San Francisco Giants Link Dump, 3/4

Have we all got the "OMG GIANTS LOST WE'RE SO DOOMED" jokes out of our systems yet? If not, I'll wait.

Giants newcomers McGehee, Aoki – so different, so much in common
Baggs – back at the Bay Area News Group, for those of you who hadn't heard – discusses the long and winding road that led Casey McGehee to San Francisco, though the questions of whether he's seen the road before and whether it will ever disappear go sadly unanswered. McGehee and his family very much enjoyed their time in Japan, which seems great, but does present the immense danger that his son will become one of those people on the Internet who constantly talks about how Japanese culture is superior. Stay vigilant, Casey. Stay vigilant.

2015 San Jose Giants Season Preview: Starting Pitchers
Joe Ritzo, broadcaster for the Baby Giants, previews the possibilities for the starting rotation this year. There are a lot of guys who could start for San Jose this year, many of whom are top prospects like Tyler Beede, Keury Mella, and Joan Gregorio. And since the rotation's performance last year was disappointing, there's nowhere to go for San Jose but up! I mean, sure, this year's group could also be disappointing, or they could even get worse, but let's ignore that. Nowhere to go but up. That's the world I choose to live in, anyway.

What Happened At The 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
Last weekend, there was a big conference on sports analytics, which you definitely couldn't tell just by reading the title of that article, and Nate Silver was there to report on the panels and discussion and, presumably, wild afterparties that devolved into nerd orgies. But if you're the kind of person interested in issues that affect the future of sports, issues like gambling, or risk factors for injuries, or just how teams use sabermetric data, then this would have been a good conference to attend. So it's good that I'm telling you about it now, several days after it ended. I'm very helpful. You're welcome.

Adam Dunn, Juan Pierre, and Why We Need WAR
Grantland uses the now-concluded careers of Adam Dunn and Juan Pierre to look at what goes into WAR's evaluation of a player, and why it's useful to have that one statistic that can be a shorthand for all of a player's contributions. They also answer the eternal question of who was more valuable, and it turns out the answer is . . . Barry Bonds! Yes, between Adam Dunn and Juan Pierre, Barry Bonds is unequivocally the more valuable one. We should have known.

Baseball Writers, Big Business, and Big Sport
Typically, The Hardball Times decided to be a bunch of jerks and write something great about a subject (the evolving relationship between media and the sport, starting in the very early days of baseball) that was barely even on anyone else's radar. I, for one, am getting pretty sick of their fascinating and exhaustively researched articles. Stop showing everyone up, guys. Show some class.