Trietley: What to “buy” and “sell” in sports right now

Are you laughing at the 49ers? Do you want Marc-Andre Fleury out of town? Well, hold your horses… Are you laughing at the 49ers? Do you want Marc-Andre Fleury out of town? Well, hold your horses — it’s time for a round of buy or sell.

Buy: Marc-Andre Fleury, trading at $5.5 million.

It took me four years to perfect my Fleury impression, and I’m not going to let a bad goal run him out of town. Yeah, Scott Gomez’s game-winner on him last Saturday was well, awful, but do you know how Martin Brodeur, Henrik Lundqvist and Tuukka Rask are doing this year? They all have goals-against averages over four. Let’s give Fleury more than two games before we forget he won a Stanley Cup at age 24, unless you really want journeyman Brent Johnson to have the job.

Buy: The San Francisco 49ers, trading at 0-5.

Pop quiz: Who is Max Hall?

A) The starting center fielder for the 1915 Pirates.

B) A famous cough-drop purveyor.

C) The quarterback of the Arizona Cardinals.

The unprecedented lack of talent in the NFC West this season, highlighted by undrafted rookie quarterback Max Hall starting for the division-leader Arizona Cardinals, means owner Jed York’s texted guarantee that the 49ers will win the division should be taken seriously.

When I read the story about the text, I thought “O” when I didn’t see “jk” at the end of it. Still, the 49ers are only three games behind the Cardinals and still play them twice. Crazier things have happened, and I like that an owner showed some faith in his coaching staff for once.

Sell: Instant replay in baseball, trading at “WE NEED REPLAY NOW!”

Let’s not beat around the bush: baseball is slow.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the sport needs to stay away from instant replay, or at least one that utilizes a challenge system.

College football’s instant-replay system drew out two clear-cut calls at the end of Pitt-Notre Dame game, and play dragged to a standstill. Pitt’s last drive, all of four plays, must have taken 10 minutes, thanks to the superfluous use of booth review. It’s not a rare occurrence — the same thing happened at the end of last week’s game between LSU and Florida.

Baseball makes bad calls. The current system fixes some of those bad calls — fair versus foul on home runs, for one. But if the league institutes a challenge system, fifty inconsequential ball-strike calls will be reviewed for every Jim Joyce moment. It’s a slippery, mind-numbing slope if there ever was one.

The correct direction for baseball: accurately identify the best officiating crews for postseason play. Once umpires start to miss straightforward calls, it becomes a matter of finding better ones — not adding replay.

Buy: Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels, trading as World Series favorites

I take the Philadelphia Phillies over the Giants. I take them over the Yankees. If you gave Halladay, Oswalt and Hamels a basketball, I’d take them over the Heat.

I haven’t seen a pitching staff so dominant since Arizona’s Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling in 2001. Do you think Halladay and Hamels tease Oswalt because he gave up a run? Way to ruin it, Roy.

The Phillies kept Joey Votto, the odds-on favorite to win the National League Most Valuable Player Award, to one hit all series. As much as I love the Giants, they don’t stand a chance in a seven-game series if H2O keeps it up. San Francisco needs two more Tim Lincecums.

I haven’t even mentioned Philadelphia’s offense, but that doesn’t matter. With the pitching staff the Phillies have, if you gave Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh baseball bats, they could probably do the job.