Friday Morning Linkaround

Hang in there, Fackers. There sweet salvation of the weekend has almost arrived. Like yesterday, the the content is going to be fairly slow around here as the reports out of this stage of Spring Training aren't worth extrapolating upon and Matt and I are held up with the tedious obligations which actually provide us with monetary compensation. The best we can do is direct you towards some interesting reading material to hold you over:

Friend of the blog Marc Carig asked Joe Girardi a bunch of questions proposed by his Twitter followers. Carig polished up the best sub-140 character entries into actual queries and did his beat reportedly duty of following them up as well. (You can follow the Star-Ledger scribe on his personal Twitter account or with the paper. Or as I do, tag along with both.)

He doesn't go out of his way to publicize it or post on it very often, but Craig Calcaterra keeps a personal blog. Yesterday, inspired by the receipt of his Spring Training itinerary, he recalled his many unsuccessful attempts to have an enjoyable trip to Florida in the past.

Larry from Wezen-Ball used his uncanny powers of research to dig up some features from LIFE Magazine on Spring Training. The Wezenmaster also discovered, as we did last year, the bounty of Spring Training photos in the LIFE Photo Archive on Google, where we shamelessly sampled the banner of the site from. Poke around there and you'll find gems like the one at the top of the post.

Sorry Joe McCarthy, Joe Torre and Billy Martin. Rob Neyer could only find room for one former Yankee manager on Managerial Mount Rushmore. (I'm not counting John McGraw who managed the franchise for the first two seasons when they were still in Baltimore and called the Orioles before bolting to the New York Giants.)

The Bloomberg Sports Blog, headed by the esteemed Jonah Keri, is now up and running. It should be an excellent resource for fantasy geeks and statheads alike.

Jeremy Greenhouse of Baseball Analysts put the "Verducci Effect" under a scientific microscope and guess what... It doesn't pass the P-Value test.

In the Journal News, Chad Jennings notes that Yankee starters will begin their throwing schedule slightly later than normal due to the additional innings they tossed in the postseason.

Ben Shpigel profiled Andrew Brackman today in the New York Times.

The Sports Herina mined photo gold from Yankees camp.

Brew Crew Ball created a Mad Lib of sorts with which you can concoct your own passe Spring Training storylines. As Craig says, "It actually works pretty well. So well in fact that I wouldn't be surprised if the beat writer's guild has called an emergency meeting to see which of them was supposed to be on duty when the secret formula was stolen."

Alex Remington at Big League Stew compares Jonathan Papelbon's career thus far to Mariano Rivera's and concludes that they aren't as far apart as we so boldly stated on Wednesday.