Surfin', surfin', USA

Bear with me, folks.

I'm off work today, and I'm bored. This combination usually leads to things involving ladders, a rodent, old car batteries, and a parachute, but today I've decided to surf popular baseball sites for stuff...and of course pass on the surfin' goodness onto you all. Thank me later. Oh, and the better stuff is on the bottom, really...but bear with me, folks.

Phil Rogers has a fluff article on ESPN.com about which players he thinks is poised for a Derrick Lee-type breakout season. I guess it kills some time, reading this, but Rogers doesn't seem to provide lots of concrete reasons as to why he believes these particular players will break out, other than: a) He's good, and he's capable of being better, b) He's improved for a few years straight, and c) the time honored reason, "Just 'cuz". It's articles like these which make me believe, if only for a few, reality-suspended seconds, that I could be a professional writer. The article just has the feel of, "Oh, man, my deadline is coming up, and I gotta put together something."

Baseball Prospectus has the Week In Quotes article up, and as usual, there's some fun stuff in there. My favorite is a quote from Royals 1st baseman (and cool guy) Mike Sweeney, where he states, "From top to bottom, we’ve got a great lineup. Or at least a better lineup, definitely."

I'm thinking I would find it difficult to downshift from 5th gear to 2nd, but apparently Sweeney is more skilled than I.

Rich Draper over at the Official Giants Site (MLB.com) writes about the Giants outfield, managing to not tell us a single thing we didn't already know -- the season revolves around the health of Barry Bonds, and that there are also injury concerns for Moises Alou and Steve Finley. I'm gathering it's tough to write consistently interesting and informative stuff throughout the offseason.

Well, wasn't that fun? Wow, I can't wait to do that again. Now, onto the real stuff: blogs.

Grant at McCovey Chronicles has put up the most recent of his projection pieces, this one on Matt Cain. He notices Cain's fluky low hit rate, and I noticed the same about him last September in a comparison between him and Noah Lowry's first season:

Lowry, with a much larger sample size, had a higher strikeout rate and a lower walk rate, which are good signs. Cain is somehow doing a marvelous job of simply not allowing hits (to the tune of a .133 BABIP), but that is something which can't and won't last over the course of a full season. For perspective, the ERA leader in the NL, Roger Clemens, has a BABIP of .236.

See how cool that is? See how much cooler blogs are? See how much cool could a cool-chuck chuck if a cool-chuck could chuck cool?

John over at Give 'Em Some Stankeye (nice to see you writing again, John) doesn't eff around -- he tells us, straight up, he's just going to provide links to hot Jessica Alba pics, and baseball be damned. Well, for at least a day. Again, blogs cooler than other sites. We can do these types of things, whenever we please. For instance, just because I feel like it, I'm going to provide a link to a picture of Kate Beckinsale (Note: that used to be a link to a Kate Beckinsale pic, but the site I linked to yesterday that worked yesterday, apparently didn't work today and led to a site that tried to download a virus...I apologize profusely for this, but at the time I put the link up, it led to exactly what I said it led to -- a nice pic of Kate Beckinsale.)

Joe over at Giants Cove gives us a humourous account of why writing sucks. Yes, Joe, it does, when compared to say, sex, but otherwise it isn't too bad. Of course, this coming from a guy who writes better than I do anyway, but I'll forgive him his faults.

Alright, so there you go -- enough reading fodder to relieve the boredom of just about anyone...except me. I'm still bored.