Hey, nobody's forcing me to work today! So if you want more things like this, best to send me a postcard, with a stamp on it and everything. Don't know where I live? Just send to Oregon, General Delivery. The Postal Service knows me here. Now some links, with the best at the very bottom...
- He died nearly three weeks ago, but Jerry Dior's obituary has just now appeared in The New York Times. Who's Jerry Dior? He designed Major League Baseball's now 46-year-old logo, that's all. And it took MLB nearly as long to give him any credit for it.
- Uh, just on the off-off-chance you missed it yesterday, Ken Rosenthal presented a radical plan for a split season in Major League Baseball. Radical? Sure! Crazy? Nah. Not unless you think almost every professional baseball league in America is crazy. I'm not saying I'd vote for it. But neither will I dismiss the notion out of hand.
- Granted, if today you polled baseball fans -- especially the serious fans -- most of them would probably not support a split season, just 55 percent prefer that pitchers keep hitting (at least according to this poll, and Question 16). But a lot of this is just basic, small-c conservatism, right? When the Astros left the National League, you might have guessed the sky was falling. But I'll bet that most of the fans down there can't even remember why they cared so much, then. We prefer much of what we've got simply because it's what we've got, and usually we can adjust to whatever comes next. Same thing with pitchers hitting (or not), and maybe even the same thing with a radical new playoffs format. Oh, you should've heard people scream in 1969 when the divisions were created...
- Friday, I cut a video in which I suggested there are now four tremendous, Cy Young-quality pitchers in the National League. In the American League, though? Seems like there are only three: Dallas Keuchel, Felix Hernández, and of course Corey Kluber, who actually won the award last season. Oh, but here's one four you: Kluber's teammate Danny Salazar might well be the fourth, at least according to Matthew Trueblood's application of the little-known cFIP metric (sorry, subscriber-only content). Oh, and Carlos Carrasco does well there, too. Watch out for the Tribe this summer, that's all I'm going to say.
- Grant Brisbee writing about his baseball-cards investment plan -- by the way, shades of my comic-books investment plan -- and then about him falling in love with baseball cards all over again? Yes please. If you read just one thing all stinking week-end, this should be that thing.
