I mentioned I have been out of touch of late so this article by Bruce Allen just crossed my radar. It’s one hell of a good look at the media treatment of Manny Ramirez and encompasses many of the points we have laid out here in the past like the difference between how Manny and Trot Nixon are regarded and just how freaking good Ramirez is. Allen takes on the topic in a much more eloquent and organized fashion than anything I have seen before.

Steven Goldman takes a look at the Sox through his Pinstriped glasses…

the Red Sox have the best record in the American League, but they have barely outscored their opponents, allowing 51 runs while scoring 55. The offensive problems that had been predicted for them have materialized, and a great deal now depends on Manny Ramírez, who has yet to record his first extra-base hit of the season. The pitching has been good but conceals weaknesses. Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling are pitching over their heads, Matt Clement is a mystery, and David Wells may be finished. The Red Sox are doing it with mirrors and David Ortíz.

Well now the Sox have outscored their opponents by 16 runs. A hat-tip is in order for Goldman’s prediction of Coco Crisp’s and Trot Nixon’s injuries, Jason Varitek’s becoming an offensive cess pool and Manny slugging his weight. All of those have “materialized.” Matt Clement is a “mystery” the same way any other league average-plus pitcher is. Yes, Beckett and Schilling are “pitching over their heads” but not that far over. Both are pretty good, Steve. And yes, David Wells may be finished but there is plenty of organizational depth to cover that loss, either via a call-up or a trade. As for the “mirrors and David Ortiz” quip, whatever. So Goldman’s a little cranky as the Sox get fat while improvement candidates outnumber regression ones.

He’s a Yankee fan. Can you blame him?

I’m a bit of a web dork. Hmm, let me rephrase: I’m a huge web dork. I work for a web hosting company, do most of the day-to-day tech stuff that affects our fair site, dig RSS, AJAX, and all of those other fun internet acronyms. So, for a while now, I’ve been using some of the “meme-tracker” websites — the most notable being tech.memeorandum.com.

A meme-tracker is, basically, a quick way of seeing what the big stories are in the internet world that day. The site does some nifty behind the scenes work of tracking a bunch of big sites, looking to see what stories are being linked to, and as more people link to/talk about a story, it shows up on the site. It’s kind of an easy way of looking at the big stories in a particular space (tech.memeorandum.com being technology, the original memeorandum.com being politics).

The man behind memeorandum created a baseball meme-tracker called ballbug.com. Ballbug is a nifty little site, where you can pop in and see a snapshot of what other folks are writing about. In one quick swoop, you can get a nice high level look into baseball for the day, with the ability to drill down a bit further.

There’s just one problem — baseball is already subdivided into 30 separate interest groups. They’re called teams. That fact tends to mean that the baseball blogosphere is already pretty well divided and insulated. There’s going to be just one or two interesting things for each team, each day (generally, a game or an injury). So, you can scan, see the big news, and drill down further … but because there’s not a lot of cross-pollination (we’re not linking to a whole lot of Bronx Banter posts …. yet), there’s not really any “big” stories. Each story is big only to the people in its area of interest.

Striketwo.net is another baseball meme-tracker. I’ve been using it for the past few weeks to help pick out stories for the “News from Around the League” posts I’ve been doing (which will be back, I promise, since I know how much you all *loved* them). It’s a nice tool, but it’s main page has the same problem that Ballbug has: there’s so little cross-pollination that there’s no convergence around big stories; instead, there’s just a big grouping around a game story or injury. Now, that will probably change if there’s a huge baseball story (Bonds being indicted, or a big steroid suspension), but even on a big day like Jackie Robinson Day, there’s just not a lot of commonality in the baseball blogosphere.

But … that’s not the end of striketwo.net’s talents. The greatest feature on the site is unique to striketwo.net, and the reason that it outshine’s Ballbug. It’s the Player Tag Cloud feature, and it’s fantastic. A tag cloud is used to give you a quick insight into which terms are being used most often. The larger the usage, the bigger the tag in the cloud (take a look, it’s easy to figure out). Striketwo.net has a tag cloud of player names. Each time a player is mentioned in a story, it gets tracked. Right now, Bronson Arroyo and Barry Bonds have both been mentioned a bunch. Val Majewski, well, he’s got sort of a small tag. There’s some team bias here: more folks write about the Red Sox and Yankees, so they get more mentions. But, it’s not so bad that it removes the usefullness of the tool.

This goes a level deeper. The tag cloud isn’t just used to see how often a player is mentioned. When you click on that player name, you’re dropped into a list of items that have referenced the player in recent days. It’s an incredibly useful feature, and something I find myself using often. Oh … did I mention you can get an RSS feed of a player? So, you want to know everytime someone writes something about Nook Logan? Or Kevin Youkilis? Just click on their name and snag the RSS feed into your favorite RSS reader (if you need more info on RSS, maybe start here).

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, our fair site is tracked by striketwo.net. But we pretty much have zero influence. So this wasn’t done in any way to make ourselves appear bigger. The nature of a tool like striketwo.net is that one blog/site/person can’t game the system. Now, if you linked to this article on your site (and they told two friends, and they told two friends … ), then this would pop up on striketwo.net. That’s how it works–the more folks that link to something, or discuss a common issue, the more likely that it’ll vault up to the top of the home page.

We’re a couple of weeks into the season, and that’s given me a few weeks to use striketwo.net. I’ve found it incredibly useful, and useful enough that I thought I would spread the gospel a bit. Head on over and poke around a bit … and drop us a comment to let us know what you think. Or, take advantage of the striketwo technology–write your own review of striketwo, link it here, and watch the discussion get picked up.

Technology is pretty great sometimes.

I can vouch for SG here when he writes that Yankee coverage, and in particular the YES Network, has gotten out of hand with respect to whom and how they criticize.

I’m tired of Jeter being above criticism. Like Joe Torre, who blew the game yesterday by saving Mariano Rivera’s arm to pitch with a lead that never came, certain people in the Yankee organization are immune to second-guessing, while others have every little thing they do criticized.

Derek Jeter was awful last night, and as responsible for New York’s loss as any other player, just as Joe Torre was the night before. But you won’t hear that from any mainstream outlet.

Having made my $160 investment in the MLB Extra Innings package, I have taken in bits and pieces of the last couple of Yankee games and it is borderline unwatchable, not so much beause their announcers aren’t the brightest bulbs like some of the other teams’, but more because Michael Kay and company offer a special combination of smugness and willful ignorance that’s just intolerable. We really have been spoiled over the years with Sean and Jerry and, to a lesser extent, Don and Jerry.

Rich Lederer and Bryan Smith of the Baseball Analysts were kind enough to invite Cliff Corcoran of Bronx Banter and me to participate once again in their Two on Two series previewing the American League East.

Check it out.

John Sickels has his annual top-20 prospects up for the Sox. Craig Hansen tops the list.

Never much of a fielder to begin with, thanks to an invite from Rich Lederer I am the Designated Hitter today over at the Baseball Analysts.

Hope you like the piece!

Over at the Replacement Level Yankee Weblog, SG has compiled two sets of Diamond Mind projections. One is based on ZIPS and has the Sox winning the AL East. The other is based upon PECOTA and has the Yanks winning the East by a comfortable margin. I am not really sure what to make of these other than to say it’s kind of fun to look at. So thanks, SG.

One thing to note, though. The ZIPS projection has the Yanks scoring 821 runs while PECOTA has the Yanks scoring 879 in 2006. I have been hearing a lot of people, most notably and lately Tim Kurkjian, saying as though it’s a foregone conclusion that the Yankees are going to score 1,000 runs this year. It’s preposterous. The Yanks scored 886 runs in 2005. Now, they did add Johnny Damon and he will enhance their production out of center field but what about their other hitters? Save Robinson Cano, each of their position players is past an age at which he could reasonably be expected to improve. So yeah, the Yanks will have a nice offense - maybe the best in baseball - but they ain’t scoring no 1,000 runs.

We added a new blog on our blogroll on the left side of screen.

Seth Speaks has an interesting look at the fantasy baseball world, and he is doing a multipart 2006 fantasy preview. The AL East was today, and he tosses up projections for the staters as well. Give him a look, bruddas.

In case you don’t read Cardnilly, the best Cardinals blog on the web, I thought I would link to what really is a great description of bias, and in particular what bias is all about when it comes to writing about sports. In short, bias is natural, human and perfectly fine. It’s just that writing that aims to be objective should contain the necessary caveat that the writer may have some biases of his own.

For instance, I don’t want to believe that Roberto Petagine’s glove is so bad that the Sox couldn’t put him at first base and help the team. But maybe it is? Anyway, here’s an excerpt…

Bias in and of itself isn’t all that big a deal — it’s always going to be there, and it’s silly to pretend that anyone’s objective about sports in particular. The trick is to recognize where those biases exist, and try to counteract them, or just own up to them and let the reader decide how much weight to give the opinion/analysis/meandering rant.

The piece goes on to identify where some of the writer’s biases exist. It’s just a great read.

Really, really well done, Scott.

For anybody wanting a quick primer on Thursday’s Rule Five Draft, Bryan Smith’s preview over at Baseball Analysts is a must-read.

Go and check it out and decide for yourselves if the Sox should be active come Thursday or not.

David Pinto, linking to Viva El Birdos, nails exactly what happened at my apartment last night.

I must admit that I yelled when Pujols hit that ball. My wife and daughter came running to see what was the matter. It’s not that I’m a particular fan of either team. It’s just rare to see victory snatched from the jaws of defeat so dramatically. The 1986 Mets comeback in game six of the World Series was water torture. This was shock and awe. This was something to yell about.

I too yelled, and afterwards wondered why. I didn’t have a horse in this particular race. Johanna, sleeping in the next room, awoke suddenly and asked me what the problem was. “When I can speak again, I’ll let you know what I just saw,” I told her.

Wow. Felix Hernandez, by all accounts, was masterful last night.

Go check out the guys at USS Mariner. They’re all great writers but they are at their best when the M’s have cause for hope and optimism. Their last few entries have been a real blast to read.

Lyford has a bang-up draft recap. Be sure to go check it out.

Go get your Cubs fill. I spent the evening with three guys heading to the Windy City for the weekend. Should be a special series, to borrow an adjective from Monsieur Gammons.

Check out Braves Journal for some good stuff on this weekend’s foe.

Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts has a great piece up on Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Paul DePodesta.

“We’re trying to predict the performance of human beings in special situations,” he said. “We’re never going to be right about that. We’re going to try to build a decision-making process where we’re right more often than we’re wrong. We know we’re not going to be right all the time.”

Go check it out. It’s a well-written and interesting take on what the Dodgers are up to these days.

Go and head on over to the Baseball Analysts site, where ya boy conducted a little roundtable discussion on the AL East with Rich, Bryan and Cliff Corcoran, formerly of Big Red Blog fame and currently with Alex Belth over at Bronx Banter.