The Futility Infielder

I'm sitting here watching the first game of the season between the Yanks and the Red Sox. As David Wells grunts through without his best stuff on the eve of his 40th birthday, I'm doing a little bit of site maintenance, and I wanted to call attention to a few new blogs out there.

The first, BaseballBooks.net, comes from Baseball Prospectus' Greg Spira. Greg's created a handy blog devoted to tracking reviews and excerpts of new and notable baseball books "from Amazin' to Zim." Greg knows his books. As Baseball Primer's Sean Forman testified: "I've visited Greg Spira's apartment, and I can attest that the guy is a serious fan of baseball books. They are in his closets, his kitchen cabinets, stacked on the floor and even in some bookcases."

I can relate; I'm dangerous when the new titles flood the market in the spring. But with my new, smaller apartment, shared domestic space, and financial austerity plan, I've had to resist the urge to buy every 300-page tome that vaguely interests me. I did purchase Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Lineups because I love books that lend themselves to browsing, I can't shut up about the latest Roger Angell book, and it's all I can do to put Moneyball down to watch a ballgame, write a blog entry, or go to work. I've got an itch to pick up Michael Shapiro's The Last Good Season, except I know it will be weeks before I even start it. Ditto dropping science with the late great Stephen Jay Gould. And I still haven't really put a dent in Baseball: A Literary Anthology, which a friend gave me as a parting gift when I left my job in February...

Anyway, if you've gotten enough of the new stuff, Greg's got another portion of his site called Buying Baseball Books: A Guide. Hold onto your wallet here, folks, because he tells you not only where to get the best prices for new books but also the places to look for those hard-to-find ones. Personally, I'm big on Hamiltonbook.com for remainders and Advanced Book Exchange for out-of-print stuff.

Moving on... Baseballblogs.org is a blog devoted to aggregating as many baseball blogs as its proprietor can find (78 at last count). The site uses RSS feeds to generate brief excerpts of the blogs, and among your options, you can view blogs by team (there's at least one for each team now) or by today's entries. Pretty sweet.

Finally, on the Yankee front, Larry Mahnken's Replacement Level Yankees Weblog has a great name and an endearingly self-deprecating tone (check out the excerpts from Baseball Primer on the left). Larry's got a great list of blog links and an Alfonso Soriano Wager Watch, comparing Sori's walk rate over the past two seasons.

Speaking of the Yankees, it's 5-1 in the seventh with two on and two out, and Boomer's done. Time to go sweat this one out with the bullpen...