And Jonathan Albaladejo got jobbed.

Hosed.

Ripped off.

However you want to put it ­- and these are the nice ways to do so - that's what happened. The greatest season any relief pitcher has ever had in the 116-year history of the International League went largely unnoticed by the league itself.

Worst part is, this is probably not all that surprising.

A guy named Jeremy Hellickson was awarded the IL's Most Valuable Pitcher award Tuesday, the day the league handed out its postseason awards for the 2010 season, and for the record, none of this is meant to take anything away from him.

Hellickson is a tremendous pitching prospect. After all, he did go 12-3 this season for a Durham team that has been the class of the league since April.

His 2.45 ERA leads the league.

If he weren't so good that the Tampa Bay Rays didn't call him up to give their already solid pitching staff a boost for the stretch run earlier this month, he'd have been on pace to challenge the league's pitching Triple Crown.

So this is not a referendum on how good a prospect Jeremy Hellickson is, or how big-time a season he had. Problem is, the people voting for these awards always seem to make it one.

The mistake media-types and public relations gurus who vote for these awards so often make is that they take one phrase to mean another.

In their eyes, they see the words "Most Valuable." But in their minds, they read "Best." Every year, in every league, there's a debate about who should be the Most Valuable Player, and every year, someone throws in the name of a particular player whose statistics happen to stand up better against everybody else's, and as far as starting pitchers go in the International League, that's Hellickson.

But really, it would be difficult to argue - even statistically - that Hellickson was as valuable to the Durham Bulls as Albaladejo was to the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.

When they clinched the IL South Division on Aug. 20, the Bulls were 79-47 and 17½ games ahead of second-place Charlotte.

Hellickson, to that point in the season, had 21 starts for the Bulls, and the Bulls were 17-4 in those games.

If Durham had played merely .500 ball in those games and gone 11-10, they'd have been 73-53. Still, 9½ games ahead of where Charlotte was on that date.

Albaladejo is a different type of pitcher, of course, with a completely different role. But even with his league-record 43 saves and an ERA that hasn't dipped below 2.00 since April, here is the statistic that has defined Albaladejo more than any other: The Yankees' record in the 57 games he has pitched is 53-4.

Think about that: 53-4.

On Aug. 20, the day Durham clinched its division, the Yankees were a comfortable - but certainly not dominant - six games ahead of Buffalo.

That's three more Yankees losses and three more Buffalo wins from a tie atop the division, and if you're wondering how much of an impact Albaladejo had on that, consider that 23 of his 43 saves were in one-run games.

He blew two save opportunities all season. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that he blew five of those one-run games ­- which would have been an acceptable number that certainly wouldn't have cost him his job as the Yankees' closer. In fact, he'd still have tied the league record in saves if he had squandered that many.

Are the Yankees in the position they're in now, playing out the last week of the regular season with the North Division title already in their pockets? Undoubtedly, no.

Did Jeremy Hellickson affect that many of Durham's games? Did he have that great a day-to-day impact? Did his performance make the Bulls what they were, or did they simply enhance what already was a pretty good team to begin with?

Hellickson made the Bulls a dominant team. Albaladejo made the Yankees a playoff team.

As far as "Best" goes, Hellickson and Albaladejo are pretty comparable in that regard.

But "Most Valuable?" Sorry, it's not even close.

Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com

Interesting. Isn't it? Roger Clemens sent this statement to his Twitter followers Thursday, shortly after a federal grand jury determined he doesn't mean a word of it.

He lied, they said. About not taking steroids. About turning up his nose to Human Growth Hormone. About his insistence that his legendary longevity had more to do with illicit substances than good, old-fashioned hard work.

Yet, as he faces counts of obstruction of Congress, perjury and false statements and a potential maximum 30-year prison sentence if ultimately convicted, Clemens remains as undeterred as ever - even as players around the game admit they've used steroids in the past with little to no retribution from fans and the media.

A compulsive liar who doesn't know when to stop, doesn't know the damage he's causing, doesn't understand that as untouchable as he was on the field, he's just an average citizen off it?

Or as innocent as he says he is? No doubt, he's either innocent or flat-out crazy. But this isn't a column about whether Roger Clemens took steroids, because none of us knows for sure.

At the end of the day, there's no positive drug test to stick the dagger in his case. And while so many others who have been accused just like him have eventually admitted their guilt, there's something impressive about the fact that Clemens keeps toeing the line of innocence.

We do, however, also know that liars lie.

We know that both Clemens' good friend Andy Pettitte and former trainer Brian McNamee either testified or told investigators Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs.

We also know that there's nothing to gain at this point by coming clean.

Doing so seals The Rocket some time in the slammer, after all.

Here's the question I have: At this point, does anybody really care what happens here?

There have been too many Congressional hearings to count. Every season, it seems like another handful of players comes clean on cloudy pasts. Baseball has even tried to out its own players, with the half-hearted Mitchell Report, completed by a U.S. senator from New England who somehow didn't manage to unearth the fact that the two most impactful Boston players since Carl Yastrzemski retired - David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez - tested positive in 2003 for PEDs.

Point is, it has been a long time now since we all found out just how big a role performance enhancing drugs played in baseball starting in the late 1980s. Nobody likes it. But we've accepted it.

It's not exactly breaking news, either, that players have lied about their involvement with steroids. Because at first, all of them lied. Every one of them.

Every couple of months, it seems, baseball fans have to be reminded of the steroids era. It's frustrating and unfortunate. Most of all, it's sad.

Think about it: We can see a day when the game's single-season and career home run record-holder (Barry Bonds), its all-time hit leader (Pete Rose), the pitcher who has won the most Cy Young Awards (Clemens) and the active player with the best chance to claim the all-time homer record (Alex Rodriguez) will not be welcome at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

All but Rose, of course, has been linked to performance-enhancing drugs.

Rodriguez admitted he has used them.

Sad.

And now, all of this can land Roger Clemens behind bars.

Even sadder.

Ultimately, the punishment for the crimes gets paid by the players who committed them. And if Clemens lied to Congress, he deserves what he gets.

But I wonder if the people who deserve a good portion of the credit for why baseball turned into the cesspool it did for more than a decade feel as much guilt as they should about this.

Of course, I'm talking about the media and the fans.

In that group, there are a significant number of silent co-conspirators who saw something too good to be true in Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998, and believed it anyway. Players don't get that big. They don't get that strong. Baseballs aren't supposed to fly quite that way.

Come on. We all knew that much.

But man, did we have longball fever.

Even with the signs that something was amiss, we talked about how McGwire and Sosa saved the game.

Saved it.

That's a far cry from disgracing it. And as far away from a prison sentence as you can get.

The steroid era was a black eye for baseball and continues to be a time we don't know quite how to reconcile with history and our hearts.

So, we choose to hate the players who misled us.

Roger Clemens will go to prison if he misled Congress.

Shows who was gullible enough to be misled in the first place.

Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com

Jim Delany, after all, always sounds that way.

Decisive.

Confident.

That's because he's perpetually a mile ahead of where every other big-time college athletics conference commissioner stands on the proverbial curve.

Get to know him a little bit, and it's easy to see the Big Ten commissioner likes to be the innovator, and not the follower. Like him or not, he doesn't react to the climate in college sports, he creates it.

The Bowl Championship Series? He helped come up with that whole scheme.

College football's instant replay system? Delany had it going in the Big Ten before it was in everywhere else.

Mega-television networks built from the ground up and designed specifically to pitch the product of a major college athletic conference? Good 'ole Jim Delany's idea.

So when he stepped to the podium at the Big Ten football media day Monday to discuss how far along the Big Ten's latest expansion efforts had come, did anyone expect him to preach patience? Did anyone expect a "There's no rush" on when a divisional alignment would be announced? Or a "We'll cross that bridge when we get there" in regards to when a potential Big Ten Championship Game will be initiated? Forget all of that. What he outlined was a confident, detailed, sure plan to usher in the next generation of Big Ten football.

A divisional alignment will be announced within 45 days, he vowed. Not too long after that, we'll at the very least know the venue hosting the first Big Ten title game after next season, and what company shelled out enough coinage to get the naming rights.

And, although this one might come a few years further down the road than the conference championship game, Delany detailed one other plan for the future that is sure to become a talking point for years to come: The as-yet-uncharted nine-game conference schedule.

"Conferences," he said, "are about playing each other more. Not less."

That's all well and good, and all things being equal, it's the proper thing to do.

But in this sense, the guess is that not every Big Ten football coach is going to be on board.

A different tradition

Nobody should argue that the Big Ten Network and westward expansion and the implementation of a championship game for football were realistic ideas for the conference to pursue. No more proof of that is necessary than the fact that every other conference is going to try to do every one of those things, if they haven't already.

But the nine-game schedule just looks all too much like an idealistic idea on the Big Ten's part. And certainly, there are huge differences between realistic ideas and idealistic ones.

Let's take one school out of the Big Ten to illustrate why.

Penn State has been carving its niche in the Big Ten for the last 17 years, and suffice to say, there is still a significant portion of the fan base that longs for the days when the Nittany Lions weren't competing in the Big Ten.

There are fans who love watching the Nittany Lions duke it out with Ohio State and Michigan and Iowa every year. But there are at least as many fans who would boot the Buckeyes, Wolverines and Hawkeyes off the schedule if it meant getting Pitt, West Virginia and Notre Dame back on it.

Bank on this: That will never change.

Bank on this also: When a nine-game schedule gets instituted, any chance Penn State will have to keep one foot in that past will be obliterated by logistics.

Home cooking

Nine, we learned in kindergarten, is not an even number. Which means, there will be some years under the new Big Ten schedule when Penn State plays five conference home games. And some years when it plays four.

Four. Think that's not a huge deal? Obviously, you haven't been listening to Joe Paterno the last few years.

On Sept. 4, Penn State will open the season against Football Championship Subdivision opponent Youngstown State. Because it precedes a trip to Tuscaloosa to take on defending national champion Alabama, Paterno probably won't hear the same kind of questions about scheduling lower-division cupcakes that he did last year when Eastern Illinois came to town. Or the year before when Coastal Carolina did. Or two years before that, the last time Youngstown State came to Happy Valley.

His answer to the critics in those instances was always the same.

"Money. So we can support the other 28 sports on this campus," he said last year when asked why Penn State scheduled Eastern Illinois.

Going forward, the preference among athletic departments seems to be toward having eight home games to help take the sting away from ever-increasing athletic budgets, as Ohio State coach Jim Tressel told reporters during Tuesday's session with the Big Ten media. And if that's the case, teams already would be striving for a standard impossible to reach every other year under a nine-game schedule.

Mark these words: Games against the FBS schools that fans have become so frustrated with over the last few years absolutely will become the norm once the nine-game schedule goes into effect. It will be impossible to find elite programs like Notre Dame willing to bend to the more rigid Big Ten schedule for nonconference games. And the likes of Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State will be more unwilling than ever to agree to home-and-away series years in advance, because no school is going to be willing to risk a scheduling nightmare.

Unwittingly scheduling the away half of a home-and-home series for a season when that team only has four conference home games to draw from could wind up costing a school millions.

Better love where you are

There is plenty of good that will come from the conference's new format, and there will be coaches who come up with some cockamamie reasons to not like it. Illinois coach Ron Zook even argued Tuesday that playing more conference games will make it more difficult for teams to become bowl eligible, because six more games against legitimate opponents means six more losses to go around.

Tough. The nine-game schedule is a fast way for the Big Ten to get as competitive as the SEC is and the Big 12 was. If playing more conference games forces some of the bottom-feeders to suck it up, get better and not strive for the minimum six wins to become bowl eligible, then bravo to the nine-game schedule.

But we all know this venture will only be as successful as the coffers of 12 athletic departments' budgets say it is.

And as far as Penn State goes, it's worth wondering how fans are going to view the Big Ten going forward, when there's even less of a chance the old Pitt and Notre Dame rivalries will ever assume prominent role again.

DONNIE COLLINS is a columnist for The Times-Tribune. Reach him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com