Today on the FAN, Mike Francesa said that Nomar Garciaparra is not a good fielding shortstop. When a guy called up and tried to defend Nomar, Francesa said, "Wait a minute, you wanna tell me Nomar Garciaparra's a good defensive shortstop?" in the "you have to be stupid/how dare you waste my time saying such things" tone of voice. Then he basically used his talk show host skills to trap the guy and make him seem dumb, which I could tell he wasn't. So now the whole New York area can say with confidence that Nomar's not a good fielder.

I'm not calling Nomar the best fielder in the league, but he does some amazing things. And even calling him simply "good" would be doing him an injustice.

The funny thing is, they were talking about this because they were doing a top ten of best current overall players, and five minutes earlier, Francesa put Derek Jeter on his list. Mad Dog, the yankee hater, of course said that he can't agree with that, and Francesa's reply was "[Jeter] has an intrinsic value..."

And in that pause, I swear Francesa himself was about to bust out laughing at what he'd just said, but he didn't. (Unfortunately, Mad Dog held back, too.) That logic has just become so stale. I expect the rookie talk show hosts to still say it, but at this point I've even heard FAN mid-morning host Sid Rosenberg say something like, "Well, Jeter's got the intangibles, that's what they always say." But to hear Francesa say it like he was the first one to think of it, as late as 2004, was just ridiculous. And it made me that much angrier when he then completely and ignorantly shot down Nomar.

I wish one of these New York guys would just once say, "Now, mind you, I only watch the Red Sox when they're playing the yankees, but..." before they go telling all of New York something about a Red Sox player.

Later, about Manny, they were saying how he's basically a first ballot hall-of-famer, but he might not be because, "you know, he's flawed." What? Why, because you don't like him?

And while I'm talking about Francesa, let me get this off my chest about Mariano Rivera. Okay, Rivera's obviously a really good pitcher. And there's always a lot of debate about who's the best reliever. There are the people who say that Mariano's the best, and they bring up the post-season to prove their point. And there are people who say the post-season doesn't count when comparing Rivera to others who've never been there. Here's where Francesa turns into a nutjob. Somebody called using the latter argument, saying how Gagne has never pitched in the post-season, and that's not his fault, and we don't know how good he'd be given the same chance as Rivera. (I agree with this. If Rivera just happened to be on a team who never went to the playoffs instead of going every year, none of those post-season stats would even exist. You could say he makes a team that much better, but think about it, if the yanks had never had him, how many years would they have missed out on the playoffs because of it? I think none, but that's my opinion.) Which brings me to my point about Francesa. Where I admit that my opinion is just that, he states his as if it were fact. His answer to the guy was: "You can't tell me Gagne would be as good as Rivera in the post-season, because you COULDN'T do better than Rivera's done in the post-season."

Actually, you could, Mike. That's a fact, not an opinion.

So the way I look at it is, Mike Francesa thinks Mariano is the best reliever of all time, because he feels his opinion is fact.

I also thought it odd that on a Fox game two weekends ago, they put up the stats of Gagne and Rivera, only they showed Rivera's post-season stats next to Gagne's regular season stats, and then had people vote on who they'd rather have, and thanks to this biased stat, Rivera won almost three to one.

Anyway, I'm off to see Fahrenheit 911 on this pre-Sox vs. yanks day of rest.