Sunday Stuff For You

Bill James, in all his socially awkwardness, was on the B.S. Report with Bill Simmons on ESPN on Friday.  The interview was in front of a live audience, which probably helped contribute to James' nervousness, but I'm sure that if you edited out all of the Ummm's and Uhhh's, it would probably translate in to a pretty interesting 40 minutes or so.  As is, it's an hour long, and still pretty good.

Sticking with ESPN, Jayson Stark has a piece about the Jays and their corresponding chances for the Wild Card, now that there are two of them.  Again, it's a lot of what we've heard recently about the amount of talent that they're stockpiling, and the strategies that they've put in place to get to where they are and where they're going.  Obviously, Stark mentions both the Rays, and Joey Votto.  Because who wouldn't?

Here's a terrible piece of shit by Kevin Glew of CBC Sports.  He thinks that Kelly Johnson should be the leadoff hitter.  I thought about making a whole post about why this is terrible, but meh.  I might make one similar to this, only reasonable, closer to opening day.  For what it's worth, I think Johnson should be closer to the 4-5-6 area, simply due to his profile as a hitter.  He strikes out too much to be a leadoff guy, but still has good on-base and slugging tendencies, even coming off a shitty year.

Shi Davidi of Sportsnet has a recap of the Jays 7-1 spring training win against the Pirates yesterday.  Worth noting, the Jays had their starting lineup from last year (post trade deadline) playing yesterday, while the Pirates opted to play only rookies.  The two teams will play again today, though lineups haven't been released.  The game will be broadcast on the FAN590 and the Bluejays radio network, and if you have MLB.TV, you can probably find it their too.  I, of course, am cheap and have chosen to wait for the inevitable discount, the way they do it every year, since I'm not really going to burst my cherry on spring training games anyway.

Fangraphs' Dave Cameron was on Clubhouse Confidential yesterday, talking about ZiPS projections.  Among the topics, and something that I was going to point out in my fantasy baseball primer that I haven't posted yet, is the fact that Ian Kinsler is probably a better pick than both Robinson Cano and Dustin Pedroia, despite being ranked much lower than both (Based on Yahoo rankings, Cano is a 1st rounder, Pedroia an early 2nd, Kinsler is a late 2/early 3).  Cat's out of the bag, I guess.  By the way, there are a whole bunch of Clubhouse Confidential videos there for free, and they're all pretty excellent.