First off, I’m very flattered by the interest in the Best of 2003 compilation. It’s been up for about 48 hours now, and so far we’ve had 149 downloads. The few folks I’ve talked to who’ve actually had a chance to read through some of it have had good things to say. I look forward to hearing more comments, criticisms, and the like over the next several weeks. How can this thing be even better next year?

Not that I’m committing to anything just yet.

Okay, a bunch of stuff has been piling up on my list of things to show you, so here they all are, in no particular order, with as much commentary as I can provide in 20 minutes.

• The Where’s Where Of Baseball Stats (Batter’s Box). "This article is a review of web sites offering Major League Baseball player statistics in the form of individual player cards."
• Deciphering the Peoria Complex: Bavasi vs. Towers (Sons of Buhner). One of the ridiculous number of excellent Mariner blogs on the scene takes a look at the maneuverings of two GMs.
• Defense Ranked by Rate2 (Raindrops). According to this defensive metric, Ryan Klesko, Mark Loretta, and Sean Burroughs were roughly average defenders last year. Ramon Vazquez was the second worst defensive shortstop in baseball, ahead only of Derek Jeter.
• Future 500 (On Deck). The Padres rank #29 among organizations, ahead of the Astros. Here are the Padre individual rankings:

  31. Khalil Greene, SS
  67. Josh Barfield, 2B
  140. Tim Stauffer, RHP
  243. Javier Martinez, RHP
  247. Ben Howard, RHP
  310. Freddy Guzman, OF
  311. Jake Gautreau, 2B
  327. David Pauley, RHP
  373. Rusty Tucker, RP
  439. Justin Germano, RHP
  496. Billy Hogan, 3B

  Gut reaction: Barfield and Tucker are too low, Gautreau is too high, John Knott and Michael Johnson are notably absent.

• Motor City Mayhem: I-Rod As Human Egg-White (Management by Baseball). This blog is gradually becoming one of my favorites.
• Pdf995 This is a free download that allows you to create PDFs. It’s what I used for the Best of 2003. Sure beats dropping a boatload of cash for Adobe Acrobat. Not that that isn’t a slick tool, but when you’re operating on zero budget…
• Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (Holt Uncensored). Useful nuggets of information for anyone who writes.
• PowerPoint Anthology of Literature This is pretty amusing, especially if you’ve studied literature at all. Found it via another curious site: Beautiful Stuff.

Okay, that actually took more like 35 minutes. I’m outta here…