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Hello, and welcome to today's link dump. I hope these are links you enjoy. If not, there will be different links tomorrow.
Marlins Fear Jose Fernandez Needs Tommy John Surgery
Baseball is wonderful and I love it, and it is also the worst. You can't just give us Jose Fernandez and his curveball and his propensity for magnificent GIFs and then take him away like some sort of common Every Pitcher. It's not fair. The season is so young and we were going to get to watch him. There was TIME now!
By the way, here is a hockey stick-like chart showing the number of Tommy John surgeries by season. There is a thriving debate among people who aren't experts about whether the cause of this is manmade. Jury's still out!
Let’s Explain Eric Hosmer’s WAR
If you want a breakdown of how baserunning can have a serious effect on a player's WAR, here it is. By offense and defense, Eric Hosmer is having a very similar season to his year last year, but he's on pace to be worth about 2 fewer wins. How can his baserunning be that bad? Well, it mostly hasn't really; he's been a victim of some close plays, some risky decisions from his third base coach, and a small sample size. The lesson is that you should treat every number accrued so far this season as predictive gospel, which is bad news for Pablo Sandoval's contract drive, but great news for Brandon Belt's ability to hit 40 homers without using his thumb for 2 months.
Clash of the Caps
The official minor league site is hosting a competition over what team has the best hat. Our very own Richmond Flying Squirrels are currently in second place, trailing only Jeff Francoeur's El Paso Chihuahuas. And as much as I usually root for Frenchy to do well, there's a Giants minor league affiliate whose games I've never attended to support! EXCELSIOR!
The Cubs have joined the 10,000 loss club
If your main takeaway here is "lol cubs," that's okay, but you're missing the bigger picture. Both the Phillies and Braves got there first. So science tells us that the two things more strongly correlated with losing than being the Cubs are the Tomahawk Chop and having Phillies fans cheer for you. Really warms the heart, huh?
In the ’90s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sat down with Oprah
There is a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out soon and it looks terrible. The good news is that at least people on the Internet won't horribly overreact to this and declare that this movie ruined their childhood, because people on the Internet are very rational and have never had comically out-of-proportion reactions to trivial things.