That's right: Daily Link Roundup. In order to avoid pushing some of the interesting diaries on the sidebar further down the page with random news updates, we've decided a daily link roundup is the way to go, especially since more people may notice them (meaning both the diaries the the links). There may be updates to the Daily Link Roundup as the day goes on, so be sure to check back for items of interest.
Matt Watson of Fake Teams, SB Nation's fantasy sports site, recently interviewed the creator of two interesting sports websites, Jason Gurney. Gurney is the creator of Striketwo.net and Lowpost.net. After checking out the site, I noticed that BtB has been linked to the fourth most among baseball blogs in the past 30 days. That is way too much pressure for us, so keep linking everyone ;-)
Here is an excerpt:
Jason Gurney: The core functionality of lowpost.net involves monitoring NBA-themed blogs and summarizing the top stories that appear. The application identifies common stories by grouping similar posts together. For a story to appear, it must have at least two different bloggers writing about it. The biggest stories can include dozens of posts.
Joe Hamrahi recently interviewed author of The Fielding Bible and man behind Baseball Info Solutions, John Dewan. You can check it out through this link. I knew I needed The Fielding Bible, but now I am certainly going to get it.
The Tigers released Carlos Pena yesterday, even though PECOTA and pNRAA think its a bad idea. I'm sure it broke management's heart to cross positional Net Runs Above Average, but they did it anyways. And yeah, pNRAA doesn't have its own thought process, but I lacked another word to use.
Clay Davenport recently published an article titled Rethinking Normalized Outs. I had originally posted this in the diary section, but figured it would work here as well. Be sure to give this a look, as Davenport thinks he found something that shows a great deal of run value systems to be incorrect, including his own.
Sadly, one of my favorite players may be retiring. Any Astros gear I own is thanks to my fandom in regards to Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, so seeing that era end in Houston is kind of sad to me, especially on this note. Luckily, Jeff is Cooperstown worthy; hopefully that doesn't go unnoticed. Joe Hamrahi actually shot me an e-mail well before the news showed up anywhere else, saying he was at the press conference for Bagwell. And finally, Richard Wade and Lance Richardson are counting down the Top 100 Padres of All-Time with a little help from the rest of the Padres bloggers in the blogosphere. I've been asked to contribute a piece on one of the players as well, and I'm sure you can all guess which one that is. If not, I think you might need to read here more often, which is a good idea in either case actually. Richard of course went all out with his idea to rank the top 100 Padres, and he ended up ranking every Padre player ever in order of value. Luckily, they are only covering the top 100, which starts with 2-year reliever Akinori Otsuka.
I will be posting multiple team previews today and tomorrow, and we will soon have a wave of guest articles to move the pitcher previews along. Basically, you get to enjoy a week with way more content than is necessary because it took us forever to put out the team previews for various reasons (like school, work, work, and work; that's just my set of excuses). And at the end of it all, I get to pass out (so I hope).