The Atlanta Braves just cut Tom Glavine, moving themselves from my “teams which are kind of annoying” list to my “list of teams I officially hate.”

The Braves are claiming this was all about performance and had nothing to do with the millions of extra dollars Glavine would have been owed for making the major league roster and then staying on it for 30 and 90 days, but that is a blatant falsehood.

The Braves cite Glavine’s fastball velocity in the low 80s as the main reason, but Glavine’s fastball has been in the low 80s for several years now, and was in the low 80s in spring training when Fran Wren was talking up how Glavine was going to be a key piece in the rotation this season.

Glavine worked his ass off after two arm surgeries and did everything the Braves asked, pitching in several minor league rehab starts and continuing to do so even after his arm was all ready to go. Plus he pitched very well, going six scoreless and allowing only 3 hits in his most recent start.

Why make a guy go through surgeries and all that rehab for nothing? Why didn’t the Braves just cut him in spring training? Were they just keeping him around as an insurance policy on Kenshin Kawakami or something?

The only honorable thing for the Braves to have done would have been to call up Glavine and let him either succeed or else pitch his way off the team and into honorable retirement. If Glavine put up a bad start or two, then the Braves would have been perfectly justified in cutting him loose, and everyone would have understood.

Look, it’s really besides the point that cutting Glavine now was probably the “best” move, both baseball-wise with top prospect Tommy Hanson apparently all ready for the show, and money-wise.

Because sometimes penny-wise is pound foolish, and it is foolish to so blatantly ill-treat 300-game winner, future Hall of Famer, and all-around good guy Tom Glavine all to save a few million bucks after all that he has done for your francise over two decades. It tears at the fabric of your success, which is rooted in the adulation of the fans, the respect between your front office and the players on your team and around the league, and your reputation for fair dealing.

Yeah, baseball is a business, but even in business, sometimes the right thing to do is actually do the right thing.

They say Karma can be a bitch – here’s hoping she woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday, because the Braves deserve whatever they have coming.

Here’s a move I never saw coming, if only because he is sitting on 499 homers and has a guaranteed $14 million contract this year, but the Tigers went ahead and released Gary Sheffield.

On one hand this is so strange, because teams never ever release guys on the eve of these kinds of milestones, do they?  Especially when they are going to have to cough up all that money either way, right?  But maybe it just speaks to how much some of these milestones have been tarnished by the steroid era. Even pitching ones, maybe, now that we have Roger Clemens. After all, the Diamondbacks just let Randy Johnson walk despite his desire to return and his being still good and only five wins away from 300.

I’m actually going to say that I think this deal is good for both the Tigers and Sheffield. Kudos to Detroit for recognizing that as a team with a legitimate shot at contention this year, they need to put the best team on the field from day one, regardless of milestones and any other sentimental garbage, and that that team no longer includes a 40-year old Sheffield who hit .247 in his two seasons with the Tigers and has been wracked by injuries.

At the same time, this is a great chance for Sheffield to hook on with a team that might actually give him some playing time. The Tigers’ trade for outfielder Josh Anderson this week really left Sheffield nowhere to go except riding the pine and occasionally DHing.

Although Sheffield has aged rapidly in the past two years, he still has some batspeed left when healthy, and at the major league minimum he represents a good gamble for some team in need of a right-handed stick.