Congrats to Troy Smith for winning the Heisman trophy. He deserved it, and his win was a foregone conclusion.

But most college football analysts dismissed the second-place finisher, Arkansas' Darren McFadden. Not a single ESPN talking head even gave him a chance to finish second. Every single one of them said Brady Quinn would finish second and really didn't give McFadden a 'second' thought.

The Yankees should trade A-Rod while he still has value.<>

<>Why? Because the Yankees don't need him as much as the potential players they could get for him in a trade.

All season long, as the Yankees took advantage of the Red Sox' injuries and sub-par performances from off-season acquisitions (Lowell, Crisp, Beckett), all baseball fans heard about was how the Yankees were fielding an all-All-Star lineup that was bashing its way to victory after victory. But we heard little about the Yanks' pitching staff, which is getting older and less effective each year.

Detroit knocked them out of the playoffs because of the adage, "Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting." So for all that offensive firepower, the Yankees still couldn't beat good pitching, and A-Rod was just one of the Yankee hitters who had a miserable postseason.

So, the Yankees could have made the postseason even without A-Rod in their lineup, but they might have advanced if their pitching staff was better.

Trading A-Rod before his career begins to fade could net the Yankees some younger pitching that could, within a few years, give New York the kind of dominant pitching staff necessary to compete for more World Series titles in the near future. 

It has recently been reported in the news that the two reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada are being threatened with jail time if they refuse to divulge the source who illegally leaked grand jury testimony from the BALCO case that implicated such baseball stars as Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds as having used illegal substances to improve their bodies for playing baseball.

The reporters, their editors, their lawyers, and other journalists are now screaming that such a threat is unfair.

I think their pleas are full of crap.

Regardless of what was accomplished by reporting the details that were leaked, these two reporters knew beforehand that leaking grand jury testimony was a crime. Not that the reporters are criminals, but the leaker of the information is. These reporters should have had the foresight to realize that printing this leaked testimony would likely lead them to the position they are in now -- reveal their source, or go to jail. By reporting the information, they accepted this risk, and took upon themselves the responsibility to do jail time if that was what was required of them.

Williams and Fainaru-Wada should be content with their fate of facing jail time, likening it as a small price to pay for the goal they accomplished, which was forcing Major League Baseball and the Players' Accociation to negotiate tougher rules and standards for drug testing.