Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times is uncomfortable with the symbolism of the Winter Meetings in the fabulous Bellagio Hotel and Casino: Reporting from Las Vegas — It’s the symbolism, stupid. As Americans lose their jobs and homes at a frequency unseen in decades, baseball convenes today for its annual holiday shopping spree in […]

Getting a deal done at the Winter Meetings is not as easy as everyone makes it sound. I mean, off the top of my head, I’d say you’re looking at a Boeski, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever. If you’re not […]

Everyone has been talking about getting one of the Rangers’ surplus catchers, but only the Tigers have gone out and done something about it.

Jason at IIATMS interviews former Indians, Orioles, and Mariners manager Mike Hargrove. The interview focuses primarily on the accident that took the lives of Indians’ pitchers Steve Olin and Tim Crews in 1993 and Hargrove’s memories of it. Good stuff.

As the Winter Meetings get underway in Las Vegas, I can’t help but think how much fun it would be to sit in the Petrossian Bar with a cell phone up to my ear and exclaim loudly: “So it’s six years and $150M for Manny? This is confirmed? Wow. Who would have thunk that Theo […]

The Tribune Company could be heading for bankruptcy: The Tribune Company, which is in danger of falling below the cash flow required under its bonds, is trying to negotiate new terms with its creditors and has hired advisers for a possible bankruptcy filing, according to people briefed on the matter . . . . . […]

I’m not that good at handicapping trades right after they happened — I’m really more of a hindsight guy — but my sense of this is that the Reds may have gotten the better end of the Homer Bailey for Jermaine Dye deal. This may sound surprising in that, generally speaking, trading a 22 year-old […]

It’s official. Or at least it will be on Monday. Maddux is my favorite baseball player of all time. Despite this, I have only seen him pitch in person one time. This is a near-contemporaneous account of that one time I saw him, related in an email to my buddy Ethan in the still-drunk hours […]

It’s been over a month since I predicted that they’d be all the rage this winter, and now finally they’re available: Next weekend, fans will finally be able to buy Phillies ear-flap caps, like the one Jimmy Rollins wore during the victorious World Series homestand in late October. At first, however, they’ll only be sold […]

Forgive me for yet another non-baseball thing, but Virginia Postrel has an excellent post noting how journalists seem to be really getting off on “Depression Porn“: The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett asked a bunch of people, including me, what a 21st-century Depression might look like. The results sounded pretty damned good to some people–a sure […]