Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system projects the Colorado Rockies to win the National League West in 2010 despite a quiet offseason in which the team’s biggest acquisition was part-time catcher Miguel Olivo.
Still, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: The Rockies will return nearly the exact same team that won 92 games and the Wild [...]

According to Adam Rubin, the Mets have an offer on the table to lefty Joe Beimel.
If the Mets are absolutely sure they need a second lefty specialist after Pedro Feliciano, Beimel’s a nice pickup. He has been, for the most part, brutal on lefties since returning to the National League in 2006 and, to boot, [...]

You might know Brian Boitano as a figure skater, and as the dude so revered by the South Park crew in their song, “What Would Brian Boitano Do?”
But what you might not know is that Brian Boitano is, in truth, every bit as heroic as that song made him out to be.
Check it out. Boitano’s [...]

I’m considering starting up a podcast, so I’m curious:
On second thought, some of the choices there might skew the results a little, so let me be more specific.
I’m considering starting up a podcast, unaffiliated with SNY (but certain to be shamelessly linked from this blog) with my former college roommate Ted Burke, one of the [...]

The big news out of Port St. Lucie this morning? Oliver Perez’s mustache. Steve Popper:
Ollie shaves beard – leaves porn mustache. Its 1986 again.
And David Lennon:
Good Ollie, Bad Ollie … Porn Ollie? Perez shaved his beard and left the mustache. Weird.
I’m going to go with “Utterly Awesome Ollie,” and hope he keeps the ’stache around [...]

Nick Evans is a fellow burrito enthusiast. He just officially won my vote for the 25th roster spot.
Obviously Corey Stokes needs to learn a lesson about finding a more discreet location. Also, a buddy of mine in college once got a ticket for public urination on P Street in DC. Totally worth whatever the fine [...]

Alex Remington, continuing his stats-based series of columns for Yahoo!’s Big League Stew, asks, “How many more wins will a healthy Reyes and Beltran bring the Mets?”
It’s a good writeup, but Remington is only trying to piece together two pieces of the giant puzzle that is attempting to project how the Mets will fare in [...]

All the REO Speedwagon talk the past couple of days made me think of the following video, courtesy of my some of college roommate Ted’s high school buddies. It was their entry for a Denver-area radio station’s contest to create its new commercial, and somehow I don’t think it won. Something about them not actually [...]

Jeff Francoeur said this to Kevin Kernan of the Post yesterday:
“One of my big goals is to have better pitch recognition…. Sometimes you try to say it doesn’t bother you to swing at a bad pitch, but it does. I’m human. I want to get better because I know if I can get better at [...]

Reading David Waldstein’s feature for the Times about the Mets’ heavy Venezuelan presence in camp this year got me thinking.
Of the guys near-certain to make the 25-man roster, several, as Waldstein notes, are from Venezuela. More are from the United States. Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo and Fernando Tatis are from the Dominican Republic. Ryota Igarashi [...]