So I’ve been gone forever… or rather four months. I missed most of the season. I just didn’t have the adequate to dedicate to good, worthwhile posting this summer. Oddly, enough traffic didn’t just plummet, rather it tapered as people realized I wasn’t around during the summer months. I’m going to give it a go again this off-season and carry it into the 2008 season. A lot of off-season articles on baseball in general and the Tigers specifically.
Mitch Albom wrote a great piece on Jim Leyland‘s pain free one-year extension with the Tigers. It’d be just about impossible not to love Leyland if you’re a Tigers fan.
It’s really not surprising to watch Curtis Granderson excel in every endeavor he encounters, so seeing him look as smooth as can be on the set of TBS’ very solid baseball playoff coverage didn’t throw me for a loop by any stretch. Their in-studio stuff is light-hearted while still offering quality analysis and Curtis, predictably, fit right into the mix with Frank Thomas, Cal Ripken and host Ernie Johnson.
Check out this great quote from the NY Sun’s Tim Marchman discussing the impact that Johan Santana would’ve had on the Mets and their pitching woes:
Johan Santana made 33 starts this year and pitched 219 innings. Jorge Sosa’s final nine starts and all those made by Chan Ho Park, Dave Williams, Phil Humber, Mike Pelfrey, Brian Lawrence, and Jason Vargas add up to 33 starts in total, during which the Mets got 170.2 innings from their starters. If Santana had replaced all those crummy starts, the Mets’ innings averaged per start would have risen all the way to 6.1. That amounts to an inning every three days. The reason they would have been better off with Santana isn’t that he rests the bullpen, it’s that he’s about eleventy-bajillion times better than Brian Lawrence.
It’s just funny to see someone use eleventy-bajillion in an otherwise serious article. Marchman is a remarkably good baseball writer. I heavily recommend his work, which can be found in archive format here.
If you’re looking to listen to music at work or home and want a customizable variety, I heavily recommend Slacker.com. I’m sure this isn’t a new site, but it is defintiely new to me and I absolutely love it. Regardless of your musical tastes, there is a station for you and it can parsed to your particular likings within that genre. I’m sure a lot of work filters block it, but here at my job, it’s open for business and I’ll utilize it until it’s not available.
Baseball By Paul 