Chuck Meehan alerts us to the following item at Radar, along with his personal disclaimer, “I have no idea how reliable this site may be,” though you could just as easily say the same of CSTB.

Billionaire blogger Mark Cuban is more serious about buying a major league baseball team than he’s been letting on. The tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner is set to offer $625 million to buy the Chicago Cubs from Tribune Co., according to a source familiar with the matter. “Mark is desperate to buy the Cubs,” says the source. “He wants this so bad.”

Though I’m sure Ben Schwartz will have an opinion or two on this matter, surely I’m not alone in thinking that if Lou Piniella’s locker room wrestling match with Dibble was any gauge, the inevitable blowup with Cuban would be one for the ages.

The New York Sun’s Tim Marchman stumps Tuesday AM for the Hall of Fame candidacy of former MLBPA Players Association head Marvin Miller (above), claiming “the list of 20th Century Baseball men clearly more important than Miller” is a rather short one —- Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.

Miller didn’t just help players become incomprehensibly rich; as he knew all along, the fight over the balance of power between labor and management is never a zero-sum game. It’s one that everyone can win. His assault on baseball’s feudal structure led to a vastly improved and much more competitive game, which led to more fans being willing to spend money on it, which led to owners making greater profits and baseball becoming an ever more integral part of the culture. Great as the legacies of men like Josh Gibson, Hank Aaron, and Christy Mathewson are, no one save Ruth and Robinson was more responsible for and representative of such fundamental changes in the game. (Arguments for Kennesaw Mountain Landis and Branch Rickey, though, will be duly noted.) If the Hall of Fame only could have 20 members, Miller would deserve to be counted among them.

All of this being true, yesterday’s announcement that the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee ” which comprises living Hall of Famers and winners of awards for distinguished careers in writing and broadcasting ” has once again elected no one was downright infuriating. This august body, created in 2001, is charged with giving a second chance to players unfairly overlooked by the baseball writers who vote players into the Hall of Fame and with passing judgment on umpires and executives. It has now met three times and has elected no one ” not Marvin Miller, not Ron Santo, and not Joe Torre. It has become even more irrelevant than the body it replaced, a Veterans Committee that served for many years simply as a means of inducting Frankie Frisch’s cronies and, as legend had it, elected the wrong player on two different occasions. One suspects that Ted Williams wouldn’t pass muster with this bunch.