So, while you’re sitting around this Christmas handing out hundreds of dollars in presents to the ones you care for, think about all the families and business you have managed to destroy. Think about the hand you played in putting these things through. Think about all of the hard working people you are going to put out of business. When your all done with that, remember me, Romeo Filip, proud owner of Diablo Bats. Remember that I personally told you to go fuck yourself and stick this approval letter up your ass.

P.S. Merry Christmas

Well, here’s a little background.

Major League Baseball has been in a tizzy over the past year regarding the dangers of broken bats.

An incident in which Pittsburgh hitting coach Don Long took a maple bat shard to the face led Yahoo’s Jeff Passan to write with more than a touch of drama, “Someone’s going to die at a baseball stadium soon.”

Conventional wisdom has centered on the use of maple wood, which some claim has a greater tendency to shatter into dangerous splinters. Players, on the other hand, love maple wood bats because they believe they are superior dinger-smackers.

Toronto slugger Joe Carter was the first to use maple bats back in the 90s. When Barry Bonds obliterated home run records while wielding maple bats, they became all the rage. Today, over 50% of major leaguers use maple bats.

Many baseball writers spent last season getting all worked up about the peril that shattering maple bats are posing to the safety of players, coaches and fans. For example, Tom Verducci called them a “daily danger”:

The danger of maple bats is, however, so clearly established that every major league baseball game is an accident and lawsuit waiting to happen. Baseball will not be able to claim in court that it was unaware of the hazards caused by maple bats, which routinely break apart in large jagged pieces that put players and, most especially, fans in harm’s way. Major league baseball has been collecting breakage information for years from club equipment managers and, most obviously, seen the scary highlights nightly.

The danger is so prevalent that Selig should consider the equivalent of a temporary restraining order, banning them immediately until and unless safety assurances can be put in place.

Easier said than done, because despite Verducci’s claims, the danger was only established anecdotally, not scientifically – thus the players’union was staunchly opposed to taking maple bats out of the hands of players who have grown to love them.

For example: Chase Utley, shattering a maple bat above, has used maple sticks his entire career:

“I like them,” Utley says without hesitation. “They last a lot longer than ash. They don’t fray or chip away. I enjoy them. Some people don’t because they feel they explode. I’ve used maple for my whole big-league career. Yes, I’ve had a few that have exploded, but I’ve also had some ash bats that have done the same thing.”

MLB decided to investigate and hired a researcher to check things out:

In 2005, alarmed by the increasing number of broken bats, baseball gave $109,000 to a man named Jim Sherwood and asked him to compare maple bats with the ash ones that used to be the norm. Sherwood runs the Baseball Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and the conclusion of the study did not jibe with the hundreds of players who swear maple leads to better performance.

“We found that the batted-ball speeds were essentially the same for the two woods,” Sherwood said. “Maple has no advantage in getting a longer hit over an ash bat.”

The study also found something evident to anyone watching baseball: Ash bats crack while maple bats snap.

Case closed, right?

Sportsfilter veteran Hal Incandenza begs to differ:

Ah, but there’s the rub! It’s not about bats hitting the balls further overall, it’s about having a wider sweet spot- which is one of the other advantages of aluminum bats besides hitting it further, and which is why maple became popular: it’s a wood bat with a larger, and thus more forgiving, sweet spot. You lose less speed on the batted ball when hitting just off the sweet spot with maple than with ash. Outside of Ted Williams and Ichiro Suzuki, hitting the ball with the sweet spot is the exception, not the rule.

Mis-hit balls go furthest with aluminum bats, then a little less far with maple, then less far with ash. This link- go to point #3 in particular, and check out the site it is on- has more on the physics of the batted ball. If you look at the ball speeds, outside the sweet spot the ball speeds drop off faster for wood bats than aluminum bats. Well, maple bats are in the middle: the ball speed drops off faster than aluminum, but not as fast as ash.

Now, if that extra 5-10mph on the mis-hit balls nets one swing a week that is transformed from an easily played hopping grounder into a squibber that gets through the infield for a short single, that’s 1 hit a week you didn’t get with ash. If you’re an every day player, 1 hit a week is about 25 hits, which for a 600 at-bat season would turn a guy with 175 hits (.291) into a guy with 200 hits (.333, and a pretty big contract come signing time). Even if the benefit is only once every two weeks that a ground out becomes a clean short single, or a warning track pop fly gets over the fence, that’s still 20 points in batting average.

So it’s by no means clear that maple bats aren’t giving the players some kind of benefit.

Regardless, baseball is less concerned about the advantages of maple bats, and most concerned about breaking bats – most particularly, with the public image problem caused by breaking bats.

If MLB can “scientifically” establish that maple bats aren’t better than ash bats, they can ban or regulate them more easily…which has probably been their intent all along.

Not only that, but it’s hard to look at MLB’s approach to this concern without concluding that part of its agenda was to squeeze out small bat manufacturers to the benefit of several large, well-connected corporations.

Here’s Jeff Passan again, reporting on the research MLB conducted before releasing its new bat rules in December:

Label stamps have been on the face grain pretty much since bats were invented, and players are encouraged to hold the bat with the label facing toward them in order to strike the ball 90 degrees from the label.

Extensive testing from MLB during its nearly six-month-long study of maple bats showed hitting on the wood’s face grain would produce fewer catastrophic breaks than the edge grain. Baseball hired the Forest Products Laboratory, a government entity, along with Harvard statistician Carl Morris, Massachusetts-Lowell mechanical engineering professor James Sherwood and wood-certification company TECO to analyze more than 2,200 bats broken between July 2 and Sept. 7.

Their task: Figure out why the bats are breaking and make suggestions to limit future breaks. Their conclusion: Conventional wisdom that discouraged face-grain contact was actually wrong.

“We didn’t tell them what they should look at,” said Dan Halem, MLB’s general counsel who helped draft the new guidelines. “The one thing we all knew from the beginning of this issue is that it was complicated. We wanted science and statistics to validate what we do.

“We hired experts. We let them run with it. And wherever their conclusions led them, they went.”

The research found that the majority of catastrophic breaks – ones in which barrels with splintered ends go airborne like medieval weaponry – are due to a poor “slope of grain.” Essentially, the best quality wood has an even grain, and some manufacturers were using low-quality wood with large barrels and thin handles, leading to increased breakage. The other suggestion, about hitting on the face grain, came from Roland Hernandez, a TECO employee.

Hernandez owned his own maple-bat company, RockBats, and worked with the Forest Products Laboratory before going to TECO. RockBats was the lone bat company that suggested hitting on the face grain. No major league players are known to use RockBats.

“Nobody other than MLB and TECO agrees with this theory,” said one bat manufacturer, who asked for anonymity because of concerns over MLB pulling his certification.

[...]

MLB’s team went to five manufacturers’ plants to see the bat-making process. Included were Hillerich & Bradsby, the parent company of the best-selling Louisville Slugger; and the Original Maple Bat Corporation, home of Sam Bats, which started the maple craze in 2001 by providing bats to Barry Bonds during his 73-home run season.

Still, as MLB prepared to release its study, some bat manufacturers weren’t content with its scientific merit. One sent MLB two dozen questions that went unanswered. In a conference call with MLB’s Health and Safety Advisory Committee, the question was posed whether the experts had tested bats that weren’t breaking to see why they performed so well. The answer was no. MLB also did not submit the study to a peer review, figuring that the checks and balances among the scientists from different disciplines were enough.

MLB chose not to release the 50-page report, citing the breadth of proprietary information gathered on its trips to the manufacturing plants.

To recap: MLB commissioned research that determined maple bats weren’t better than ash bats – even though its definition of “better” is rather suspect.

Then MLB conducted research at a small number of manufacturing plants, all of which happened to be owned by the biggest corporate entities in bat manufacturing. Louisville Slugger is obviously a huge company, but even once-small Sam Bats is now owned by sporting goods giant Wilson.

Their findings formed the basis for drastic new requirements – but they won’t release those findings, because the huge bat companies need to be protected from their competition.

Nothing fishy about that…

You know what else would protect those large and well-connected companies: jack up the fees for everyone else, and weed out the small manufacturers who can’t afford to pony up!

Hey, what do you know — MLB doubled its bat-manufacturer licensing fees and now mandates a $10 million insurance policy!

Most small manufacturers are privately grousing about this, but won’t go public with their complaints for fear of being totally blackballed by MLB.

But Romeo Filip is an exception.

Romeo Filip: Mad as hell and not gonna take it any more.

Filip’s Diablo Bats company makes maple, ash and birch bats used by major leaguers including MVP/home run king Ryan Howard. Eric Chavez popularized Filip’s bats and is a loyal customer. Jermaine Dye calls them “the hardest bats I’ve ever used.”

Diablo first ran afoul of MLB when Manny Ramirez took his Diablo bats to play Oakland in Japan. Manny had used Diablo bats all throughout spring training, but ran into problems when he tried to use them in the season opener.

The red bats were outlawed by baseball officials, who said they would distract the pitchers.

As opposed to, say, Louisville Slugger’s pink bats, distributed by MLB itself to raise breast cancer awareness?? Granted, that’s a good cause, but if colored bats distract pitchers, why is MLB endorsing their use in non-exhibition games? Or could it be that the ruling on Diablo’s bats was totally arbitrary and not scientific whatsoever?

According to Manny, this decision robbed him of a home run:

Ramirez hit a drive to deep center and was sure it would be a home run. It wasn’t.

Just Manny being Manny.

He learned when he got to the ballpark that he couldn’t use the red-barreled bat he planned on using because it would distract pitchers. So he got some new bats in Tokyo.

“Maybe if I used my American bat that ball maybe would have gone,” he said. “I thought I hit it good. I couldn’t use my bat because it wasn’t legal. Thank God I got some Japanese wood that I could use.”

Manny ended up using an orange Japanese bat after being forced to switch from Diablo’s red bat. So FYI – pink and orange are not distracting, but red is. The scientific data to back this up must be in another of MLB’s secret research packets that you’re only allowed to see if you ask really nicely…and work for Louisville Slugger or Wilson.

Red bats: distracting. Pink bats: totally acceptable.

MLB’s decision to address the maple bat controversy by overturning a century of accepted bat-wisdom based on a single, secret study that was not peer-reviewed, while jacking up prices for all bat manufacturers to essentially ensure that only large corporations could stay in the game…well, that seriously pissed off Romeo Filip.

So he decided to let MLB’s pointman for the maple bat controversy, Roy Krasik, know how he felt about it.

And he didn’t mince words.

Jeff Passan’s story referred to Filip’s email only euphemistically. Although it was CCed to every other major bat manufacturer, the actual email doesn’t seem to be publicly available anywhere on the interwebs…probably because it’s pretty strongly worded.

So ROTI contacted Mr. Filip and he obligingly sent it along to us. Now we’re making it public for the first time:

This bullshit packet that you have sent out is just another clear violation of everything our country stands against. MLB, MLBPA, YOU, and your staff have been robbing good hard working people for long enough. Your regulations are as big a crock of shit as your players integrity. You have the [nerve] to send this packet to us after we bust our asses sitting in the rain waiting to sell our products. We bend over backwards and kiss ass to every idiot clubhouse manager in the league. We get no special treatment, no respect, and no direct contact to players. We set up at 5:00am in the parking lots for your teams just to watch Louisville Slugger reps walk right past us directly into the clubhouse. We get shit on by you, the teams, the agents, and even players from time to time. We take this abuse from you for what??? We do this so you can send us this bullshit approval process that no owner in his right mind should stand for. Who do you guys think you are? Who the hell made you idiots the know it alls when it comes to bat making.

How many bats have you made in your lifetime Krasik? How many maple, ash, or yellow birch billets have you sorted for quality? How many custom orders have you processed and hand delivered to the players? The answer is zero. Zero, like the amount of information you have on bat making. You and your idiot detectives (aka, Louisville Slugger) have been in bed together since this approval process started. We tailor our hand created products to your specifications just to watch Louisville Slugger build whatever they like. The morons you hired to do this amazing research have put together a list of the stupidest regulations ever assembled on one piece of paper. Who the hell came up with hitting against the grain. You idiots have to be the stupidest people I have ever come across. A 15 year old high school player can tell you that hitting against the grain is outrageous.

Along with all this you dare raise the administration fee and the insurance requirements to over $50,000.00 per year! We are in a recession you fucking idiots. Hundreds of people are losing their business, jobs, and well being in these harsh times. What do you fucking greedy idiots come up with. Make it harder for us. Kick us further while we are down. Hurt our business more and make it harder for us to put food on our families tables. You Mr. Krasik are a FUCKING thief. MLB is a fucking thief. You steal from the poor and give money to the rich.

I wonder how much you’re sorry ass gets paid to kill businesses and destroy lives. I’m sure your overpaid sorry ass gets a 6 figure paycheck. I’m sure your just fine in these tough times. I’m sure you will not lose a minute of sleep when you notice only a handful of bat companies were able to pay your ransom. I’m just wondering how your Christmas is going to be this year. I’m sure you have finished your shopping and wrapped your presents. I’m sure your planning on driving your Mercedes to your family’s house for a big turkey dinner. Guess what we are doing this year Mr. Krasik. We are holding on for dear life just so we don’t go bankrupt. We are saving every penny we can for the rainy days ahead. We aren’t buying gifts because we all understand how hard times are, and how [bad] the economy really is.

(The email concludes with the paragraph printed at the top of the post.)

When we spoke with Filip, he was pretty cool and rational about the matter, despite the evident fury in his email.

“I was very upset at the time that I wrote it,” he told us via email, “so it does contain several words and quotes I don’t think really tell who I am as a person. Anger can make people say and do many things they wish they had not done at the time. With that said, I am not ashamed for my words or my beliefs in how MLB is strong arming small companies such as mine. I don’t feel any of the bat companies are treated fairly and it was about time people heard about it.“

In essence, Filip said, this was the act of a small businessman pushed over the edge by a huge and merciless corporation.

Of course, in the aftermath of this email, MLB refuses to show its super-secret report to Filip, and ostensibly this will be true for any other manufacturer who dares to object.

To which we say, bullshit.

There’s little doubt that a lot of maple bats shattered this year, posing a danger to players, spectators and coaches. But ash bats broke too, sending barrels flying in the direction of potential victims.

Not only that, but the hazards of broken bats are hardly the only threats on a baseball field, as Red Sox pitcher Bryce Florie can tell you, after he took a line drive to the face a decade ago…

Oh the humanity!! Ban baseballs!!

Ray Chapman could also tell you a thing or two about the dangers posed by the baseball, if he hadn’t died after a beaning. Ditto Mike Coolbaugh, the Colorado minor-league coach who was struck and killed by a line drive.

It very well may be true that MLB is right to tighten specifications and rules about maple bats. However, the way they are going about it leaves a lot of questions to be answered.

It’s not clear if MLB is actually trying to solve the problem in an equitable manner, taking into account the desire of players to maximize their hitting abilities and the ability of small bat manufacturers to continue to drive innovation in the sport, or if they just want this problem to go away, and help out their buddies at Louisville Slugger while they’re at it.

But if you ask Romeo Filip, the answer is obvious.

The LA Dodgers are one of the most storied franchises in baseball history, and they play their games in the second-largest city in America.

Unfortunately, their owner would be better suited for a market like Florida, because he has little in the way of baseball knowhow and lacks the requisite money to represent LA with any consistency.

While Frank McCourt made his fortune, such as it is, by developing parking lots, he still managed to royally screw up the parking situation at Dodger Stadium – just when you didn’t believe it could get any worse in gridlocked Chavez Ravine.

Most big-city owners rely on experienced baseball minds to run their franchise, but McCourt has installed his wife Jamie as Dodger President, despite her utter lack of credentials. Just to fully affirm that he believes in the power of nepotism, he’s also hired his son as marketing director.

McCourt first tried and failed to buy the Red Sox, before zillionaire John Henry and his merry band swooped in and outclassed his bid. Now the ex-Bostonian desperately grabs every former Red Sox he can get his hands on: witness the conga line of Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Lowe, Bill Mueller, and for the love of God, he actually thought it was a good idea to hire Grady Little!!

McCourt’s evident Northeast bias hasn’t been ALL bad for the Dodgers in the McCourt era: McCourt made a decent move by hiring Joe Torre after the should-be Hall of Famer was let go by the Yankees, and the Manny Ramirez trade carried the Dodgers into the postseason.

All that’s well and good, until you realize that the Dodgers basically got Manny for free, and now that it’s come time to pay up for a playoff-caliber MVP, they’re pinching pennies again.

The perma-grumpy TJ Simers gripes today,

I think I understand why CC Sabathia wanted to play for the Dodgers, then talked to Frank McCourt on the telephone and signed with the Yankees.

It will be five years next month since the Boston Parking Lot Attendant bought the Dodgers after a failed attempt to buy the Red Sox and told everyone at a news conference the Dodgers have the best fans in sports.

I immediately followed that up with a question: Had you been successful in buying the Red Sox, what would you have told Boston fans?

Never have trusted much of what the guy has to say after that, and he hasn’t given much of a reason the last five years to change my mind.

We’re not talking mistakes here, the hiring of Lon Rosen and his plans for loud music and a Dodgers mascot, or the Tipper Gore Lady, $2 Tuesdays, the wife’s sudden affection for Little League fields or flip-flopping on Paul DePodesta and Grady Little.

It really doesn’t have anything to do with the ridiculous chants of “Hee-Seop Choi,” or J.D. Drew’s escape clause. This isn’t about Jason Schmidt, Andruw Jones or Jason Phillips.

And it’s more than keeping the poor folks from using the new concession stands and restrooms on the field level once the game has started, or the decision not to upgrade the concession stands and restrooms everywhere else this off-season.

It’s a matter of trust, McCourt promising five years ago at a packed news conference to be “transparent” in everything he does, while saying, “I know what it takes to inspire and to lead,” and “I’m not afraid to spend whatever it takes to bring a world championship back to Los Angeles.”

Now that you know him, do you believe him?

Do you believe he’s not afraid to spend whatever it takes to bring a world championship to Los Angeles?

Do you think he knows what it takes to inspire and lead?

Do you feel McCourt is transparent, as the dictionary defines it, “open, frank and candid?”

OK, so I’ll give you “Frank.”

Hey theah buddy, how does an incentive-based one yeah deal sound to ya?

Despite getting a playoff run for the price of disappointing prospect Andy LaRoche, the Dodgers refuse to pony up for Manny, sticking to their guns on a 2-year, $45-50 million dollar deal. This is almost assuredly not enough to get the job done, yet McCourt and GM Ned Colletti seem to naively believe that their efforts are sufficient.

“I just find it curious,” Colletti said. “We made a [contract] offer and never heard back. We made a [salary] arbitration offer and never heard back. Maybe we have to look into the communications we’re using.”

So what are the chances that Ramirez will be a Dodger next season?

“If he shows up in spring training, we’ll find him a hat, we’ll find him a shirt and we’ll play him in the field and figure it out then,” Colletti said. “But I can’t wait until the day he shows up to go after a third baseman or a shortstop or another reliever.”

Huh?? Is this some kind of a joke?

The only reason the Dodgers got a free trial of Manny being Manny is that the two $20 million per year options held by the Red Sox were not sufficient compensation in the eyes of Ramirez and his agent, the nefarious Boras.

And now they don’t understand why a contract offer of the same length and only slightly more per year isn’t inducing the wacky outfielder to sign on the dotted line?

Without Manny, the Dodger offense in 2008 was limp; with him, it was potent. Sure, it’s never good to overpay for an aging slugger, but it’s ALSO never good to give away one of your top prospects for a half-season rental. A reasonable, market-price contract offer to Manny is the difference between the Dodgers competing for the playoffs in 2009 and disappointing their fans for another year.

Apparently in this time of economic apocalypse, 3 or 4 years at $25m per is out of McCourt’s reach.

The lowlight of the Dodgers’flaccid pursuit of Ramirez was when team prez Jamie McCourt suggested that the megabucks it would take to sign Manny might be much better spent on a bunch of charity baseball fields:

Would Dodgers fans react negatively if the team were to pay big money to free agents when the nation’s economy is in sharp decline and many Americans are losing their jobs?

That was the question posed by Dodgers President Jamie McCourt as she made an appearance with her husband, team owner Frank McCourt, Tuesday at an event where it was announced the club’s charitable foundation would help build 42 youth fields around Southern California.

“If you bring somebody in to play and pay them, pick a number, $30 million, does that seem a little weird to you?” Jamie McCourt asked in an interview at the Evergreen Recreation Center in East Los Angeles. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We’re really trying to see it through the eyes of our fans. We’re really trying to understand, would they rather have the 50 fields?”

The Dodgers recently made a two-year, $45-million offer to slugger Manny Ramirez that they later withdrew, and the McCourts seemed to be hedging against lavish spending during a time of such great economic uncertainty.

Jamie McCourt said the fact that the majority of contracts were guaranteed was a significant issue.

I think, oddly enough, maybe if things weren’t guaranteed, then we could pay for it,” she said. “If people can’t play anymore, it’s like, ‘Oh well, see ya.’Different story. Whatever money they are guaranteed could be money that we could otherwise have given to community.”

HUH? What is this, Moot Point Debate Society?

If you hate guaranteed contracts so much, you shouldn’t have purchased an MLB franchise, lady.

There’s certainly a strong argument to be made that signing Manny to a 4 year deal will result in overpaying him for one or two seasons.

But Dodgers fans have been overpaying to see a mediocre team for the last 20 years.

Yet, as Simers goes on to point out, the Dodgers have had no hesitation about laying out dollars and/or years to some pretty crappy players:

We’ve all been trained here in the Entertainment Capital to know better, never thinking of the Dodgers as big-time bidders, and doesn’t that say something about the McCourts’ownership reign?

Maybe if Teixeira is free, McCourt pounces — the acquisition of Ramirez and Boston’s agreement to pay the remainder of his salary the highlight so far of the owner’s time on the job.

As for offering money, the Dodgers gave a five-year guaranteed deal to Juan Pierre a few years back and recently a three-year guaranteed pact to [Casey] Blake.

But they have offered only two guaranteed years to Ramirez, the only player in the last 20 years to put the Dodgers within a sniff of the World Series. The Dodgers pick the oddest places to play hardball.

Now maybe McCourt and Ned Colletti have already put their heads together and come up with a winning plan, and for the record, I did not laugh out loud while typing that sentence.

But as transparent as McCourt and Colletti have been to date, one wonders if they have anything in mind other than waiting and picking through the leftovers.

One player who they won’t be retaining is shortstop Rafael Furcal, who’s apparently agreed to a three-year pact with the team he originally came up with, the Braves.

After Furcal had an injury-plagued 2008 season, the Dodgers decided to offer him an insultingly incentive-laden contract. The Braves, meanwhile, noticed that when Furcal’s back wasn’t bothering him he played tremendously well, and they got the deal done.

While the Dodgers delude themselves, making idiotic decisions like inking Andruw Jones while spurning far more useful options, the Artists Formerly Known as the Anaheim Angels have made big signings like Vladimir Guerrero and Torii Hunter, have been perennial playoff contenders, and won a title in the not-too-distant past, which makes it a lot easier for their fans to accept when players like Francisco Rodriguez get poached by Northeastern baseball titans.

The big-market West Coast teams will never have the endless sums of money that the New York and Boston franchises can draw upon, but they have no excuse for not making SOME quality snags in the free-agent market. If 36-year-old Manny is deemed to be too big a risk, then there are – or at this point, WERE – other middle-of-the-lineup or top-of-the-rotation options available.

Casey Blake ain’t one of them, though.

Hey, it could be worse – the team could still be owned by FOX.

UPDATE: Clearly stung by our criticism, the Dodgers have reportedly re-engaged Furcal’s representatives even as a deal with Atlanta was imminent! That’s more like it, McCourt!

In an ESPN story about Manny Ramirez’s quest for a new, blockbuster contract, we noticed this amusing quote (emphasis added):

There could be a Manny Ramirez sequel in Hollywood if a blockbuster deal can be worked out.

The Los Angeles Dodgers will talk to the slugger’s agent, Scott Boras, and according to an SI.com report on Wednesday, average salary might not be an issue. The duration of the contract is another matter, however.

“We don’t have too many six-year deals,” Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti said, according to the Web site. Actually, nobody on the Dodgers has a six-year contract.

Ramirez has said publicly that he is looking for a long-term deal. Sources told SI.com that the Dodgers might be willing to pay Ramirez Alex Rodriguez-type money, but only for two years.

“We’ll know more after we sit down with Scott to gauge what’s happening and see if there’s some place we can meet in the middle,” Colletti said, according to the site.

After the Dodgers were eliminated by the Phillies in the NLCS, Ramirez said: “I want to see who is the highest bidder. Gas is up and so am I.“

Oh really, Manny?? Gas is up? Tell that to the people who locked in winter heating fuel supplies this summer only to see prices plummet in the wake of the financial meltdown.

Or if we’re talking strictly price-at-the-pump, dig this chart:

Manny Being Economist isn’t going so well. Don’t quit your day job.