By Michael Miner

To acknowledge the changing times, the tradition-caked Golden BAT–for Baseball Acumen Test–shall henceforth be known as the BAT.com, a virtual award for virtual perspicacity applied to virtual competition. And in our winner we find an apt symbol of the modern era.

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Mike Kiley of the Sun-Times copped his first BAT by picking the Yankees, Indians, Braves, and Astros, and also the Arizona Diamondbacks in the NL West and the Mets as the NL wild card. He also named the Texas Rangers–who went on to win the AL West–to make the playoffs as the AL wild card. In short, a year ago Kiley named seven of the eight eventual playoff teams for a staggering six and a half points, and if the competition had been forced into a tiebreaker (which it wasn’t), he also saw the Yankees beating the Braves in the World Series.

Now we come to the booby prize, the only slightly less hallowed Wiffle BAT. Last year Bernie Lincicome, who’s claimed both Goldens and Wiffles in his storied Tribune career, defiantly denied the Braves or Astros any place at all in the playoffs. His reward was to finish a distant last.

Whereas unionized employees insist on getting paid, under the present arrangement the Sun-Times is given the pictures for nothing. What Chicago-Scene.com gets out of the deal is access to the newspaper’s 500,000-some daily readers. Meanwhile, the Sun-Times is exposed to the “pretty nice hip crowd coming to our Web site,” as Widen puts it–some 40,000 visitors a month. It’s a clean deal. No money changes hands, and each hand washes the other.

When even John Kass isn’t sure what’s going on, the story must really be weird. On Friday, March 24, Mayor Daley’s right-hand man, Terry Teele, mysteriously gave himself up to the Sun-Times and Tribune, confessing that he’d borrowed $10,000 from operator-about-town Oscar D’Angelo. “It was dumb,” Teele told the Sun-Times.

This wasn’t a BGA-Sun-Times expose. Terrence Brunner, executive director of the BGA, tells me he’d been working the D’Angelo story with Channel Two’s Carol Marin for a couple of months. “We were sitting here wondering whether whoever gave the Tribune and Sun-Times the Teele stuff–or however it got there–was going to flush out what we were doing,” says Brunner. “We had a feeling everything was going to unravel.”