Cliff Lee in June

Click on the picture to enlarge.
Pretty boring month all around.

That's a 0.22 ERA, for those of you counting at home.

How the NFL is trying to ruin football (this week)

Details of the potential settlement between owners and players leaked today. Most of the proposals are what you'd expect: a modified rookie wage scale, team spending caps and minimums, discussions on future expansion to an 18-game season.

However, one simple proposal on the table would ruin the NFL landscape instantly: 16 Thursday night football games over the course of the season, starting in 2012. No details on what weeks those games will be played, but here's why that sucks.

1 -- One or two football games on Thanksgiving makes Thanksgiving awesome. Three is overkill. Five or six makes it exhausting. We gotta have dinner at some point.

2 -- Thursday night games not on Thanksgiving stink. Thursday night football is meant for teams like Boise State, not the Bengals, even if Boise State could probably beat them. Most people have to work on Fridays, whether or not there is a game.

3 -- The short advance week for Thursday games screws with team's practice and recovery schedules. And the long week following games gives those teams an unfair advantage for the next match-up. That's fine for a few unusual circumstances, but every other week? No.

4 -- Thursday night games are a pain in the ass for fantasy football.

5 -- The NFL network will undoubtedly broadcast the Thursday night games and call them "special editions of Sunday Night Football." And that makes all of us dumber.

The perfect All-Star ballot

All Phillies (and former Phillies, because I can't vote for Francisco) on the right.

All fun names (and no Yankees or Red Sawx) on the left.

Click to enlarge.

Another 10,000 loss team

Remember the royal treatment the Phillies got back in 2007 when they became the first professional sports franchise to collect 10,000 losses? Well, they're about to get some company.

Coming into Tuesday night's games, the Hotlanta Braves had collected 9,982 losses in their 135-year history, putting them on pace to break the 10K plateau somtime in July. If they can manage a 12-17 record from tonight on, that will give them a chance to hit the mark during a three-game set in Philadelphia just before the All-Star break.

Of course, like all things the Braves do, the new 10,000-loss mark will be less of an accomplishment than their predecessors' was. The Phillies, the oldest continuous one-city franchise in American sports, performed all of their losses as citizens of the city of brotherly love. The Braves had to spread out their losses over three cities, under the names of the Atlanta Braves, Milwaukee Braves, Boston Braves, Boston Bees, Boston Rustlers, Boston Doves, Boston Beaneaters and Boston Red Caps.

The next 10,000 loss team likely won't come for another four seasons -- The Chicago Cubs currently sit 277 losses below that mark. After that, the next team up is the Washington Natinals, who have lost 9,000 games in the last three years alone.