First of all, your goddamn MySpace Hottie of the Week is coming sooner or later. You have to remember that I’m using the loosest possible definition of the phrase “of the week,” and, in this case, it means “occurring almost once a week, but not quite - pretty much whenever I feel like doing it, actually.” Trust me when I tell you that writing a Hottie episode is much more difficult and time-consuming than it appears. I’m kind of like Jesus when I write them. Dig?

In lieu of that, I’m providing a link to one of the greatest blogs on the Interthingies, Fire Joe Morgan. I’ve been a big fan of FJM for some time now, but I’ve held off on linking to it, because it’s targeted at a rather specific audience - baseball nerds, to be exact. Not just people who like baseball, but people who enjoy baseball statistics. The premise of the site is simple: professional baseball commentators are very bad at commenting on baseball. While most baseball journalists out there are at least competent at stringin’ words into sentences, when it comes to content, they haven’t a clue. That’s where FJM comes in. Combining impeccable grammar and spelling, wry senses of humor, and a whole lot of baseball nerdspeak, the cats at FJM routinely dismantle the arguments of some of the nation’s worst writers and TV personalities, of whom ESPN’s Joe Morgan is undoubtedly the most egregious offender. Quite often it’s a fish-in-a-barrel situation involving a barely literate former player like John Kruk, who somehow gets paid to talk about baseball, but if shooting fish in barrels were as entertaining as this site, I’d watch that, too. It’s high time you visit FJM.

Since a lot of the dorky stuff on baseball statistics probably won’t mean much to most of you, try and acquaint yourself with, at the very least, Moneyball and Bill James before visiting FJM. If all else fails, remember that Barry Bonds is really good at baseball, and David Eckstein is really not good at baseball.

Oh, and here’s just a taste of what FJM has to offer (from yesterday’s post): “The day after a sports team loses in the playoffs, people suddenly have a lot of (typically intangible) insights as to why that team was always destined to fail in the first place. It’s a combination of hindsight and psychology that I am deciding to call hindpsychology, because I am a fan of sports portmanteaus (or as I call them, sportmanteaus).”

No, they’re not just baseball nerds; they’re also word nerds. That second sentence might be one of the best sentences in the history of the English language. If I were in the business of assigning points for such things, they’d get 50 billion for that meta-portmanteau.

Go Tigers.