The Federal Government, whose batting average has dipped well below the "Mendoza Line" when it comes to prosecuting cases involving high-profile athletes, will step into the batter's box on Monday, and will once again attempt to take Roger Clemens Prison Yard.

Last July U.S. Judge Reggie Walton declared a mistrial accusing prosecutors of making a mistake that even a ''first-year law student'' wouldn't make when they allowed the jury to see evidence that he had ruled inadmissible.

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In 2004 Frank McCourt bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for a little over $430 million, most of it with debt-ridden loans. He then proceeded to: drive the team into bankruptcy while driving away fans by raising ticket and concession prices annually, paid a close friend over $400,000 a year (25% of the budget) to run the Dodgers charitable foundation, and became involved in a bitter divorce fight that was scandalous even by Hollywood standards.

Among the disclosures coming out of the divorce suit was that the McCourts used the Dodgers as their personal bank, taking over $100 million from the team to finance a Hollywood lifestyle that included several luxury homes.

And what did McCourt get for all his incompetence and greed?

Earlier this week he sold the Dodgers to a group fronted by Earvin "Magic" Johnson for $2.1 Billion – CASH.

The same day that the sale of the Dodgers was finalized there were reports that the Fox Network is seriously considering challenging ESPN by starting a national sports cable network.

What these two events have in common is the seemingly staggering amounts of money that can be made from regional and national sports channels.

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As you know, SB Nation has embarked upon a video adventure with Google / YouTube. You will see some of this in the not too distant future right here on Barking Carnival.

Aside: We are currently negotiating with HenryJames' SWAT team of agents to get him lensed in sepia tone drinking and debating the relative merits of a variety of craft beers from around the world. His last text was from De Groote Witte Arend...

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First, we have to deal with this. I will speak of it only once.

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The Rangers have a better-balanced, more talented team overall, but the Cardinals have three distinct advantages: (1) Chris Carpenter; (2) Tony LaRussa; and (3) a better bench. Saint Loo used all three last night to beat Texas 3-2 and claim Game 1 of the World Series. Comprehensive reviews at Lone Star Ball; my take below:

1. Whither Roy Hobbs?

I'll get to the 7th inning in a minute, but as managerial miscues go, that was nothing. Ron Washington actually made a much bigger mistake when he filled out his lineup card. Texas had only 8 baserunners last night. Ian Kinsler reached twice, on singles in the 1st and 6th innings. He had no chance to score either time because of the punchless chasm in slots 2-3-4 of the Ranger batting order. The biggest problems are Josh Hamilton and Michael Young, who have absolutely no business hitting 3rd and 4th (respectively) right now.

Hamilton has acknowledged that he's only at about 50% due to a nagging groin injury (is this guy ever really healthy?). This is why he hasn't hit a home run in almost a month -- he can't generate enough power from his legs and his hip turn is soft. Swinging the bat must also be awfully painful for Hamilton since he seems so eager to get it over with. First pitch in the same zip code and he's hacking. Hamilton is hitting .267/.286 OB/.378 SLG for the playoffs, so at least he's faring better than The Face of The Franchise (vomit). Young's playoff line: .191/.224/.319. Wash needs to reconfigure his lineup. His biggest producers -- Beltre, Napoli and Cruz -- are hitting too late and its costing them ABs. If not an outright 5-6-7/3-4 flip, then at least a complete re-shuffle. Matter of fact, given Andrus's lousy numbers, I'd hit Napoli 2nd. Think I'm crazy? Bullshit. It might get him one extra plate appearance per game. Andrus and Napoli have each played in 11 postseason games this year. Andrus has 51 PAs to Napoli's 45. Now who would you rather have at the plate six more times? The guy with a .190/.306/.190 line, or the one stroking .325/.400/.475? That's what I thought. Kinsler is getting on base (not as much as he should at .295, but some), but Wash is wasting his production with the Hamilton/Young vacuum. This isn't the regular season where you can afford to placate egos and let things work out.

2. Washed Out

If nothing else, this World Series offers a group hug opportunity for the troglodyte baseball press and the abacus jockey blogosphere. Most of them think that Wash is a lousy tactical manager -- and he made two decisions in the 7th inning last night that didn't do anything to help his cause. The first one is defensible. The second one; not so much.

With runners on first and second with one out, Wash pinch-hit Craig Gentry for David Murphy. The move was intended to counter LaRussa's insertion of lefty Mark Rzepczynski. Murphy hit .215 BA/.234 wOBA against lefties this year and .253/.286 for his career. Gentry was better this year against lefties in limited duty, but career-wise, his numbers are a scratch with Murphy's: .265 BA/.325 wOBA for 2011; 242/.287 career. Result: Gentry looked at strike 3. With the pitcher (Alexi Ogando) due next, off the bench Wash calls the Ruthian juggernaut otherwise known as Esteban German, who hit a spry .301 in 123 games for Round F-ing Rock this season. The 33-year-old German must have made quite an impression in his September liberation to Arlington, going 5-11 with 4 singles and a double. He's a contact-spray guy who has hit .280/.333 wOBA over 1,000 or so big league ABs. German made the post-season roster in large part because Wash's favored utility man, Andres Blanco, has a bad back. German looked like a guy who had yet to make an appearance in the postseason, which is exactly what he was. Result: struck out on 3 pitches, the last a dirt-borne slider.

The bone of contention, of course, is why Wash didn't pinch Yorvit Torrealba instead of German for Ogando? One reason being tossed around is that Wash was trying to force LaRussa's hand; make him go to righty Octavio Dotel right there, in which case Wash would have countered with one of his two available lefties: Mitch Moreland or Endy Chavez. If that was Wash's intention, he wouldn't want to announce Torrealba as a pinch hitter only to have to waste him. German was expendable in that regard. But LaRussa didn't bite, and why the hell would he? Screw the platoon advantage -- German is a slap hitter with no pop who's been on the bench for almost three weeks. Let's be clear about this: this was no Mensa move on LaRussa's part. The vast majority of major-league managers wouldn't have fallen for Wash's ploy there, either (if that's what it was). In any event, the decision to opt for German instead of Torrealba in that situation is drawing a lot of heat. Assume that LaRussa counters with Dotel. So what? For the season, Torrealba hits right-handers better than left-handers: .256 BA/.273 wOBA vs. LHP; .280/.324 vs. RHP. Wasn't this the reason that the Rangers added the third catcher -- Matt Treanor -- to the roster, so Wash could make use of Torrealba's bat off the bench?

3. The Ersatz Ace

I'll leave the C.J. Wilson debate (sign him or not) for another time and place, but the immediate fact is this: he's been a tremendous disappointment this postseason. In his 4 October starts, Wilson is 0-3 with a 7.17 ERA, 14 walks and 21 strikeouts. Opponents are hitting almost .300 against him, including 6 dongs. Last night was arguably his best performance, yielding only the 3 earned runs over 5.2 innings on 4 hits with 4 non-intentional walks and 4 Ks. In this case, the numbers don't tell an accurate tale: C.J. didn't pitch so much as he just survived and got pretty damn lucky. The damage could have been much worse. Thankfully for the Rangers, Wilson was able to keep the ball in the ballpark. But he was pitching from behind half the time (9 of the 18 hitters he faced, minus intentional walks and first-pitch plays), and was wild in the middle of the zone (that's where he got lucky). His slider wasn't biting and his cutter looked flat. Out of 94 pitches, the Cards swung and missed six times. On a night when Chris Carpenter was good but not great (and dealing with a sore elbow), this was a missed opportunity for Wilson and the Rangers. The offense shares some of that burden, but definitely not all of it.

Nobody, including Wilson, is making any excuses. There's no talk of fatigue or anything like that. My opinion is admittedly uninformed, but I sense that C.J. is one of those guys that compounds his own trouble. It seems like he's fighting three opponents in each of his last four starts: the other team, the umpire and himself. Wilson is a thinker, and he's stubborn as hell. Don't think, meat, just throw. He also seems to have forgotten that the most important pitch in baseball is Strike One.

4. Outlook

If the Rangers will remain the series favorite if they win Game 2 tonight.

There is no biographical information on Nelson Cruz’s Wikipedia page. Just a name, a date of birth and a chronological listing of his baseball career.

I don’t know anything about his family. I’ve never heard him speak in an interview and I’ve never read a magazine profile about him.

As a Dallas resident and extremely casual baseball fan, I am aware of his existence. But beyond telling you how good he is at baseball, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about him as a human being. It’s kind of nice.

I was a baseball fan as a kid, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to watch the games. They are really long and there’s hardly any action. I have about the same attention span as my five year old cousin; if you’re asking me to commit four hours to watching something, it had better be the Godfather.

** The NBA understands this. That’s why you are bombarded with loud music and artificial crowd noise while the game is played. If the action ever stops, they pump up the noise even louder: either by blaring an overproduced skit on the Jumbotron or parading a bunch of strippers around center-court. Some people might not like all the empty theatrics, but I appreciate anything that breaks up the monotony of everyday existence. **

A playoff baseball game is different though. Everyone watches playoff games. It’s an excuse to get drunk in the middle of the week, yell profusely and generally act like a front-running douchebag. More importantly, it’s an excuse for people in Dallas to feel good about themselves, send out "Dallas = Titletown USA" text messages and whitewash any negative feelings they have about their community.

Y'all wish you were doing it this big.

That’s what professional sports are about, providing a sense of community for communities far too big to have any real sense of the word. As a UT alum and a Dallas sports fan, I’ve been lucky enough to experience deep playoff runs in baseball, basketball and football in the last few years.

The difference is, because I don’t follow baseball as much, the individual Rangers players are more abstractions that actual people to me.

I know about Colt McCoy’s family in small-town Texas, and that he was lightly recruited out of high school and that he believes in Jesus and that his wife is good-looking. I know about Dirk Nowitkzi’s upbringing in Germany, and the trials and tribulations he suffered to become an NBA superstar and the time he dated a woman who was not very good-looking and turned out to be a criminal.

Nelson Cruz? I know he’s a 6’2 240 pound outfielder who moves surprisingly well for a man of his size. He’s a tank of a man who can walk off having a 100 mph fastball beam him directly in the chest. He doesn’t hit just-barely home-runs; he hits moonshots that explode off his bat. His arm is just as powerful: he gunned Miguel Cabrera down by ten feet in Game 4.

That’s all I know about him, and I feel like that’s enough. Because I’m free of any narratives about his career that have grown up around him, I can simply appreciate him for what he’s doing on a baseball field.

If you ever watch one of Hubie Brown’s telecasts of an NBA game you’ll notice this. The man is a fan of the game, but that’s as far as it goes. Ask him about Zach Randolph, and he’ll tell you how impressive his post-up game is and what soft touch he has for a big man. Ask him about whether LeBron can win a championship, and he’ll hem and haw and talk about how skilled LeBron is and what the Heat can do to win a title. He doesn’t seem to know anything about Z-Bo or Bron’s off-court issues, nor does he really seem to care.

He’s watching them as players and not as characters in a story. So from his point of view, the question of whether LeBron or Dirk can win a championship is entirely besides the point. They can do certain things on a basketball court that can be combated in certain ways. He expects they’ll perform with a level of professionalism so that only what happens on the court will affect their performance.

As someone who writes about the NBA, I get asked about LeBron a lot. Is he arrogant? Well imagine if you were a 16-year old who was put on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Imagine you were bigger, faster and stronger than all your peers. Imagine that you were always the best athlete and the most skilled player on the court, and that this never changed, even when you entered the NBA. If I had to guess, I’d imagine he’s fairly insufferable in person.

Gandhi would be a dick if he was this famous at 16.

On the court, he’s a 6’9 270 point guard. There’s never been a man of his size with his speed and skill level before; he’s operating in totally uncharted waters. As a fan of the game, how could I not enjoy watching him play basketball?

Off the court, he’s just a really tall dude who can jump really high and do cool stuff with a basketball. He’s not important in any way. We’re almost the same age; if I ever met him, I would go out of my way to act like meeting him is no big deal: "Picture me being scared / of a n**** that breathe the same air as me."

There’s no real difference between an athlete and a rapper, between LeBron and Biggie. They’re just entertainers. Who they are as human beings has really no bearing on how much they entertain me when I’m watching them perform.

I enjoy listening to Rick Ross rapping about how many people he’s killed, how much drugs he’s sold and how much money he’s made. Does it matter that he used to work as a correctional officer? Not really. He’s got hot beats.

Similarly, I enjoy watching Nelson Cruz hit home runs. It’s very entertaining.

If it turned out that he used steroids when he was younger, a lot of Rangers fans would be disappointed. I wouldn’t. If anything, I’d be impressed: here’s a man willing to sacrifice his health in order to amuse me! I’d appreciate that he was that dedicated to making my viewing experience slightly more enjoyable.

I have no emotional investment in Nelson Cruz. If he stops hitting home runs, I don’t want him playing for my team anymore. If he continues to hit home runs, I don’t care what he does with his free time.

He’s just Employee #17 to me, and that’s all I'll ever ask him to be.

This is why the Texas Rangers are going to be so damn hard to beat in the postseason. For one thing, the bullpen is a bottomless well of asphyxiating filth. That Whatasizes narrow Ranger leads and keeps opponents within striking distance. Exhibit A: Game 1, ALCS. Exhibit B: Game 2, ALCS. Collectively: 12.2 scoreless frames, 5 hits 3 walks, 16 M.F. strikeouts. Tonight: Barbara Feldman to Alexi Ogando to Wash Mistake to Neftali Feliz to Mike Adams of Sinton, Texas.

Beats the hell out of working at Sears.

For another thing: this is the deepest lineup in baseball. Nelson Cruz -- the 7-hole hitter -- just hit the first walk-off Dong Augustus in post-season history. And that would be his third dingus of the series.

Motor City bound, up 2-0. Discuss, please.

Time is short, but I wanted to put in a few quick words before first pitch in the Texas/Tampa ALDS. Since there's a beer vendor that desperately needs my attention, I'll leave most of the data points to others and just tell you what I think. I'll also be checking in with posts after the games.

By now, you may be aware that the Texas Rangers are a trendy pick to win the World Series. One of these days, I'll be able to read something like that and not recall Pete Incaviglia lighting farts in the clubhouse or Charlie Hough getting ready for a start by leisurely working his way through a pack of Tareyton 100s. Still not quite there yet.

As a general rule, post-season picks are inherently unwise propositions since they're based largely on what you saw over the summer. Regular season baseball lends itself to forecasting. You have meaningful sample sizes to work with. Not so in the post-season. Understand this: baseball is played from April to August. The September game (que desperation stage left) that you saw over the last couple of weeks is a hybrid. And then there's the October game. This, boys and girls, is American fucking hardball.

Baseball and hardball are two fundamentally different games. Success with the former guarantees you nothing with the latter. Examples from the "wild card era" (since 1995): (a) the team finishing the regular season with the best record has won the World Series only three times; and (b) the team with (or tied for) the best record lost in either the LDS or LCS 12 times.

Baseball is about accumulating, surviving and grinding. Division titles are won by steadily overtaking the field. Conservatism is rewarded. Safeguard your outs. Avoid the big mistake. It's like the gradual but undeniable force of water.

Hardball is played with your ass on fire while tethered by dental floss to the outer edge of your physical envelope. There's nothing gradual about it. Everything is consequential. Aggression is a bigger part of the game by an order of magnitude. So is luck. Both combined make it much harder to predict, but a hell of a lot more fun to watch.

When you look at the field of eight clubs, the trick is to separate the accumulators from the hardballers. General rule: accumulators don't fare well in October. Ask Billy Beane. Better yet, ask Joe Torre. The 1996-1999 Yankees were hardballers. The 2002-2008 Yankees? Classic accumulators.

Lest you think otherwise, the distinction I draw between baseball and hardball isn't a thinly-disguised middle-finger to the abacus jockeys. Far from it. You need advanced metrics to help you tease out who the hardballers are. Why and how are are certain teams successful? How many ways can somebody beat you? Although there are good arguments against it, I will indulge in smaller, late-season sample sizes in certain situations to get a feel for a team's post-season chances. In the Rangers' case, I think September was huge because Texas kept kicking ass even after clinching the division. Hell, Wash tried resting everybody and then the bench players got hot. Eventually, the Rangers decided to go hammer down for the 2 seed and as a result come into the post-season as the hottest team in the game (winners of 9 of the last 10, 16 of the last 20 and 22 of the last 30).

For my money, the 2011 Rangers are hardballers right down the line. Why? Because Texas is the deepest, most complete team in the tournament that can literally beat you any which way. It's the only team in the AL that ranks at or near the top in several key power, speed, baserunning and defensive metrics. It's impossible to understate how much that means to a pitching staff. Look at it this way. Starting pitching was--or is--supposedly the weakest link on the club. Yet the Rangers' starting rotation ranks at or near the top of the AL in several metrics, including xFIP (2nd, 3.82), SIERA (1st, 3.71) and cumulative WAR (2nd, 19.8). And for the last month of the season, the Rangers had the best starting pitching in baseball, with the rotation going 15-4 with the highest strikeout rate (23.6%) and 2nd lowest SIERA (3.21).

Losing the Clifton Phifer Lee sweepstakes hurt. No doubt about it. But the Rangers are a better team than they were this time last year in part because Derek "Dutch Oven" Holland, Matt Harrison and Alexi Ogando matured quickly enough to win 43 games between them. Those guys get a lot of credit for that, but ask any one of them and they'll tell you that pitching behind a lineup that's prison raping the rest of the American League and throwing the leather tends to take the pressure off a tad.

Something else that helps: the back end of the Ranger bullpen is fathoms deep and dirtier than a bag of assholes. The Koji Uehara and Mike Adams deals triggered a complete reformation of the Texas pen from an Achilles heel to a weapon that can turn a game into a 5 or 6-inning affair. It lit a fire under Neftali Feliz and enabled Wash to adopt a more reasonable deployment strategy for Darren Oliver. And adding Alexi Ogando to the mix makes the pen just flat out sick.

So, do I believe that the Texas Rangers can win the World Series? Hell yes. But here's the thing about hardball. In about 20 minutes, none of this will mean a damn thing. Buckle up.