A Little off the top

With Red Sox manager Grady Little taking more heat in Beantown this past week than Joan of Arc, I decided to set the record straight. By the eighth inning of game seven, Little already had less control of the outcome than Shaq at the foul line.

Yep, you heard it here first. Johnny Damon's mullet cost the Sox the series.

No, not any statistical decline. Damon hit .256 with an on-base plus slugging total of .766 during this year's playoffs, compared with .273 and .750 during the regular season.

No, not any physical problems. Damon had fully recovered from his holy-crap-it-looked-like-he-just-got-hit-by-a-truck collision with Damian Jackson in game 5 of the Oakland series.

It was that other awesome power - the curse of the mullet, if you will - that truly determined the result of the ALCS.

If you don't know what a mullet is, I believe Webster's defines it as, "a hairline on the back of the neck that edges just past human decency; or a hairstyle promoted by Satan; or a tourist attraction in Texas."

You knew it wasn't going to go Boston's way the second Tim McCarver said that everyone on the team but Nomahh and Damon had lopped off their domes for good luck during the playoffs. Garciaparra didn't go to the razor because he was getting married to Mia Hamm the next week, and honestly, if he's with Mia Hamm, he's gotta be doing something right.

But Damon had no such excuse.

I mean, I could understand if his parents were Fabio and Rapunzel, but honestly, what's a scrawny centerfielder from Fort Riley, Kansas doing with a Minnesota Mauler? Had he only looked to the past for advice, Damon would have realized the error of his ways and broken that other curse in the process.

Whether you call it the business cut (business in the front, party in the back), the 10-90 cut (10% in front, 90% in the back), or the shlong cut (short in the front, long in the back), the mullet seems to be to baseball teams what kryptonite is to Superman.

Example 1: John Kruk - the, um, big-boned Phillies slugger from the early nineties, had a career average of .300 and hit 100 home runs over 10 seasons. Thanks to Kruk's Long Island Iced Tease, though, the Phils got bounced from their only World Series by bald Joe Carter's lowly Blue Jays in 1993.

Example 2: Randy Johnson, The Big Unit, was already 143-83 with 2,329 strike outs before he signed with the Diamondbacks in 1999 - but no World Series ring. In Seattle and Houston, he had an Ape Drape that rivaled Andre Agassi's, but since the mullet was axed before the 2001 season, Johnson was able to pick up three wins with a 1.04 ERA against the Yankees in the World Series.

Example 3: Mike Piazza, tirelessly heralded as the greatest hitting catcher who has ever played the game, has as many rings as a jewelry store after visits by Liz Taylor and Jennifer Lopez. What else besides a Soccer Rocker could explain the lack of bling-blingage on this 10-time All Star?

Example 4: Gary Gaetti played third base for Kirby Puckett's 1987 World Series champion Twins team, but back then his neck didn't have the Sphynx. He played 14 more seasons in the bigs - Neckwarmer included - and he didn't even make it back to another fall classic.

Instead of looking back at the Mud Flaps that screwed these guys, sports columnists up the yin-yang have been jumping on Little. Why, they ask, did it take four straight hits off Pedro to send him to the showers? Why, they ask, did four other big league managers call Little and say they would have done the same thing? Why, they ask, didn't Pedro himself know it was time to go? The solution, it seems, is pretty obvious.

Damon's Canadian Passport glaring in from center field single-handedly massacred the hopes and dreams of an entire city.

So, Theo Epstein, the choice is up to you. You have Damon hooked through the 2005 season, so either you trade Byung-Hyun Kim to Fantastic Sam's so one of their guys can perform the de-mulleting ceremony, or you just get it over with by trading Damon outright.

Seeing how Kim's got to be due for some post-season success eventually (hee hee), ship the Hack Job off for a DH under 600 pounds and enough money to buy a lifetime supply of Bics for the entire team.