is it time for spring training yet?

Sadly, probably not. What a lame Series. At least it’s time to end the self-imposed moratorium on reading baseball books.

o The New Yorker‘s Ben McGrath gets loose on Scott Boras, agent to A-Rod, Carlos Beltran, and many others.
o A pair of scholarly studies about the effects of the Designated Hitter, including a PDF of “the Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule” (apparently, um, Democrats favor the DH more than Republicans) (Thx, MVB)
o FireJoeMorgan.com will keep me entertained during the long, cold months. Of this, I am sure. (Word, OAK.)
o Richard Ford has a nice piece in today’s Times about the game-as-played versus the game-as-discussed. Anything that “refines the idea of spectatorship” is good. Anything “trying to sharpen the focus on a bunch of focusless stuff that not only doesn’t matter a toot, and could never be proven true or false and therefore isn’t really journalism, but that also doesn’t have anything to do with the game as it’s played”… well, that’s bad.
o It is time for the annual reading of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind.”

No, seriously, is it time for spring training yet?