Not much in Padre-land with the continuing struggles … so we’ll go back to the well — blogs and MSM — with this edition of Friday links (with some other stuff after that).

Here’s a Bob Costas interview with Aaron Barnhart discussing, as you might imagine, Bissenger’s remarks on “Costas Now” and the whole thing in general. Costas:

While there is unquestionably a new media revolution going on, and much of it is good, the part that — speaking for myself, the only part, the ONLY part — of which I am critical, is that there is an ethos on a significant portion of the web, an ethos not of criticism or skepticism or a contrarian viewpoint. There is an ethos of abuse, where not only is cogent thought not required, it’s almost resented. Where a reasonable argument has no place and where ad hominem attacks reign. That is not all or even most of the web, but no fair-minded person would say that isn’t a significant portion of it. That’s my criticism.

There’s a bunch more there from Bob. His criticism seems to be that some blogs are bad and some are not. He doesn’t like the bad ones. Hmm … fair enough. But what’s the point of getting frustrated by that? Clearly, Costas is aware of the good ones (or the ones he personally would define as ‘good’ or valuable):

Now, coming with it are there many important fresh new voices? Absolutely. Are there places where people like you, who were one of the first ones, and Joe Posnanski, not to name all Kansas City guys, but where you can go to get more expansive or quirkier versions of their thought? Yes. Are there nichier places … baseball-centric sites filled with detailed statistical analysis or, say, everything you want to know about the Seattle Mariners? That’s great. Nothing wrong with that.

Why read that bad ones or the ones that you don’t like? The value that I see in blogs, in general, is the diversity. You’re going to get a whole lot more areas of expertise from anyone who can start a blog than you’re going to get from the specific subsets of journalism school grads or talk show hosts. Now, like I mentioned yesterday, I’ll bet that your average professional writer is better than your average blogger. The content in your average newspaper is better than the content you’ll find in the average blog out there. But the main point — for me, anyway — is that blogging gives an opportunity for anyone to get their stuff out there. And many times it is better, or at least more interesting, than your average newspaper guy’s material. Weed out what you don’t want to read and concentrate on the good stuff.  

Joe Posnanski has, as usual, a great take on the issue:

“I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty,“ Buzz said just before he started screaming and swearing at Will, and this is so weird because I was actually thinking for a long time about calling this blog ”Dedicated To Cruelty“ or DTC (you know, for the kids). Come on. Is journalism dedicated to lies because a couple of pretty famous writers made up stories? Are books dedicated to murderous anti-semitism because Hitler wrote ”Mein Kampf?“ Is music dedicated to demeaning women because Flo-Rida sang “Low?” How are you going to judge blogs and the Internet because some anonymous jerk on a message board or in a comment section decides to tell poo-poo jokes about Tony LaRussa?

And here’s Jason Whitlock.

Ahh, alright, enough of that for now.

Here’s a great piece on Brian Bannister and Zack Greinke – they may just be my favorite pitching duo in baseball.

I haven’t read any of this yet, but here’s part three of Pizza’s series on foul balls.

Colin Wyers has been doing some awesome work with the fielding portion of the PITCHf/x data. Check out his other posts on it, too.

Jeff Moore from Dugout Central has a piece on how to spice up the mlb draft. A lot of the suggestions sound interesting. It also gives me a chance to talk about the “draft series” I mentioned a while back. You probably don’t even remember it, but I said I was going to make a series of posts on the draft at some point. Well, I haven’t yet and I probably will not. I will most likely have some posts on it as the process certainly does interest me. But the truth is that I simply don’t follow college or high school ball closely enough to really provide much value there. Just wanted to mention that in the rare case someone was looking for those posts.

Paul Nyman has an article on Phil Hughes’ mechanics. Personally, I am very skeptical of all the analysis on mechanics out there (not necessarily Nyman, who seems to have a better grasp on it than most, especially me; but I still remain skeptical, in general). For some reason, despite the fact that almost everyone that talks about mechanics seems to know what they’re talking about (although, they many times disagree!), I need to see some kind of evidence. Now I’m not exactly sure what that evidence would be, but for me there has to be something. I know, not counting MGL and some others, I’m probably in the minority on this. But so be it — it’s not like anyone cares about my opinion in the first place.

The Pads are one of the teams in pursuit of Juan Castro, says mlb trade rumors (and the L.A. Daily News). Hmm … pass, anyone? Castro would have to be a helluva fielder to make up for his truly awful bat.