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Happy post-T'eo/L'armstrong week! Hope yours was a little more relaxing than mine was. Nathan is off on Saturdays and Sundays so I'm going to try to pull together links like he does so you aren't left hanging. We'll see how it goes.
Here's your Saturday fix of our top baseball stories:
The Big Three
- The big wall of information you've been blasted with over the past week has mostly been about arbitration. It's overwhelming at times but it's an important process of the offseason, which bridges the gap between the Winter Meetings and Spring Training. Nathan wrote an excellent piece explaining what exactly arbitration is for our newer readers, and I think it's a good refresher for some of our trade rumor vets as well. The bad news is that we'll probably see arbitration stuff still trickling in; the good news is we have it all covered with our Avoiding Arbitration Tracker which has every team and every player's pre-arb agreements listed, and our Arbitration Filings Tracker, which has every team and every player's filed salary bids all in one place. Both are excellent resources I encourage you to reference.
- The Justin Upton rumor-mill won't die, and I'm not going out on a limb here to suggest it's Arizona's fault. First, the D'backs make a deal with the Mariners, which were on Upton's no-trade list, and now they've tried to make a deal with the Cubs (which won't go through because Chicago won't part with Starlin Castro), but they're on Upton's no-trade list too! What's going on here?
- Corey Hart will undergo surgery on his knee this Tuesday and will be out for 3-4 months, certainly missing opening day. Mat Gamel will most likely take his place on the roster, but the bigger question remains is about the timing of this whole thing. Last season Hart had surgery but recovered enough to play Opening Day, but this time he waited long enough that he'll definitely miss time. What gives? To quote a friend from NeoGAF (and pardon the language here), "I don't know why that hillbilly c*cksucker waited until the middle of f*cking January to have the surgery." No comment.
Other News
- The Dodgers are reportedly leaning toward Time Warner instead of Fox on their TV deal. Either way, they're going to keep spending like they stole it.
- Earl Weaver has died. No word I could offer will possibly do his legacy justice. Instead, read this wonderful piece from Jeff Burd at SABR: Earl Weaver: Strategy, Innovation, and Ninety-Four Meltdowns.
- The 2013 World Baseball Classic is coming soon, and we took the liberty in assuming you could use every single roster in a single list. Useful!
Extras
- We have a new section here at MLB Daily Dish, mostly because I like to write about bullshit where I can make more bad 80s/90s film and music references, but also because we see a lot of funny stuff that you need to see as well. Feel free to jump into the fray. It's called Peanuts and Crackerjacks because they're pointless and I know it. Enjoy it. If you're only here for 'teh serious', ignore it.
- Here's an image of how most theropods (bipedal dinosaurs) were thought to have looked. Yes. Feathers. Go scrub your brain of those classic T-Rex images you read in your books and Steven Spielberg fed to us over all those years and embrace feathered dinosaurs.
- Saturday is movie night. I'm going to see Zero Dark Thirty finally. Can't convince my wife to see Django Unchained with me, even though she kinda-liked Inglorius Basterds. Pretty sure I'll be paying for making her watch through Reservoir Dogs when we were still dating for a long time to come. Might have to sneak off to see Django on my own.
- Finally, here's 50 Collective Nouns to Bolster Your Vocabulary. Perhaps you'll see this exaltation of rumor larks using these in the future.
