Greeson: Mets still paying Bonilla

Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt filed for bankruptcy protection this week, and the entire organization is mired in a nuclear soap opera.

This will not affect the payroll, however. Major League Baseball has pledged to make payroll for the Dodgers, even though the club is on the hook to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars to the likes of former outfielders Manny Ramirez, Andruw Jones and Marquis Grissom as of this morning.

And it's still not the worst deferred payments story around.

According to the New York Post, the New York Mets will cut a $1.2 million check sometime today to Bobby Bonilla. Yes, that Bobby Bonilla, who has not played baseball anywhere since October 2001 and was last with the Mets in 2000. It gets worse.

When the Mets released Bonilla in 2000, they agreed to defer the payments of the $5.9 million Bonilla was owed until July 1, 2011. That agreement was with the nice little kicker of adding 8 percent compound interest, which will make the value of the buyout roughly $30 million by the time it's complete in 2035. Ouch.

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Former University of Tennessee quarterback and current U.S. Congressman Heath Shuler has been mentioned as a possible candidate as the next Volunteers athletic director. Shuler appears more news-filler in a newsless vacuum than headliner, though.

He was a great UT football player - he was the Heisman runner-up in 1993 - but today's big-boy AD jobs are more CEO than coach and certainly more desk jockey than ex-jock.

Shuler's time in politics could be viewed as a feather in his fundraising cap. But Vols athletics is a $100-million-a-year business that prides itself on making money and operating in the black - and operating in the black is not high on Congress's list of priorities recently.

Here's saying that UT has its eyes on someone with more experience in athletic department management than athletic field success.

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Hours before the NBA labor lockdown, the Portland Trail Blazers made a qualifying offer to Greg Oden.

You may recall that Oden was the No. 1 overall pick four years ago, a spot ahead of two-time NBA scoring champ Kevin Durant, who appears to be headed for super-DUPER-stardom.

Oden has played all of 82 NBA games because of injuries and appears to be this generation's Sam Bowie, the former Kentucky center whom Portland drafted one spot ahead of Michael Jordan in 1984.

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Ricky Vaughn, the star rookie starter-turned closer for Lou Brown's miraculous Cleveland Indians team in the 1980s classic baseball film "Major League," admitted to using steroids to bump up his fastball.

Actor Charlie Sheen, who played Vaughn back before he snapped and went off the deep end of sanity and landed in a molten pool of Tiger Blood and Adonis DNA, said he used steroids to increase his velocity for the filming. "I did them for like six or eight weeks," Sheen told Sports Illustrated. "You can print this: ... my fastball went from 79 to like 85."

On the baseball metaphysical side, which cheating was worse: Vaughn using steroids or Eddie Harris putting snot on the ball?

Seriously, each is cheating the game, but why does an alleged steroid user such as Roger Clemens draw such venom and known ball-doctors such as Gaylord Perry are viewed as crafty gamesmen?

Until next time.

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