Some Shameless Self-Promotion

Our friend at Simon on Sports has been conducting a feature called "Blogging the Offseason" in which he asks a blogger from each team ten or so questions about the issues facing their respective organizations this winter.

Today, he's covering the World Series participants and talked to Meech from The Fightins and Mike from River Ave. Blues. Last and probably least, he asked some know-nothing from another Yankees blog to chip in with his two cents.

In other news, the folks over at the always funny It Is High, It Is Far, It is... Caught are conducting a poll to determine the Yankee Blog of the Decade. For one reason or another, despite only existing for about a year, we are actually in third place. If you are so inclined, head over to the left hand margin of their site and show your support. Since you can select multiple blogs, be sure to kick some votes towards RAB and IIATMS as well since they are severely underrepresented as of right now. By the time you're done, the weekend will almost be here.

TYU Fought The Law And, Well, You Know...

After dedicating a post to another Yankee blog for all the wrong reasons earlier today, we would like to atone for that by lending a helping hand to the fine folks at The Yankee Universe.

We link to TYU with some frequency and if you have been to the site, you've probably noticed that their name is pretty close to the Yankees' charitable organization that sells T-shirts to benefit the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center. Well perhaps because their blog shows up higher in Google search results than the charity, or perhaps due to the fact that Randy Levine founded the organization, they received a cease and desist notice from the Yanks today:

Accordingly, demand is hereby made that you immediately cease and desist from using the YANKEE UNIVERSE name and the Logo, any other Yankees Mark and any other MLB Mark in and as the name of your Website, to promote the Website, to seek advertising any other commercial opportunities, in and as the Domain Name, and in any other manner that would cause consumer confusion, dilution of the MLB Marks, or imply any sponsorship or endorsement of your Website or its contents by any MLB Entity.

Since the Yankees are asking in the name of a charity (and since they've had the name since 2006 whereas TYU was created in 2008), the bloggers are going to step aside. Now they have asked the interwebz to help them find a new name for their blog.

There are obviously a ton of Yankee blog names already claimed, and aside from tossing out variants of existing ones like we did on Twitter today, we are trying to think of something else they could use. Here are a few (some from other places), yours in the comments or better yet, at their site.

• The Pinstripe Post
• Bronx & Beyond
• The Yank Think Tank
• Straight To Twenty Eight
• The Steinbrenner Doctrine
• The Yankee University
• The Bomber's Lounge
• The Pinstripe Universe
• Monument Cave
• The Dead Torre Scrolls
• The Moshe Pit

A Rare October Call Up

Good morning, Fackers. Let's start the day off on a positive note.

Our friend Jason has some big news:

It's About The Money, Stupid has been selected by Rob Neyer and ESPN to be a charter member of what will be a new blog network on ESPN.com known as ESPN.com's SweetSpot Blog Network! IIATMS has the distinct honor of being the sole blog representing the New York Yankees in this network throughout the 2009 Playoffs, and hopefully into 2010 and beyond.

The network won't officially launch until Monday so there's nowhere to direct you to just yet, but I will of course provide that info once it become available. Check out the post linked above for Jason's reaction. He's justifiably excited and those guys at IIATMS should be in for a fun ride.

ESPN.com is a pretty lofty place for a blog to ascend to and let's hope that they do the blogs in that network justice and feature them prominently as they should. There's a lot of interesting insight and analysis be churned out by hobbyists like Jason, Will, Tamar and Brendan and ESPN has the chance to elevate blogs as a whole by placing them in front of baseball fans who don't really visit them or understand the concept... yet. Who knows how assertive they'll be on this front, but there's hope.

A good amount of you probably haven't been around long enough to be aware of this, but Fack Youk also sprouted underneath of the Rob Neyer/Shysterball/IIATMS blogging tree to some extent. Jason was one of the first bloggers to take interest in our site, allowing me to do a couple guest posts to promote this operation early on and linking to us more than one could rightfully expect over the past 9 months. Craig was more than generous with his advice when I first started doing this back in December, and has been kind enough to point people to the site in the past as well.

In short, those guys did more than their fair share to introduce our site to some of you. They offered a helping hand up onto the already crowded stage of baseball blogging and it's good to see some of that good karma coming back around. Whether it be Craig getting absorbed by the Hardball Times and NBC or Jason now appearing on ESPN.com, it's cool to be able to recall the simpler days of reading them on Blogspot, you know, back before they were big internet celebrities.

Congrats, Jason. Enjoy the ride.

Want To Talk Some Baseball?

Our pal Jason from Heartland Pinstripes is hosting a live chat which he quite appropriately calls a Heartland Digital Living Room. There should be some good banter going on at his place when the game fires up. Grab a six pack and stop by.

Is Damon Cooperstown Bound?

We discussed whether the Yanks should bring Johnny Damon back yesterday, and he comes up again today because friend of the blog Josh at Jorge Says No! looked at the same article by Tyler Kepner but was inspired to write a post about a different portion of it; his potential of getting into the Hall of Fame.

Past the part we excerpted, Kepner notes that Damon has been a very well rounded player and has a chance at 3,000 hits:

Only three players have matched Damon’s career totals for hits (2,389), runs (1,459), stolen bases (370), doubles (443), homers (205), runs batted in (981) and batting average (.289). They are the Hall of Famer Paul Molitor and Roberto Alomar and Barry Bonds, who are not yet eligible for Cooperstown.

Damon has only one season with 200 hits — for Kansas City in 2000 — but he has an outside chance at 3,000 for his career. He is 10th in hits among active players, but only two players ahead of him are younger: his teammates Jeter (2,688) and Rodriguez (2,483).

Sure, it sounds pretty impressive that only three players are ahead of Damon in those seven categories, but it's a lot harder to get in the Hall for being good at a bunch of things than it is for being great at a couple. He's got a career OPS+ of 105 as a centerfielder, which tells us that he wasn't especially good at hitting for power or getting on base, and those are pretty important skills to have. Even guys like Bernie Williams and Jim Edmonds have him crushed in that category though they don't have the counting stats to go along. He wasn't any great shakes defensively, either.

Johnny needs 611 hits to get to 3,000 so it's pretty safe to assume he would need to play four more seasons to get there. Will he get that chance? I'm not so sure.

Josh conducts a Keltner List, a set of 15 qualitative questions, on Damon which is the best thing aside from a statistical analysis in terms of evaluating a player's Hall of Fame candidacy. Check out Josh's responses to the questions. I found myself agreeing with most every one.

The biggest variable here is that we don't know how writers are going to treat this era. If just 25% of writers don't vote for anyone who played in the so-called steroid era, well, no one is going to get in. Even if 10% or 15% make that decision, it's going to make it much harder to gain entry. If it was 15 years ago, this would be a much simpler question to ponder.

Chances are, Damon is going to be up for consideration shortly after Ken Griffey, Jr. and Andruw Jones (388 HR, 115 OPS+) and alongside Ichiro and Carlos Beltran and I think all four of those guys have either vastly higher peaks or much better overall careers. Perhaps if he compiles 3,000 hits writers will have a hard time turning him down, but I think Damon will ultimately end up in the Hall of Very Good.

Moving Day At IIATM,S

Those of you who frequent this site should in turn be familiar with our friend and fellow Yankee blogger Jason at It Is About the Money, Stupid. That link will lead you to the new location of his blog and the pitcure above gives you a glimpse into the new design.

I've adjusted the link on the Blogshelf on your lower left and would encourage you to adjust your bookmarks and RSS feeds in accordance. If you haven't bookmarked or subscribed, now would be a great time to get on board. Jason brings an angle of observation and discourse to the table that you just won't find anywhere else in the sports blogosphere.

Being A-Rod > Being Jeremy Guthrie

I'm usually all over crowd-related Yankees screengrabbery, however I must turn to two good friends of the blog for this one: The Sports Hernia and New Stadium Insider. 

Exhibit A: A supremely hot blonde wearing a tight pinstriped tank top skips down the steps right behind the dugout to get a glance at A-Rod after his home run. She then has an obvious eyegasm upon first sight. 

Exhibit B: Jeremy Guthrie has a woman in the stands creepily miminc every portion of his pre-game warm-up routine.