January is always slow, but today is crazy-slow in the world of baseball. Really, not a substantive baseball happening since that Manny Ramirez story yesterday. This has left me to tweeting my close readings of Toto songs from the early 1980s and proposing liberal arts essays about it all. That’s pretty desperate and pathetic, even for me.
So, let’s look at what other people are writing about stuff that isn’t really news, which I have been reading so far today:
- In light of the Manny comeback news, here’s ESPN’s Jayson Stark and Tim Kurkjian discussing Manny’s Hall of Fame case. It’s interesting. While we can all agree he was a great player, his PED issues occurred in the post-testing world which makes me think he’s going to get way lower vote totals than any of the PED guys from the pre-testing era. And that makes sense. If we’re going to talk about character things, though, I’d say that PEDs are only the third worst offensive on Manny’s list. His alleged domestic violence incident and the time he attacked that Red Sox employee are the worst, followed by his transparent quitting on the Red Sox back in 2008;
- Mark Armour has been writing about baseball cards for the Society of American Baseball Research. Indeed, he has a whole blog at the SABR site solely about cards and SABR has a baseball card chapter now. His latest entry is about those weird, rare multi-player cards from the 1950s and 60s. I had the Hank Aaron/Eddie Matthews “Fence Busters” card when I was a kid. It was one of my favorites. Mark wants to know why they don’t make ‘em anymore. It’s a good question.
- Did you know that Babe Ruth became great when he stopped throwing baseballs at random yaks? That 714 is more than 12? That Barry Bonds’ nickname was “Massive,” and that, if he tries to enter the Hall of Fame, the employees bang pots and pans until he is scared away? No? Well go educate yourselves with this statistical portrait of Babe Ruth. Buried lede: According to NASA, Chipper Jones is the second-greatest player of all time. Can’t argue with statistics.
Here’s hoping some news happens. If not, we’ll share more nonsense.
