The Futility Infielder

I'm swamped with work right now and pretty damn ornery as well, stuck on a three-month-long math project at work which has made my life a living hell. I'm Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winfield character in Pulp Fiction when he's on brain detail, a "mushroom-cloud-laying m*****f*****." It ain't pretty.

Needless to say, I haven't had the chance to do much writing lately. I'm working on my Hall of Fame analysis for relievers, which will hopefully be up later this week. Three or four other things I wanted to write about have been stashed on the back burner, if not rendered completely irrelevant. That's life as a blogger when you've gotta pull down a paycheck, too.

So for now, I'm going to have to settle for passing on a few links, not all off which are fresh:

• Baseball Prospectus' Derek Zumsteg has a worthwhile take on the possibility of Fox selling the Dodgers now that their five-year window for writing off player contracts is closing. For those unfamiliar, the five-year rule allows half of a franchise's purchase price to be allocated to player contracts and depreciated over that span, creating an artificial loss which reduces the owner's tax liability. So if I buy the Dodgers from Fox for $400 million, I can write off $200 million of that, which is $40 mil a year. When five years are up, I, just like other owners, particularly the corporate ones, bail on the Dodgers and find a new tax shelter. See: Disney's Anaheim Angels, anything Jeffrey Loria has touched, and the entire history of the Florida Marlins (Huizenga to Henry to Loria, Oh Shit!).

Incidentally, the guy who came up with this grand scheme is the same guy wearing the ugly toupée. From a CNN/SI piece last spring:

"This legal rule was actually generated by a major tax law victory won by Bud Selig in his former baseball role, as a new owner when Selig bought the Seattle Pilots for $11 million in 1969 and moved them to his hometown of Milwaukee,'' says [Harvard law professor Paul] Weiler, author of Leveling the Playing Field. "It was a terrible legal verdict that was won by a guy 30 years ago in a different world."

No wonder those owners love Bad Rug Bud.

• Also at Prospectus, Will Carroll's first Under the Knife column is worth a read. For the uninitiated, Carroll has been running a free email list of the same name which details player injuries and their outlooks from an informed sports-medicine standpoint. He gets a lot of good inside stuff about the game in general as well. The first BP column discusses the now-quashed Bartolo Colon-Brad Penny deal involving the Expos, Marlins, and Reds. Of Penny, Carroll writes: "Rumors circulated fairly regularly last season that Penny's elbow was not the only concern, but that his shoulder had come up abnormal during an MRI. While tears were not seen, sources indicated that Penny had some lesions inside his shoulder capsule and according to some reports he may have the dreaded Hill-Sachs lesions that would imply rotator cuff problems." If that kind of talk is your cup of joe (and if you own a fantasy-league team it had better be), then you've got a new columnist on your reading list, particularly once the season hits.

• Mike C. over at Mike's Baseball Rants has been working on a lengthy, multipart analysis on the history of relief pitching. It's now five parts and thick with numbers, but it's definitely an interesting look at the development of an important, if nebulous, facet of the game. Start with Part 1 and then go scroll crazy...

• Christian Ruzich has one of the best baseball sites around. He's got a weblog devoted to the Chicago Cubs called The Cub Reporter, an article on the Ex-Cub Factor, the most comprehensive list of retired baseball numbers on the web, a baseball bookshelf feature which has me green with envy, and a little doodad in the upper-lefthand corner of the Cub Reporter which tells you how many days until Pitchers and Catchers (today we're at 31!). If that's not worth a look during the dark days of January, I don't know what is.

Christian's been stewing about the Cub-related Hall of Fame candidates -- Sandberg, Dawson, Sutter and Smith -- none of whom received the magic 75% during last week's voting results. As if being a Cubs fan isn't hard enough already. He's also done a fair bit of research related to another Cub candidate, one who should have been in the Hall long ago, Ron Santo. "Number of players dubbed 'the next Santo': 3 (Gary Scott, Kevin Orie, Cole Liniak). Career games for the three next Santos: 251." Hmmm...

• Introducing a new blog devoted to baseball analysis and rotisserie advice, called At Home Plate. It's done by a guy named Jonathan Leshanski. I'm not sure I agree with his suggestions for speeding up the game, but they're worth a look, and so is the rest of his site.