MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - On Monday Steve Buckley, general sports columnist at the Boston Herald, rattled out "At heart of Duke-ness," one of those homer tomes on Beantown college basketball that die-hahd Boston fans eat up, but which land like Lunesta on anyone outside of the hallowed ground of the Massachusetts sports Mecca.

In the process of trashing Duke basketball, a time-honored ritual of the sports writers around college programs jealous of the Coach K machine, he decided to nuke Durham Bulls baseball, Toledo Mud Hens baseball and Minor League Baseball in the process.

"In the end, though, that’s all there is to Durham, N.C. When there is no college basketball being played, it is just another minor league tank town. The Durham Bulls. Oh. Lovely," drops Buckley into his March madness Beantown bombast. He then winds up with: "And I’d rather be watching Red Sox-Yankees on a steamy August night than Bulls-Mud Hens."

Now, admittedly, that qualifies as pretty progressive thinking from a sports writer in a town where the great Yankee-Red Sox struggle has been placed on the pedestal of immortal sports combat not only by the hometown fishwrap writers in both burgs, but by Major League Baseball, which has parlayed that founding fathers rivalry into the core of baseball mythology for over a century. 

Somewhere up in heaven, the Babe is reading Buckley and smiling.  Trash the little teams out in the sticks and tulies. Good boy Steve-O.

Folks in Durham, Toledo, and all of the rest of us out in the other 99% of the country who watch professional minor league sports, however, are not.

Sure, we are used to it. Major League media arrogance is a dish served up hotter than the lobsters at Legal Seafood in that corner of New England.

For an educated sports guy, Buckley picked the wrong teams to slight. The Bulls were the 2002-2003 back-to-back International League (IL)  champions under Bill Evers. The Mud Hens were the 2005-2006 back-to-back IL champs.

The Hens only bricked at the Bricktown Showdown, the Triple-A version of the World Series,  in the face of a particularly tough PCL Tucson Sidewinders club. That's the Pacific Coast League, by the way, Steve.

I know that, while Buckley probably doesn't read our FAB50 Baseball rankings, he has to read the BA beauty fest.  He must have skipped down the list to the Beantown picks and missed the Bulls' Delmon Young pegged at No. 1 (No. 2 in the MLN FAB50 Baseball 2006).

Even though they haven't reflected it with a recent championship record, the Bulls have had, year-in-and-year-out, some of the top prospects in the game including Young. B.J. Upton, and Rocco Baldelli, just to name-drop a few.

Granted, the Bulls had a tough year last year, both on the field and off.   For a columnist who likes action, Buckley apparently missed Delmon's temper tantrum that resulted in the bat toss that was seen via You Tube across the globe at the Pawtucket game (They're the other Red Sox, Steve.). 

He turned the page on the AP stories about Elijah Dukes (See: "Titanic Talent" SZ 01.17.07) , who drew 53 games worth of suspensions for his antics, and, in January, was pulled over in Tampa and allegedly caught in possession of marijuana.

He missed top prospect BJ Upton's little off-field problems with the DWI stop (See "The Devil Goes Down to Durham", BLOGS, 06.18.06) in mid-June.

He was busy hacking out his column when the wires buzzed with the very public firing of Bulls skipper John Tamargo (See: "Off With Their Heads", BLOGS  09.10.2006) and his key  coaching crew, who walked the plank at the end of the season. 

He missed his complimentary hotel copy of USA Today with the piece where Delmon, BJ Upton and Dukes all chastised the Devil Rays for not promoting them. 

Dukes' attributed quote "Those guys up there [in the big leagues] shower in Evian. Here, we use sewer water,"  was the kind of juicy tabloid stuff that Boston writers have been eating up for generations.

The one thing you can say with 100% certainty: Baseball sure ain't dull in Durham.  

Perhaps we just need to chip and get Steve-O a subscription to the Herald-Sun, or a pair of readers.

Believe me: Both the Durham Bulls and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays would have loved for it to be as dull as Buckley contends. 

There is a story appearing today on Raw Feed that the Bulls have invited this Boston baloneymeister to discover Bulls baseball.  He has accepted, it says.  Another journalist spoon-fed on the MLB hype-machine since birth who will become educated to the magic of minor league baseball. Hallelujah!

 As to his contention that he'd rather be watching the Red Sox take on the Yanks in August, I can go with that: August is about the time that either of those clubs really start playing.

Both the Red Sox and the Yankees are stocked with enough great veteran players that they can beat up on  teams in their part of the AL enough to stay near the top of the rankings in the division and keep in playoff contention without breaking too much of a sweat.  You're going to see some pretty slow games in April, May and June though, before Buckley and the boys start ballyhooing pennant fever.

Meanwhile in the minors it is balls-out baseball from opening day until the 40 man roster opens up at the major league level.  In a world with far fewer millionaire players, the game gets played at 110% most days because there is no MLB pay-day on the fat-cat superstar teams unless you get there by stepping over a lot of other guys trying to get there. That makes minor league baseball exciting and dynamic the whole season long.  

The other difference is that it takes a lot of working stiff baseball fans four, five, eight different shareholders to hold on to a set of Red Sox tickets.  You can buy a season of the Bulls and put your kid in braces for far less, and, while Boston baseball is probably some of the best and most entertaining that you'll see at the major league level, there are a lot of other teams (Marlins) that are panhandling for fans while the DBAP (That's Durham Bulls Athletic Park, Steve), an MLN Top 10 Ballpark (2001), is packing them in.

In fact, when we opened the doors of MLN Sports Zone, our flagship magazine, in 2000, Durham was the most baseball rabid-town in America, with the best fans in the world. I would put them up against the Beantown loyalists and the Bronx die-hards any day of the week. 

Personally,  I would rather be in Durham at the DBAP on a hot day in August watching the Bulls and the Mud Hens duke it out, playing hard to impress, stealing home, and giving the fans, who sit closer to the game, more for their buck.  I know that MLB would love to have us all glued to our computers watching MLB.TV, the last possible avenue to major league ball, watching the Red Sox and Yanks rather than sitting and watching the game live in our home markets. We choose a different path.  We like our teams in Durham and Toledo and Altoona and Bakersfield and Butte, Montana. We take offense to columnists who ding our fan base, 43 million strong in MiLB alone.

You, like many Boston writers before you, operate from the  presumption that being an older sports town makes you a better sports town. That, as you will find out, is a joke.  

This is the Brave New World, Steve-O. Small towns across America aren't small anymore.  Durham, North Carolina and Toledo, Ohio have grown the game of baseball while MLB in markets outside of New York and Boston has been shrinking at the turnstiles. 

To paraphrase Jim Croce: You don't tug on Superman's cape. You don't spit in the wind. You don't pull on the clipboard of Ol' Coach K and your dump on Durham was bull.

Minor league sports are the real deal. Check it out.

- Brian Ross