The Yankees and Angels do not play the final game of their three-game series until 8pm ET tonight — I dislike ESPN Sunday Night Games and am anti-night game on weekends in general — so here are some spare links to get you through the day. Enjoy.
- David Laurila at FanGraphs spoke to Carlos Beltran last week about hitting. Specifically about making adjustments from year-to-year, his approach, thriving with runners on base, stuff like that. Beltran’s an ultra-smart hitter, so, needless to say, check it out.
- ESPN’s Jayson Stark put together the best and most thorough take on the recent Tommy John surgery epidemic that I’ve seen so far. I thought the most interesting nugget was that while the rate of elbow injuries continues to increase, the rate of shoulder injuries has actually gone down in recent years.
- With that in mind, Eno Sarris of Sports on Earth wrote about young pitchers and their tendency to get worse through the years, not better. There is no real peak age. Guys show up in the big leagues, hopefully maintain their performance level for a seasons, then start declining. Obviously there are exceptions, but in general everything starts trending downward immediately.
- Another post from Eno, this time at Hardball Times. He looked at the Great Ice Cream Riot of 2009, when fans and vendors in the Legends Seats were throwing free ice cream sandwiches to the fans in the slightly less rich seats. It generated some headlines and the Yankees weren’t happy. It was kind of a big deal.