Three years, $36 million, the Kansas City Royals sign Jose Guillen and get some much-needed offensive punch.

The signing creates roster flexibility because it leaves the Royals with a glut of outfielders. Guillen can play left or right field, which could allow the Royals to shift Mark Teahen to first base.

Club officials must also decide what to do with outfielder Emil Brown, who led the club in RBIs in each of the last three seasons. Brown is eligible for arbitration after making $3.45 million in 2007.

The Royals are also now better positioned to field trade offers for David DeJesus and Joey Gathright. DeJesus had drawn heavy interest from several clubs, including Texas and Atlanta.

The Braves are believed to be offering lefty Chuck James for DeJesus. James, 26, is 22-14 with a 4.05 ERA over the last two seasons.

I refuse to buckle to PC pressure and call it the "Border Showdown."  Glad to see the Kansas City Star editors seem to agree:

Border War Special Section

Congratulations to Mizzou.

Go Rabbits!

My boys in yellow and blue, the South Dakota State men's basketball team, finally had a quality win at home last Friday night.  SDSU's men's basketball team evens its record at 2-2 while giving Northern Iowa their first loss of the year.

It was probably SDSU's best win in three years of competition at the Division I level.

Meanwhile, SDSU's women's volleyball team awaits their destination in the NCAA volleyball playoffs, and SDSU's women's basketball team is off to a 5-1 start, the 1 loss being at top-20 George Washington.

Go Rabbits!

Division I FCS Appalachian State (two-time FCS champions, by the way) just went to Ann Arbor and defeated Division I FBS Michigan today.

Wow.

CENTRAL	W	L	Pct	GB	RS	RA	L10	Str
Cleveland	68	56	.548	—	614	566	4-6	L2
Detroit	68	57	.544	1/2	694	638	5-5	W1
Minnesota	62	63	.496	7	554	551	4-6	L2
Chicago	56	69	.448	13	536	646	2-8	W2
Kansas City	55	70	.440	14	568	603	4-6	L3

Front page article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp. are refusing to carry the NFL Network, launched in 2003, on the league's terms. Charter Communications Inc., whose controlling shareholder owns the Seattle Seahawks, stopped carrying the network in late 2005 because of a contract dispute. Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable operator, yanked the NFL Network out of millions of homes after a bitter battle. The NFL tried to stop Comcast by suing, but lost. The case is now on appeal.

At the heart of the debate: how much pro football is enough for America's already robustly served TV fans. The NFL, which has long been able to command top dollar by packaging its games myriad ways, says viewers are still insatiable. But after years of budgetary woes caused by the skyrocketing cost of football, cable executives say they -- and viewers -- have had enough. Die-hard football fans can now watch as many as 16 regular-season games a week via broadcast, cable and satellite operators.

I'm not sure that it's a good thing for us lowly consumers for sports leagues (and, parenthetically, content-producers of any type in our media age) to exclusively own their distribution media.

On a related thought:  Are the people who were outraged about Rush Limbaugh's brief stint as an NFL studio analyst for ESPN lining up to protest Keith Olbermann's upcoming gig on NBC's Sunday night football programming?  Just wondering . . .

NCAA puts a moratorium on new members of Division I:

The Division I Board of Directors has enacted a four-year moratorium on permitting institutions to begin the process of joining the division – an action that among other things will prevent a school from moving from another division into Division I or moving between its subdivisions until August 2011.

Although the division recently enacted new Football Bowl Subdivision criteria and established procedural steps to become a Division I member, standards for Division I institutional and conference membership were not reviewed.

The moratorium, which is effective immediately, does not affect 20 institutions that already have entered the seven-year Division I provisional-membership process for new NCAA members or the five-year process to move from Division II -- including institutions that currently are officially exploring Division I membership.

The moratorium also prevents institutions in Divisions II and III from seeking reclassification of a specific sport into Division I under multidivision-classification legislation, and prevents a new single-sport or multisport conference from achieving Division I membership until the moratorium ends.

Hat tip:  Terry Vandrovec's Sioux Falls Argus Leader Sports blog.

The Kansas City Royals, that is.  They've had their second consecutive winning month.  If this keeps up, they might just finally escape 'laughing-stock' status around baseball.

UPDATE:  And then, of course, they go to Minneapolis.

Kansas City gets the 2008 Big 12 Football championship game, and the 2010 and 2011 men's and women's basketball championships:

“We’re ecstatic,” said Kevin Gray, president of the Kansas City Sports Commission. “It demonstrates that if you have the facilities, you can be competitive in these situations.”

Meanwhile, Sioux Falls and Tulsa are the finalists for hosting the Summit League (nee Mid-Continent Conference) men's and women's basketball championships:

The league, which is changing its name from the Mid-Continent Conference on June 1, will make a site visit to Sioux Falls next week for the 2009 and 2010 tourneys. Conference commissioner Tom Douple said Sioux Falls and Tulsa, Okla., are the only two in the running.

The Kansas City Royals finally lost patience with shortstop Angel Berroa.  After a 2004 season where Berroa won the AL Rookie of the Year award, he struggled through two dreadful seasons where he couldn't hit or field at the major league level.  So, yesterday, the Royals sent him to AAA Omaha after acquiring Tony Pena Jr. from the Atlanta Braves organization.

Pena looks to be the starting shortstop for the Royals on opening day,