The people in my neighborhood

As mentioned in the inaugural edition of this feature, “The people in my neighborhood” will periodically highlight the work of some of the (for now, anyway) lesser-known bloggers with whom I’ve had the pleasure of conversing and who, on occasion, loiter around ShysterBall comment threads waiting for you to make a mistake and then pounce on it like a hobo on mulligan stew. Friends of ShysterBall, as it were, of whose work you may not be aware if you’re just clicking the same bookmarks you set up back when the borderline Asperger’s dude from the IT department brought you your new machine after you spilled a Coke Zero on the old one.

Like I said last week, this isn’t some popularity contest or Deadspin commenter audition, so if you think your blog should be on here and it isn’t, I’m not shunning you; I just forgot or haven’t seen it or something equally innocuous, so just shoot me an email. I won’t promise that I’ll always feature it, but if you update pretty regularly and have something interesting to say, I’ll certainly be reading it and getting around to you eventually.

With that out of the way:

tHeMARksMiTh continues to chug along nicely with his new baseball history site, Way Back and Gone. Scroll through the last few days to learn a little bit about how Hank Greenberg ceased being a Tiger, how a ballplayer with gap power could have gotten a free suit in Brooklyn between the 1920s and the 1950s, and just what the hell the Temple Cup was.

Ron Rollins’ Baseball Over Here wonders about the implications of girls playing on boys’ baseball teams, ponders the wisdom of the Japanese moving to Tucson, and welcomes Pedro L. Lazo to the 240-win club. Wait, you don’t know who Pedro L. Lazo is? That’s fine. He’s never heard of you either.

Jason at IIATMS is asking what you would do if you were commissioner for a day. If you’re thinking of responding with some sort of economic proposal, you would be best served by first reading some of Jason’s posts from late last week about salary caps and salary floors.

Last week The Common Man so thoroughly owned a ShysterBall comment thread about Roger Clemens that he took the thoughts to his own blog to expand and expound. He also embeds a link to the original trailer to “Wrath of Khan,” which is pretty spiffy in its own right.

Jay at Fack Youk joins the hatin’ on the Mets’s rotation depth and overall plan. But though he is a Yankees guy, he doesn’t seem to take any special joy in it. That he reserves for the news that the Sox signed Kevin Youkilis. After all, if they didn’t, Jay would probably need to find a new name for his blog.

Finally, Josh at Jorge Says No! asks the Blue Jays What the Hell They Were Thinking with the Vernon Wells contract, and then asks the Cubs the same question — albeit less formally — about Ryan Dempster’s deal.

What will the next week hold for these magnificent blogs? Hell if I know, because I just got all ten volumes of Y: The Last Man from the library and plan on reading them to the exclusion of all else over the next few days. Baseball is everywhere. A story about the simultaneous death of every male animal on the planet save one guy from Ohio and his pet monkey who are subsequently hunted down like dogs by neo-Amazons only comes around once in a while, and it’s moments like these you have to savor.