THE MAILBAG: Jerry Everard at Moe clarifies that, despite rumors circulating last December, he and not any ex-MS exec makes all the club’s decisions. Everard and Scott Blum, who runs Moe’s Internet broadcasts, insist the Xing software they use is the best for the job. I’m willing to reconsider my judgment about it, once Xing makes a version that runs on my computer without pausing for four seconds between every second of sound. The real problem isn’t the software but the primitive science of netcasting itself; fewer people may get to hear a concert via the Net than in person. This isn’t a condemnation; experiments must be allowed to fail to be learned from. Speaking of not-quite-ready media…

JUNIOR’S MINT: So we’ll keep Ken Griffey Jr. after all, for only the highest salary in baseball history. Sure, we all have to pay a piece of it thanks to the complexities of the Ms/ Kingdome lease. But for that, we get a genuine star athlete, a living mascot for the new stadium deal (a role he can keep playing even if he gets another half-year injury), and an affable spokesperson for Nintendo and whoever else can pay him.

I wasn’t the only one to think “superficial contract-stalling ploy” when Griffey said he thought of leaving Seattle because of “all the rain and snow.” Ballplayers spend only about 13 weeks a year in their home team’s area (the rest is spent on the road, at spring training, and wherever they make their “real” home). Advocates of a no-roof stadium note that during baseball season we get less rain than any baseball towns outside California.

Griffey also said he wanted to be on a team that doesn’t sell off some of its best players, like the Ms keep doing so they can afford to keep him. The Ms’ problems as a “small market franchise,” trying to keep one megastar plus an adequate team behind him, are well known. What isn’t known is how to keep big players in small cities in an age of luxury boxes, owner-city blackmail, and splintering TV audiences.

Baseball was historically a hierarchical business. Minor leagues fed players to the majors, which had an established pecking order with the Yankees and old NY Giants always around the top, the Washington Senators and St. Louis Browns around the bottom. Lesser teams sold any promising players to the Yankees just to pay their hotel bills. (Remember the early years of Thunderbirds hockey, when they traded a player for a team bus?) In today’s baseball, under the right circumstances, a Cleveland or maybe even a Seattle can win a pennant. Is this situation a trend or just an anomaly? Wait ’til this year. Meanwhile…

THE BIG INTERCEPTION: Didn’t it seem this past season like the Seahawks were already gone? They had only one home sellout. Fan and media interest waned, especially in the early fall in the wake of Mariner-mania. But that doesn’t mean everyone stopped caring. The day rumors the team’s move to L.A. started flying, sports-talk radio was abuzz with the usual debates and rants. Callers generally followed a line about how team owners, especially Hawks owner Ken Behring, were Scroogeoid robber barons out to shaft the communities they purported to represent. Some callers suggested that team owners were just the most visible example of corporate welfare, that people and communities oughta get together to stop this nonsense in sports and other industries. Maybe this shows sports fans aren’t all the politically-reactionary boors us “alternative” folks love to stereotype them as.

GAS ATTACKS: You may have seen the newspaper ads and billboards in Seattle for the Shell Visa card, offering modest gasoline rebates. The catch is that in Seattle, Shell’s first U.S. market, the venerable Dutch/British company now only has stations at 175th & Aurora and down on E. Marginal Way S. It also means if you want to boycott Shell over its support of the murderous Nigerian junta, you’ll have a hard time finding a station to not get gas at.

WORD-O-WEEK (citizen-activist Makoto Sataka at a meeting about Japan’s bank-loan crisis, as quoted on CNN): “Trying to find morals in politicians and bankers is like trying to find morals in cockroaches.”