As the season dwindles down to a precious few weeks, attention is focused on remaining races – not that there are any – and the playoffs ahead. But pause for a moment in your excited anticipation and think of how Pittsburgh Pirates fans approach the post-season.

They may actually look forward to it eagerly because once they get beyond Oct. 4, the Pirates can’t lose any more games this year. They probably can’t make any more trades either because they have already traded everybody of value.

On second thought they have Andrew McCutchen on their roster, and if they traded Nyjer Morgan they can trade Andrew McCutchen.

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If necessity is the mother of invention, it has done a pretty good job in developing a pretty good pitcher for the Texas Rangers. The pitcher’s name is Scott Feldman, and he entered the weekend with the best record in the American League, 16 victories and only 4 losses as a leader on the league’s most surprising team.

“Last year he pitched in relief and started for us,” Nolan Ryan, the Rangers’ president, said, tracing Feldman’s rapid emergence as the team’s No. 1 pitcher. “We felt going into spring training his highest value to us was pitching in relief. He could throw strikes and be able to be used more often than in a starting role so we started out that way. But we got into a situation where we needed him so we gave him an opportunity to start and he pitched at a level where he deserved to stay in the rotation.”

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It is a popular game with baseball writers. It is an easy game to play. All it requires is a telephone; the number of calls is up to the writer/player. An Internet column I came across last week epitomized the practice.

I won’t identify the column, the Web site or the writer because if I did, I would be singling out someone for an industry-wide practice, and that might not be fair. Suffice it to say, however, that the columnist is not a rookie and the Web site for which he writes is not an obscure site. In other words, this is not a piece by someone who doesn’t know any better writing for a site you would stumble across only by accident.

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