Verrry interesting. Follow us here on the timing: Oregon State University's baseball team wins back-to-back national championships. A few weeks later, the University of Oregon announces that the school is going to start up its baseball team again - after a 26-year hiatus.

Here's the best part: UO athletic director Pat Kilkenny said July 13 that the Beavers' national titles had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with this decision:

"It's great for the state of Oregon, it seems like they're really good kids, Coach Casey seems like he represents the state admirably. But everything that we do, we're not going to do if we don't feel like we can be excellent at it. Secondly, we take a very long-term view of what it is we're going to do," he told the Associated Press.

Wow. Not everyone could have pulled off such a triple word play of hubris, condescension and spin.

Never mind that UO president David Frohnmayer had to dig back to 1877 to establish the Ducks' long-buried baseball legacy, noting that the first intercollegiate sport that the university played was baseball, a year after its founding.

Why it is that the UO just can't let baseball remain as OSU's glory sport? Maybe sharing the Oregon sports spotlight is more difficult, now that our football team is a force to contend with.

Yet UO is a sparking citadel of sports as well. They have the world gravitating to Hayward Field for the honor of running on the field where so many track legends have run - and the world's elite athletes will be back there next summer to compete in the Olympic Trials for track and field. Their men's basketball team cracked the "elite eight" this year, losing to the eventual national champions.

Sure, the revival of the U of O baseball team wasn't the only change Kilkenny announced. The way you disguise the presence of a knife is by placing it with a fork and spoon, and so he announced that the Ducks will ix-nay their men's wrestling program after this season and boost women's sports with the addition of (are you ready?) competitive cheer-leading. No, this isn't a case of a woman's place is on the sidelines. It's just that competitive cheer leading is getting really popular. (So perhaps we'll soon hear of a new U of O competitive eating team? That's got a big following, too.)

In any case, we don't mind. We've got the coach, we've got the team, and we've got the talent. And if the Ducks want to drive on over, we'd be glad to give them a deeper appreciation of just how baseball is played.