One of the few sports stories with any traction this week is Gary Sheffield’s “Real Sports” interview (which airs tonight on HBO) where he accuses Joe Torre of treating white and black players differently. So far this week you can’t turn on ESPN without hearing some blowhard spouting an opinion on it. And that’s fine with us. We get it. It’s summer and sports news is scarce, so no way this doesn’t get discussed ad nauseum. Whatever. Just try to mix in more football.

As always, we’re not going to actually do any real or pretend journalism in this case. We have no interest in providing an opinion on race issues in baseball. That’s not us. The only thing we’ll mention about race is how awesome the line in the interview is where Sheffield says Derek Jeter “ain’t all the way black.” That’s classic. We’re putting it in the vault. Jeter is such a tweener.

What we want to discuss is the one aspect that these self-righteous windbags in the media all seem to be overlooking: that despite being completely batshit crazy, Gary Sheffield is having an awesome season. The guy is batting .311 with 27 dingers and has practically carried the Tigers on several occasions. They now look like they could be the team to beat in the AL. The son of a bitch even has 16 stolen bases. He averaged 7 over the last three seasons. The Sheff may be carrying some of your fantasy teams, you big dorks.

How the hell do you pull off these stats AND be a complete fucking lunatic at the same time? Seems impossible. When was the last time someone with this much verbal diarrhea just kept delivering? Most nut job athletes wait until they’re not performing to become super controversial. Sure, there’s guys like T.O. who just can’t keep their mouths shut, but that’s just a bunch of me, me, me garbage. Sheffield is insane.

Or maybe Sheffield’s just old and his back hurts and he just doesn’t give a damn anymore. Baseball is one of the few sports where guys can keep performing at a high level despite being ancient. We aren’t sure what’s going on. It’s an enigma. We ain’t all the way decided.

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