When I tell people that Neifi Pérez is my favorite player, I don’t exactly mean that I love Neifi Pérez the human being or even some idealized, media-created version of him as a human being, one who does good work in the community or happily signs autographs for the kids or jokes around winningly with the morning guys on the radio. I’m also not joking, though I will admit that my fascination with Neifi began as a goof.

He began his career with the Colorado Rockies, spending a few years in the starting lineup and producing decent offensive numbers for a slick-fielding shortstop — thanks almost entirely to playing half his games at Coors Field, which aided hitters to a preposterous degree. He needed that boost just to get to decent. For a slick-fielding shortstop. But people paid less attention to park factors then than they do now, and while any baseball fan knew Coors Field was a pinball machine, most tended to take Rockies stats more or less at face value.

Then, on July 25, 2001, Pérez was traded as part of a three-team deal to the Kansas City Royals, for whom the trade boiled down to Pérez for Jermaine Dye, a twenty-six-year-old All-Star outfielder who had been a fine slugger for two years and would continue to be one for the rest of the decade. Dye was the World Series Most Valuable Player in 2005 with the Chicago White Sox. Pérez spent a year and a half in Kansas City hitting not like a slick-fielding shortstop but like a pitcher.

That performance, combined with the idiocy of the trade that had brought him to Kansas City, made him a hated man among Royals fans and a favorite whipping boy of the sabermetric crowd that was just beginning to make itself heard. A slick-fielding, fast-running scrapper who rarely took a walk, got caught stealing entirely too often, and had no power, he was exactly the kind of player the old-schoolers loved — he led the league in sacrifice bunts one year! — and the Bill James disciples hated.

A recent convert to sabermetrics — shorthand for the idea, championed by James, that baseball can be analyzed through objective evidence rather than just listening to wisdom passed down from one generation to the next — I joined in, a little. But it wasn’t until he went from Kansas City to my home team, the San Francisco Giants, that I really took an interest in Neifi.

It was in early June 2003, his first and only full season with the club, when I noticed he was a sort of secret weapon. The Giants were a good but not great 26–22 on the days when Pérez made it onto the field. But when he stayed in the dugout, they were 13–1. The Giants were in first place, five games ahead of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Neifi not playing accounted for the entirety of that difference.

So I invented the Neifi Index, a measure of the contribution a player makes to his team by not playing. The Giants had a .542 winning percentage when Pérez played, .929 when he did not. So his Neifi Index was .387 (.929 minus .542). I concocted the Neifi Award, given to the bench player in each league with the highest Neifi Index, and unique among baseball awards in that you or I, if we could only find our way onto a major-league team, would be a shoo-in to win it. I got a couple of funny columns a year out of it.

Giants fans weren’t quick to hate Neifi the way Royals fans had been. The expectations were different. He’d been picked up on waivers, not in a trade for a young All-Star, though the team had then signed him to a two-year contract. As that season wore on, mild puzzlement over the Giants spending more than $2 million a year on Pérez turned into exasperation at seeing him take the field 120 times. Why is he playing again? He’s an out machine!

He was even worse in 2004, and the Giants finally released him in August. He was thirty-one. It had been three years since that fateful trade from Colorado to Kansas City, and in that time, in exactly 1,400 at bats, he’d hit seven home runs. Dye had hit fifty-nine over the same period in sixteen fewer at bats. Since Pérez had left Colorado, his onbase percentage hadn’t come within a cab ride of .300, the Mendoza Line of that stat, the minimum output required even to be considered lousy.

A few days after the Giants let him go, Neifi signed with the Chicago Cubs, who shipped him to their top farm team in Iowa, where he was three orders of magnitude worse than lousy. But he could still play a sweet shortstop, and the Cubs had the always-injured Nomar Garciaparra at the position. They called Neifi up when rosters expanded in September, and in his first few games he went six for six with a double and, stunningly, a walk.

Garciaparra’s injuries flared up, and manager Dusty Baker began writing Neifi’s name on the lineup card every day. After two weeks in a Cubs uniform, Pérez was hitting .382, with a .414 on-base percentage and a .564 slugging percentage. These are outrageous numbers. His OPS was .977, 400 points above his career norm. Garciaparra came back for the last two weeks of the season, and Neifi played sparingly. But he’d earned himself a one-year contract and, with Garciaparra missing a big chunk of the season and then moving to third base, the starting shortstop job for most of 2005.

That April, he started in like gangbusters again. This was a whole new Neifi! Three weeks into the season he was hitting .393, with three home runs and an Albert Pujols–like OPS of 1.028. Then it was over.

Over the next three weeks he hit .175 and was typically unproductive at the bat for the rest of ’05 — though thanks to that first month it ended up being easily the best year of his post-Colorado career. His on-base percentage, .298, came tantalizingly close to qualifying as lousy.

For this, the Cubs signed him to a new contract, a two-year deal that didn’t exactly thrill Cubs fans, who, over the course of 154 games played by Pérez, had come around to hating him just as Royals and Giants fans had. He can’t hit! Caught stealing! Why. Is. He. Playing?!

He had two-thirds of a poor season in 2006 before being dealt in August to the Detroit Tigers, who were in a pennant race and had an emergency at second base. Neifi was ridiculously bad down the stretch, yet there he was on the Opening Day roster in 2007 — to the howls of Detroit’s fans. Will he ever take a walk?

Somewhere in there, I began to feel for Neifi Pérez. It wasn’t his fault managers kept writing his name on the lineup card. And those managers weren’t a pack of fools either. Baker and Detroit’s Jim Leyland have their critics, but they’ve each won more than 1,000 games and three division titles. Baker has won a pennant, Leyland two pennants and a World Series — the latter with Neifi on the postseason roster. Felipe Alou, Neifi’s manager in San Francisco, won a thousand games, too.

But more than that, I came to appreciate something important about guys like Neifi Pérez. To be a guy like that, to be a guy who makes fans in four cities tear their hair out, to be possibly the single worst regular player in the major leagues in multiple seasons, to last for a dozen years in the big leagues, start more than 1,200 games, get caught stealing an astonishing 45 times in 102 attempts, you have to be a hell of a ballplayer.

The worst player in the major leagues is a hell of a ballplayer. The worst player in the history of the major leagues, whoever he was, was a hell of a ballplayer. Neifi Pérez was a hell of a ballplayer.

It’s only in the context of the major leagues that the guy with the lifetime OPS of .672 is oh-my-gosh-is-he-playing-again awful. You see this if you ever watch big-league pitchers, who struggle to hit .100, take batting practice. They drill line drives all over the place. They’re the guys in your muni softball league who hit balls over the houses across the street from the park and everyone says, “He must have played pro ball.”

You see it when marginal major leaguers drop back down to the high minors and dominate. If Neifi Pérez wasn’t my favorite player, my favorite player might be Trenidad Hubbard, a light-hitting outfielder who in ten years got into 476 big-league games with the Rockies, Giants, Indians, Dodgers, Braves — still with me? — Orioles, Royals — almost there now — Padres, and Cubs. But his real achievement, for me, was spending at least part of sixteen different seasons at Triple-A, where he was a consistently solid hitter into his forties.

How would you like to be that guy? Everywhere you go for most of your life, you’re the best. As a kid, you’re the guy who can play ball. In high school, in the minors, you’re a star. There’s really only one place in the whole world where you aren’t much good, and that’s where almost everybody who knows you knows you from the major leagues. That’s life as Neifi Pérez.

We fans buy our tickets and sit in the stands and boo lustily when our team’s current Neifi grounds into a double play or gets caught stealing or serves up a three-run homer in a tie game. But really, who are we to judge? We’re the tone-deaf knocking the choir, illiterates mocking poetry. The player has to stand out there near first base, waiting for a teammate to bring him his glove and cap, listening to the catcalls of people who couldn’t carry his jock. Then again, the pay’s nice.

Pérez was hitting .172 — but still with Detroit — in early July 2007 when he tested positive a second time for amphetamines. A first positive test carried no public punishment at the time, a second resulted in a twenty-five-game suspension. Just as that sentence was ending, he was banned for another eighty games for a third positive test. The Tigers released him.

Neifi called the testing process unfair, claiming the positives were a result of his using Adderall, which he said he’d been prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. He also said all three positive tests had been administered before his first suspension, that he hadn’t continued using the drug through the numerous dirty tests.

No matter, really. The bitter stuff of appeals and depositions. It’s been more than two years now. His career appears to be over. Most of those who remember Neifi Pérez at all will remember him as the first major leaguer to be hit with an eighty-game punishment for drugs. For me, his legacy will be his lousiness, the infuriating sight of his name on the home team’s lineup card day after day, the greatness required to induce so much rage in so many fans of so many teams.

I’ll never forget Neifi Pérez. He was the greatest lousy player I’ve ever seen.

I wanted to be quiet about it because while I enjoyed and appreciated the lovefest that followed my announcement late last year that this column would be switching from daily to part-time, I don’t need another one and didn’t want to look like I was fishing for one.

I’m also not in need of condolences over my career. As I mentioned last fall, Salon asked me in the wake of the financial crash to switch gears and take on some editing duties while continuing to write the column whenever I could. I said I’d try that, though I didn’t think I’d like the column-writing part of it.

The daily format, with several updates a day, was this column’s skeleton, something without which I believed it wouldn’t thrive. I think I was right.

Meanwhile we here at Salon have been, like our colleagues everywhere, trying to figure out the future of this racket and how we fit into it. What is journalism going to look like a year from now, two years, five years, as the newspaper industry collapses, the technology continues to evolve and new business models are developed?

I’ve been asked to help try to figure all that stuff out for Salon. It’s fascinating and exciting. While some of you are picturing me chained to a desk, slogging through copy, bitterly recalling my glory days as a columnist, I’ve been over here in what feels like the hippest seminar in grad school: big ideas, great conversation and no tests or grades.

Just, you know, we all lose our jobs if we don’t get it right. And also, the chains aren’t so uncomfortable.

Seriously, though, these are exciting times. I have a lot of friends in the newspaper business and to them I think these days feel apocalyptic. But, while my eyes are wide open about all the jobs that are being lost and I’m sensitive to the suffering of good people in my line of work, these days are feeling to me like a thrilling time of new beginnings and possibilities. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out, even if it turns out that there won’t be a place for me in the new world.

But I think there will be. And I haven’t retired as a writer. You’ll see my byline pop up in Salon from time to time and I have a few other writing projects I’m percolating on that you’ll hear about if you’re interested and you have a rudimentary ability to find people on the Web who want you to find them.

Until then, thanks for reading, and feel free to send me any brilliant Web 3.0 ideas you have lying around.

Allen Barra says a case can be made that 83-year-old Yogi Berra was the greatest catcher in baseball history. And no ex-ballplayer is more famous today, not even Willie Mays.

But a few years ago, fresh off a book about Bear Bryant, Barra noticed that there hadn’t been a definitive bio of Yogi. He set out to fix that, and the result is the new “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee.”

Yogi’s best known to younger generations as a lovable lunkhead, the idiot savant who talks to a duck on an insurance commercial, who said, “It ain’t over till it’s over” and “You can observe a lot by watching.” Then there are the malapropisms that make a weird kind of sense when you think about them: When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Half this game is 90 percent mental. I didn’t really say everything I said.

But, as Barra points out, Yogi’s been a success at almost everything he ever tried. Pitchers who were brilliant when he was behind the plate never did anything much when he wasn’t. Whitey Ford, one of the greatest left-handers ever, often says he never shook off one of Berra’s signs, and Don Larsen has said the same thing about his World Series perfect game.

Berra won more World Series than any other player. He won three Most Valuable Player awards and appeared in 17 straight All-Star games. He was the leader and the on-field constant of the only team ever to win five straight World Series, the 1949-53 New York Yankees.

He was only the second manager ever to win a pennant in each league. He was a great coach and he’s a good businessman. And just about everyone who’s ever dealt with Yogi Berra has come away not just liking him, but respecting his decency, his integrity and his intelligence. There’s more to Yogi Berra than meets the eye.

I talked to Allen Barra about his new book last week. Some full disclosure: Barra’s a former Salon columnist who still freelances here. He’s a colleague and a friend. I called him at home in New Jersey.

I remember you told me a couple of years ago that you were starting this book and you were saying that it was amazing that there’s never been a serious biography of Yogi Berra. And after having read yours — don’t take this the wrong way — but I kind of get why. There’s no big flamboyant conflict and drama in his life. Did you find that that was something you had to overcome, that lack?

Well, let’s put it this way: There are certain eras in sports and baseball when that’s a plus. And it struck me a couple years ago, even then, that this would be one of those times. It might be nice to read about a guy that there are no big dramatic issues concerning. That’s why I liked the idea of writing about Yogi.

I wanted to write about a life in baseball and keep it apart from huge contracts, drug issues, everything that’s been plaguing the game over the last couple of years. And, happily, he’s also one of the greatest players in baseball history, and maybe the most underrated. Which seems funny when you think about it, because he’s probably the best-known former ballplayer around and yet he’s underrated. He’s underrated as a player.

You wrote a few years ago that he was the most valuable player in American team sports history.

I don’t think that anyone would deny that there’s something to be said for the idea of intangibles, contributions that can’t necessarily be measured by statistics. I just don’t know — since they can’t be measured, how do we know what that would be?

Sean O’Faolain, Irish novelist, once wrote about an Irish woman, a peasant woman. He said, “Do you believe in the fairies?” And she said, “I do not.” Period. “But they’re there.” I feel the same way about intangibles. I don’t know if I believe in them. But they’re there.

If somebody’s contributing something in the clubhouse, some added little bit of knowledge, some experience he passes on, some kind of thing that pulls the team together, then I think that guy’s teammates would be the people to judge whether or not intangibles exist. And everyone who has been with Yogi Berra insists that he brings something extra to the table that can’t necessarily be quantified.

Now, what are we going to do, argue with those people? I mean, it isn’t like Yogi doesn’t have the rings to prove it. And his contributions as coach and manager. So, whatever it is that’s out there that he contributes that you can’t see statistically, Yogi obviously has it. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a case for him with the statistics, which I think are amazing.

It seems like you didn’t interview Yogi for this book. I assume he didn’t want to talk to you and I wonder if he gave you a reason or what happened?

Who’s the great Irish actor in “The Quiet Man”? Barry Fitzgerald. Barry Fitzgerald always says in “The Quiet Man,” “I did and I didn’t.” I was asked not to sit down with Yogi. They said he’s getting tired. He’s having trouble remembering some of the details of the things he’s talked about many, many times. And that’s understandable. And that was fine with me. So in that sense I wasn’t granted access.

In another sense I was given everything I needed, all the materials. I mean, let’s face it: How many more times does Yogi need to talk about hitting the home runs off Don Newcombe? Or something like that. There are scores of taped interviews, in-print interviews, newspaper stuff, magazine stuff. All I needed was access to that.

Now, in another sense I did get access to him. I was invited to all the events at the museum. For instance, in the back of the book there’s an appendix from the [showing of the tape of the] Don Larsen perfect game. Larsen and Yogi showed up at that and I was allowed to ask all the questions I wanted. And I got some good stuff out of that.

So there were several times over the years, the World Series broadcasts at the museum with Yogi, there were local high school events he would do with Larry Doby around here that I taped. I got plenty of conversations in with him. We just didn’t sit down and retalk these things over again.

Is there anything that, if you could, that one question you would have wanted to ask him that you didn’t get a chance to ask?

Here’s what I wanted to ask him more than anything else, and I didn’t. I was curious to see in his 1989 memoirs, which was not an attempt at an autobiography, it was mostly just reminiscing. He mentions, he says, “A lot of people said they loved Casey Stengel.” Yogi said, “I didn’t love him, but I missed him when he died.”

Yogi and Casey were not joined at the hip, and you get the feeling that over the years there was many times when Casey rubbed Yogi the wrong way. It’s interesting that Yogi understood that most of the decisions Casey made were as a manager, not as a friend, and it had to be that way. There was always that distance that you had to keep from the players when you were managing, no matter how much you loved somebody.

And Casey would constantly try — he tried to push Yogi back to the lineup after an injury on two occasions. “You know, we need you. What’s the matter with you?” And he even — one of the players told me that Casey had talked him into needling Yogi to try to get him back in the lineup. I mean, that’s a hell of an admission. You know, the manager’s using me to try and, that they even put out the feeler, the idea to Yogi that he might not get a full World Series share one year because he didn’t get back in the lineup.

And Yogi was absolutely adamant. Here’s a guy that’s one of the most durable players ever. A tremendous team player. But he, by God, was not going back in that lineup until he knew that his injury was healed. A very smart decision, not only for himself, but for the team. But you’ve got to remember that Casey’s thinking, “If we don’t win, I might get fired.” So he had his interests, and Yogi had his and Yogi was smart enough to know exactly where they differed.

I would have asked, in answer to your question, I would have asked Yogi to talk more about his relationship with Casey and when he became a manager himself did he understand that you have to make decisions based on what management wants rather than what the individual player might want.

It’s really sort of amazing that he was so close to Casey Stengel, so closely tied to him, and they both have that same thing, they’re thought of as clowns and they’re remembered for the silly things they say, and they both have a lot more meat on their bones than they’re given credit for.

How could they not? You have the most successful manager in baseball history and the most successful player in baseball history. And it’s amazing to me that there are still people that don’t give them their due for what they did. Supposing they weren’t clowns. You know, supposing they were classic smart guys. Let’s say the Gene Mauch mold. How much more could they have won? How much better could they have done than they did?

Here’s wishing for them that they didn’t have all the success Gene Mauch had.

That’s right. And I think it’s interesting to note that here’s Mauch in ’64, his team goes through one of the two or three greatest collapses in baseball history, and Yogi’s, on the other hand, his team makes a great second-half comeback, pulls together and wins. So what are we saying? That the Yankees would have been better that year had Yogi been smarter? Or more of a classic manager? I don’t think so.

Well, it’s a hobbyhorse of mine that Gene Mauch is the most overrated manager in baseball history. But also, you know, Berra’s so successful and Casey was so successful. I wish, on the other side of the coin, players and managers today would take a look at that and lighten up a little.

Well, yeah, there’s a lot to be said for that. And also for having faith like Yogi did. Once you made a decision sticking with it and riding out the storm of controversy, all the people that disagree with you. And every circumstance where Yogi did something like that he turned out to be right.

The thing that surprised me, and I’m about to ask you if anything surprised you, the interview question there. The thing that surprised me was how often the sort of a recurring theme of Yogi sticking to his guns, starting from when he was a teenager and Branch Rickey tried to sign him and the famous story where Joe Garagiola got 500 bucks and Yogi didn’t so Yogi said no. I mean, all those contract negotiations with the Yankees, it always worked out for him.

You’re a kid and you’re dealing with Branch Rickey and he offers you a contract but you’re not gonna go, because you’re absolutely convinced that you’re as good as your pal, who got 500. Imagine that, I mean, that takes a lot of guts. I wonder if the one recurring theme throughout this is that Berra’s luck was a residue of Berra’s intelligence and resolve.

He seemed to have an unerring sense. There doesn’t seem to be that point where, gee, I stuck to my guns and I stuck to my guns and boys, I was wrong. I mean, we just don’t have that story.

I see this from Yogi at a very early age, dealing with Branch Rickey. All of these decisions he made, he made on his own. There was nobody looking over his shoulder. They questioned his intelligence, always, right on through to the end of his managing career. And yet, Yogi’s decisions were always right. Just as his decisions with pitchers, how to handle ‘em, what pitches to call for, were right. He was there for the biggest games in baseball history. And eventually, everybody that worked with him was willing to just, you know, let him call the game.

Let me ask you what I said I was going to ask you, if there’s anything in your research that really surprised you, that really stood out, that you didn’t know, didn’t think would be true.

I’ll mention one small thing and then I’ll go to a larger one. I did not realize the titanic salary struggles that were going on below the surface. We never do back then, you know. All we think of is how Scott Boras is ruining the game for getting huge contracts for these players.

But you go back then and you see people like [Yankees general manager] George Weiss, who was a penny-pinching bastard, and arguing with Yogi Berra that, “Well, you don’t need that extra raise because you got your World Series check.” And Yogi’s smart enough to come back with, “Yeah, I had something to do with that.” Not buying that argument. You know: That has nothing to do with my salary. And how could you possibly have fought back then? Since you didn’t have an agent and there was no free agency?

Well, you know, the cleverness of having your picture taken in the paper as a waiter at your friend’s restaurant, saying, “Gee, I think I like this life. You know, I’m making good money here, I may not play this year.” It took a lot of guts and a lot of smarts. And Yogi won just about all of those battles.

He and Carmen, his wife, were very, very sharp and very smart when it came to the salary fights and they almost always won. I didn’t know that Yogi was that shrewd when it came to money and we should have all known, right? Because of all the guys, all the Yankees and all the smart guys in those years, who was the one who became a successful businessman off the field? You know, with his bowling alley and Yoo-hoo soft drink and other stuff. It was Yogi.

Who was the man that hooked up with the great genius of modern advertising, George Lois. The cat food and the other commercials. It was Yogi Berra. So I didn’t know that Yogi was that shrewd off the field and took his money that seriously. Good for him.

Overall, though, I have to say that before I started thinking about writing this book I just didn’t appreciate Yogi’s greatness. I never saw him as the glue that held the only five-time, five-World Series championship team [the 1949-53 Yankees] together.

There were no Hall of Fame pitchers on that team. DiMaggio was winding down. Mantle doesn’t start to make a real contribution till about ’52. Yogi was the glue, he was the glue all of those years, and when I went up and down the roster and looked at the Yankees pitching staff, year after year, from ’49 to 1960, it’s amazing how many guys would have never been winners had it not been for Yogi Berra.

So, you know, overall I would say, yes, I would take Babe Ruth, I would love to have Lou Gehrig, I’d love to have Mantle. But I’m not certain that if I was gonna pick a baseball team and I wanted overall value for 10 years, that I wouldn’t start with Yogi Berra as my first pick.

With Bear Bryant and now Yogi, you’ve written about the most famous sports figure in your two home states. Is that sort of a conscious decision?

Yeah, I’ve covered both sides of my family. I don’t know. It’s funny how some people ask you how long it takes to write a book like this and I always say 40 years.

I remember as a kid my father took me, we were out West and my father took me to all these legendary places. Deadwood, you know, where all this western lore had come from. We went to the Little Big Horn Battlefield, we went to Tombstone, and I wrote that biography of Wyatt Earp. So I guess to know what I’m gonna be writing about a few years from now, I have to go back 40 years and see what was I doing then. And how long did this idea take to germinate.

I don’t know, I don’t know what to say except you reach a certain point where you say, “These are colossal figures.” In all three circumstances there, with Wyatt Earp and Bear Bryant and Yogi Berra, and you say, “Well, why hasn’t anybody done a definitive book on them?” And the only answer I can say to that is that, the answer to that question isn’t easily apparent. It takes a while, it takes time for you to get perspective on these people.

A pretty swingin’ day of basketball so far. No upsets for the ages, but almost-upsets are almost as good. Upsets for the ages wouldn’t be for the ages without the almosts. And it’s nice when those middle of the bracket games, the ones between teams that don’t have much better odds of winning the Tournament than North Dakota State or Stephen F. Austin, turn out to be good ones, as today’s Tennessee-Oklahoma State and Utah State-Marquette games were.

Breaktime now. Two more sets of games in prime time. Morehead State will meet Louisville and try to keep the losing streak of 16-seeds from reaching 100. And don’t miss Cleveland State, the 13-seed in the Midwest, against No. 4 Wake Forest. The Vikings’ wins over Indiana and St. Joe’s, bringing them to the Sweet 16 as a 14-seed in 1986, helped put the NCAA Tournament Cinderella run on our cultural map.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend’s games.

1:35 p.m. PDT East Tennessee State — famous in my house as the team my son Buster picked to go all the way a few years ago — is giving Pittsburgh all it can handle. The Buccaneers are the latest 16th seed trying to win a game for the first time ever.

From here, and I’m doing that same thing of trying to watch four games at once and not really getting the whole story of any of them, it looks like the Panthers are vastly superior, as you might expect, but they just aren’t working that hard.

Pitt’s Jermaine Dixon had a runout a few moments ago. He was all alone downcourt with one defender. He missed the layup, and all the other players on the floor were so slow getting there that Dixon was able to get his own rebound on a bounce. A few seconds later the other four East Tennessee State players arrived, and there were still no white uniforms in sight.

After that, Levance Fields of Pittsburgh had an easy layup, but he went up soft and a streaking Greg Hamlin swooped in from behind and swatted the ball away.

It’s a story as old as sports. The heavy favorites think they have an easy win. They figure they throw their jocks out on the floor and there shouldn’t be a problem. The big underdogs play their hearts out, hang close, start to believe, and next thing you know it’s a real fight. Most of the time, the favored team is able to wake up, go on a run — it’s often late in the first half, as noted earlier — and take care of business. But once in a while, the underdog can keep the magic going for 40 minutes.

It’s never happened for a 16-seed in 98 tries since the Tournament went to a 64-team format, including the two games yesterday.

Funny thing about things that have never happened, though. Once they happen, it’s not true anymore.

Thirteen and a half to go. Pitt by one.

12 noon PDT That was fantastic. The kind of moment I think about when I think about watching the NCAA Tournament.

North Dakota State gave a valiant effort but didn’t force Kansas to the wire, finally falling by 10. Still, I don’t know what else is going on in Fargo tonight, but those guys ought to get a hell of a welcome home.

The other two, though, roaring to the final buzzer a few minutes apart, were thrillers. This column was frantically clicking between the games, and so was CBS. It was a game of hide and seek there for a minute.

Byron Eaton of Oklahoma State decided the game against Tennessee with a great drive and score, and one, with 6.7 seconds to go to give the Cowboys a 77-75 lead. Tennessee had a look at a 3-pointer in the final seconds, but it didn’t go.

I think those 8-vs.-9 games, which the TV guys always say are great matchups because, hey look, they’re so evenly matched, are mostly dogs. They tend to match mediocre also-rans from big conferences, teams that would be seeded well into the double digits if they had the exact same talent and results but played in smaller leagues.

Oklahoma State-Tennessee fit that description. Neither is in the top 25. The Cowboys finished in a four-way tie for fourth in the Big 12. The Volunteers tied South Carolina for the lead in the SEC East, but overall their 10-6 record was in a three-way tie for second best in a very down league. The SEC’s best team, LSU, is also only an 8-seed, and is ranked 21st in the nation.

But mediocre also-rans from big conferences can stage a humdinger every now and again too, and these two did.

Utah State rallied, took the lead, fell behind, then fell just short in another late rally, losing by one to Marquette thanks to a get-’em-close 3-pointer at the buzzer. A 3-pointer by Pooh Williams of Utah State with 23 seconds to go brought the Aggies to within two, and it would have been one of those indelible Tournament moments if Utah State had found a way to win. He picked up a loose ball, turned and fired. It banked in.

One more thing I liked in the last hour. Late in the North Dakota-Kansas game, Jayhawks guard Sherron Collins was walking the ball upcourt slowly, burning some clock, and CBS’s Gus Johnson said, “Collins taxis into the front court.”

11:25 a.m. I am loving this! A classic Tournament hour. Kansas has pulled away a bit from North Dakota State, but it’s still a single-digit game. Meanwhile Utah State and Marquette have been nip and tuck, with the Aggies just now going on a run to take the lead, 49-46 at this writing.

For most of their second halves, those two games and Oklahoma State-Tennessee have been within five points, and within two minutes of each other. I wish I could tell you exactly what’s been happening in each of these games but I’ve been flipping back and forth and forth and back among them and I have only an impressionistic view of all three.

I hadn’t noticed this until Utah State started burying 3-pointers and the crowd in Boise went bananas, but the Aggies, an 11-seed, have gotten a geographical break similar to North Dakota State’s. From Logan, Utah, to Boise is only 300 miles.

Hang on, triple fantastic finish could be coming. At least a double. Tennessee and Oklahoma State are tied.

10:45 a.m. PDT Forget everything I just said! The Aggies and the — looks it up again — Bison! Go Bison! have both come out strong in the second half. For the moment, three close games!

Wait, that’s too many. I can’t keep up with three games at the same time, can you?

10:25 a.m. PDT Tennessee and Oklahoma State are playing a pretty good, if entirely too orange, game in Dayton. At the half it’s 38-34 Oklahoma State. There’s a decent chance that as the four second halves of this first set of games progress, the Vols and Cowboys will be the only close game.

Syracuse is beating up on Stephen F. Austin, 38-22 at the half. North Dakota State — Go Bison! — is hanging around with Kansas, though the Bison are living by the three — they’re 7-for-13 so far — which tends not to last for 40 minutes, though you never know because sometimes it does. North Dakota State also has one player Kansas can’t stop, which is even less sustainable. But in the meantime, Ben Woodside has been fun to watch.

Kansas went on a little run at the end of the first half, which overdogs tend to do. The underdog will hang around for most of a first half, and then, bing-bang, the favorite will put together a quick little run and that close game will all of a sudden be a 10-point margin at the break, and it takes the wind out of the underdog’s sails. The Jayhawks’ lead is 43-34. Let’s see how NDSU responds in the second half.

Marquette, the 6-seed in the West, was expected to struggle without injured point guard Dominic James. The Golden Eagles are a dismal 1-5 since James broke his foot, including the game in which he got hurt in the opening minutes. But Marquette’s held on to a solid lead over No. 11 Utah State for the entire first half. It’s 26-18 at the half.

I know I said Oklahoma State-Tennessee has a decent chance to be the only close game over the next hour, but I wouldn’t stray too far from Utah State-Marquette.

9:40 a.m. PDT A pair of 14-seeds are up in the early set of games as the NCAA Tournament’s second day begins.

Stephen F. Austin — that’s a whole team, not just one guy — is up first, and the Lumberjacks have quickly fallen behind No. 3 Syracuse in a South region game in Miami. A 3-vs.-14 game in the Midwest has the North Dakota State Bison — had to look it up — challenging Kansas in Minneapolis.

The Bison get a break here, and of course they need it. The NCAA’s pod system puts high seeds close to home whenever possible, and while actual home games aren’t allowed, there are a lot of quasi-home games in the first two rounds. Villanova playing in Philadelphia, for example. North Carolina and Duke in Greensboro. Even Washington in Portland.

There are first-round games being played in Kansas City, which is reachable from the KU campus on a county bus, but the Jayhawks have had to travel to Minneapolis, a day-long drive from Lawrence but only four hours from North Dakota State’s campus. That’s in Fargo. Had to look that up.

Jayhawks travel for basketball, so Kansas figures to have its share of support, but a game-opening 3-pointer by Mike Nelson revealed the Bison have a solid contingent in the Metrodome. That figures. Not only is it a fairly short drive, but, as CBS’s Len Elmore points out, a lot of NDSU grads llive in the Twin Cities.

Kansas’ first bucket, a jumper by Cole Aldrich, drew only a tepid cheer. Of course all the neutrals in the building are rooting for the underdog, but it’s sounding like North Dakota State is benefiting from its first-ever Tournament game being so close to home.

Approaching the first media timeout, the Bison are hitting their threes and they’re up 11-10. Not so good for Stephen F. Austin. they trail Syracuse 18-4.

I can drag out my well-worn theory here that a difference of three or four seeds in the middle of the bracket, a 7 vs. a 10 or an 8 vs. a 12, that sort of thing, is nothing. It has more to do with the biases of the Selection Committee and the small sample size of a season than the actual quality of the teams.

But I’m not going to do that.

The evening games offer some upset chances. A lot of people have Western Kentucky over Illinois in the South as their token 12-over-5 upset, and a few have No. 13 Akron, also in the South, over No. 4 Gonzaga.

While you’re waiting for the third set of games to get going, read this terrific post by my friend Jonah Keri, “The Legacy of Gonzaga, Adam Morrison, and Gus Johnson.” By way of reviewing Gonzaga’s decade-long run as a major Tournament player, he pays cockeyed tribute to my favorite announcer. With clips. Oh, baby!

I’ll take my leave of you for now. We’ll talk about the evening games later.

3:10 p.m. PDT I asked if it’s my imagination or if 1-vs.-16 games have become less competitive in recent years. After a quick look at the last 10 Tournaments, I have to say it’s not my imagination. In the last three years, those 1-16 games have been a lot more lopsided than they had been.

But they only had been less lopsided for two years, 2005 and 2006. What was a figment of my imagination was that the top seeds’ opening games had been fairly competitive for most of this decade. Not true. It’s been blowout city all along, except in ’05 and ’06.

Today’s 1-16 games had victory margins of 43 and 56 points. North Carolina’s 103-47 win over Chattanooga, by the way, was the first 50-point win by a No. 1 seed over a 16 since 1998, when Kansas beat Prairie View 110-52.

That means this will be the third straight year in which at least two of the 1-16 games had margins of 20 or more points, and it still could be the third straight year with 20-point margins in all four games. In both 2005 and ’06, only one of the four 1-16 games had a 20-point margin. Those were the only years since 1999 when fewer than two of these games were decided by 20 or more, and there was only one other year, 2002, when as few as two games were so lopsided.

The average margin of victory in 1-vs.-16 games from 1999 to 2003 was at least 24.25 points every year, and twice it was more than 30 points. In 2004 it fell to 22.5 points, then to 15.5 in 2005 and 16.5 in 2006. But it was back up to 31.25 in 2007 and 32 points last year. This year, it’ll be at least 30 points unless the total margin of victory in the remaining two games is fewer than 21 points. There have been 42 1-vs.-16 games played since 1999, and no two of them have a combined margin of victory fewer than 21 points.

The last time a No. 1 failed to win its opening game by at double figures was in 1997, when North Carolina beat Fairfield 82-74.

So what does all that mean?

It means that Mike Montgomery is part of a devious Stanford conspiracy against my Golden Bears.

In the only game going right now, Washington is pulling away from Mississippi State early in the second half. Washington’s a good team.

2:10 p.m. PDT So I’ve been off playing fanboy, watching my sturdy Golden Bears play the Terps, and it’s been a pretty dismal affair. That’s partly because Maryland just closed out a solid win and mostly because it was kind of a dreary ballgame.

Now here’s another way the NCAA Tournament is just like America: I’m looking around for someone to blame. Give me a few minutes here and I’ll have a conspiracy theory worked up that has to do with Cal’s coach, Mike Montgomery, still being loyal to his old employer, Stanford.

Chattanooga’s early surge against UConn didn’t exactly sustain itself. At this writing, the Huskies lead by 54. North Carolina struggled to a 101-58 win over Radford. That game was over so quickly I didn’t even have time to look up where Radford is. Virginia, is what I would have found.

Is it my imagination, or are 1-vs.-16 games becoming less competitive in recent years? I don’t remember so many 40- and 50-point games in the late ’90s and early ’00s, but lately they’ve become common.

Maybe I’ll do a little research on that question while I watch this West region game between No. 4 Washington, champs of my home conference, the Pac 10, and No. 13 Mississippi State.

See? We work even while we’re watching basketball, we Americans. That’s productivity.

12:15 p.m. PDT Thanks mostly to Roburt Sallie’s 35 points, Memphis held off Northridge State 81-70, so the big upset didn’t materialize in the first flight of games.

Butler over LSU in a 9-over-8 in the South wouldn’t have been an upset, but it always feels like one when a smaller conference team beats a BCS school, even when they’re evenly matched. That didn’t happen either, the Tigers hanging on for the 75-71 win. BYU never got its act together against Texas A&M and lost 79-66. That one was a BCS 9 over a smaller conference 8, but it felt a little more like an upset because who expected BYU to look so overmatched in that game?

So we soldier on to the next run of games, in search of our first upset. This is what we do during the first two days of the Tournament. We watch for upsets and any other close, exciting games. Upsets are almost always close and exciting.

We also watch our own team play, if we’re lucky, and this column’s lucky this year. The real alma mater, California, seeded seventh in the West, goes up against No. 10 Maryland in this set of games. The others are 5 Purdue vs. 12 Northern Iowa in the West, an upset pick for me but going the Boilermakers’ way early; and the first two 1-vs.-16 games of the Tourney, North Carolina-Radford in the South and UConn-Chattanooga in the West.

The Huskies announced shortly before game time that coach Jim Calhoun would miss this game because of a health issue. He’s reportedly at the team hotel, but the school isn’t saying exactly what’s wrong. He’s had some gastric issues for several years and sometimes misses games.

In 1954 an academic named Jacques Barzun famously wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” and we baseball fans love to quote that, even though for all we know Barzun was a complete idiot and while this country’s heart and soul might or might not be a constant since 1954 its leisure interests have most certainly changed, and if baseball knowledge were necessary to know the heart and soul of America in 1954 — a dubious idea — it’s almost certainly not necessary today.

“American Idol” maybe. The NFL perhaps. But not baseball.

And maybe you can see where I’m going with this. Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better pay attention to the NCAA Tournament.

Which is nonsense, of course. Complete doo-doo, as a favorite history professor of mine at Cal — there’s the tip! Go Bears! — used to say abouut some theory or other. But I wonder if there’s something to the idea that you can learn a little something, or a lot something, about our heart and soul, maybe even our liver, by cozying up to the NCAA Tournament, especially the first round.

We love our underdogs, of course. Have I mentioned Andrew Leonard’s great “National underdog days” in Salon in 2001? We love our underdogs, but we mostly bet on the favorites. And we don’t really squawk much when the deck is stacked in their favor, which the NCAA Tournament does by letting high seeds play early-round games close to home.

We bet a lot.

We become absolutely fascinated by something because it’s right in front of us. All of a sudden, we’re huge fans of … Cal State Northridge! We don’t know where it is! We mix it up with Fullerton, or is it San Luis Obispo! But we’re living and — oh! He fouled him! The refs are in the bag! — these guys for an hour or so if they get up in the grill of some high seed. We become experts on them. That No. 3 guy. He’s got to stop going to his left like that. He can’t go left! Why doesn’t he know that?

Of course we’ve never seen No. 3 before in our lives and for all we know his friends call him “Lefty” because he goes to his left so well. But we saw him go to his left twice and not score, and we know. He should listen to us.

And we’re going to forget No. 3′s name 10 minutes after this game’s over and never give him another thought. We don’t much care what you used to do. We care about what you’re doing right now.

We use the Tournament as an excuse to get together, to party, to sluff off at work. But we also work really hard. We work extra hours to make up for our — ahem — lost productivity. Maybe we check in on a few basketball games we shouldn’t on Thursday and Friday, but how many of us are trying to catch up on Saturday and Sunday, doing a little work on the side when, goshdarnit, we should be concentrating on basketball.?

Our hearts and our souls are a little too complicated to be boiled down to how you’d best get to know this or that game to understand them. But maybe you don’t get the full picture without knowing a little bit about baseball, about “American Idol” and the NFL, and certainly about the NCAA Tournament.

I could go further with this theory, but Cal has rallied from a bad start, Radford is hanging in against Carolina, and — Chattanooga! The Mocs! I didn’t even have to look that up! They’ve got the lead! It’s 6-4!

10:55 a.m. PDT Matadors! Northridge — my alma mater! OK, shut up — have pulled ahead of Memphis in the middle of the second half. Mark Hill’s 3-pointer put the Matadors on top 44-43. Following a Memphis timeout, a Hill assist led to a bucket that gave Northridge a 46-43 lead.

What would it do to your bracket if we got the first 15 over 2 since Hampton beat Iowa State in 2001?

10:30 a.m. Halftime times three. Why don’t they stagger those starts by more than five minutes? There are 16 games going on today. Why should there ever be down time?

Northridge is hanging in there against Memphis, though I’m not confident for my alma mater. They trail by three. BYU, outside my vision because I got tired of shielding my eyes, has semi-rallied to pull within 12 of Texas A&M. LSU leads Butler by six.

I should mention that I’m not going to try to fool you into thinking I have any expertise on the 2008-09 college basketball season. This season has largely passed me by. I was shocked to find out that UNLV didn’t make the Tournament. Don’t they win the championship every year?

Just kidding. But I’m approaching the Tournament the same way most people do — as a person suddenly paying a radical amount of attention to college basketball after having been no more than a casual fan all year.

This moment of full disclosure dispensed with, can we start those second halves please?

10 a.m. PDT Cal-State Northridge is giving Memphis hell in Kansas City. The No. 15 Matadors jumped off to a big lead but the No. 2 Tigers pulled even before I could even do any crowing: My alma mater!

That was a little personal in-joke anyway. I’m not a Northridge alum. I just like to say that because I went to a weekend journalism seminar there when I was in high school. But the joke’s on me: That seminar was at Cal State-Fullerton, not Northridge. Who can tell the difference?

Memphis has a 26-22 lead with about eight minutes to go after a big dunk by Matador Kenny Daniels — from St. Louis. Hey, he’s my homeboy, sort of. I’m just looking for connections wherever I can find them.

Butler has righted the ship somewhat but still trails LSU 22-18. BYU is getting blown out by Texas A&M, and it’s not looking flukey. The Cougars are playing terrible ball.

9:25 a.m. PDT Sweet Bud Light commercial there with the skier crashing down the slope, thanks to the tree that the Bud Light guy drew onto the mountainside with his finger.

It’s not like one of the biggest news stories in the country today is a famous actress having died after a ski accident or anything.

So one of my few “upset” picks — not that a 9 over an 8 is an upset — is off to a great start. LSU 9, Butler 0.

9:10 a.m. PDT This column is ready for duty, primed to watch Day 1 of the NCAA Tournament so you don’t have to, though let’s face it: You’re going to.

So let’s get a few things taken care of right off the bat. The most true thing ever written by anybody about anything, and yes I’m including all those old Greek dudes and Thomas Jefferson and whoever came up with that thing about beans being the magical fruit, was Andrew Leonard’s 2001 piece in Salon headlined “National underdog days,” in which Leonard argued that the first two days of the Tournament should be holidays in the United States. I link to it every year, so there you go.

“It’s an insult to working men and women to have one of the most exciting 48-hour stretches of sports off-limits to us poor sods who have to pay fealty to evil capitalist overlords,” Leonard wrote.

Put that man in charge of the Fed. Or at least make him president.

Another thing I like to do is point out the absurdity of the annual publicity-stunt claim by a Chicago consulting firm that the NCAA Tournament costs American business some tremendous and entirely fictional amount of money. Challenger Gray & Christmas gets its name in the paper — sorry, its name in the blogosphere nowdays — with this stuff every year, and good for Challenger Gray. I admire the ability to get mentioned and am happy to support it.

The main thing this publicity does for Challenger Gray is let potential clients know that the firm is comfortable with shoddy analysis based on faulty assumptions, and that’s giving the company the benefit of the doubt that it doesn’t just invent facts to lead to the conclusions it thinks will best benefit Challenger Gray.

Hire away, American corporations! These guys can really help.

The short version of what Challenger Gray does: It uses some old survey to guess at how many college basketball fans there are and how much time per Tournament day basketball fans say they devote to the Tournament. Then it multiplies that number by the number of days men’s and women’s Tournament games are played on, even though there are only two days in the whole thing when games are played during normal business hours. And then it multiplies that absurdly inflated number by the average hourly wage and, presto, a figure for the amount of money lost by American business.

Oh, by the way, this calculation assumes that no American worker ever wastes a single minute, all year, except on the NCAA Tournament.

OK, that wasn’t short. Challenger Gray’s lost productivity figure swung from $889.6 million to $3.8 billion and back down to $1.2 billion in the space of three consecutive years from 2005 to 2007. Just to give you an idea of the rigor here.

But never mind that. We’re ready for basketball. I’ve decided to go with a boring bracket this season. My son Buster, the coin-flippinest 6-year-old who ever thought he was a rock star, has a much more interesting bracket than mine, though we both come to the same conclusion: Pittsburgh over Louisville in the Championship Game.

Here’s what I have. In the Midwest, my only first-round upset is 11 Dayton over 6 West Virginia. In the second round I have all favorites except 7 Boston College over 2 Michigan State. Louisville over Kansas in the regional final.

In the West I have my token 12-5 upset, Northern Iowa over Purdue. I also have 11 Utah State over 6 Marquette, but then the bracket resolves to the top four teams making the Sweet 16. How could I resist the Huskies vs. the Huskies and the Tigers vs. the Tigers in the regional semis? I’ve got No. 2 Memphis beating the top seed, UConn, in the final.

In the East I’m taking 11 Virginia Commonwealth over 6 UCLA, only because I always pick against UCLA if a Bruins loss is plausible. I was born there. Paging Dr. Freud. I have 10 Minnesota beating 7 Texas. A minor upset in the second round, 5 Florida State over 4 Xavier, and then 3 Villanova over 2 Duke in the regional semi before Pitt takes the region.

In the South I’ve got 9 Butler over 8 LSU and 10 Michigan over 7 Clemson. I’m going with a 6-3 upset in the second round, Arizona State over Syracuse. And then North Carolina over Oklahoma in the final.

So my Final Four is Louisville over Memphis and Pitt over UNC, with Pitt winning the title. If I’m not entered in your pool, just send me the money.

Buster has Missouri, his home-state team, making a Final Four run out of the West, where he had them beating Cal in the Sweet 16. Dad has his own alma mater losing in the second round. Even better than that, though, he has Clemson making a shocker of a run out of the South, knocking off Gonzaga in the regional final.

Butler-LSU, Cal State Northridge-Memphis and Texas A&M-BYU are all bouncing balls around, about to tip off. Let’s go.