Lunch Time Link Dump

• Roger McDowell is apparently a homophobe. The Braves pitching coach has been suspended two weeks for some interactions with fans where he made some gay slurs and insulted a father in front of his two kids... and this is all alleged to have occurred during batting practice. AT&T Park in San Francisco is one of the few ballparks in the majors that still maintains a "bullpen" in foul territory along the base lines rather than in its own area of the outfield. Without some sort of barrier between fans and players, relief pitchers are pretty much heckle-bait all game long. Not that I'm making an excuse for McDowell, who is probably more famous for the Hotfoot and other dugout antics than his pitching acumen. 

•  I've discovered an old SI.com article of things we miss in baseball and for the exact same reasons I mentioned above, they seem to miss the bullpens being in foul territory. They also miss "fans running into the field" and "wimpy middle infielders" to put into perspective what kind of writer we're dealing with. I do, however, find the first item on the list intriguing: Stirrups. Not just colored socks, or those white socks with a vertical stripe up the side. Actual stirrups you wear over your socks. I never really understood the reason for them, but hell if I didn't make sure my stirrups were pulled as high as possible during little league. Of course they were usually stretched out and dry rotted from the years and years of other kids wearing them, but that's nothing a few safety pins didn't fix! Bullpen carts and Youppi were two other good ones from the list.

• Possibly the most surprising and under the radar news of the year so far is the impressive start by Bartolo Colon. I had him listed at the beginning of the season as a zero risk, high reward player and so far he's been the latter. He's averaging a K/IP and keeping the Yankees in every game he's played, last night's fine performance included. The fat man seemed destined to be hanging up the spikes for good, but a couple of Yankee injuries made way for a spot in the bullpen and now a Phil Hughes implosion has made it likely that he hangs onto a starting job for at least a little while longer. He throws with finesse and deception. He's not the CY Young winner he was in 2005, but he's eating innings as thoroughly as he's eating pizzas. 

• As successful as the Bartolo Colon move was, Derek Jeter's new contract is looking like just as big of a failure. $15M this year (and at least $34M the next three) isn't a terrible deal if your team leader is batting at a decent clip and playing stellar defense. But Jeter isn't really doing either. In his last calendar year of baseball, Jeter is batting .257 with 6 HRs. And yet though 26 games this season, Jeter has led off 16 of them. His defense is as sub par as ever (despite his Gold Glove awards that can only be attributed to blackmail). The Yankees are in a really tough spot right now. Do they risk moving Jeter down to 7 or 8 in the lineup to see if he can right the ship? Do they need to bring in another player to share time with their $15M man? A solid year of sub par performance at age 36 is more than a slump. 

• ZooWithRoy.com made the "Huge Butt" announcement last week that they'll be working with Iron Hill Brewery to produce a ZWR Beer this summer. Naturally, that means a trip to Iron Hill Brewery is in order. One of my biggest selling points when trying new beers is the art on the label and you can bet that "So Cuttered Hoppy Wheat" will have some sort of Penguin/MS Paint image worth the price alone. 

• Reading through an article on PhilliesNation the other day about Baseball Prospectus rankings for players kind of showed me that for the most part their top 5 rankings have panned out pretty well from season to season. But that got me thinking about how actual draft picks work out. Luckily it only took about 30 second worth of Googling before I found this article on the rankings for 40 years of #1 overall picks from 1964-2004. For every A-Rod, there's a Matt Bush. The list counts down from the outside and the median #1 overall pick turns out to be Phil Nevin. Which pretty much explains why the MLB draft is such a crap shoot.

• The Common Man  over on Platoon Advantage has been doing a series of family trees for trades and signings that produced other players. In the latest installment, he shows how a 1967 draft pick would eventually turn into David Wright. It's pretty wild to think about and certainly a little far fetched considering all the moving parts involved in the deal, but I'd love to see a Phillies family tree that traces Granny Hamner to Bobby Abreu or something... I'm just too lazy to do the research myself.