I received an interesting comment on last night's post:

Alan has left a new comment on your post "The other day, I got a snide little email from a f...":

If Derek Lee had teared up after the Cubs got swept this year, I would have never heard the end of it. Never. But of course, when it happens to TO, it's barely worth a mention.

First, and foremost, there is no fair barometer to compare a team that lost an NFL playoff game by four points to a baseball team which was bounced from the playoffs as quickly, brutally and unceremoniously as this year's Cubs were. Don't get me wrong, I don't tend to like picking on Cubs fans (unless they happen to be close friends of mine because I am a horrible person). But the Cubs were outscored 16-6 in their three game travesty against the Diamondbacks.

As for Derrek Lee, yeah he managed to hit .333 for the series against the Diamondbacks, so he has that going for him, which is nice. Too bad for the Cubs fans, all of his four hits were singles and not one of them drove in a run. And on top of that, he struck out four times. Better still, if you look at his postseason stats for his career, Derrek Lee has one more career postseason homer and four more RBI against the Cubs than for the Cubs.

TO didn't have his best statistical game by a long shot, but at least he managed to get his team on the board in Dallas' loss to the Giants. Not only that, but a wide receiver in football is much more bound to his quarterback's performance, offensive line play and his coaching staff's follies than is a first baseman in baseball. Lee got 12 official at bats against the Diamondbacks, but the Cowboys didn't exploit the mismatches available in the Giant secondary the way they should have in the second half.

Two of the missed connections between Owens and Romo in that second half, the long pass down the left sideline where a Giant d-back (I believe it was Corey Webster, but I might be wrong) tipped it away at the last moment and the pass inside the ten where the ball was behind Owens likely would have been TDs. The Cowboys should have gone back to those plays, or at the very least wasted a lot less time in their two minute drill. Can you really say that any of the GDPs Derrek Lee threw at us in the playoffs would have been run scoring plays?

To make a long story short, with the way he played and his team played, Derrek Lee forfeited the right to have any kind of emotional response to the Diamondbacks sweep this fall. TO produced one of his team's two TDs, so he earned the right to be a little frustrated with the Cowboy's failure. And be grateful I chose to overlook the fact that you misspelled your hero's name when you brought that foolishness up in here. I am the only one allowed to misspell words here.

In the giving the devil his due category, Bill Simmons came up with a fairly interesting and surprisingly well thought out comparison of the 1986 Celtics and this present Patriots squad. As far as comparing apples and oranges can be done, it was reasonably successful.

I do think that he is looking a little to hard at the present at the expense of the past, but then I've never been a Patriots fan while I was a Celtics fan before Danny Ainge came back to town. I think the Cs win going away in this comparison, since they neither sold their soul nor (perhaps, given that Moss is both a character problem waiting to happen and in a contract year) mortgaged the future for their epic run at history.

And I think Simmons also fails because he is even slightly afraid of jinxing these Patriots. Maybe Green Bay can catch lightning in a bottle, but I fear that this season is already over.