Go read Larry Stone today

Larry Stone has a lot of good stuff in his Sunday column:

Extra! Extra! MLB sticks it to fans

I've withheld commenting on the Extra Innings situation, because I wanted to get a further grasp of the issues, and also see how baseball would attempt to wriggle out of a public-relations nightmare.

Now that the deal with DirecTV is official — but still in flux — it looks like Bud Selig and Co. did some backroom dealing to keep from looking like money-grubbing ogres.

Did they succeed? Not quite. Not yet. This whole situation, despite affecting a relatively small number of fans, still leaves a bad taste, still threatens to tick off Major League Baseball's most passionate customers, and still seems to be, well, a public-relations nightmare.
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When the actual deal was announced this past week, it had been tweaked to appease both fans and legislators. Now, both Dish Network and cable provider In Demand will have a chance to offer Extra Innings, provided they agree to carry the MLB Channel, a new all-baseball network that will launch in 2009. Such an agreement was the centerpiece of the original exclusivity given DirecTV, whose payout to MLB would drop commensurately with the addition of alternate providers.

Dish and In Demand must agree to those terms by March 31, or else fans will have to switch to DirecTV if they want the Extra Innings package. The only alternative for out-of-market games would be via MLB.com, but those games can only be viewed on the computer.

The early response from In Demand president Robert Jacobson was not encouraging. Apparently bristling over the MLB Channel requirement, he told The Associated Press the agreement between MLB and DirecTV was "a de facto exclusive deal" and said in a statement run by The New York Times that "this decision represents the height of disrespect and disregard" to fans.

Now, it's important to note, as the Los Angeles Times did, that Extra Innings had 500,000 subscribers in 2006, and more than half — 270,000 — were DirecTV customers.

Stone wraps this part up with a point that even if things work out for MLB, baseball still winds up looking like jerks.

Stone also has updates on former Rattlers Emiliano Fruto (WI '02) and Greg Dobbs (WI '02).
Things aren't going well for Fruto

While I was in Nationals camp a couple of weeks ago, everyone was raving about Emiliano Fruto, who was traded by the Mariners, with Chris Snelling, for Jose Vidro.

The Nats seemed to think that Fruto was the sleeper of spring. Catcher Brian Schneider raved about his "nasty" stuff.

"He has a chance to be a quality reliever in the big leagues," Nationals general manager Jim Bowden said.

Perhaps, but the start of spring games haven't been kind to Fruto. In his first 2-1/3 innings of work, he gave up three home runs, and sported an earned-run average above 20.

Things are going much better for Dobbs

Dobbs appears to have a solid shot a utility job with the Phillies, battling Karim Garcia and Randall Simon for a spot.

"He's more of a National League than an American League player," [Phillie's GM Pat} Gillick said. "They don't use the bench as much in the American League. Here, there's a lot more double switches. Greg has a chance to maybe go out of here as a left-handed bat off the bench."

Dobbs had three homers heading into Saturday's game.