This card costs ’cause you aren’t supposed to have it’

(Darren Rovell/ESPN.com, 2.5.06)

What a fiasco. How did Kansas City Royals rookie Alex Gordon get his face onto a baseball rookie card when the MLBPA says he hasn’t met the eligibility criteria to qualify to appear on one?

1917: Chicago White Sox
1918: Boston Red Sox

2004: Boston Red Sox
2005: Chicago White Sox

The IOC meeting in Singapore has decided today that Beijing 2008 will be the last appearance of baseball and softball at the Olympic Games for the time being. They have been dropped from the 2012 games in London, but are theoretically eligible for re-inclusion in the Microsoft Seattle Olympics of 2016 (remember where you hear it first!)

This is a pity from my point of view, as baseball is one of the few Olympic competitions which capture my interest.

A brief IOC announcement is here. Five other sports are candidates for inclusion in 2012: Roller Sports, Squash, Karate, Rugby (presumably the seven-a-side mutation) and Golf! Later today, the IOC Executive Board will decide whether to submit any of the five to the IOC session, which is scheduled to wrap up tomorrow.

Hopefully, the IOC takes a big reality check and admits none of the five - and continues to reduce the Olympics in size in the years to follow.

We know it had to come. His place at the Cubs had become untenable at the end of the 2004 season. But the trade came rapidly this week. Sammy Sosa is now a Baltimore Oriole.

Never mind his brief stints with the Texas Rangers and the Chicago White Sox, Sammy was one of the greatest Cubs of all. He has hit 574 home runs, 541 of those for the Cubs. (Here are his stats from Baseball Reference)

Baseball America analyses the complex trade deal. Check out the discussion of the Sosa deal on the blogosphere.

Media coverage at the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.

I’ve heard it said this week that Sammy Sosa was bigger in Chicago than Michael Jordan. Dead right in my opinion, Sosa is a much better baseball player than MJ ever was.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

More later.

Our favourite baseball team in the Mexican Winter League, the Tomato-growers of Culiacan, are finished for 2004-05. They lost their semi-final series in the seventh game on Thursday to the Venados of Mazatlan 8-2.

The Venados are taking on the Aguilas of Mexicali in the final series. Mexicali won game one on Saturday 7-3. Game two at Mexicali Sunday night.

With the college baseball season revving up this weekend, the playoffs are also well under way in Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. More about those later.

Considering that Test cricket in Australia is sponsored by a mobile phone company, it can’t be long before we will have this to endure:

Submitted to Poynter Online’s Media Tidbits by Monique Van Dusseldorp:

Another one that made me smile: doing the wave with your mobile phone. How does that one work? A Dutch company just launched SMSwave this week, at a baseball game of the Demon Astronauts in Amsterdam. First people in the audience register their participation by sending in their chair number via an SMS message - the ‘wave’ is then played out, by calling all registered phones in the right order, generating a wave of sound travelling the audience. Free to the audience, the service is open for sponsoring as well - users get a thank-you sms from the advertiser. Founder Jan Louwers has in the mean time patented the technology and is plotting away on making his sms wave global.

Los Tomateros de Culiacan are leading the Mexican Pacific League! They are 16-9 after beating Los Venados de Mazatlan 10-9 in 11 innings on Thursday.

Come on ye Tomato Growers!

There wouldn’t be too many people still around who can remember the Red Sox last World Series win back in 1918. Even that great Bostonian, JFK the First, would have been less than 18 months old when they did it. The question now is whether Boston can make it a double: the Red Sox today, and the junior senator from Massachussetts (JFK the Second) in the presidential election on Tuesday?

A great, and concise, comment on the Red Sox win at guff.szub.net:

Residents of Hell take up ice skating

You may already know that the Boston Red Sox just won the World Series, a 4 game sweep against the St. Louis Cardinals.

I’d voice my congratulations, but nobody in Boston can hear anything over the celebratory rioting.

More reaction to be added to this post as I come to it. Keep your eye on the Fire Brand of the American League, the Most Valuable Network’s Red Sox blog site.

Jeff Gordon (not the Nascar driver) of the St Louis Post-Dispatch has filed his report on Game Four.

Brainwagon.org’s baseball section has Podcasts, but not for Game Four yet. He does, however, point out that the Curse of Bambino came to an end with the first World Series game to be played during a total lunar eclipse.

It took less than a minute for the Boston Globe to put this up on their home page:

More later. Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox on their first World Series title since 1918.