Spring is turning into a Bad Deal for the Real Deal, according to this Strib article. Seems like the Real Deal, who has been pitching like ass-crap all spring, has lost his confidence. Mostly. He's still able to give quotes like, "I worked my tail off in the offseason, getting my arm all ready to go," he said, "and I come here and can't find the arm slot. It's frustrating...Real Deal has got to be himself."

Batgirl can't understand someone referring to himself in the third person like that.

Speaking of sucking, Grant Balfour/NoBalls is continuing his annual process of irritating the @#$% out of the coaching staff. He's injured again. Kind of. I mean, he might be okay. He might not. But you never know about these things. It can be so hard to tell. So stop pressurizing him, eh mate?

Meanwhile, the Job-like trials of Doctor Morneau continues, as is seems
he has developed a cyst on his appendectomy scar. Pretty soon, the good doctor will be able to operate on himself.

In more general news, the New York Times reports that the National League is now turf free.

And the hyperbole of the day award goes to Stanley Brand, lawyer for the commissioner's office, who vows to fight the congressional subpoenas of baseball's merry band of 'roid ragers--NOT in order to avoid getting a spotlight shown on MLB's complicity in allowing these players to do permanent damage to themselves, but in order to protect this country's sacred institutions.

"The audacity, the legal audacity of subpoenaing someone who's been a grand jury witness before there's been a trial in the case in California is just an absolutely excessive and unprecedented misuse of congressional power," Brand said.

"Not even the Iran-contra committee attempted to do that, and when it did, it tainted irreparably the prosecutions that came out of that investigation. Now, if that's what Congress wants to do to advance what it says is the public interest in combating a very serious problem that baseball has confronted, then, in my judgment, they've torn loose from their legislative moorings and they're marauding in an area of the law that has very serious consequences for the judicial system."

Batgirl thinks The Real Deal could learn something from this guy.