Today's links were ferried across the Mississippi from Modoc, Illinois to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri …
• Do you have some time to kill? If not, don't bother checking out
Maury Brown's interview of Rick Peterson. I'm not saying it's not well worth reading. I'm saying that Peterson loves to talk about pitching. (I once interviewed him in an alcove off the A's locker room. He said he could give me a couple of minutes, and we wound up running through both sides of a micro-cassette. I was distraught when I later discovered that my recorder picked up little but the droning of the nearby air conditioner. Lesson learned.)
• In the Philadelphia Daily News, Stan Hochman takes a few shots at Bill James while making a
Cooperstown case for Dick Allen, who's on the Veterans Committee ballot (the results of which will be announced next week). For many years, Bill's point has been that Allen was so difficult to manage that he hurt his teams more than his big bat helped them. Any number of people have attempted to rebut Bill's charge, and to some extent I believe they've been successful. I'm still not sold, though. Not only because Allen could be a hard guy to manage. But because often he wasn't
available to manage; Allen didn't enjoy a particularly long career, and during that career he managed to play more than 130 games in only six seasons (including his first three seasons). My problem with Allen isn't that he didn't play well enough or hard enough; it's that he didn't play
often enough.
• This is the first I've seen of blogger "wezen-ball", but he's off to a good start with
this look back at a 1981 preview of 2000. What jumps out is MLB's labor relations guy -- i.e. hatchet man -- saying that baseball wouldn't be able to survive in 2000 if players were making a million dollars a year. Good times …
(Tip of the chapeau to BTF's
Newsstand, but now I've got wezen-ball bookmarked...)
•
Dave Cameron's take on the
reported Javier Vazquez trade: Vazquez is wonderfully durable but can't seem to strand runners as often as he should, and it's not at all clear that he's worth $11.5 million per season and the four prospects the Braves gave up to get him. If the Braves don't win something with Vazquez or a couple of the prospects pan out, I suppose the deal won't look so hot.
•
According to Danny Knobler, the Rays are willing to trade
Jason Bartlett -- supposedly
their most valuable player -- and they're interesting in trading
for Delmon Young (who of course they traded to the Twins just a year ago). It's hard to put a great deal of stock in these rumors, but neither should they be all that surprising, as this is classic financial strategy: buy low, sell high. Bartlett's value will
never be higher than it is right now (and as Knobler notes, the Rays have two younger shortstops waiting in the wings). And it's quite possible that Young's stock will never be lower (at least not until 2023 or thereabouts). My guess, though, is that the Twins will swear off trading with the Rays for a while, as the last time
didn't go so well for them.
• Bronx Banter's Alex Belth just keeps piling up his series of Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories. Lately he's featured star turns from
Charlie Sheen (?),
Joe Posnanski and, in case you missed it, here's
my humble contribution to the project.
Rob Neyer
