The Pastime

With Spring Training rapidly approaching, it’s time to familiarize ourselves with the best of the team-specific baseball blogs out there. Need to know the down-low on how that rookie starting pitcher is going to fare against your team? Better know where to go. In the third of a six-part series, I’ll go through the AL East, and highlight my picks for the cream of the crop.

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New York

Replacement Level Yankee Blog

This is one of those times that I have to remind myself that I’m trying to compile a list of the best team sites, and not passing judgment on the teams themselves. As any small-to-mid-market fan should, I don’t like the Yankees. At all. I can respect their tradition, and the class exuded by the organization. I can’t stand the flagrant buying of talent, and arrogance, though.

With respect to Replacement Level Yankee Blog, I have no complaints, though. They do a great job over there. One of the things that drew me to pick them is the emphasis on statistical analysis, as shown here. Along those same lines, the annual Diamond Mind Baseball season results that are published over there are a great way to see how your team is projected to fare.

Boston

Fire Brand of the American League

Even if you disqualify the majority of ESPN.com’s staff, there are still some great Red Sox blogs out there. Evan Brunell, when not running the day-to-day operations of sports blog network MVN, writes a pretty solid Red Sox blog. In fact, it’s one of the most well-written blogs out there, I’d dare say. He updates almost every day with long yet readable posts. Plus, he’s got the most important part of a blog nailed: the name.

[Full disclosure: I write for MVN.com, though it in no way affected my picks. Not that I’d have anything to gain by showing bias, anyway.]

Tampa Bay

Baseball Happenings

While not technically a Devil Rays blog, Baseball Happenings is as good a place to read about the D-Rays as any. David Bloom writes about all sorts of MLB happenings, as the name suggests, but there’s a distinct Tampa Bay theme to his work. I was tempted to list The Dugout as a Devil Rays blog, due to their long-running fun with Delmon Young, but I resisted.

Toronto

Batter’s Box

According to striketwo.net, the people who track this sort of thing, Toronto has the weakest blogs of any baseball team. I’m pretty sure they get the internet in Canada, so I’m not sure why the Blue Jays online landscape is so bleak. The Batter’s Box is a fairly strong site, with enough content to satisfy most Jays fans, I’d assume. It’s hard to pick the “best” Toronto site when the only competition is openly looking for writers.

Baltimore

Oriole Post

A few weeks ago, I ran across Oriole Post and thought to myself, “huh, just another team blog for a team I’m not interested in”. Wrong. [/Dwight Schrute voice] Oriole Post is about the Orioles, sure, but it’s also a conglomeration of things baseball-related and not. It’s become one of my favorite sites to check up on, and since it’s updated so often, there’s new content all the time. It also helps that the author admitted that he was addicted to baseball caps, a vice I share.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under General Baseball, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.