Here's a little gem brought to my attention by Raphy: The Best of Baseball-Reference.com's Sponsorship Comments by Baseball Junk Drawer. Apparently Raphy saw it linked in a piece written by Rob Neyer although I haven't found the original article yet.

This is an interesting post by Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs... Jason Bay is going to get massively paid this winter, we all know that -- but what if there was another player on the market who was equally valuable, but would cost you far less money? Does that sound like a player you might be interested in?

You've all heard of Bill James' "power/speed number", developed back in the Baseball Abstract era, right? (We have it here on the site, btw.) Well, over at The Hardball Times, Brandon Isleib applied the same technique (taking the harmonic mean of two numbers) to Offensive and Defensive Win Shares to come up with what he calls the "Offense/Defense Number", or a measurement of those who excelled at the plate and afield. In Part I, infielder seasons are examined (spoiler alert: Honus Wagner was awesome).

Here's a nice piece about the Hall of Fame as a museum:

It's the sports trivia show for the real fan!

Over at the Hardball Times, Chris Jaffe presented his list of the worst World Series games of all time. As he put it:

I went through Baseball-Reference's World Series gamelogs and chose the worst games to ever grace the game's biggest stage. Main criteria are a complete lack of drama (blowouts and games decided early), and poor play (pitchers unable to throw strikes, fielders unfamiliar with the proper operation of their gloves, hitters who can't drive in the runners).

And of course, throwing games is always good for #1 on a list like this.

Congratulations are in order to FanGraphs' David Appelman, who was named to the Huffington Post's list of the 100 biggest "Game Changers" in new media. Way to go, David!

From Sporcle, Name the all-time franchise leaders in hits, HR, wins, and saves for every MLB team.

Another Sporcle quiz -- Can you name the players who have hit a home run in 6 or more consecutive games?

No, the title is not commentary on the post-season. In fact, so far I'm finding it pretty thrilling.

Rather, I'm wondering if the 2009 Phillies are the first playoff team to have a starting lineup featuring three players whose names end in "Z"?

Check out the box score of Game 1 of the NLCS and you'll see what I mean: Raul Ibanez, Pedro Feliz, and Carlos Ruiz all started.

If any other team has done it, I'd think it's been within the last 40 years, as names ending in "Z" are much more common in Spanish-speaking countries than any other. I thought that perhaps the Rangers playoff teams in the mid-1990s had done it--after all they had a Rodriguez and a Gonzalez, but no other "Z-ending" players I could find.

I've also been wondering for a while if any other team (besides the Phillies) has ever had two players whose last names ended in "iz" as with Ruiz and Feliz.