Questions Still Swirling Around Dreifort

Notes, quotes and anecdotes from the Dog Days Diary:

* The problems Darren Dreifort has experienced in the eighth-inning role previously occupied by the virtually spotless Guillermo Mota are the Dodgers’ worst nightmare -- assuming that Brad Penny’s injury doesn’t prove to be long-term -- in the aftermath of the controversial trade with the Florida Marlins.

Dreifort can insist that this is not a new role, not a learning experience, not Pitching 101, but it’s all that and more, or as a person who knows him well said, insisting on anonymity, “Darren is now basically the last line of defense before [Eric] Gagne, and I have to think he’s going out there and thinking about it rather than just doing it. There’s nothing wrong with his arm.”

There may be nothing wrong with Dreifort’s arm, but a man who has worked his way through the AMA handbook while overcoming a variety of injuries and surgeries has recently been experiencing hip discomfort. People familiar with the situation are concerned that it may be turning worse under the increased stress and regularity of Dreifort’s new assignment.

* Owners will reward Commissioner Bud Selig with a three-year extension at a meeting in Philadelphia on Tuesday and Wednesday. What else can they do? Who else is there? Selig’s five-year contract would have expired Dec. 31, 2006, and there is no desire among owners, riding a 2004 high, to disrupt continuity and embark on a protracted search at a time when the current labor agreement and national TV contract will also be expiring in 2006.

Baseball is headed toward an attendance record, amid improved parity, and the owners are confident that the next labor agreement will produce even greater revenue sharing and a more restrictive luxury tax. The ultimate aim is an unstated but clearly orchestrated payroll cap in the area of $85 million, pleasing bankers if not the always skeptical union.

Said a National League owner: “We may never be able to do anything about the Yankees, but everybody else now seems to understand the need to get the house in order.”

* Extension or not, Selig’s primary order of business is to relocate the Montreal Expos, with Washington or Northern Virginia still the only feasible choices, despite the opposition of Baltimore Oriole owner Peter Angelos.

Actually, Angelos isn’t alone. There is a group of owners still wary about giving the D.C. area a third opportunity to support major league baseball, and there are six clubs that might vote with Angelos in opposing Washington or Northern Virginia.

Seven would be enough to defeat the recommendation, and the nervous possibility of that may be one reason the consensus-building and always unanimous-minded Selig hasn’t put it to a vote.

The six potential Angelos allies are the two New York teams, the two Chicago teams and two strange bedfellows, the Dodgers and Angels. All dislike reviving the precedent of territorial intrusion if the Expos join the Baltimore market, fearing the eventual possibility of third teams in their own major markets -- an idea floated by baseball’s own economic study committee in July 2000.

* The coup that forced out Jerry Colangelo as managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks and swept in renowned player agent Jeff Moorad as the club’s top official has red lights flashing at all levels of the industry.

The players’ union, according to an official, is investigating “everybody at Moorad’s firm,” to determine whether any player represented by the firm was compromised during the process of what the union believes “could not have been an overnight decision.”

This new investigation coincides with an ongoing union investigation into allegations by other agents that representatives of Moorad’s firm have been guilty of stealing clients -- a tawdry practice that has generated union investigations into other agents at other times.

In addition, if Moorad takes an equity position with the Diamondbacks and/or is designated as the club’s representative at owners’ meetings, he will have to go through a background check and be approved by the same owners with whom he has waged contract battles as a player agent.

The situation may be no more bizarre than longtime agent Steve Greenberg’s becoming deputy commissioner under Fay Vincent, but can Moorad guard against the perception -- and reality? -- of conflict and hypocrisy?

Can the man who helped inflate payrolls now deflate the Diamondbacks’ payroll? Can he tell future free agent Shawn Green he’s not worth $16 million a year, after helping convince the Dodgers that he was? Can he reject a possible contract extension for Luis Gonzalez, on whose behalf he negotiated Gonzalez’s five-year, $30-million deal with the Diamondbacks?

Colangelo put the Diamondbacks on the map in more ways than one and was repaid by being forced out when the bills continued to come due. The club still owes about $170 million in deferred salaries, about $120 million in stadium debt, and more than $10 million in bank loans.

The Diamondbacks are headed toward more than 100 losses, the ace pitcher would rather be in New York, the interim manager is expected to be fired and a general housecleaning could claim General Manager Joe Garagiola Jr., among others.

Moorad faces an imposing task, but then he has already accomplished the impossible -- creating consternation for both the owners and union.