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 sixth of a six-part series, I’ll go through the NL West, and highlight my picks for the cream of the crop.

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San Francisco

McCovey Chronicles

It’s not that I don’t like Giants fans. I do. They’re generally nice people, and they like to watch baseball as much as I do. It’s just that I can’t stand Barry Bonds apologists. Thankfully Grant, who runs McCovey Chronicles, is a fine writer who doesn’t delve into the mire of rationalizing Barry Bonds. He accepts him for what he is, and then writes beautiful articles like this. An excerpt:

Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle which contends, “The simplest explanation is most likely the correct one”. Barry Bonds’ trainer is taken down in a performance-enhancing drug scandal. Barry Bonds became a incredibly large man, and did it quickly. Barry Bonds was able to sustain an unprecedented level of success as he went into his forties. Not only is Occam’s face baby smooth on this one, but he’d look great in a bikini, too.

So don’t count me among the Bonds apologists. It makes me sick to think about it all, and I’m beyond conflicted. It’s human nature for a competitor to look at the way Mark McGwire was deified in 1998, and to want to reach the same level in the same way. But that never took the shadiness out of what was being done. It was a competitive advantage that not everyone was willing to take. “Everyone’s doing it” is a point that shouldn’t be blithely dismissed, but it certainly doesn’t condone the whole endeavor.

San Diego

Ducksnorts/Gas Lamp Ball
Since its inception way back in 1997 (?!) Ducksnorts has been the place to go for the Padres. Geoff Young, who also writes Knuckle Curve and is an author of The Hardball Times, knows what he’s doing. Any sports blog that’s been around longer than the word “blog” has deserves to get recognized. Ducksnorts has an emphasis on stats, which of course appeals to me.

Gas Lamp Ball has great writing. I’ll let this little excerpt stand on its own as a testament to the quality of the site:

See if somebody asked me the question, “Who’s better… Alan Trammell or Brooks Robinson?” I would’ve raised one eyebrow, stroked my chin and said, “Who do you think is better?” Then, no matter the response, I would follow up with, “But are you sure you’re taking into account VORP’s influence on the EqA’s statistical push on WARP?”

And then again… Regardless of the response to that, I would respond with, “That’s what she said.”

And that’s why Bill James gets paid the big bucks.

Arizona

AZ Snakepit

Sadly, this seems to be the only viable, professional looking, updated-in-the-offseason Diamondbacks DBacks blog. It’s well-written, though, and a testament to how strong the SBnation family of blogs is. This made me laugh, though:

I got a spam message in my mailbox today: not normally something worth noting, but the subject was curiously appropriate: “Dont want no short Johnson man.” How apt, since Randy’s return to Arizona does answer one issue that was of concern to the Diamondbacks in this off-season, namely a rotation spot.

Los Angeles

Dodger Thoughts

I was sorely tempted to choose Tommy Lasorda’s often incoherant MLBlog, especially after reading his latest post. He writes about how he was supposed to be at the dinner where RFK was shot, but decided to see Don Drysdale pitch instead. Out of nowhere, he injects this paragraph into his story of RFK’s assassination:

As I dressed that morning, I put on a brand new pair of shoes. They were CoreFam shoes, and as I wore them around that day, they really started to hurt my feet. So much so, that I had to leave the game, and I walked to my car with the CoreFam’s in my hand. That’s how badly they hurt.

Huh?

Anyway, Dodger Thoughts is a member of the Baseball Toaster group, a small but high quality gathering of authors. It’s not often long on words, which can be a death knell for a blog, but it’s mastered brevity. Jon Weisman also writes for SI.com, it should probably be noted.

Colorado

The Purple Row

Another team that’s cursed with a small number of online sources for commentary. The Purple Row is, of course, SBnation’s Colorado blog. They certainly seem to have cornered the market on teams without large blogging presences. I have to give them credit for profiling the top few projected draft picks for the 2007 draft, though. I though the David Price bio was nicely done.

Especially this bit:

The only downside with Price is that he lists David Justice as the greatest baseball player of all time in his Vanderbilt profile.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 2:47 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.