Sunday's Side 2

This post will be like side two of a Beatle album. The band had a bunch of pieces of songs but nothing complete. So they mashed them all together and somehow made it work. There is nothing complete in this writer's head this evening, so in honor of the Fan's favorite band, here is Side 2:

There is a great blog out there called, "If we were General Managers" or something like that. The Fan has been there a few times but forgot to create a favorite. But it's a great concept and fits perfectly with being a baseball fan. We all like to think that we could make smarter moves with our clubs than those getting paid to do so. Such is the case with some moves today and some moves projected to happen in the days coming.

First, Daniel Bard was sent down today by the Red Sox. The guy has shown himself to be an animal and did not give up a run this spring. He throws in the upper 90s and writers have said that he does so with a real easy motion. So why would he get sent down? Are the Red Sox saving money on the future arbitration thing again? Do they see him getting more work on the farm than at the big league level? The Fan would have opened the season with him. Talent like that doesn't need seasoning. It just needs to be let loose.

The same will soon happen to David Price of the Bay Rays and Matt Wieters of Baltimore. Price blew away the Yankees today for four innings and if the post season tour de force wasn't enough to get the guy a job, what is? But apparently, the two pitchers "ahead" of him do not have options. That means that if either of those two pitchers is sent to the minors, they will be subject to the waiver wire and could be snatched by another team. Wieters has appeared in the FanDome before, so if you want the Fan's take on that situation, just look up the post. Bottom line: Any other outcome for Wieters other than starting the season with the Orioles is bogus and not in the best interest of the team or its fans. The ONLY reason for doing so is to save money and delay arbitration for one more year. Bogus.

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Only in Spring Training can there be one game which features the Tigers getting zero hits and another that featured two teams combining for fifteen homers. You heard correctly. Fifteen homers. The Fan is meditating and saying his chi (but the knees are too shot to assume the lotus) that Spring Training means nothing for the regular season. But Golly, the Tigers look awful. Really awful.

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The Fan recently discovered a site called BallHype.com. It's a fun site that is basically a source for sport links. But it has some unique angles. First, they have what they call "Hype It Up." This is a method for giving instant feedback on if you liked the post or not. Posts from the FanDome show up there automatically and the Fan seems to be stuck on one "Hype" a day. So it goes for the undiscovered talent that lies within. The Fan's record was three "Hypes" for the Rickey Henderson's acceptance speech. Alas, the Fan's blog is ranked something like 1847th.

But the fun goes even further than that. Once you sign up (registration is free), you can pick games every day. Just click the "Games" tab. Picking the games is easy. You just click the dialog box of the team you think will win. The site keeps track of your daily totals and your weekly and "career" totals. It's a lot of fun.

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The Fan is happy to report that Buster Olney is back in fine form after getting over his foam at the mouth period concerning Manny Ramirez. His posts are back to their normal excellent quality. The Fan doesn't always agree with Mr. Olney, but really appreciates that the guy at least writes a long post nearly every day.

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The Fan is falling in love with widgets. That scoreboard at the top right of this blog is a "widget" or a little application that makes something happen on your page. The Fan saw another cool widget on another site that lists the time in days, hours, minutes and seconds until the season starts. The Fan thought that would be fun until it occurred to him that the widget will be useless once the season starts. Know of any cool widgets that you would like to see here? Leave a comment with a link and we'll take a look.

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Here's a tip for those of you who use Blogger as your blog tool: Never make a link site a site you click as a "Follow." The Fan did that and now a million posts a day are bombarding the Fan's dashboard. Makes it hard to keep track of what Josh is doing over there at JIB.

There are a lot better tools than Blogger. The Fan uses WordPress, which is a really good program, for his company site. But this blog has always been on Blogger and the Fan is loyal if nothing else. Plus, it's easy and it's painless. Speaking of not painless, there are quite a few videos over on YouTube that give detailed explanations on how to do things on Blogger. They are quite useful but are put together and narrated by some eggheaded guy who is really dull. Oh well.

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The Beatles were brilliant. The Fan, not so much. This Side 2 was more like something done by the Bare Naked Ladies. Anyway, the post is done, the needle is skipping off the end of the record. See you tomorrow.