grapefruit league links

The Mets lost 4-2 to the Tigers in a split squad game today. Welcome back.

o Dunno how I missed this when the Voice ran the story in September, but ex-Mets pitcher/current Mets announcer Ron Darling is apparently a huge jazzhead.

o Digaman hipped me tonight to the existence of the fantasy baseball league that existed only in Jack Kerouac’s head. Really.

o Despite the utter failure of the Mitchell Report to create any kind of closure with the steroids era, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are speaking in gestures as weirdly elegant as their records are grotesque. That is, one can imagine John Chancellor’s narrator in Ken Burns’ Baseball reading off their narratives. The latest installment, far less reported than Clemens’ escapades on Capitol Hill, involves Bonds personally driving from spring training camp to spring training camp looking for work, while threatening to go play in Japan. (Thx, Russ.)

o SNY’s feature on the best Mets brawls would be a whole lot cooler with video clips. But it’s still pretty cool.

o The Times Bats blog reports on Mets’ pitching coach’s Rick Peterson’s observational skills. According to Sports Illustrated, Peterson spent the off-season “read[ing] Eastern philosophy and [drawing] sketches of his players.”

o A classic meditation by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.