Off Night Links

[Again via 30fps]

Yet another baseball-less night. Here are a few things to help pass the time.

Navin Vaswani, better know on Twitter, in the blogoverse and on occasion in our comment section as "eyebleaf" is doing a project for the Toronto Globe and Mail during which he'll travel by bus and visit all 30 Major League ballparks in 60 days. He's a Jays fan and filed his report of yesterday's Yankees and Rangers game from the refreshing perspective of an outsider. Tonight, he's off to see the Mets play the Cubs at Citi Field before he continues his journey. If, like me, you are extremely jealous of the awesome trip Navin is embarking on, you can keep up with his dispatches here.

+100 to Matthew Pouliot of Hardball Talk for this headline.

The Yankees are heading to the White House next Monday.

Will Leitch has an excellent feature in New York Magazine about advanced defensive metrics awesomely-titled "Databases Loaded".

Both Joe Posnanksi and Larry from IIATMS took a look at the Forbes Business of Baseball Rankings. It's really staggering how much more money the Yankees make than everyone, particularly at the gates.

Sam Dolnick of the New York Times wrote a piece about the street named after Thurman Munson. There's a great quote from Munson's widow, Diana, in it:

“He wasn’t about the big superhighway and mainstream streets,” she said. “It fits his personality so much more that it would be an out-of-the-way street and be something that not a lot of people would embrace.”

In conjunction with his new gig at RotoGraphs, Mike from River Ave. Blues made an appearance on FanGraphs Audio this weekend to talk about fantasy baseballing.

Last week, a message informing people of a Metro North train with service to Yankee Stadium was accidentally replaced with a warning of a bomb threat at several stations. Oops.

The Wire + Baseball = Win.

More Soxenfreude, this time from Charles P. Pierce who thinks that it's not too early to panic over the Red Sox. As much as I'd like to agree with him, it is. We're only through 7.5% of the season and although they've stumbled out of the gate, they're going to find their way soon enough.

Morgan Ensberg wrote a post at his blog this weekend about the real reason the pace of play in the MLB is so much slower than it used to be: Bud Selig. Not really, it's the commercial breaks and FOX, ESPN and TBS get an extra 30 seconds every time. But the players are only allotted 8 seconds of at bat music because that's the real menace.

Dave Cameron, who just joined FanGraphs full time, talks about the Mariners' baserunning so far this year and attempts to draw the line between aggressive and reckless.

Ubaldo Jiminez threw a no hitter this weekend, which is cool and everything, but he had six walks and needed the 10th most pitches of the Retrosheet era to do it. It's still an impressive feat without a doubt, but wouldn't, say, a two hit, two walk complete game shutout technically be better?

An interesting note from that game: Matt pointed out that Jiminez started throwing exclusively from the stretch after the 6th inning and didn't give up a walk after that.

Sagiv from Fire Jerry Manuel took Jon Heyman to task for saying that Andy Pettitte is going to the Hall of Fame for pretty much the same reasons he said he wouldn't vote for Bert Blyleven.

Speaking of firing Jerry Manuel, Matthew Carruth at FanGraphs took him to task for allowing not only holding back Francisco Rodriguez from pitching until the 19th inning on Saturday, but letting him warm up in every single inning before that, throwing over 100 pitches. Warm up pitches aren't imaginary, Jerry, they tax pitchers' arms too.

Do the Mets need Jesus in their lives? Mike Francesa doesn't see why he would choose them over any other team in the division.

There are parallel characters in The Sandlot and Reservior Dogs? You bet.

That's all for tonight. Catch you in the AM.