The Great Friday Link Out

Today marks the dawn of a new era. Like many baseball bloggers, I have decided to do a link out post. Big stuff, I know. Some popular writers like Rob Neyer have the audience to do one of these posts everyday. I am going to start off at one a week and see where it goes.

Before going any further, I have a confession: I don’t read nearly enough baseball blogs. For someone who spends an inordinate amount of time every week sitting hunched over on a stool, squinting at the my laptop, researching or writing about baseball history (and it pisses my cat off), I have only a handful of blogs I actively go to and fewer that I read. This needs to change. I’m going to make a point of reading more blogs, particularly in hopes of finding great content to link to each week. I also encourage anyone who’s interested to send me their stuff. I can’t guarantee a link, but I’ll read everything I can.

All this being said, one of my goals at the outset is to help my friends, the people in my blogroll. I like to think we’re a talented bunch, and I aim to showcase as much of our content as is reasonable.

Without further adieu, here are the links for the week:

• The debut edition of the column Bill Miller and I will be writing about good players on bad teams should be up sometime today on his blog, The On Deck Circle.
• I should have an interview up on Monday with Josh Wilker who wrote a book, Cardboard Gods, that I reviewed here in May. Josh writes a blog of the same name, and he’s had some great content as of late. I particularly enjoyed a December 28 post he did on Dwight Gooden, likening the aimlessness of his 20s to the once-great pitcher’s decline. Josh’s writing is often funny, philosophical, and totally original. He absolutely influences my efforts here.
• I’ve heard it said of late, great Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray that he could have written about anything; sports just happened to get lucky. Joe Posnanski seems like Murray’s equivalent these days, even if I doubt he’d ever claim it. Anything he touches is gold. Here’s a sweet blog post, for anyone who hasn’t read it, that Joe wrote about taking his family to the newly-opened Harry Potter World. One great passage: Sadly there was no Cleveland Indians world, unless you count the bleachers at old Municipal Stadium where factory workers drank schnapps from flasks and swore liberally and rubbed your head when the Indians actually scored.
• I’m glad that economics professor and sabermetrician Cyril Morong is part of the goings-on here, leaving the occasional comment and, like Wilker, participating in a recent project I led to find the 50 best players not in the Hall of Fame. I wrote a post yesterday on 1930s and ’40s pitcher Paul Derringer, and Cyril commented that Derringer had a better-than-average strikeouts/walks ratio in his time. Coincidentally, Cyril recently wrote about a future Hall of Fame pitcher who just retired with the all-time best ratio.
• Peter Nash reports on yet another piece of phony memorabilia connected to the late Barry Halper. Was anything in his collection real?