We pick things up with an eyewitness account from one of Anderson's Facebook friends:

Last wednesday I got a facebook chat from Jamal Anderson around 6 AM asking for my phone number which I obviously did not give out. He then went on to tell me that he had a couple women coming over, one of them was a big girl but the rest were bangin and then he started complaining about why women think a big man can't handle multiple women. He would go on to talk about his penis and how he could totally handle multiple women. He told me that he was considering going into porn under the name Axel Steelcock as a play on the character from Guitar Hero.

Fearing for Anderson's mental health, or perhaps his physical well-being had Jamal done the Dirty Bird with said "big girl," our tipster checked up on him. This was his response.

No, Jamal. Hope all is well with you.

It's pure marketing genius from the independent-league St. Paul Saints, a team partially owned, of course, by Mike Veeck and Bill Murray. The players, coaches and fans will presumably tweet their way to a loss next Thursday. But everyone will have fun! And that's the point of independent league baseball, last time we checked. After all, the Saints are also the bumbling squadron of fun known for their innovative giveaways: a Franken-Coleman doublesided bobbleheading concoction; a Bud Selig tie; rubber dog toys to honor Michael Vick; and, the cream of the crop, a bobblefoot to honor Larry Craig.

Twitter-My-Face, though, is not bobbleheadable, which leads us to this excerpted (and sic'd) press release below:

On July 23, players, coaches, fans and employees will be asked to update their facebook status, post photos and send tweets so that baseball fans around the world will know exactly what is going on at Midway Stadium.

Phew! I thought I might be missing out.

Saints pitching coach Jason Verdugo is expected to tweet during a trip to the mound to speak with one of his pitchers and other players and coaches are expected to tweet from the dugout. Fans will get to see the Saints updated facebook, MySpace and twitter pages during the game displayed on the Saints videoboard. Fans will check out the live status of Saints players. For example, when Saints first baseman Jason Cooper comes to bat, his facebook status may appear on the videoboard stating "Jason Cooper is…at the plate" or "Jason Cooper is…upset at that last strike call."

Jason Cooper is... waiting to get the call-up to a real minor league team, where all he has to do is sign a few autographs during his at-bat.

Popular Saints staff members and ushertainers such as Mudonna, famous massaging nun Sister Ros, beer vendor Trixster and Superfan will let provide a unique perspecitive with updates during the evening.

I am so there, if only to learn the meaning of the euphemism "famous massaging nun." Twitpics are encouraged.

Saints Embrace Social Media With Twitter-My-Face [St. Paul Saints]

Ideal Houston Chronicle baseball writer Jose de Jesus Ortiz could not believe his eyes, ears, and other sensory organs when a female intern for a Houston media organization was asked out by a married baseball player to go to a club later that night. Ortiz hoped to stop speculation when he said the intern didn't work for the Chronicle and the player didn't play for the Astros. And it worked. End of blog post.

Whoops, no wait, there appear to be some more words. here. The female in question publicly blurted out her new found digits:

[T]he young lady, who has nearly 700 "friends" on Facebook, decided to post this message on her Facebook account for over four hours: "Was asked out by (team name and player name) last night and I have his cell phone number to prove it."

Not much to go on, but this we know: it was a guy. This is not a LESBIAN LOVE AFFAIR story. Regardless, please put on your thinking caps.

We also can presume that, while it wasn't an Astros player, it was someone on a team who played at Houston since McNair's death on July 4, since Ortiz's point was that these two people "didn't learn" from his death. That narrows it down to someone from the Pirates or the Nationals, which brings us to this conclusion: this woman has extremely low standards.

So I suppose if someone cared enough, they could filter out all those players and get a list of wedding banded hands. I am unsure how to rule Jose Tabata's marital status.

McNair's Death Not A Lesson To One Idiot [Houston Chronicle]

Some of the posts were lifted from Scout.com's Phog.net, but one reader snagged screengrabs from some of the more doltish people who fell for it, like former Memphis Tiger and current New Jersey Net Chris Douglas-Roberts who was a little freaked out by his turncoat coach writing on his wall:

Of course, this could also be a fake Chris Douglas-Roberts but I'm hopeful people don't have that much free time on their hands.

Some of the other Fake John Calipari victims include this poor kid who actually wrote an essay because he thought it would enter him in a contest to win a one-on-one dinner with the coach:

And then there's this guy, who was eager to thank Calipari for the lessons he learned after he attended his summer basketball camp:

If John Calipari tells you to "Put It In The Butt" then you damn well better do that, I guess. If you'd like to befriend this John Calipari before the real John Calipari shuts it down, you can do so by clicking here.

*******

Okay, so the comment changeover thingee didn't happen today, obviously. It will be very soon, though, but I'll tell you the gist of it in the meantime since I hinted about it last night.

Here's the deal: Starred commenters will become royalty and non-starred commenters will be shuffled off to an alternative commenting universe on the site , which I'm told is quite like purgatory, one filled with screaming headless children threadjacking their own threadjacks or something. It's a little confusing, I know, but hopefully it will all make more sense once it's enabled and I'll give you specific instructions and guidelines for how to succeed in this format.

So once this is up and running, you'll hopefully see why the mass de-starring executions had to occur. No, I wasn't very nice about it, but it was also an effective way of rooting some people out who I (or the silly ninjas) may not have noticed otherwise. But for those offended, this is my informal apology for said shadiness. However, this was also a way to make the whole process moderately amusing for the 95% of the readership who could give a crap about the commenting situation but who do enjoy watching online melodrama. Sorry. You were outnumbered. Anyway, until the switch is flipped, onward.

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Yeah you are.

Here's the screen-grab from one of his most recent updates and his enthusiastic support group (including former Texans defensive end Anthony Weaver) encouraging Daniels to continue his hold out until the Texans' money-holders give him the same respect as Yahoo's! Brandon Funston does on his latest Big Board.

The next logical step for Daniels is to poke the crap out of Texans owner Bob McNair and then threaten him with a public de-friending on his wall. Who needs agents?

Daniels Joins Robinson As Texans Holdout [Houston Chronicle]

Fesenko, whose team option is up this offseason, recently had an exit interview with Sloan and general manager Kevin O'Connor. It didn't go so well, reports The Salt Lake Tribune.

He apparently was asked by general manager Kevin O'Connor and Jerry Sloan to explain some of the updates on his Facebook page.

There are those more Facebook savvy than myself, but one of the posts in question concerned being happy to be in Los Angeles during the playoffs because it was such a good city in which to go out.

For the record, Fesenko didn't play a single minute of the Lakers series.

Earlier this season, you might recall, Sloan was thoroughly discombobulated by the concept of social networking. "I don't even have a computer," he said at the time, when asked about Twitter. "I don't know how to turn one on. I don't know what you're talking about."

He does now, evidently. And wouldn't it be just like Sloan to teach himself personal computing merely so he can monitor whether his players are showing sufficient grit and moxie?

The Fesenko question [The Salt Lake Tribune]

Just like the rest of Kentucky's fan base and her father — who called out "this Pat Ford guy" in a tweet last month — Erin Calipari has taken umbrage with Forde's reporting on Kentucky's basketball program. The Kentucky resident has rained on the Calipari-to-Kentucky parade since the opening press conference, presciently warning of past transgressions and shady alliances, but his criticisms have been consistently dismissed by the Wildcat commentariat because he co-wrote a book with Rick Pitino and, consequently, must just hate the Widcats.

So in the last two days, Erin Calipari has been on the offensive, dissing Forde through Facebook for more than 3,000 of her closest friends. A collection of status updates (Photoshopped for consolidation), sent in from astute readers:

Perhaps she should heed the advice her father gave her other sister after she scooped the news that Josh Pastner would be Memphis' new head coach: "I told them that they have to get off Facebook. This stuff is crazy."

John Calipari takes on ESPN, or vice versa [The Dagger]
Facebook's Megan Calipari has learned... [Gary Parrish]
It's 'see no evil, hear no evil' in Kentucky [ESPN]
The Calipari Daughters Should Probably Get Off Facebook Immediately [Deadspin]

Apparently, Big Ben fans were slightly alarmed this week when he announced on his Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages that he had been diagnosed with skin cancer. (Which makes total sense when you consider all the sun-drenched beaches in Pittsburgh.) But it turns out that not only does he not have cancer, he doesn't even have a Facebook page. Ben is "off the grid" as they say, which is why he has two Super Bowl rings and everyone who has ever left a comment on Digg does not.

It's now been established that fake celebrity and athlete accounts make up roughly 60% of social networking sites, rendering the services even more pointless than they already were. There's been at least four fake NFL players exposed just this week and all it accomplishes is making bloggers look bad. Now why would you want to do that? Pretending to be someone else on the internet is the comedic equivalent of the "your shoe is untied" joke. Someone even created a fake Twitter account for me, which might be the saddest thing I've ever heard. Even my fake internet mom wouldn't read that.

By the way, be sure to check out the Deadspin Twitter! It's just like reading Deadspin, but with fewer words!

No cause for alarm: Roethlisberger denies he has skin cancer [Post-Gazette]
Fake Ben Roethlisberger Facebook Page Says He Has Skin Cancer [Fanhouse]
Beware Phony Twitter Accounts [Pro Football Talk]
[Pic]

It might seem a little invasive, but this isn't completely outside the scope of what many multi-million dollar businesses do when they recruit prospective employees and plan on paying them large sums of money. However, in this case, the NFL's red flags are the things that may or may not end up on a blog some place like racist status updates or incriminating drunk photos. Stuff like that. The bait used in most of these "ghosting" tactics is usually a young, attractive girl, proclaiming her undying admiration for the player. Most of the time, players bite. Then, right after the draft, just like Keyser Soze, poof, the winsome lady has vanished.

Robinson spoke to many NFL personnel sources for the piece and most of them were not apologetic about the practice. Most were just anonymous.

"Twenty years ago, if you weren't getting a lot from a [college team's] coaching staff or a family, you might put weeks into gathering good information on a couple guys," the personnel source said. "Now, we can do a lot of it in a few days. We can sit down with 20 guys that we might be looking at, and have a pile of pictures and background things to hit them with. And every once in a while you come across something that probably saves you from making a big mistake. Not as much as you might think, but if it happens every couple years, it keeps you ahead of the game."

It would be interesting to see how some of the more infamous internet photos of certain players would have impacted their draft spots. Would Leinart drop out of the first round? Would Roethlisberger? Would Kyle Orton be institutionalized?

Social networking a potential trap for prospects [Yahoo Sports]

Operation Scheyerface was conceived as a Facebook group by Maryland student Jimmy Johnston, who quickly organized a small army of 1,100 Maryland fans armed with computer images of Duke guard Jon Scheyer for Wednesday's game. From the page:

Duke guard Jon Scheyer makes possibly the funkiest facial expressions of all time while playing basketball. Therefore, we shall make fun of him. Did this two years ago and we won, so let's follow the lead of the lady terps and do it again!

This time, we need everyone to print out one black and white scheyerface (or more since I'm sure people will miss this) from the end of this description and taunt him. It doesn't matter which one, just pick one. If you are on the wall, I'm pretty sure shooting 2nd half free throws into a wall of Scheyerfaces would work to perfection.

Witness the result above.

It's the next step in fan evolution, I suppose, from the big-head sign craze, made popular at Marquette, and transferred to Indiana when Tom Crean moved to the Hoosier state.

Who knows what crazy shit we'll seen in the stands in the future? (Note to NCAA: Do not ban these signs for the NCAA Tournament. Big mistake if you do).

Of course, Operation Scheyerface didn't work exactly as planned: Scheyer hit a key 3-pointer with 1:54 remaining in the Blue Devils' 78-67 win.

Operation Scheyerface v2.0 [DC Sports Bog]
Operation Scheyerface v2.0 [Facebook]

Florida lineman Jim Tartt isn't nearly as circumspect. The 315-pound senior from Sopchoppy, Fla., is a little slap-happy with the confirm button, apparently. His latest fun Facebook friends: "Africa Gives Nothing To Anyone — Except AIDS." Oh, it's a merry group ... I was just over there. I won't link to it, but here's a random excerpt:

It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating. If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what? I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that's an idea.

It's so comforting to know that, conceivably, their members can comment on Deadspin.

Tartt's Facebook page has been taken down, which leads me to believe he either wasn't paying attention to the groups he's joining, or someone else did it as a joke. Or maybe he shares their views, I don't know. Also, as The Sporting Blog points out, Tartt is an anthropology major. Awk-ward.

Oh well; let's just let this go and keep it among ourselves, OK? Back to my Facebook page.

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UF's Tartt Is Unaware Of Africa's Many Exports [The Sporting Blog]