- John Sickels has an interesting entry up on Josh Hamilton entitled Making Sense of Josh Hamilton. He certainly does present an interesting case for guys who project prospects for a living.
- JinAZ has started his April review, and part 1 is a good read.
- I haven't been linking it every time they update, but Baseball Reference has made a ton of changes in the past few months, and it's now easily the most useful baseball site on the internet. I'm a big fan of the daily updated expanded standings that they just rolled out.
- This is just unfortunate.
- Baseball blackout rules are going to be looked at, and hopefully they'll come up with something more rational. There a real parallel between baseball and the music industry here in that neither seems to really realize that it's a good thing for people to be experiencing their respective products as much as possible. I will never, ever understand how owners can be so stupid as to not want their team's games on TV every single day.
The more people watch the more interested they will be, the more merchandise they will buy, the more games they attend, the more stadium hot dogs they will eat, but it all starts with getting people interested and that doesn't start with denying people access to the games in the first place.
- Halo's Heaven has a nice interview up with Fantasyland author Sam Walker. You can read Part One here, and Part Two here.
- Ken Rosenthal has absolutely torn Jim Bowden apart. It's hilarious to read how he's running Washington into the ground, and while Krivsky frustrates the hell out of me sometimes, I'm extremely glad that the team moved on from the Bowden era. The guy's never going to be a successful GM. He's been doing this for over a decade now, and so it's silly to think he's going to stop being a douchebag now. Like this:
Perhaps the most vivid example was the dismissal of longtime baseball executive Tony Siegle without severance pay last Oct. 24 -- the same day that Siegle, as assistant GM, participated in the interview of Manny Acta, who later was named Nationals manager.
Classic Bowden. To a T. Absolutely no benefit to be gained from handling the situation like a dick, and yet he still fires the guy (without severance) the same day he's interviewing managerial candidates. With anyone else I might give the GM the benefit of the doubt, but this continues a long pattern of behavior with Bowden. Guy seems like an honestly nasty human being. Washington's not going to amount to anything as long as he's running the ship down there.