Call me a traditionalist.

Tonight, your Boston Red Sox will play baseball together for the first time since they were swept at Fenway Park during the fourth weekend in August last summer, and all should be right with the world. However, there are a couple of items that I've noticed in the papers the past couple of days that are really grinding my gears.

One of the peripheral stories on the baseball front over the past couple of days has been what appeared to have been a bit of a snafu at the Topps baseball card company. Now, I realize that baseball cards have really fallen by the wayside over the years, but it wasn't too long ago that they were a brisk trade - I still remember collecting cards, and my mother has to dust the big old binders in my closet in Lynnfield to show for it. Members of my generation can still remember opening a pack of cards and going straight for that unwrapped, stale "gum" that came with each set of 12, collecting 15 Luis Riveras for each Ken Griffey Junior or Bo Jackson. Go even further back in the history of the game and the cards were even more fundamental. I think there is still a place for baseball cards in the modern fandom, but the card companies have to be willing to bear down and do battle with the Magic and Pokemon cards favored by the Dungeons and Dragons kids.

Anyways, this week the new set of cards came out. Here is Derek Jeter's card.

Now say what you will about Jeter, but in terms of marketing the league he is a pivotal figure. You would think the most prominent face on the most prominent team in the league would merit plenty of attention, right? Well, if you'll notice, the fine people at Topps have Photoshopped Mickey Mantle into the Yankees dugout and George Bush into the crowd. A funny little in-house prank that slipped by the final checkpoint, you would think? Not quite. A spokesman from Topps said, "We saw it in the final proof, and we could have axed it...[but] we thought it was hillarious." That's a great way to do business. We'll see how hillarious it is when your department is closed down next fall to expand the Yu-Gi-Oh! Blue series.

On the other end of the spectrum of tradition, local New York idiot and Times sports "writer" Murray Chass wrote a particularly insightful passage in his column on Tuesday regarding the new wave of statistical analysis in baseball. And I quote:

"I recieve a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics that only stats mongers can love.

"To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time I had no idea what VORP meant and didn't care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn't know what it meant either.

"Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don't ask me what it means. I don't know.

"I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that's their [sic] prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans' enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

"People play baseball. Numbers don't."

Just to lay out a quick point of fact, if you google VORP, the second item that comes up is a page titled "Introduction to VORP: Value Over Replacement Player." I understand Murray may not have had time to do such a time-consuming activity, but you would think he would be able to squeeze it into his schedule, seeing as how it is his job to talk about sports.

Can you imagine something like this happening in any other line of work? Imagine if there was a problem that doctors around the world were trying to wrap their minds around, and suddenly in one corner of the industry there was an innovation, a breakthrough. If you cared about the business at all, wouldn't you at least check it out and do the most basic level of research? Sure, VORP is a totally geeky statistic, but it is a fascinating new angle to look at statisics. How could that conceivably undermine anyone's enjoyment of the game? Are geeks going to black out simple numbers for the less developed fans like Murray, replacing his antiquated "batting averages" and "win-loss records" with things like OPS and win shares? Heaven forfend!

This is the kind of surly rant one would come to expect if you brought up the advanced sabermetric statistics to your grandfather, who was a blue-collar fan of the Sox since the days of Pinky Higgins. But writing about sports is Murray Chass' profession. It is his job to know about things like this.

But that's fine. Let Murray remain in the late 1930s in terms of his statistical tools, and he can keep telling his loyal readership that Derek Jeter is an excellent fielder (it can be statistically disproven) or that Johnny Damon is so valuable because of his base-stealing ability (its his plate discipline).

Finally, the last item for the evening is the rumblings surrounding the Baseball Hall of Fame's Veteran's Commitee shutting out all its applicants for another year. Jane Forbes Clark, the chari of the Hall of Fame, said yesterday that these results "may decide...[the process] needs a little bit of a change."

I would argue: Why? Remember, before the Veteran's Commitee gets to even vote on a player, they must have been declined by the Baseball Writers' Association for fifteen years. These are not outstanding players - simply by virtue of surviving on the writer's ballot for fifteen years, they are probably the definition of mediocre or fringe Hall of Famers. And I thought the Hall of Fame was reserved for the Best, not the Yeah, Probably Good Enough, I Guess.

The Veterans Comittee is an oversight commitee. They did a great job several years ago in inducting a bunch of Negro League players who had been ignored by the BBWAA. That is what the committee is for, not for allowing a Ron Santo or a Tony Oliva to sneak into Cooperstown through the back door.

Keep the Hall of Fame elite. There are too many people in there already.