If a player went to bat four times in six years and didn’t get a hit, he probably wouldn’t command consideration for the Hall of Fame. Fair enough.

If a player, on the other hand, pitched four times in six years and threw a shutout each and every time, would he deserve to be in the Hall of Fame?

Well, the “player” who has pitched those shutouts is already in the Hall of Fame – he was actually 64 players this year – and the player who has gone hitless is at the Hall of Fame, running the Hall of Fame and doing at least as good a job as Larry, Curly and Moe could do.

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The people who work for Commissioner Bud Selig have obviously taken seriously his recent warnings on the economy. Depending on who is counting, anywhere from 19 to 26 reporters and other people who work for mlb.com are the first to feel the effect of the warnings

The layoffs, or dismissals because people who are laid off sometimes come back and these people don’t expect to come back, were disclosed by some of the people who lost their jobs. They received the news in the form of layoff packages Friday, and Dinn Mann, an mlb.com executive vice president, told more fortunate employees about the layoffs in a conference call Friday evening.

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C.J. Henry, J.B. Cox, Jonathan Poterson, Jeff Marquez, Brett Smith, Brandon Weedon, John-Ford Griffin, Jon Skaggs, Bronson Sardinha. There is no reason that any of these names should be familiar to the ordinary baseball fan. They and many like them, however, have played a role in the last decade of baseball history.

Until the last decade or so of baseball history, owners and players had filled it with angry, contentious relations. In the beginning of their formal labor relationship, whatever the players wanted the owners refused to give them. Then the momentum switched and whatever the owners demanded the players said no way.

Now, however, in a sea change unparalleled in sports labor history, the two sides have become so harmonious that they have taken the fun and entertainment out of their off-field matters.

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