Friday Linkstravaganza

They are making Negro Leagues stamps? Awesome.

Without getting into subjective things like game calling and pitch framing, Mike from River Ave. Blue attempted to quantify the defensive contributions of Major League catchers, with emphasis of course on Jorge Posada and Francisco Cervelli. Using stolen bases, caught stealing, wild pitches and passed balls, Mike created cRSAA/180 (Catcher's Runs Saved Above Average per 180 innings). A key point: it's a good thing Cervelli is hitting, because he's not the defensive whiz he was in the minors.

According to a survey conducted among MLB players by Sports Illustrated, Joba Chamberlain is the most overrated player in the league and by more than double the next closest guy (A-Rod, obviously). Translation: guys who play for other clubs really don't like him and resent the attention he got when he first broke into the league. Does he get more recognition than he deserves because of his unique name and what he did in 2007? Absolutely. Do people who look at baseball objectively overvalue what he does? I don't think so.

Sparked by a conversation on Google Reader about a paragraph on Rob Neyer's blog by two of the guys from IIATMS, Moshe Mandel from TYU talked a little bit about what makes a team "championship-caliber". I agree with Moshe: we don't need to get ahead of ourselves, but if the Yankees don't deserve that distinction right now, then no team does.

Speaking of those gents from IIATMS, they, along with a few others, wrote a trade deadline primer which you can purchase here for $10. It's packed with information about where the Yankees stand and who they might be looking to fill some of the gaps in their roster with.

According to TiqIQ, who has a really cool partnership with River Ave. Blues, the secondary market prices were climbing for Friday night's game even before it was announced that the Yankees would be honoring George Steinbrenner and Bob Sheppard. The fact that is the first home game since the 4th of July on a Friday night certainly is helping raise those prices.

Is it just me, or does The Boss deserve a better commemorative patch than this. Bob Sheppard's, on the other hand, is pretty sharp.

Red Sox fans payed tribute to George Steinbrenner and Bob Sheppard and were respectful about it. Seriously.

Hey look, the All-Star Game got the lowest ratings of all time. It might have been the interminable pregame ceremonies or the 8:50PM ET start, but I'd like to think that, without a hook like the last year of Yankee Stadium or something, mostly because of the infinite pitching changes and cameos by position players the ASG really just sucks. This isn't Little League, not everyone has to appear in the damn game.

You probably noticed that the radar gun was lighting up on Tuesday night. The appropriately-named Mike Fast at The Hardball Times looks into whether or not the readings were accurate.

In response to an email from a Twitter follower, Jonah Keri put together "a few" (more like a dozen) thoughts on some of the deeper (social, racial) implications of the Yunel Escobar for Alex Gonzalez trade.

Minor league maven John Sickels projected Major League character Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn's career statistics. Unsurprisingly, his propensity for free passes kept him from being truly dominant.

Ben Nicholson-Smith from MLBTR had an excellent profile of Daniel Nava, who signed with the Red Sox for a whopping $1 back in 2008 and is producing for the Big Leauge club now.

Not golf-related, but Wright Thompson has a typically great feature piece up at ESPN.com about the history of St. Andrews. A nice companion piece to some early morning British Open viewing, I say.

Perhaps you heard about the suicide bombings that took place in Kampala, Uganda that targeted a viewing of the World Cup final at a rugby club. Well, my sister is actually in Kampala right now. She was nowhere near the bombings and is just fine, but if you'd like to read her reaction to the attacks, here it is.

My buddy Frank has tickets to the Lacrosse World Championships, which had to be reshuffled because English officials initially wouldn't accept the hand-written passports presented by the Iroquois Nation's team.

It's not at all sports-related, but here is a great story about the guy did an incredible amount of research before he appeared on Price is Right and whose appearance culminated with him guessing the exact price of the Showcase Showdown. But was it just preparation and luck? The producers of the show think the fix was in.

Number Crunching

Good morning Fackers. In case you missed it in Saturday night's late innings or in Peter Abraham's Friday game post, Brian Bruney, who had switched from #33 to #38 when Nick Swisher arrived, switched from #38 to #99. It led to this text message exchange between my buddy Gripp and me:

Gripp: Bruney switched to 99? Who does he think he is, Rick Vaughn?

Me: Vaughn has better control

Gripp: Maybe Bruney needs glasses

Me: Maybe he needs to bang Kate Hudson

With Bruney switching to 99, he joins Alfredo Aceves as current Yankees with numbers in the nineties. They are two of only three people in all of Yankee history to wear a number in the nineties. The third is Charlie "King Kong" Keller.

Keller is a forgotten star of the 1940s Yankees. While he was a perpetual second banana to Joe DiMaggio, from his rookie campaign of 1939 through 1947, Keller never posted an OPS+ lower than 141, and led the AL with a 168 mark in 1943.

Age and a bad back began to sap Keller's skill in the late forties. He played just one complete season after returning from World War II, and was released by the Yankees after the 1949 season. Keller spent the next two seasons as a useful pinch hitting specialist with the Tigers, until they released him after the 1951 season. Keller returned to the Yankees in September 1952, but by then his former number 9 had been claimed by Hank Bauer, prompting Keller to switch to 99.

The Yankees currently have 37 players on their active roster. They have two more on the 60 day DL. They have a seven man coaching staff. They have fifteen retired numbers. Joe Torre's #6, Paul O'Neill's #21, and Bernie Williams and #51 are unofficially out of circulation, and Mike Mussina's #35 hasn't been issued in the first year after his retirement. Numbers are getting tough to come by.

In the next several years we'll assuredly see #2 and #42 come off the board, probably #13 as well, and there's a good chance we could see #20 and #46 disappear too. High numbers are fairly uncommon in baseball. To date, the tradition rich Yankees have had only six players wear numbers in the seventies or above, three this year and all but Keller within in the last ten years. In the future though, that will probably be far more common out of necessity. We may end up seeing triple digit numbers in spring training one of these years.

Check out Cliff from Bronx Banter's Yankees by the Numbers post where he explains the origin of uniform numbers in baseball and lists the greatest Yankee to ever to wear each integer. YankeeNumbers.com is also a great resource if you need to look up anything related to the subject.