Friday, July 25, 2003

You guys might check out CavBlog by Eugenio for a whole bunch of good commentary. The Baseball Crank, besides providing lots of excellent and enlightened baseball thought (how many of the rest of you has Bill James influenced? James, as an advocate of clear thinking, has been as influential on me as anyone else. Yeah, he's using his talents on something comparatively insignificant like baseball, but he's using baseball debates--who was better, Mantle or Mays?--to show us how to approach a question, frame its possible answers, and choose among them) has a lot of other good stuff about politics and law and the like. He was also nice enough to link to us, so check him out. I also linked to Aaron's Baseball Blog, which is another terrific source of info from a Jamesian perspective. If only Aaron weren't a Twins fan. I hate the Twins. Anyway, he's still young and I've got the idea he'll be a real sportswriter in the future. He's only twenty, still in college, hasn't yet gotten his minor-league contract with the Ottumwa Warthog or the Sioux Falls Hookworm ("All the News Here in Sioux; Published Bimonthly"), but he'll go high in the draft within a couple of years and you've gotta figure he'll peak between ages 24 and 30. The rumor is he's prone to carpal-tunnel syndrome, though...Rob and Rany on the Royals is by far the best team blog out there; its two authors are real writers, Rob Neyer with ESPN and Rany with the Topeka Capital-Journal. Now, the CJ is one of those papers you subscribe to for the coupons and the comics, but it is a paid job writing, which is more than I've got. Also, Rany's a doctor when he's not a baseball columnist, so I get the idea the CJ gig is something he does more for fun than anything else. Rob--well, I won't call him an idiotarian politically, but let's just say we disagree a lot about everything. He sure does know his baseball, though, and he's not a bad writer at all.

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