I/O:  Geoff Baker has a post handing out year-end awards and 50-100 word eulogies to -- wait for it -- twenty (20) different customers on his website. 

He favors each one of them with a hand-picked graphic and cheerfully confesses how each of them makes him, um, feel.

....

CRUNCH:  If you didn't realize that Geoff Baker was a superior human being before :- ) then you will now.

Not superior to human beings in the abstract.  Superior to the author of SSI, specifically.  :- )  I'm not about to consent to allowing blog posters to make me feel anything, much less to inform them of what that feeling was, if it existed.  LOL.

Well, okay, NYM makes me feel street-smart, Grizzle makes me feel Fortune-500'y, and Silentpadna makes me feel Cheen-ey.

Baker's benevolence knows no bounds.  One can love one's enemies too much, you know...

I think it was unfair of Geoff to use Chris From Bothell's actual facebook photo when everybody else got an avatar.

.

I/O:  Jason with an article on Felix' workload. 

Jason calmly, and reasonably, points out that Felix is 23 with 230+ innings, and that Justin Verlander had a serious off year in 2008 for no reason other than, apparently, workload.

.

CRUNCH:  All of the quotes in Jason's fine article parallel Bill James' philosophy on pitcher workload:  how hard does a pitcher throw, in a particular game, after he's tired?

Folks don't even realize to what extent Bill James shaped, and continues to shape, baseball thinking.  Every quote in the article, just about, could have come from James.   And it represents an evolution past the Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP) thinking of five-ten years ago.

So:  do YOU think that Felix has thrown freely, and easily, all year?  Or have you begun to see him jerking his head to yank his body around into the pitch?

Me either.

...........

I/O:  Dead Cat's Bounce with a good read on NFL teams and the option play. 

.

CRUNCH:  The Seahawks, with Seneca Wallace, could be perhaps the NFL's best team at it.

College teams don't have their quarterbacks sliding feet-first into tackles.  If you could find some way to keep Seneca Wallace out of the ICU, if not graveyard, it could be very interesting to watch.

I mean, the man has played receiver, run reverses and stuff.  But the option depends on lateralling the ball JUUuuuuuust before the defender arrives at the QB...

..........

I/O:  R.J. Anderson at Fangraphs with a series of articles trying to count up hhow MLB's best players are acquired ... draft, trade, FA.   He believes that a small fraction are acquired via FA.

.

CRUNCH:  There are 30 major-league teams, and 30 of them desperately want to "acquire" stars by having them come up out of the minor leagues and play for $400,000.*

A team who has a player it believes in, say Dustin Ackley, who is about to give them six long years of discounted productivity, won't trade him to you unless you've got photos.  Of the GM.

The commenters tick off lots of interesting corollaries and objections to the series' premise, but still, it makes for a good read if you're in the mood for Hot Stove philosophizing.

Cheers,

Dr D