I know this place has turned into Rob Neyer Avenue today, but this was just too good to ignore. The above link is to a screengrab I took of Wikipedia's page on Rob Neyer this evening. It appears that someone got real angry about Neyer's Top 100 Players of the Aughts list and changed his wikipedia entry accordingly. The screengrab is a little hard to read, so here's the text:

"In late 2009 Neyer compiled what he thought to be the top 100 baseball players of the decade list. Aside from the notable omissions of Tim Lincecum, Justin Morneau, and Ryan Howard, Neyer also saw it fit to include some other "bad" players and blame it on the statistical way that he calculated the rankings.

Scott Rolen, at number 11 in the decade, was only the beginning of the travesty. Neyer also saw fit to include such notables as Jorge Posada, Bobby Abreu, and Jason Giambi in his top 20. Adding to the anarchy, J.D. Drew was put at 22, 2 spots higher than the most dominant closer of the decade and possibly in history Mariano Rivera. Johnny Damon and Mike Cameron also crack the top 40, and don't forget about Adrian Beltre (owner of 1 good season) and Placido Polanco (owner of 0 good seasons) to round out the top 50. Add in Brian Giles, Corey Koskie, Jarrod Washburn, Brad Radke, and at this point Neyer probably was just pulling names out of a hat. Neyer did not seem to understand that a large number of innings pitched or at bats did not translate to a good player. Sometimes bad is just bad, and you can't go ahead and rank bad people above good people simply because of how much they played in the decade.

There was widespread critical panic with regards to Neyer's list, not the least of which was at ESPN. Most found his claims to be so outrageous that a widespread manhunt ensued for Neyer's computer in order to strike the data from all human accounts. This search led by renegade sports fans failed, and this list found its way to the ESPN website, thus depriving ESPN of all credibility and losing them millions in revenue.

Thanks a lot, Rob."

J.J. and his lame-headline-friendly last name are off to the ChiSox.

Zack Greinke, that's false hustle.

Interesting read. Not often you read MLB players talking about FIP and zone ratings.

Cue AA's one Jermaine Dye fanatic . . .

I'm not sure if this quote refers to baseball or extra-marital affairs:

"ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said Sunday night the network determined Phillips' ability to be an effective analyst was 'significantly and irreparably damaged.' "

I haven't followed Jones' career much at all, what with him being in the Bundesliga and not qualified for the MNT. Does anyone have any idea of his potential impact for next year, assuming he returns to full health?

Joe Pos shares his love for Theo Epstein using a few quotes from a radio interview where Epstein defends J.D. Drew's value to the Red Sox, despite his lack of RsBI. For example:

"Based on his skill set, he’s always going to have underwhelming RBI totals. I couldn’t care less. When you’re putting together a winning team, that honestly doesn’t matter. When you have a player who takes a ton of walks, who doesn’t put the ball in play at an above average rate, and is a certain type of hitter, he’s not going to drive in a lot of runs. Runs scored, you couldn’t be more wrong. If you look at a rate basis, J.D. scores a ton of runs. And the reason he scores a ton of runs is because he does the single most important thing you can do in baseball as an offensive player. And that’s NOT MAKE OUTS."

I'm sharing this link only because I read stuff like this and I just can't imagine the same type of analysis going down in our own front office. Share my sadness, AA.

The Mets do not appear on this list.