I’ve been way out of the baseball loop lately, as you probably no.  I haven’t seen an M’s game since the exhibition against Australia, I’m not sure what’s going on in the WBC and my Google Reader is spilling over with unread baseball related articles.  While I try to catch up I figured I might as well share some interesting reads I come across.

General Baseball

• Boston Herald: Scott Boras doesn’t like his young, pre free agency players signing long term deals.  No surprise there, but it’s something to think about as many of the projected early round picks in next June’s draft will be Boras clients.
• Seattle Times: Randy Johnson continues to confuse everyone by speaking fondly of Seattle, and doesn’t sound like he’s retiring anytime soon.
• Baseball America: Jim Callis answers some questions about the next three “consensus” number one picks, the percentage of first round draft picks that make it in the bigs, and baseball draft evasion.

Mariners

• Seattle Times: More roster cuts since the last time I updated: RHPs Luis Pena, Stephen Kahn, Marwin Vega, Eric Hull, Luis Munoz, Denny Stark, LHP Chris Seddon, and OFs Prentice Redman and Freddy Guzman.
• Seattle Times: And more!  So long 1B Mike Carp, 1B Bryan LaHair and RHP Gaby Hernandez.  No surprises in either group.
• USS Mariner: Dave determines that there isn’t much upside to keeping Miguel Batista around rather then just waiving him and eating his big salary.  I agree that he shouldn’t be given a spot just because of his salary and that he should earn it, and I get the impression Jack Zduriencik and companay would agree with that.
• Beyond the Boxscore: Sky Kalkman on how to build a batting order.  Tango at The Book Blog adds his two cents. A reader at Looking Landing takes a stab at building Seattle’s lineup based on this info.

Well, that takes care of about half of my unreads, leaving me with about 200 more for later.  I’ll also try to get a post out talking about whose stock is up and down this spring as we near crunch time.

I’ll talk to some of you at the H2H draft tomorrow morning.  Cheers!