bagwell or Mike Piazza or Sammy Sosa are not. We don't know. We don't know because no one ever looked so deeply into those players as they did into Bonds, as they did into Armstrong. You can't read sports-drug use by looking at a person's body, and you can't read it by looking at a stat line, and you damned sure can't read it based on who's answering questions in front of his locker after a tough loss. Too often, though, that's how those decisions have been made.

We don't know. We'll never know. To grant the presumption of innocence to some and not to all, though, is to ignore just how hard and how expensive it has been to gain the minimal knowledge we have about the people who have been the primary targets of investigation. It's time to stop designating some players as "clean", because the gap between "clean" and "dirty" is really just about who pissed off the wrong people.

Newsletter Extra: Landing Spots for Bourn

The best free agent remaining on the market, Michael Bourn, has a flawed profile, as discussed in Thursday's newsletter. Bourn was expected to pace the center-field market when the offseason began, but B.J. Upton, Shane Victorino and Angel Pagan all signed fairly quickly, and teams like the Nationals and Reds filled center field through trades. Despite this, there are a number of teams who could use him, even teams not specifically in the market for a center fielder. Here are the teams that are the best fits to sign Bourn at this late date.

Rangers: The Rangers got neither Zack Greinke nor Josh Hamilton, and they signed A.J. Pierzynski to a bargain-basement deal. Even eating money for Michael Young and some raises due to players under contract, the Rangers have money to spend. With Hamilton gone, they're missing an outfielder, with Leonys Martin now slated to have a starting job -- something he's yet to prove he's ready to keep. With Nelson Cruz a free agent after 2013, the Rangers are going to need an outfielder in 2014 as well. They could sign Bourn, get a big defensive upgrade in 2013 and fill the leadoff spot, allowing Ian Kinsler to bat lower in the order, better fitting his skill set. Bourn/Kinsler, with Elvis Andrus ninth, is better than Kinsler/Andrus, with Martin ninth. Signing Bourn a short-term solution that would make the team better, and he'd even be a serviceable fourth outfielder on the back end of a three- or four-year deal.

Orioles: The Orioles don't have a leadoff hitter, though they did get good work from Nick Markakis in that role last last year. They've re-signed Nate McLouth, but McLouth makes a better extra man than starting left fielder. (They also hope for a healthy Nolan Reimold in 2013.) Signing Bourn is also unlikely given Adam Jones' defensive reputation and salary, even though he's not a plus center fielder. File this under moves that make more sense to the statheads than the front offices.

White Sox: Alejandro de Aza was an incredibly important player for this team last year, and he sets up as one again next year. The White Sox project to get poor OBP from as many as six lineup slots, and there's no guarantee de Aza repeats rather than adds to that number. The Sox, down Kevin Youkilis and A.J. Pierzynski, need Bourn's OBP, even taking the downside risk into account. A de Aza/Viciedo platoon in left field is much more attractive than Viciedo as an everyday player as well.

Rays: Desmond Jennings moves over to center field, but he's 26 years old and has a career .327 OBP in the majors. That number was .314 last year. Sam Fuld is listed as a starter for this team, so clearly Bourn would be an asset. In an AL East where the Yankees and Red Sox are down, the Rays could pick this year to spend some money. Bourn also fits their defense-centric approach.

Yankees: This is unlikely, because the Yankees are determined to reset their payroll below the luxury-tax threshold. Doing so could save them $50 million over a period of years, so it makes sense to do so. Signing Ichiro Suzuki -- who has been a replacement-level player for two years -- blocks Bourn, as well.

Reds: The Reds don't have a center fielder, and signing Bourn would crowd both their payroll and their outfield. Were they to sign Bourn, though, the impact on their defense, their depth, their team as a whole might be enough to make them the best team in the NL. Given that the Reds have remained below average in attendance despite two division titles in three years, it may be difficult to argue that they should blow open the vault doors for a luxury item.