Madison Bumgarner is fighting for a spot in the rotation this spring, and is expected to be the next dominant arm to come out of the Giants’ farm system. (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO — Madison Bumgarner is why spring training is great.

Every year at this time, somewhere in baseball there is a story just like this. This spring, when those seemingly meaningless exhibition games begin next week, this story will tantalize Giants fans. And they’ll be the better for it.

The 20-year-old Bumgarner serves as this spring’s gem for Giants fans to ogle; the shiny, new object of their affections at which they can lustily “ooh” and “ahh.”

Bumgarner is the latest ray of hope emanating from the pitching pipeline that gave them Matt Cain, then Tim Lincecum. More lightning in that bottle of pitching prospects the Giants have been pouring onto their pitching staff the last four-plus seasons.

When its Bumgarner’s turn to pitch, they’ll be reminded of Bruce Bochy bringing up the left-hander from out of nowhere on a cool, clear night last September when Lincecum succumbed to back spasms. With the Giants just four games back in the wild-card race, this was no small assignment.

That night, at the ripe old age of 20 years, 38 days — making him the youngest Giants starter since they came to San Francisco — Bumgarner held the San Diego Padres to a pair of solo home runs and a few
singles over 5¹⁄³ innings, and departed with a 3-2 lead.

This after finding out he was being called up just the day before, and finding out he was filling in for Lincecum just 3½ hours before taking the mound at AT&T Park. Bumgarner would make three more scoreless appearances in relief before it was back to oblivion. Giants fans, meanwhile, mostly worried this offseason about Lincecum and arbitration.

Until Giants pitchers and catchers reported.

Now Madison Bumgarner is back, and as bright and shiny a prospect as there is. He’s been named on a couple of Top-5, Top-10 “top prospect” lists that surface from Fantasy Baseball Web sites across the Internet.

With just 49 minor-league starts and eight major league innings to his credit, Bumgarner will be examined and re-examined under the magnifying glass of major league expectations while the Giants play their way from Scottsdale, Ariz., to the Bay Area.

From the looks of his 27-5 minor league record — and how he handled his major league stint — it appears as if Bumgarner will be a prospect described as “when” he joins the Giants rotation, not “if.” And if that “when” is now, then three-fifths of the Giants’ rotation will open the season 25 years old or younger.

Watching all this unfold will be the Giants’ gentle reminder why the spring is so beautiful to baseball.

Nothing but hopes and possibilities. Let the games begin.

Tim Liotta is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to The Examiner. E-mail him at tliotta@sfexaminer.com.

Decidedly unglamorous gal Tina Fey has received the highest blessing from the world’s fashion bible — the writer and actress appears on the March cover of Vogue magazine. 

“I feel like I represent normalcy in some way. What are your choices today in entertainment? People either represent youth, power, or sexuality,” Fey tells writer Jonathan Van Meter.  

“And then there’s me, carrying normalcy. Me and Rachael Ray.” 

Tina doth protest too much, however. We doubt Rachael Ray could pull off the Gucci evening gown, Prada separates and Dolce & Gabbana romper Fey wears in her Tonne Goodman-styled spread. 

“I’m almost 40, and I wore a romper today,” Fey said in a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot, which took place at her stomping ground, 30 Rockefeller Center.  

Fey’s trademark scar was airbrushed for the shoot, but the actress insists she’s not perpetuating an image of perfection. 

“I don’t weigh myself. I just go by if my clothes fit. I try not to participate too much in the incredible amount of wasted energy that women have around dealing with food,” she said. 

Before her Emmy-winning show “30 Rock” hit airwaves, Fey was the head writer at “Saturday Night Live” — a gig that wasn’t landing her on any covers. The comedian was about 30 pounds overweight, but after being appointed a “Weekend Update” anchor she hit the treadmill and hasn’t stopped since. 

“I’ve never gone back up,” she says of her weight. 

“Well … I have had a baby. I gained 35 pounds. And had a five-pound baby.” 

Keep going for more photos of Fey, shot by Mario Testino. 

– Matt Donnelly  

Photo: Fey gets whimsical in a D&G romper and mouse ears on the roof of 30 Rock. Credit: Mario Testino for Vouge. 

Photo: Radiant in Gucci evening wear. Credit: Mario Testino for Vogue.  

Check out related Ministry dispatches about stars in glossy magazines! And make us your cover stars on Twitter and Facebook.  

New Orleans’ storybook 31-17 Super Bowl XLIV triumph over Indianapolis ends four-plus decades of franchise futility and elevates a hard-pressed but hardy city 4 1/2 years after Katrina.

The New Orleans Saints, for decades the NFL’s lovable losers, used the biggest stage Sunday to answer the question that has become their mantra.

Who dat say they gonna beat them Saints?

The answer: Not a soul.

What once was unbelievable is now a reality. The underdog Saints are pro football’s champions, 31-17 victors over the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV.

As thousands of fans gathered in the stands behind an end zone at Sun Life Stadium chanting “Who-dat! Who-dat!” Saints quarterback Drew Brees sat on a podium and tried to find the right words. To him, the club’s first trip to the Super Bowl — and, of course, its first Lombardi Trophy — means so much more than a spot in the history books, especially to a region ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“Whoever thought that this could be happening?” Brees said. “Eighty-five percent of the city was under water. People were evacuating to places all over the country. Most people left not knowing whether New Orleans would ever come back, or if the organization would ever come back.

“But not only did the organization and the city come back. And so many of our core group of players came in that year as free agents, and we all looked at one another and said, ‘We’re going to rebuild together. We’re going to lean on each other.’ And that’s what we’ve done.”

To reach the mountaintop, the Saints had to beat a native son, four-time NFL most valuable player Peyton Manning, who was raised in New Orleans. He was on the wrong end of the game’s pivotal play, a 74-yard interception return for a touchdown by Saints cornerback Tracy Porter with 3 minutes 12 seconds to go.

That came when the Colts were trailing by seven and looking to march downfield to forge a tie. Indianapolis had done that so often this season, setting an NFL record with seven fourth-quarter comebacks.

This time, however, it wasn’t to be. Porter stepped in front of a short third-down pass for Reggie Wayne, snared the ball, found an open path to the end zone and was gone.

“When I saw my blockers in front of me, and only Peyton and the offensive linemen left,” Porter said, “I cut back and ran it in.”

It was Porter who made a huge interception in the NFC championship game too, picking off a pass by Minnesota’s Brett Favre to force overtime.

This time, Porter’s runback gave the Saints a two-touchdown lead and sapped the spirit of the Colts, who were favored by 4 1/2 points on the field where they won a Super Bowl three years earlier.

Porter called his play “great film study by me, a great jump, and a great play.”

Wayne attributed it to something else.

“They did a good job of guessing,” he said. “That’s what it is, a guessing game. . . . That’s what they’ve been thriving on all year, creating turnovers and scoring with it. He pretty much caught it and put us in panic mode.”

Manning isn’t alone. Along their road to the championship, the Saints became the first team to defeat three quarterbacks who previously won Super Bowls (Arizona’s Kurt Warner, Favre and Manning).

In their three games before facing the Saints in these playoffs, those three quarterbacks combined for 12 touchdown passes without an interception. But against the Saints, those passers had two touchdowns and four interceptions.

New Orleans used special teams to grab the momentum at the start of the second half. Trailing after two quarters, 10-6, the Saints opened the third with a successful onside kick. That set up a 58-yard touchdown drive for a 13-10 lead. That possession ended with a highlight-reel catch and carry by running back Pierre Thomas for a 16-yard touchdown.

Indianapolis answered with a touchdown, but that would be the last time the Colts scored. The Saints took the lead in the fourth quarter on a two-yard scoring reception by Jeremy Shockey, followed by a two-point conversion, and extended it on Porter’s interception return.

Brees was named the game’s most valuable player, completing 32 of 39 passes for 288 yards with two touchdowns. His 32 completions tied the Super Bowl record set by New England’s Tom Brady six years ago in a victory over Carolina.

About an hour after the game, Brees rode across the field on a golf cart, facing backward as a cluster of cameramen followed in his wake.

In his hands was the Lombardi Trophy. The glistening silver ball was just as shiny as he’d seen on television, Brees said, but “it wasn’t as heavy as I thought.”

Of course, this comes from a man who has lifted a city.

sam.farmer@latimes.com

twitter.com/LATimesfarmer

Mixing things up: San Francisco’s current system is designed to create socioeconomic diversity on each campus. (Examiner file photo)

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco school officials on Tuesday discussed options to overhaul the unpopular student-assignment system for elementary and middle schools, including possibly sending students to the school that is closest to their homes.

At a Board of Education meeting, San Francisco Unified School District officials presented a set of recommendations that would no longer rely on factors such as socioeconomic class or home language to place students in schools.

Instead, the staff presented options that would use academic performance and student proximity to schools as a way to place students and diversify campuses. The Board made comments, and a recommendation will be presented next Tuesday. A final vote is scheduled for March 9.

The first option presented would be similar to what is already in place: parents can choose from any school in The City. However, once that school is full, the remaining names would go into a lottery system. The difference is that the lottery would use academic performance to get an aggregate of low- and high-performing students in each school, which officials say would achieve a similar level of diversity if they used race as a factor. The lottery system would also consider location, or where students live, to help place them in schools.

The second option would place students in schools that are closest to their homes. Under this option, parents would still be allowed to choose other schools only if there was availability. This option would make school assignment predictable and less convoluted, yet it would limit a parent’s ability to get their kids into their first-choice schools.

District officials admit neither option would resolve an ultimate goal of student assignment: Creating more racial diversity in schools.

“I’m interested in a more aggressive plan for diversity,” board President Jane Kim said. “We really want to reduce the number of racially isolated schools. We think it affects the quality of the school.”

Currently, instead of students attending the schools closest to their home, San Francisco uses a complex assignment system so students from all backgrounds will have a fair shot at going to the best schools.

The Parent Advisory Council and Parents for Public Schools teamed up to represent the community and parent concerns over the controversial assignment system. The two groups said they would not support any options that strip away a parent’s ability to choose schools. They strongly advocated creating equity in schools so student assignment creates less contention among parents.

“If all of our schools were great, people would not care about student assignment,” said Ruth Grabowski, coordinator of PAC. “That’s the anxiety factor — it’s the lack of equality of our schools.”

New proposals

Two options to replace the current school-assignment process were offered at Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting :

Option 1: Parents can choose from any city school. Once a school is full, names would be placed in a lottery system. Academic performance would determine school assignments, with low- and high-performing students mixed.

Option 2: Students would be kept in schools close to home. Parents would be allowed to choose other schools, but only if there is availability.

Source: SFUSD

Playing the lottery

63 Percentage of students who received top school choice in current year
82 Percentage of students who received one of top choices
18 Percentage of students who received none of top choices
63 Percentage of kindergartners who received top choice
9 Percentage of ninth-graders who received none of top choices

Source: San Francisco Unified School District

History of San Francisco Unified School District’s school assignment system:

1978: The NAACP files a lawsuit against San Francisco Unified School District and the state on behalf of a group of black parents whose children had been assigned to racially segregated schools.

1983: The lawsuit is settled with a consent decree, or court order, which mandates reforms SFUSD must make to improve academic achievement and desegregate schools. The district implements racial caps at schools that limit the number of students of one race to 45 percent.

1994: The families of several schoolchildren file a class action lawsuit against the state, the school district and the NAACP challenging the consent decree as a denial of their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

1999: The class action lawsuit is settled with an agreement that race will not be used in deciding school assignments. 

2001: The consent decree is extended until Dec. 31, 2005, and a new assignment system is created that uses a “diversity index,” which considers six socio-economic factors — not including race — when assigning students to popular schools. 

2005: SFUSD’s Community Advisory Committee on Student Assignment releases recommendations for improvements to the student assignment process.

2005: A UCLA report on SFUSD’s assignment system concludes that there maintains “a pattern of continuing resegregation at close to half of the district schools since 1999.”

2005: The consent decree is closed Dec. 31 by the decision of a federal judge.

2008: The San Francisco civil grand jury recommends dismantling the current enrollment lottery system and reverting to offering families preference at neighborhood schools while redrawing school boundaries.

June 2009: The Parent Advisory Council and Parents for Public Schools make recommendations for changing the student assignment system after surveying parents and other stakeholders.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/District-begins-shake-up-of-assignment-system-83418632.html#ixzz0eW3dWO1e

Ladies night at the Grammys

Swift’s win at the end of Sunday night’s 3 1/2 -hour ceremony seemed to stun the music-industry audience inside Staples Center in Los Angeles.

“I just hope you know how much this means to me . . . that we get to take this back to Nashville,” a breathless Swift said onstage at the 52nd awards. “Oh, my God. Our family is freaking out, my dad and little brother are losing their minds in our living room. This is for my dad and all those times he said I could do anything I wanted.”

Beyoncé’s stellar evening included song of the year, a writer’s award, for her effervescent endorsement of matrimony, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” But she and Swift lost their bids for record of the year to the dark horse win by the Southern rock group Kings of Leon for their hit “Use Somebody.”

Beyoncé and Swift’s combined 10 awards honored recordings that sold in numbers last year that defied the beleaguered music industry’s downward trend in recent years, saluting broad-based success at a particularly difficult time in the record business.

“For me, genres have really become something that I don’t think people focus on anymore,” Swift said backstage. “Country music is my love. [But] when you’re making music, I think the healthiest thing to do is remove titles or stereotypes from what you’re trying to do. It’s not country versus rap . . . it’s not anything you don’t make it. It’s about trying to make an album you hope is good enough to win album of the year.”

Beyoncé’s haul also included R&B female vocal and R&B song, for “Single Ladies,” contemporary R&B album for “I Am . . . Sasha Fierce” and traditional R&B performance for her recording of “At Last” from the film “Cadillac Records.” Besides her album of the year win, Swift collected trophies for country song and female country vocal for “White Horse,” and country album for “Fearless.”

The night took on an added country accent with the new artist award going to the Zac Brown Band, the Atlanta-based group that took the category largely on the strength of its hit “Chicken Fried,” a curious ode to the U.S. military’s defense of Americans’ right to beer and fried chicken.

Michael Jackson was the subject of an emotion-packed tribute in 3-D. “Earth Song,” an ecologically minded clip from the posthumous concert film “This Is It,” spurred the audience to don 3-D glasses to watch the image of a young girl amid a lush tropical setting while Céline Dion, Jennifer Hudson, Smokey Robinson, Carrie Underwood and Usher added live vocal accompaniment

Then Lionel Richie, Jackson’s long-ago partner in the “We Are the World” benefit project, introduced two of Jackson’s children, Prince Michael and Paris, who wore black suits and red armbands and caused tears to well for many in the crowd.

“We would like to thank God for watching over us for these past seven months and also our grandma and grandpa for their love and support,” Prince Michael said. “We’d also like to thank the fans, because he loved you so much.”

During the eye-popping opening sequence, Lady Gaga faced off with her 1970s forebear in flamboyant fashion, Elton John, both their faces smeared with blotches of makeup as they played a big-budget version of dueling pianos. They joined other members of the pop music elite who dressed to the nines, hoping to remind the world and perhaps themselves that the beleaguered music business can still sparkle.

The most electrifying — and most buzzed-about — performance teamed Eminem, Lil Wayne and Drake in an expletive-laced rap that resulted in multiple bleeps of the audio during their delivery of hip-hop newcomer Drake’s song “Forever.”

The show also included a pitch for relief efforts in Haiti by Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean, who referenced “the worst earthquake in history” and said on behalf of his countrymen, “We thank you for your support, and we will continue.”

The Recording Academy is making performances from the show available for download, including those by Swift, Beyoncé, the Black Eyed Peas, Elton John and Lady Gaga, Jeff Beck, Andrea Bocelli and Mary J. Blige, with proceeds earmarked for Haiti.

Noticeably absent was Kanye West, who was honored in the rap-sung collaboration category, in which he was nominated for three of the five entries. Having upstaged Swift last year at the MTV Video Music Awards, West was nowhere in sight of a live microphone as Jay-Z and Rihanna walked onstage to pick up the award for “Run This Town.”

Beyoncé started her groundswell early, having picked up four awards in the pre-telecast portion. The award for “At Last” carried extra emotion, as the torch song’s most famous performer, R&B great Etta James, remained hospitalized in Riverside with a serious infection and other ailments.

James’ son recently told reporters that his 72-year-old mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that may have been at play when the veteran singer lashed out at Beyoncé for singing the tune last year at President Obama’s inauguration.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

The iPad contains Apple’s App Store, so the hundreds of thousands of applications already available for the iPhone and iPod Touch will run on the tablet — scaled up to fit the bigger screen.

A software development kit will be available to software makers today to design apps specifically for the iPad. Some developers have already begun revising their software for the larger screen and more powerful processor.

Apple has revised its own software that ships with the device. The iPad version of iTunes resembles a hybrid between the desktop version and the one on the iPhone. The calendar has big text and buttons. YouTube supports high-definition video.

“Watching one is nothing like getting one in your hands,” Jobs said after a demo.

The device is half-an-inch deep and 1.5 pounds — “that’s thinner and lighter than any netbook.” Earlier, Jobs lambasted netbooks, those tiny, inexpensive laptops that have become so popular recently.

“Is there room for a third device?” Jobs said before introducing the gadget. “Now, some people have thought — that’s a netbook. The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything. … They’re slow. They have low-quality displays.”

Jobs says the iPad is better than laptops and phones (and yeah, netbooks) for consuming video, music, Web browsing and reading e-books (no e-paper, though, so it’s not as easy on the eyes as a Kindle).

The iPad has a 10-hour battery life and comes in versions that hold between 16 gigabytes and 64 gigabytes.

[Updated 10:41 p.m.: Added more information based on an in-progress announcement.]

– Mark Milian

Follow the Apple event live!

Photo credit: Tony Avelar / Bloomberg