Obligations...

First of all, my apologies to anyone who has asked me for a plug and not gotten it in the last few weeks. As I mentioned yesterday, I've been very busy, and still am, so I won't belabor the point. Now, on to the good stuff:

Two new links appear on your right. The first is Mudville Magazine, full of prolific and excellent writing, regularly posted readers' email responses, cartoons and weekly reviews of baseball related stuff (this week: magazines).

The second is Sports Frog. Against my usual trend, this site has sports other than baseball (who knew they existed?), with smart-alecky commentary on everything from Baseball Magazines to Horses to basketball to Jennifer Lopez to...well, you get the point. They have four different writers, one of whom reportedly has a cat that eats Volkswagen Beetles for lunch, but personally I think the stray tabby that my aunt fed until it weighed thirty two pounds (they called it a "racing hippo") could probably take him. If it wasn't dead.

Also, I need to make some much-needed amends with my blog brothers, Mike Carminati, and Jay Jaffe, who have been reviewing and rewriting the way relief pitchers are evaluated for some time now. Mike's summarized all of those history links here, while Jay has a revision on a system for evaluating said short-winded hurlers here. Both are very thorough, and very good.

It's posted at Baseball Primer, where Aaron Gleeman's Top 50 Prospects Report also appears. Aaron is a college student, which, aside from being unemployed, is about the only way someone could possibly have the time to do what he does without being paid for it. You go, Aaron.

Also, Alex Belth over at Bronx Banter has posted the first part of the transcript of an interview with Ken Burns, the famous documentary guru. Belth was fortunate enough to work on Ken Burns' Baseball Documentary right out of school, which makes my pansy-ass brushes with greatness pale in comparison. Hopefully the celebrity endorsement will help him to pull in a few more readers. If that doesn't work, try mentioning supermodels in the text of one of your posts. Or underwear.

Batter's Box has piles and piles of great stuff, and not just about the Toronto Blue Jays, so much that I won't go into all of it. But you should go check it out. Now.

In other news, I missed a golden opportunity. Last week, Jayson Stark wrote the most ridiculous column he'd written since, well, the previous week, and I had hoped to take some time to pick it apart, but my schedule would not allow it. It turns out though, that I was not alone in my distaste for said crap, as Mike's Baseball Rants and Elephants in Oakland both beat me to the punch. Mike has a couple of follow-up posts, and between his stuff and that over at EIO, I don't think anything was written that I wouldn't have brought up myself, though perhaps with somewhat less name-calling, if only because I'm not good with names.

And finally, some of why I haven't been able to write much of late is that my family has a new addition. We adopted an eleven-week old girl, whose mother had been homeless, and she has taken up all of my free time, as well as my wife's. She's wonderful, except when she wakes us up in the middle of the night crying or something like that, especially if we lock her in her cage. She's lots of fun to play with and her personality is already coming out. She has "accidents" once in a while, but is generally learning when and where it's appropriate to relieve herself. Smart kid. Of course, she chews on anything she can get her sharp little teeth around, and her breath stinks, but overall, she's a lot of fun. She's a Dalmation/Laborador mix we got from Willing Hearts Dalmation Rescue, and we couldn't be happier, as you can tell from the pictures below. (My wife is the one without hair on her face.) We named her McCartney.