Notes, quotes and comment

I don't often hang around for FSN's post-game stuff, but the promised sight Tuesday night of Ron Gardenhire playing goalie after the Wild game was too good to resist.

Not to say that Darby Hendrickson and Terry Steinbach were firing NHL-quality shots at Gardy, but he seems pretty good with the glove hand, which I suppose one should expect of a former major league infielder, even when in his 50s.

But a goalie has to be better on skates than Gardy. A lot better.

Todd Richards, the Wild coach, returned to the ice to take in Gardy's style:

"You get to see a good goalie (Nikolas Backstrom, who had a shutout for the Wild) and you get to see a bad goalie (Gardenhire)."

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I've written the past two days about the Mets/Madoff connection and the implications for the franchise ownership. The New York Times reports the Wall Street con artist was heavily entwined with the baseball team's finances, and a good chuck of Bernie Madoff's clientele came to him though the recommendations of the Wilpons.

This is going to get uglier, I think.

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Rob Neyer left ESPN this week to join SB Nation. Because of that, I've added the SB Nation baseball home page to my siderail under "other baseball links."

Neyer was, for me, the biggest attraction to the ESPN baseball page; I expect my visits there to dwindle. And while I find SB Nation as a whole uneven -- so much of it is unappealing or even sophomoric that I've shied away from most of their blogs in the past -- they've made some intriguing hires of late on the baseball side, Neyer being the most prominent.