Since there’s not much to do in New England in January when the Pats don’t make the playoffs, I decided to update our blogroll. Rest assured, the list now contains no dead blogs, out-of-date URLs, or lame-o bloggers who take the winter off. Seriously, I just can’t respect anyone who hangs up their keyboard come November. I mean, the rest of us are here, waiting it out, refreshing mlbtraderumors, sitting under those SAD lightboxes and reading The Mindful Way Through Depression. But where are they? WHERE ARE THEY? Actually, I don’t even care. I’m going to make some more hot chocolate, throw a good slug of whiskey in it, and think about summer. Oh, and click through the blogroll.

And if you know of any blogs that are more fun than checking sunrisesunset.com, waiting for the days to get longer, leave ‘em in the comments.

Game 5 of the NLCS had a few anxious moments, but for the most part the Phillies cruised. After the game, the team looked supremely pleased. It’s clear they wanted to win last night for their manager. Buster Olney explains:

It was tremendous to see the way the Philadelphia players responded to Charlie Manuel after the Phillies clinched the NL championship Wednesday night, each of them giving him a hug. Jimmy Rollins gave him a heartfelt hug, and then the two shared words, and another hug. Having lost my own mother two years ago, I am so relieved for Charlie that he can fly home to bury his Mom without having to worry about baseball the next couple of days.

I’ve Made a Huge, Tiny Mistake has a bunch of pics of Brad Lidge jumping up and down like a crazed monkey.

Phillies Nation links to Phillies Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Kalas calling the last out of the NLCS, and blogger Tim Malcolm shares this tidbit:

I had a dream last night.

No, no, it wasn’t a dream about winning the World Series. Actually, I dreamed I was at a bonfire, and Charlie Manuel was there. I thanked him for the wonderful managing job he did in 2008, and he accepted it wholeheartedly. Then he taught me hitting — in an office, no less — by tossing cough drops at me as I waited with a bat.

The Good Phight offers apologies to members of the Phillies front office, including the man, the myth, the legend, former GM Ed Wade:

Ed Wade: This team, in large part, is your team.  You always resisted trading away young stars at the trading deadline, and now the team is made up of those young stars in the prime of their careers.  Five of the starting eight — Pat Burrell, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Carlos Ruiz — were all homegrown products of your time as GM.  On the pitching side, Cole Hamels, Brett Myers, and Ryan Madson were part of your drafts and have been key parts of the run in 2008.

Finally, Crashburn Alley sums it all up with the simple opening line, “As hard as it may be to believe, the Philadelphia Phillies are the National League representatives in the World Series. Pinch yourself to validate that this is not a dream.”

So after all the speculation and theorizing about whether MurrayChass.com is a real site written by the real Murray Chass, who used to write for the real New York Times, Sarah finally had the brilliantly simple idea of just calling up the real Murray Chass and seeing what he would say.

Wisely mentioning that she writes for the Boston Metro and glossing over the fact that she also considers herself a blogger (preferring instead to refer to “websites,” which, after all, UmpBump is), Sarah said she had heard some internet chatter that the site was a clever hoax, that she’d been discussing it with some colleagues, and that in the end she figured she’d better go to the horse’s mouth.

Chass was very intrigued as to why people thought the site might be fake and peppered Sarah with questions about that, while not giving away any information. In the end, since Sarah works for a newspaper (”something that’s actually printed on paper,”) and since she actually called him (he did acknowledge receiving “some emails” asking the same question) he said he would confirm that it was really his site.

So in the end, UmpBump’s suspicions turned out to be untrue. But you know what they say in journalism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Me and the boyfriend have been apartment-hunting, and are currently on a demoralizing 0-for-21 slide. That’s right, 21 apartments viewed so far and 0 leases to show for it. So, I’m doing what any good manager would do: benching us. Clearly, what is needed here is a day to clear the head. And how better to clear said head than with some good hardball linkage?

First, Baseball Reference’s Stat of the Day blog has a quick take on winning with no hits, as the Dodgers did last night.

SportsbyBrooks weighs in on the issue that wouldn’t die: the unkillable pink Red Sox hat debate.

Towel Drills has the Ozzie Guillen-Lou Piniella “rap” commercial, which I hadn’t seen yet. It’s horrifying, and it makes me grateful that Boston only has one baseball team.

Half Street Blues has the news of a rather interesting (read: desperate) marketing ploy from the offices of the Washington Nationals: today’s first 10,000 fans who bring in any non-Nats baseball merch and trade it for a free Nationals hat, the one with the curly little “W” that looks like a pig’s tail.

In this week’s Metro column, I assess Curt Schilling’s HOF chances.

River Ave. Blues and Blogging the Bombers are both chuckling over today’s oddball Yankee lineup. Oh, that Joey Girardi! He’s such a kidder!

Razzball has an “interview” with “Spike Lee.”

Balls, Sticks, & Stuff has some simple steps to “Phix the Phils.”

“Eyre placed on DL,” begins the headline of this MLB.com piece. Naturally, I supplied the rest in the blink of an eye: “Expected to be out at least six weeks with malnutrition, exposure to typhus, smoke inhalation, and a broken heart. Will return only when Mr. Rochester finally calls.”

Do you often hear ghostly voices crying your name over the lonely moors? Tell me about it!

Only a few more hours left of Wednesday. A bit of reading to get you through the last hump of Hump Day:

Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell would like their ice cream machine back, please. (Bradford Files) And is lack of ice cream behind Beckett’s mysterious injuries this year? (Center Field)

What it’s like when Jose Canseco hits on your girlfriend. (Diamond Hoggers)

The six-man roster continues to loom. (Washington Post) Oh god, no.

Dusty Baker doesn’t like walks, so Joey Votto isn’t walking. (Vegas Watch) Moneyball haters, rejoice!

A backward glance at Nomomania (Sam Mellinger for the Kansas City Star)

“Jeter and others may be trying to get Paul O’Neill’s number RETIRED? Has the world gone mad?” (Joe Posnanski on behalf of LaTroy Hawkins)

Why are Kenji Johjima’s pitchers throwing him under the bus? (Detect-O-Vision)

Stephen Drew is a righthanded dude who bats left. (DbacksBuzz) After burning my right arm two weeks ago, I have discovered that I can do absolutely nothing with my left arm. At all. Tip o’ the hat to you, young Stephen.

And finally, earlier in the week, Coley wrote about Boston prospect Jed Lowrie’s potential as a super-utility guy for MLB Trade Rumors. Today, Joe Haggerty writes for the Boston Metro about why the Sox are grooming their prospects that way.

And as always, if you’re reading something we should be reading, let me know!

Via Deadspin and The Fanhouse, Dodgers Broadcaster Steve Lyons would like his homeowner’s insurance to pay for a little accident…that time a couple years back when he grabbed that woman’s wrist and demanded she show him her boobs, and then got sued. It was an Act of God, I’m tellin’ ya! But seriously, what would Vin Scully say? (Interesting aside: his official bio includes the line, “He has earned national notoriety as a staple of Fox Sports’ coverage of Major League Baseball from 1996-2006, where he earned an Emmy Award and two additional Emmy nominations during his tenure with the network.” I’m not sure “notoriety” was quite the word they wanted right there, but it certainly seems appropriate now.)

Over at Salon, King Kaufman has an interesting meditation on the no-hitter—why it’s superior to other athletic achievements and why he tries to jinx them at every opportunity.

DBacksBuzz notes that Randy Johnson did not fare well in his start for the AAA Tucson Sidewinders last night. ExtraBases notes that Bartolo Colon was strong in yesterday’s AAA Pawtucket Red Sox opener.

BlessYouBoys on Detroit’s April stupor.

DodgerThoughts defends bloggers against—guess who?—Murray Chass. The blog’s author, Jon Weisman, followed the New York Times columnist on Charlie Steiner’s XM talk show yesterday. Chass, alas, used his airtime to rail against bloggers. Weisman gave a thoughtful, measured response, thus demonstrating that bloggers = more thoughtful, measured than Murray Chass. In his post, Weisman also notes that despite the knock that bloggers live in their parents’ basements, the only time when he’s actually moved back in with his parents was during his two-year stint as a beat reporter. (Hat tip to BrewCrewBall, where I read it first.)

And finally, Beyond the Box Score had a bunch of good tidbits yesterday (Bill James on Fenway’s left field, the first of many Joe Torre managing miscues, and what PETA would like to call the new Nationals ballpark (hint: it’s not Furmeat Field).

Dear UmpBumpers,

If you like baseball and you use Facebook, chances are you’ve seen the Bleacher Report’s ad for bloggers. The ad, when clicked upon, brings you here. If you click on MLB, on the front page you’ll see the headline “Ellsbury on the Fast Track” posted by an Alex Potter:

Of course, I had already read this headline. And as it turns out, I’d already read Mr. Potter’s article, too.

That article, which appears on The Bleacher Report under Mr. Potter’s byline, was actually written by Dan Shaughnessy and appeared in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Word for word.

Looking to see if the Bleacher Report had participated in other incidents of plagiarism, I Googled “Bleacher Report” and “plagiarism.” It turns out that BR has—but from the other side, when a writer at the Sporting News copied something from them. The Bleacher Report is “open source,” so “Alex Potter” may just be operating on his own. Nonetheless, you’ve got to think they would have some way of filtering what gets posted on their site—not to would just open them to legal troubles, no? Even if it’s just a spambot…why would 400,000 people a month read a blog that was written by spambots?

And on the blog’s “About” page, they claim that “every contribution bears the stamp of its writer’s personal convictions” (unless of course they bear the stamp of someone else’s unattributed personal convictions) and that “each submission is edited and rated by the Bleacher Report user-base, allowing individual writers to hone their skills and ensuring that the best analysis gets featured on the site.” I guess this means Dan Shaugnessy’s writing is good enough to be featured on a blog. That’s good news for Dan…but I’m sure he wishes it was under his own byline.

Oddly, in a bizarre coincidence, I wrote a column about a year ago that was very similar to one written by Dan Shaughnessy. Only mine was published about a week before Dan’s appeared. I wrote up some tips for a new Red Sox player to welcome J.D. Drew to town, and Shaughnessy wrote up some tips for a new Red Sox player to welcome Daisuke Matsuzaka. After first reading Shaughnessy’s column, I was out for blood—the similarities between the two, I was convinced, were proof enough of Dan’s nefarious intent! (Twirls mustache, or female mustache-equivalent.) But then I realized a) it wasn’t a very original idea and b) the likelihood that someone who grew up reading Shaughnessy’s columns would somehow finagle their way into his brain and think of his ideas before he did is much likelier than the notion that Dan Shaugnessy reads a fishwrap—it’s a term of endearment!—like the Metro, much less lift and idea from it. Coincidences do happen.

I guess that’s just by way of saying, sportswriting ain’t academia, folks, but word-for-word copying is never cool. Why anyone would plagiarize anything in this age of Googlability beats the heck outta me.

A very puzzled,

Sarah

Why read our long-ass HOA posts when you can read the “half-assed” haiku version on Babes Love Baseball? It’s like the Cliffs Notes of season previewing, only way awesomer.

ArmchairGM points out to Hank Steinbrenner that Red Sox Nation (which Hank called “a bunch of [expletive]“) has infiltrated New Jersey. I guess that makes up for all the Yankee fans in Connecticut, though I still consider those people traitors. And I’m sorry Hank, but Red Sox Nation is not a creation of ESPN. It wasn’t even a creation of the Red Sox, though marketing genius Larry Lucchino certainly capitalized on it. It was a creation of Dan Shaughnessy. Or maybe even Nathan Cobb.

And via Awful Announcing….wiffle ball fight! (Fight over wiffle? That’s just piffle!)

Speaking of the Sox-Yanks rivalry and of fighting, check out this story on Baseball Think Factory about a bunch of Sox fans in Cambridge jumping a Yankee fan at Central Square’s Cantab Lounge. The Cantab, which is well-known in the area for its Bluegrass Tuesdays, describes itself as a “meeting place for multi-ethnic, multi-generation” people. Apparently this diversity does not extend to sports teams.

Moving on down the Red Sox police blotter, Sox and Dawgs has a good guess what Boston scout Jesse Levis was doing when he committed that “lewd act.”

Baseball Reflections would like to know if Sean Casey is for real. So would I.

Jeff Pearlman at ESPN ripped Nomar a new one for not being happier on Autograph Day. And lest you think Garciaparra was just having an off-day, he showed the same surly demeanor when I saw him signing at Spring Training five years ago. In fact, since Nomar left Boston, I have heard so many stories about his sourpuss ‘tude that I have been forced to admit that my long-standing love for Nomie was unappreciated and undeserved. Oh well. It’s not the first time Sarah’s affections have been bestowed on an unworthy object. I’ve loved worse men than you, Nomar! So don’t go thinking you’re special!

The Sports Hernia looks at Dmitri Young and Nick Johnson and wonders what (or who) they ate for lunch.

At SI, Tom Verducci wonders if a pure DH could make the Hall of Fame. Specifically, David Ortiz. Plus, what Big Papi eats for breakfast (hint: it’s not mango salsa).

Corey Patterson finally got a job…a minor league deal with the Reds, finalized late on Monday…and according to Bus League Baseball, he may actually start the season over Jay Bruce, SI’s No. 1 prospect, which would be a shocking turn of events if it actually came to pass. But Bruce has a mild quadriceps strain, which may give Dusty Baker just the excuse he needs to go with crappy and old instead of young and talented.

And finally, from Can’t Stop the Bleeding, we bring you Joe Beimel’s number one fan.