Five highly curated links (well, actually seven today!) whilst we all wait for Royals fans to get organized and figure out how to get Eric Hosmer to Cincinnati...
– Gird yourselves, sports fans! Lead-based forfeits are coming to Major League Baseball! Okay, probably not any time soon. But as Patrick Dubuque writes ($), it does seem like an idea whose time will come, eventually. My prediction: It gets tried out in the minors first. And we've got them in the majors by ... well, let's say 2030.
– Over at Uniwatch, Paul Lukas has uncovered a fascinating uniform modification ... and it's a Hall of Famer straight from my misspent youth, no less. Just goes to show what you can see if you actually bother to, you know, look. (Oh, and while we're hanging out with Paul, I heartily recommend his old column about the Yankees farm club that wore a stars-and-bars patch, and his new column about a trove of elementary-school accident reports from the 1940s. Jeepers.
– Just a neat little story from MLB.com's August Fagerstrom about Chris Archer and what drives him to give an hour to the community from time to time.
– I know if you're reading this, you're probably quite familiare with Jeff Luhnow already. But if you're just joining us, Tyler Kepner's recent profile has most of what everybody needs to know about Luhnow.
– In the wake of that seemingly bizarre Diamondbacks-Braves trade, people are reasonably wondering if the Diamondbacks are "stupid, cheap, and bad." But might they actually have a sensible plan here? Matthew Kory theorizes!
