Monday Morning Shortstop

A lot of stuff in the baseball blogosphere happens over the weekend or on holidays. If you're a guy like me who mostly goes online at work you may miss some of the stuff, so I'll recap some for you. Actually, this past weekend was relatively quiet, but I found a couple of things that touched upon a couple of my idiosyncratic interests.

Steve Lombardi reviews the advance copy of the upcoming Cardboard Gods book. Lombardi used to run a forum called Netshrine that I'd occasionally hang out at. A Yankee fan friend gave me tickets to an April 2008 game against the Jays so I trained down from
Connecticut with a friend. I thought of him when they showed Steve Lombardi answering a trivia question on the Diamondvision, but wasn't sure how many Steve
Lombardis are out there. It turned out that it was him.

I'm not sure if I should like The Faster Times or hate it, but they had an article about Adrian Beltre last week. The author quotes (I think) his brother:

"Being able to enjoy watching the new Beltre/Cameron Red Sox will be a challenge. A lot of being a better defender is just getting to more balls, covering more space, being in the right place at the right time, in a way that could go unnoticed. We won’t notice all the flyballs Mike Cameron runs down that Jason Bay wouldn’t. We will notice when Cameron grounds out with 2 guys on in the 8th. So, new year’s resolution, growing a keener defensive eye, or this season won’t be that fun"

But then he contradicts himself by embedding a YouTube montage of exciting Adrian Beltre plays. To be honest, I think the Red Sox will be more fun to watch this year than they were in '09. But some of that is addition by subtraction (Jason Bay.)

Finally, and not baseball, but here's a MarketWatch piece on writing.