If you're interested in baseball (and perhaps even if you're not), you've probably heard by now that the Manny for A-Rod deal is toast. Bud Selig used his tinhorn despot powers to put the kibosh on further negotiations, and the Sox management termed the talks "dead," which isn't encouraging.

So I've been trying to come up with alternate deals, and have come up with two off the cuff and not particularly well thought-out options:

1. Send Manny to the Orioles for prospects, use money to sign Vladi. I think Angleos is just crazy enough to buy into this, though we'd probably have to pay part of his salary. I'm also not sure what Vladi's target figure is, but he turned down $14 mil a year in Montreal.

2. Send Manny to the Devil Rays for their starting eight, keep Rocco Baldelli, and trade the rest as needed. I imagine this would also require trading off Johnny Damon, though I suppose they could platoon for a year.

In either case, we'd still have the Nomar question. Going back to an earlier post, this is taking on even greater shades of the Carlton Fisk debacle. I can see him moving on after a disgruntled '04 and us getting nothing for him. We'd then get to watch him spend another decade playing high-level baseball for someone else, wondering where it all went wrong.

And let's not even begin to consider Pedro and the other free agents at the end of '04.