Put Formula 1 on death watch. Eight Formula 1 teams, including perennial powerhouse Ferrari and current season leader Brawn GP, have announced their intention to leave Formula 1 and start their own racing series next year. The issue is financial, but not in the way that you might expect. The ruling powers of F1 want to limit team’s annual budgets to $60 million a year, and impose severe penalties if teams don’t adhere to the limitations. The eight teams aren’t interested in having someone else dictate how they can spend their money, so they are threatening to go out on their own. I have never heard anything so stupid. Going off on their own set open wheel racing in the U.S. back a decade or more, taking Indy racing from a rapidly growing sport to one that it all but irrelevant. F1 has a bigger base by far to build from, but they would still be badly crippled by this dissension. It seems odd that a series that depends so heavily on the car industry would be looking to find ways to spend more now, and it certainly seems like an odd way to try to garner public sympathy in the midst of a bad recession. I just hope that someone swallows their pride and blinks before this one gets totally out of hand. It’s not that I even care about F1 – I don’t – it’s just that I can’t stand to hear anything more about groups tearing themselves apart for stupid reasons.

I meant to mention it yesterday, but I didn’t – I can’t believe the Jays. They have struggled for much of the last month, and they got yet another bout of terrible news this week with the injuries to the AL’s best starter in Roy Halladay and key reliever Scott Downs. That would be an excuse for them to quit, or at least to show even more cracks than they have been recently. Instead, they go out and beat NL East leading Philadelphia three times in a row. It just goes to show that you can never really get inside the heads of any team unless you are inside the clubhouse.

Philly lost these three games on the road, but they still have a truly bizarre record. Even with getting swept they are 23-9 on the road – by far the best in the league. At home they are 13-19. Only the pathetic Nationals have fewer wins at home than the Phillies. You’d think that a defending World Series champ would have a huge home field advantage, but nothing could apparently be further from the truth. Bizarre.

Crazy, crazy, crazy College World Series game on Thursday night. North Carolina was up 4-0 over Arizona State after four innings, and they looked like they were cruising. But then the Sun Devils woke up in a big, big way. They tied it up in the fifth, and then exploded for eight runs in the seventh to run away with it. This is the craziest tournament ever – stuff like this always happens in Omaha. I think Texas will beat LSU in the end, by the way.