Baseball DIY

There's a boatload of baseball history and lore over at Chatter from the Dugout. Most recently there's a great history of all players banned for life. Over at the Resource Shelf a lot of baseball links have been posted with everything from the Negro Leagues to bios on all the previous commissioners. There are also several baseball stats sites, which should settle any of those ugly little conflicts that come up around inning seven, after one beer too many.

The current issue of Elysian Fields Quarterly has a look at the end of the Expos (although everyone still seems to be referring to them as "the team formerly known as the Expos) and the history of college baseball, among other wonderful things.

And finally, even though I really don't want to write about the steriod scandal, Selig has handed over a ton of documents to Congress in the hopes of stopping the need of players to testify. I'm pretty conflicted about this, to be honest. On the one hand, I'm sure that a lot of this is just a bunch of crap where politicians get to pick on someone bigger than them in public opinion and make themselves look good by yelling "no one is above the law!" (Unless you're Tom DeLay of course.) But I also think that baseball brought this upon itself by having a weak commissioner and an acute inability to face serious problems when they arise. MLB also seems to worry more about making things go away then fixing them. So maybe they all need to get spanked in order to wake up to the fact that all those high salaries and high ticket prices only work when the fans think it really is a game they are watching and not a chemical freakshow.

I'm going to bed. Tomorrow we buy The Incredibles and listen to the three year old laugh hysterically for a couple of hours. I'm looking forward to it.