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.

Midday Odds & Ends

Here are a few items of note, mostly from over the weekend:

A rainout down in Florida forced the Yankees to schedule an intrasquad game today to ensure that all their pitchers stayed on their respective schedules.

Hearing that, Jon Heyman busted out his jump to conclusions mat and declared that since Joba Chamerlain was not playing against the Phillies in Clearwater that he was no longer in the race to be fifth starter and can take his rightful place in the bullpen. (/rolls eyes and makes wanking motion)

Where does Joba belong? The chronically uninformed and impatient contingents of the interwebz have spoken loud and clear.

Alfredo Aceves had a bad outing against the Astros (4.1 IP, 5R). HE'S OUT OF THE RACE!!!!!

Chad Jennings profiled Ace in the Journal News on Sunday.

While the primary topic of the Yanks' Spring Training continues to focus on who will be the 5th starter, Marc Hulet at FanGraphs contends that the role is something of a myth. He instead suggests a three-headed approach to soaking up the last 25 or so starts the top four members of the rotation don't make.

Mark Teixeira (somewhat understandably) doesn't understand why UZR categorizes him as a below average first baseman. Joe Pawlikowski explains what UZR might be missing, to which I will add the fact that the metric totally disregards infield line drives which go a long way between determining which first baseman are good and which aren't. Joe also leaves open the possibility that we are giving Teix a little too much credit.

Marc Carig has a video interview with Phil Hughes wherein Phil demonstrates and discusses the different grips he uses for this 4-seamer, cutter, curve and change.

Carig also caught up with Kevin Towers over the weekend who explained how his background helped him as GM in San Diego:

Because I wore several hats, I probably had a greater appreciation for all the different roles. I knew what it was to be a player, to be a prospect, how difficult it was being a prospect and going through the different levels of the minor leagues, what goes through a player’s mind. As an area scout, how difficult and lonely a job that is... You feel like you’re kind of off there on your own, especially when I was doing it. There wasn’t cell phones, there wasn’t computers, there wasn’t voice mail. You were really kind of a nomad out there trying to find players.

Before Jesus Montero was assigned to minor league camp, Chad Jennings sat down with him for 5 questions.

Austin Romine, Colin Curtis, Reid Gorecki, Dustin Mosely, Jason Hirsh also got the boot from the Big Leauge camp.

Tyler Kepner caught up with Chein-Ming Wang.

'Duk from Big League Stew checked in on Rinku and Dinesh, the winning contestants from the Indian reality show Million Dollar Arm.

Robert Cribb of the Toronto Star did a piece on the mysterious man that is Tom Tango, who helps the Blue Jays' front office in an advisory capacity.

Jeff from Lookout Landing ran some data in an effort to see how much LASIK surgery benefited the players who had it done and came to a somewhat unexpected conclusion.

If plan on visiting Citizen's Bank Park anytime soon, you might want to vote for their signature hot dog. My vote would certainly be for the The South Philly, which is "all-beef and topped with broccoli rabe, spicy roasted peppers, and sharp provolone on an Italian roll". They had me at "broccoli rabe".

This suspect's second biggest crime was wearing a green Yankees hat.

Thoughts On Washington

Legend says that when George Washington was a boy, he chopped down a cherry tree. Papa Washington wasn't too happy to find a felled cherry tree on his land and when he asked little Georgie about it, our founding father sang like a canary. The moral of the legend is that George Washington couldn't tell a lie.

Ron Washington, on the other hand, can tell a lie. At least I think so. Because I can't conceive of a remotely plausible scenario in which a fifty seven year old man decides to try cocaine for the first time in his life. And, according to Washington's explanation, that's exactly what happened last year, leading to his much ballyhooed positive test.

Yet, as Craig Calcaterra pointed out earlier this week, Major League Baseball had a very extensive cocaine problem in the late seventies and early eighties, with the Kansas City Royals being one of the most deeply involved teams. Washington came up through the Royals system in the early seventies. This doesn't make Washington guilty by association, but it does make it very likely that he faced far greater access and temptations during his impressionable youth than he did as grizzled baseball lifer some time last year.

Virtually every Washington story that's filtered through my Google Reader over the past several days has centered on the question of how big of a deal is this? Unscientifically, the majority of what I've read (or my memory of it at least) posits that it's not a very big deal.

I don't want to play the morality police here, but I think this kind of is a big deal. Yes, Washington is a grown man. Yes, he is more than free to make his own decisions. But decisions have consequences, and right or wrong, Washington's decision was in violation of the law and was in violation of his contract with his employer. If I'm Nolan Ryan or Jon Daniels, I'd want to think long and hard about whether Ron Washington is the guy I want running my team.

That isn't to say that Washington doesn't deserve a second chance or that what he did was terribly wrong in the first place. But as I said above, I'm having a hard time believing that this was one time incident. If Washington endeavors to take a risk like that from time to time, I don't know that I want him calling the shots for my club. Managers have very little impact on what happens between the lines anyway, so unless Washington is some sort of managerial genius, why take the risk of continuing to have him steer the ship? Washington is a guy who was within a hair's breadth of getting fired in 2008 anyway.

That said, this all should really be a dead issue at this point. According to his statement to the press Wednesday, Washington offered his resignation when the positive test came in last year. Ryan and Daniels allegedly weighed the situation, decided to keep Washington, and were fully supportive of him as he went through and completed MLB's treatment program. All parties should be commended for their actions as far as all of that is concerned.

So why then is this a story some eight months or so after it happened? If you want to believe one of the more salacious rumors out there, it's because a disgruntled former Rangers employee was trying to blackmail the team and subsequently leaked the story when his demands were not met. If true, it would mark the first time ever that Jon Heyman got a scoop leaked from someone other than Scott Boras.

And I think that is what bothers me most about this whole situation. Far beyond the morality play unfolding, here is yet another instance of where a drug test - essentially a medical record - which is both collectively bargained and federally mandated to be kept confidential, has been leaked to the press for character assassination purposes. Just as it was in the BALCO trial with Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield. And just as it was with the 2003 survey testing that has seen Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, and others called before the court of public opinion.

No matter which side you're on as it relates to steroids, or cocaine for that matter, I think everyone should be a little uneasy that these stories are made public because someone leaked information that was supposed to be confidential. And I think everyone should be particularly uneasy when that someone, as in the BALCO and Club 103 situations, is about ninety nine percent certain to be a Federal Agent.

And with that, I'm going to double check my income tax filing and make sure everything is in order. Enjoy the weekend Fackers. Who knew managers were subjected to drug testing?