This week, the baseball community mourned the passing of quintessential baseball man Don Zimmer. His career as a player, coach and manager have been well documented over the past few days. If you're interested in learning about the life and legacy of the west side of Cincinnati native, the Cincinnati Enquirer has a locally tinged obituary. Beyond that, take your pick between retrospectives by Tom Gatto of Sporting News, Leigh Montville of Sports on Earth, Richard Goldstein of The New York Times, or Tom Verducci for Sports Illustrated.
The Los Angeles Dodgers are visiting Great American Ballpark next week, which means the Yasiel Puig show is coming to town. Dodgers blogger Jon Weisman has a fascinating look at how Puig's perceived eccentricities stack up against his spiritual predecessors. The takeaway here is that, while it's far too early in Puig's career to know where he will end up, he's hardly the first player to take baseball by storm and spark debates between the old and new schools.
Speaking of the Dodgers, SB Nation's Cee Angi has fantastic long form article about the legendary Vin Scully. You may have seen it, it's been in the front page of the SB Nation baseball page all week. I'm an unabashed Scully fan, so I loved every word. If you agree, and you haven't read it, read it.
Author, broadcaster and former pitcher Dirk Hayhurst has weighed in on the seemingly neverending debate about baseball's unwritten rules. Speaking for myself, I agree wholeheartedly with this piece. Hayhurst advocates for killing the entire eye-for-an-eye system, which is obviously easier said than done, but it's nice to see a former player come down on the side of sanity on this issue.
I've never been a Star Trek fan, but Zach Bergson of Sports on Earth has what appears to be a pretty exhaustive look at all the baseball references in all the various version of Star Trek over the years. If you're a Trekkie and a baseball fan, this article is probably a gift.
Finally, Fangraphs' Carson Cistulli has created his own Joey Votto meme. It involves insults in Italian pasted over pictures of our favorite injured former MVP. So fire up the old Google Translate and click-save for use in future game threads, because this is some quality memesmanship right here.