The notion of two baseball teams fighting over Gary Majewski is only slightly less improbable than two women fighting over Eric Mangini.  Then again, when the fight comes down to neither team wanting Majewski (link from the Cincinnati Enquirer’s John Fay), perhaps the comparison is more apt.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Gold reports on Bill Clinton’s visit to the Cardinals clubhouse last night, where presumably, the former Leader Of The Free World compared notes with Tony La Russa on covering shit up.

Surveying the Ted Lilly/John Gibbons flap, the Toronto Star’s Dave Perkins wonders “who’d want to play here?”

If you were a free agent in waiting, looking on from afar, what would you see? First you see the general manager, speaking out of frustration, rather mildly chide his players for underperforming a few weeks back. J.P. Ricciardi didn’t say anything particularly flammable, but some of his players took great offence and were in a snit. There was some candy-ass reaction there.

Then came the Shea Hillenbrand dust-up, the manager in there scrapping or at least offering to scrap, a sorry situation during which someone scratched what turned out to be highly prophetic words on to the clubhouse bulletin board: “This ship is sinking.”

The team went into the tank shortly afterward, after which the GM gave away a reasonably productive player (Eric Hinske) to a team ahead of the Jays in the standing for nothing immediate in return, then suggested the Jays still were serious about contending.

Fans of the Pollyanna persuasion might buy it, but players can see through this kind of nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with pulling the plug on a season and planning for next year, but don’t pee in everyone’s ears and tell them it’s raining.