San Francisco Giants Link Dump, 9/10

I was a juror on a trial that ended yesterday. You know what the movies don't tell you? It's boring.

Baseball is dying? Nonsense: The Case for Baseball’s Vitality
It seems like we need to go through this at least once a month, so let's just keep this link handy. Baseball is not dying. Baseball is great. Maybe you hear people say "But ratings are down for national games!" And that's true. But ratings for everything are down, aside from football, and gosh, isn't it too bad that football doesn't have multiple lingering scandals tainting the league that you can point to? That sure would make it easy to point out that expecting something to grade out perfectly in every way is just another form of concern trolling. Alas, we don't live in that world, so that point will have to go tragically unconsidered.

The 25 Worst People in Sports
Well, well, well. Look at all the Barry Bondses that clearly don't belong anywhere near this list. Remember all the times people would say "What is wrong with Giants fans that they would keep rooting for Barry Bonds?" And our answer then was the same as our answer now: screw that. We never even had to dip into the spite-laced well that was "Well what's wrong with Florida State fans, or Rays fans, or Marlins fans?"

Now that I think about it, uh, maybe it's clearing a low bar to say we're better than the entire state of Florida.

Grindcore Gods Puig Destroyer Are Back, And We've Got An Exclusive Track
Not only does Puig Destroyer feature erstwhile McC commenter delorean, but it is also chock full of helpful life advice. For example, this song tells you about all the different kinds of people with whom you should discuss your fantasy team. Literally everyone who wants to hear about your fantasy team is mentioned by name, so take notes!

MLB's Joe Torre issues memo on collision rule -- Not so fast, umps
To the casual fan, the fact that a couple parts of the new rule protecting catchers weren't good for the game might have suggested that the entire rule should have been scrapped and everyone involved in it should have to watch Pete Rose blowing up Ray Fosse for months on end. But weirdly, baseball decided to just tweak the rule to make it better, as if trying to solve the problems is preferable to giving up and watching guys get injured. I'll never understand bureaucracy.

Los Angeles Angels Mike Trout and Los Angeles Dodgers Clayton Kershaw collide
Sometimes I get really really jealous that Los Angeles fans get to watch Trout and Kershaw play for their teams. Then I think about all the good times the Giants have had recently – Barry Bonds, Buster Posey, three no-hitters, a perfect game, two World Series – and it doesn't help at all. I'm still really jealous. Those guys are good.