Mike Cameron’s name has, for whatever reason, popped up as a candidate for the Mets’ open left field slot for next season.

I don’t think it should happen and I don’t think it will, but the rumors have reopened debate amongst my friends over whether Mike Cameron looks just like Seal. You be the judge:

There’s a cursory resemblance, but I don’t think they have very similar faces. Not like Raul Ibanez and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, as demonstrated in this 2008 split:

Or like, as Jake Rake recently pointed out, Tim Lincecum and the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner:

According to press release from Newsday, Newsday is pioneering a new web model which involves charging money for Newsday.

According to me, Newsday is pioneering its way into new realms of dumb.

Here I thought the black background with white font was a bad idea.

I grew up on Long Island and my family subscribed to Newsday. Whenever I put aside dreams of being the President or an NFL linebacker to focus on the more realistic goal of becoming a professional sportswriter, I imagined writing for Newsday.

Now, starting in six days, I will no longer read Newsday, since I am unwilling to pay $20 a month to read Newsday.

The shame is that Ken Davidoff, the best baseball columnist in the New York papers and obvious respecter of me, writes for Newsday. So does Neil Best, the best of the sports media critics in the market and David Lennon, one of the best Mets beat writers.

They’re all good journalists, but they’re not $20 a month good when there’s so much else on the web. It’s essentially like paying for music or video on the Internet. Why bother when there’s so much free stuff out there?

Maybe Newsday really is pioneering a brilliant new era of Web money-making, and maybe they employed a bunch of really smart people who determined that this was a viable business model, but I doubt it. It feels like a last-ditch desperation move by another newspaper in financial straits.

I just don’t imagine making content exclusive is the way to increase awareness and expand the online footprint. It makes some sense when it’s the Wall Street Journal or something which fills a very specific niche and caters to rich people, but not with plain-old Newsday.

I have to guess Newsday will stop charging pretty swiftly, or maybe fold. I don’t know.

It’s a shame and I’ll certainly miss it, but the upside is at least I won’t have nearly so much exposure to Wallace Matthews.

“No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Why yes, I have heard the sordid details of Steve Phillips’ affair.

Honestly, I feel really bad for his kids, not just because their father has once again been outed as a philanderer, but also because their father is Steve Phillips. That can’t be fun.

Also, I can’t understand why anyone could be surprised to learn that someone so willing to spend time around Steve Phillips would turn out to be criminally insane.

But really, what’s interesting here is one of the details in the young lady’s crazytime letter to Phillips’ poor wife.

It turns out Steve Phillips has “a big birthmark on his crotch right above his penis and another one on his left inner thigh.”

First of all, gross. Second, could this be a clue as to why Steve Phillips hates Carlos Beltran so irrationally and so thoroughly?

Think about it: After “being awesome at baseball,” Carlos Beltran’s most distinguishing characteristic is the massive mole over his right ear. And now we learn that Phillips, too, is riddled with embarrassing birthmarks.

Could it be that Steve Phillips’ is publicly punishing Beltran because he can’t handle his own birthmark-fueled shame? Is Carlos Beltran, in some vague way, like the Hester Prynne to Steve Phillips’ Dimmesdale, forced to carry openly the burden Phillips keeps secret?

And could you imagine a catharsis in which Steve Phillips, finally overcome by guilt, throws open his pants to reveal himself to the world, throwing himself at Beltran’s mercy?

I prefer not to. I’m not insane, and thus am not interested in seeing any more of Steve Phillips than I absolutely must.

In a column for the Chicago Tribune this morning, Phil Rogers suggests the Cardinals could look to trade Albert Pujols.

Excuse me?

Pujols made a couple of odd and un-Pujolsy comments recently about his future with the Cardinals, saying essentially that he’s in no rush to sign a contract extension. But everything I’ve heard suggests that Pujols is a St. Louis-lifer. He went to high school in Independence, MO, and junior college in Kansas CIty, plus he’s all set up with restaurants and charities and his family in Nellyville.

But we can dream, huh?

Rogers suggests the Mets as a possible suitor in trade or free-agency, mostly because few other teams could afford what Rogers speculates he’ll cost. The Cardinals owe him $16 million for 2010 and have a $16 million option on his contract for 2011, which they’d be crazy not to take.

For some reason, though, and maybe this is some sort of schoolboy fantasy, I always get the feeling that the money is secondary to Pujols. He seems like he might be the one professional athlete with legitimately higher priorities. Like dominating.

Pujols is, according to Rogers, going to see Dr. James Andrews about his long-lingering elbow pain. That baffles me for a couple of reasons: First, if it really hurts, why is he still so awesome? Would he be even better if his elbow was fixed? Second, I was led to believe that Albert Pujols doesn’t feel pain.

Speaking of which, here are some true things about Albert Pujols. Forgive me if they sound like a Chuck Norris list:

1) In his first college game, Albert Pujols hit a grand slam and turned an unassisted triple play.
2) Albert Pujols’ career OPS+ (172) is higher than any single season in Mets’ team history.
3) In a series of coordination tests in 2006, Pujols not only scored remarkably high, but got better at the tests with practice and showed little fatigue. In one test, Pujols was asked to depress a tapper as many times as he could in 10 seconds. He tapped so hard he broke Dr. Desiree White’s tapper. Then, he fixed it for her.
4) Albert Pujols got a 100 on his U.S. citizenship test.
5) There’s also this.
6) In seven career Buddy Walk days, when the Cardinals host area children with Down Syndrome, Pujols — the St. Louis Buddy Walk chairman — has hit .393 with six home runs and 13 RBI.
7) Albert Pujols’ restaurant has 45 HDTVs.

Not enough people are familiar with the terms of Tim Wakefield’s contract. Check it out.

According to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, in 2006 Wakefield signed a one-year, $4 million contract with recurring club options. Every option is for another one year and $4 million, and every time the club picks up his option, an option for the next season is added.

So basically Tim Wakefield and Theo Epstein have determined that Wakefield’s knuckleball services are worth $4 million a year, and Epstein has the option to retain Wakefield at that rate for as long as he’s effective or until he retires.

The Sox exercised his $4 million option for 2007, 2008 and 2009, and, according to WEEI, they’ll do it again for 2010. Cool.

The Majors should always have a knuckleballer, so Wakefield has to keep it up until one of the Charlies Haeger and Zink assumes the mantle.

A couple of readers in the Voice of the People section in today’s Daily News, apparently responding to some earlier discussion that I missed, suggested that Johnny Vander Meer’s record of two no-hitters in a row is the baseball record least likely to be broken.

That could be true, but — and not to diminish the accomplishment, because it’s amazing — it sort of feels like a bit of a novelty record, no? I mean, Vander Meer’s dominance over those two starts is crazy, but it also feels like a crazy run of luck. It’s a pretty safe bet that no one’s ever going to break Fernando Tatis’ record for grand slams in an inning, either.

I feel like the record least likely to be broken that is often overlooked — and this is a pretty record-ish record — is Cy Young’s ridiculous 511 wins. The game has changed drastically since Young played, and so we almost look at that like a footnote more than anything — a novelty itself — but it’s no less amazing. Walter Johnson is the only other pitcher to break 400.

Basically, for anyone to even come close to Young’s record at this point, teams will have to radically change the way they use pitching staffs in some unforeseen way. I strongly doubt anyone is ever again given the opportunity to throw 400 innings in a season — and rightfully so, since so many of the circumstances have changed.

But that dude must have had some kind of arm.

Pat Lackey, in an awesome article for Fanhouse, examines Jim Tracy’s decision to let Huston Street face Ryan Howard last night.

As Lackey points out, Street is the Rockies’ closer, and so no one doubted Tracy. But Howard demonstrates a massive platoon split, and lefty Joe Biemel was available in the bullpen.

The whole concept of the one-inning closer makes no sense to me. It seems like the entire role has been developed to serve the save stat, and the save stat is an imperfect one. Is there anything more surreal than seeing the Yankees score a run to go ahead by four, instead of three, in the top of the ninth and watching Mariano Rivera stop warming up?

Check it out: In the 20-year period after Tony La Russa popularized the one-inning closer in 1988, teams won nearly exactly the same percentage of games they were leading in the ninth inning as they did in the 20 years prior.

It’s nice to have a closer that shortens the game, as they say, but all too frequently guys incapable of that job are pigeonholed into it for lack of a better option. And even worse, in the toughest situations — often in the sixth or seventh inning, when the starting pitcher has tired — teams frequently rely on their middle men, almost by definition the worst pitchers on the staff.

The problem is, the best relievers, obviously, want to be paid accordingly, and the way to do that is to accumulate saves. So relief pitchers demand to know their roles, and no pioneering team has yet had the nerve to tell them their role is to retire all the batters they face.

There now are stats that weigh the importance of a situation into which a reliever has been called and his ability to succeed in those situations. Stats Tom Tango creates, like Leverage Index and WPA/LI could help us understand the highest-leverage situations in a ballgame, and the pitchers who best succeed in them.

But I’m getting away from my point. There’s no reason the best pitcher in the bullpen should be limited to the ninth inning in games while his team is winning. Some shrewd team needs to break the mold and stop assigning so much importance to saves and the isolated ninth inning.

It won’t be the Mets, for sure, or likely any team so concerned about public perception. But it will happen eventually, once some smart GM decides not to pay such a premium for 70 innings and instead to find or groom a versatile reliever who can be equally effective in any situation.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The era of the one-inning closer should end. It brought us one beautiful, awesome pitcher of transcendent greatness: Mariano Rivera. When he hangs ’em up, so should the entire institution.

In a column for the Philadelphia Daily News, Marcus Hayes rubs salt in the wounds of New Yorkers everywhere by comparing Chase Utley to Brett Favre.

OK, I’ll admit that Chase Utley is awesome. He’s a spectacular baseball player.

But a couple of things:

First, responsible members of the media must never, ever bring up Brett Favre when he is not directly involved in the story. Brett Favre is an overrated media jester who can cry on command. He gets too much attention as it is. Don’t fuel the stupid, nonsensical, fawning fire.

Utley’s ninth-inning heroics, celebrated here, were on account of dumb luck. Yes, he hustled, and for that we should all be very proud of him. But the ball was foul and the umpire botched it. That is not heroism. That’s good fortune.

John Harper, in today’s Daily News, channels Murray Chass to show how relying on numbers ruined the Red Sox last night.

Harper’s point is that Terry Francona elected to have Jonathan Papelbon walk Torii Hunter to get to Vlad Guerrero because Hunter had more success against Papelbon this season, and obviously Guerrero made the Sox pay.

I can’t speak for Francona or why he made the decision. It baffled the crap out of me at the time. But I can point to the great Joe Posnanski, who uses numbers to show why the decision was a terrible one.

Harper concludes:

And while Francona was just managing by the numbers the Red Sox love so much, you wonder if his gut would have made the same call.

Ugh. I wanted to put together a well-reasoned response to Harper’s column but I don’t have the patience right now.

Look: Francona made a bad decision, and he paid for it. When he was asked to justify it afterwards, he cited a stat based on a terribly, pitifully small sample size, and John Harper went to town.

But what Harper entirely misses is that the Red Sox likely wouldn’t have even been in the playoffs without loving those numbers so much, and wouldn’t have won two World Series in the past five years.

I have no beef with people who choose not to view the game the same way I do. When they’re smart about it, I love nothing more than engaging them in respectful debate about how to put together a team or fill out a lineup card. It’s fun, and I’m certainly willing to recognize that the numbers I trust are not the be-all and end-all of baseball analysis.

But nothing bothers me more than how anytime someone with some ties to the so-called “Moneyball” school of thought does something dumb, stodgy columnists come out of the woodwork to bash the entire concept. It’s cherry-picking at its worst, and it’s the same type of polarizing discourse that makes me hate politics.

Tito Francona makes a bad decision and John Harper wants to know, essentially, “where are your precious numbers now?”

But the numbers I hold precious show me that baseball is a hilariously random spectacle, and that a single at-bat is never, ever, ever reasonable grounds upon which to make blanket statements.