Hey, you're not going to get Roberto Alomar for a one-year $1M deal ... oops, bad example. Well, you won't get the Roberto Alomar people actually wanted, in any event. Personally, if you were going to take a flier on a youngish guy with recent struggles, I'd have liked to see what it took to get Jerry Hairston, Jr. What, maybe a nice, polite note and a bucket of clams?

No, Ron Belliard isn't going to break any rebuilding efforts. How much damage can he do? Carlos Guillen exposed his team to tuberculosis, and he got an extension. If he's bad, give him the wazoo and give Bran or Jhonny another couple shots (personally, I'm waiting for Peralta's eyes to contract back down to saucer-sized first), or maybe flip one of the Chad Parontoes of the world into something, or wait 'til Hector Luna comes back again. Heck, move Casey Blake over and give Adam Piatt a chance to get the third-baseman's glove out of mothballs. And look, your bottle's largely lightning-free at this point; who knows?

But it wasn't so long ago, less than a month, that we'd made the preposterously offensive offer to Todd Walker, Important Cog of the Mighty Boston Art Players, a one-year monstrosity worth a paltry $2.4M, when everyone knew he would probably fetch a three-year, eight-figure deal from someone. Predictably, he wrinkled his nose, and we rescinded the offer, and he ended up ... signing a one-year (!), $1.85M (!!) deal with the Cubs. The Cubs! The man went from waiting for ten million to being Mark Freaking Grudzielanek's caddy for three-quarters of what he rejected last month. Who is this man's agent? Stephen Jackson?

This is not so much to lament a lost opportunity, though, as to lament one of the first targets of my Virtual GM'ing career. I knew this guy from Minnesota who would tell us about the keeds the Twins would be bringing up (this was the mid-nineties, back when they'd given up any pretense of competing and were donning uniforms for the sole purpose of giving Tom Kelly migraines). There were three guys I targeted on those pre-goodness Twins: Matt Lawton, David Ortiz, and Todd Walker.

Ah, youth. Lawton has been an UNMITIGATED disaster for Lawton pimps past and present. I thought I could shake of his struggles and foist them off on shoulder trouble, but the fact is, since he left the Dome he's been atrocious. Ortiz, of course, can still mash, although as a first baseman, he makes a helluva DH. And that's part of the charm of Virtually acquiring Ortiz and Walker from Kelly's Twins: each of them horked off Kelly no end because

• they wielded serious frying pans
• they had "attitudes"

And, of course, Walker could hit. He would have hit in Minnesota if Kelly hadn't really liked the way he looked in a Salt Lake uniform (had Minnesota had an affiliate in Ouagadougou, he'd have sent Walker there). He hit in Cincinnati. He hit in Colorado. He hit in Boston. He'll hit in Chicago, too. He never made it up to Oven Mitt (actually, it's not his hands but his insistence on the cement Nike Ground Jordans that does him in), but the man can hit.

As it turns out, though, the other thing Todd Walker can do is irritate the bejeezus out of his teammates and front office. His reputation is normally expressed as a colloquialism for "anal sphincter." And it's pretty much universal: it's not like Kelly gave him a bum rap that unfairly stuck. No, Todd Walker apparently earns every bit of ill will he can conjure forth. One imagines the scene in which Mark Shapiro makes Walker the $2.4M offer, mildly secure that he has started the bidding and will bow out after showing good faith effort, when other GM's call him up and whisper, "Mark ... no one else will offer him that much ... he is a colloquialism for anal sphincter." Thus Shapiro rescinds his offer, because he realizes that, Good Lord, pretty soon Walker's going to figure out that that's gonna be the best offer he's gonna get. and he might actually take the sucker. See, I think Shapiro may have fallen into the trap we Virtual GMs stumble over, which is he made an offer commensurate with the numbers without enough regard to the fact that the human being generating said numbers is pretty much universally reviled.

Anyway, I'd rather have Todd Walker's numbers at 2B than Ron Belliard's, but with Milt and Matt already in the clubhouse, I'm not sure we made the wrong call there. Remember, it's not always all about the numbers.