- Joe Posnanski has become my favorite sportswriter over the past year, so I was pretty happy to see that he's now blogging to promote his Buck O'Neill book. He seems to be enjoying the blogging format, and it's a good read. He was also interviewed here, and that's also worth checking out. Lot of insightful commentary on the state of sports journalism.
- When you're reading about a Hollywood madam's black book being released, I'm not sure you expect to hear a name like Tommy Lasorda. Lasorda, for various reasons, has really pissed me off the last few years, so I can't say I'm all that displeased to see him dragged through the mud a little bit.
- You have to wonder if Topps did this intentionally, but it really is a funny looking card.
- I find professional athletes pensions to be really fascinating, I think because it's interesting to see if current day players think it's worthwhile to take care of the players that came before them. It's incredible to me that the NFL has the worst pension (and weakest union) in all of sports, since football is easily the riskiest sport with the shortest average career.
And baseball players make out pretty well. The article above mentions Larry Dierker getting a $180k a year pension once it kicks in. Not too bad.
- The famous Honus Wagner card just sold for $2.3 million, which I think is silly in a way, but it's also important to note that I don't think anyone's ever actually lost money on the card.
- It's looking like the whole DirecTV - Extra Innings deal might not happen, which is probably for the best. It's funny how the NFL has had an exclusive deal with DirecTV for years and no one seems to mind, but baseball is held to an entirely different standard.
- John Sickels took a look at Jay Bruce yesterday:
Bruce projects as an All-Star outfielder with plus power, though not as much speed as Maybin, perhaps similar to Larry Walker or Jim Edmonds.
- This is pretty awesome, but it's unfortunately the type of thing you can only do pre-marriage.