Let's focus on getting a win today. Please.
- Here's your time-consuming Angels links for the day. The Angels are celebrating 50 years of baseball this year, and the Los Angeles Times gives us 50 listed factoids celebrating the history of the franchise. Lists? I like lists.
- Bobby Jenks on Red Sox struggles: "I stunk." Let's feel better about the White Sox bullpen, if only for a few minutes.
- Tom Wilhelmsen, 2003 seventh-round draft pick and former bartender/hippie, is now a (not-very-good) reliever for the Mariners. It's a wordy piece, but I find heartwarming up-and-coming stories like this to be a damn cool aspect of baseball.
- From Beyond the Boxscore, the definitive guide to sabermetric managing. A lot of it is, exhaustively or refreshingly, depending on your viewpoint, discussed within these very threads.
- I try to avoid linking articles relating to the Cubs, but I'm also fascinated with some of the unwritten rules of baseball. In this case, Brewers manager Ron Roenicke, feeling a 5-run lead in the ninth was not sufficient to hold off the Chicago Nationals, sent Carlos Gomez in to pinch run and steal a couple bags. Cubs manager Mike Quade wasn't exactly pleased the breaking of this implicit rule. With the state of the Sox bullpen lately, I wonder if Ozzie would do the same under the similar circumstances. Here's the Fangraphs article.
- Via Baseball Musings, a comic reflection of the old adage "It's not a sprint, it's a marathon," as it relates to the putrid Red Sox season to date. I'm not a Red Sox fan in the least, but this cahmic is wicked good. Check out the archives for extra time-wasting goodness.
- Lincecum, displaying some disgustingly awesome physics, throws in this .1000 fps video.
- Finally, here we have Alexei adjusting his power, in heat maps, 2008-2010 vs. early in 2011.