ColbyCosh.com

Pretty much any human endeavor contains an element of skill and an element of luck. The person who is tops in the combination of the two that is directly observed is almost always going to have both working in his favor, and you're often going to be able to go back, after the fact, to point out where he got the lucky breaks.

I am most bothered by the fact that Bonds got grandfathered into being able to use the elbow-pad/hitting-machine -- if they're going to make it illegal, make it illegal, but have everyone who's playing at the same time play by the same rules -- though if I were looking to assign fault for that it would rest with MLB and not with Bonds. Perhaps if they had simply made it illegal, Bonds would have had fewer home runs; it would have been his bad luck not to have been born 5 years earlier so that he could have had more time hitting home runs with the device.

I'll never be happy until sports pages start taking seriously the pursuit of the player with the best five years of Adjusted OPS+. Of course, I'm also the kind of useless loser who regards the Oakland A's as the best team in baseball on the basis of their consistent cost-performance ratios.

For real unpopularity, though, you can't beat telling an online collection of hockey fans that making it into the second round of the playoffs is really a very good performance, and one worthy of being praised.