Friday Foursome

Super Bowl madness continues here in the Valley of the Sun and so far I’ve passed on opportunities to hang with L.T. (the original L.T.), 50 Cent and Ludacris. Hey, after you’ve shopped the Apple Store with Mike Tyson, the celebrity scene gets so tedious.

On to the baseball…

• Rob Neyer continues his series of posts on the best big-league players, position by position. Today he points his lens [$] toward centerfielders. Where does the Tigers’ Curtis Granderson rank? Well, he’s in the top two…
• Jayson Stark keeps tabs on the remaining free agents of note. (Shawn Green anyone?) Among the notable notables is former Tiger Sean Casey. [Update: Casey agreed to a one-year deal with the Red Sox Friday evening.]
  

  Why, for instance, would a 33-year-old, .301 lifetime hitter like Casey have found himself jobless all the way into February? True, he only hit four home runs last year. But after a slow start, he did basically what he always has done for a decade — get his hits.After May 1, Casey’s stat line looked like this: .317 avg./.372 on-base/.424 slugging.

  (snip)

  Casey picked a rough winter to be a free agent — a winter full of suggestions like, “If you played another position besides just first base …”

  “If I played some outfield or a little third base, I’d have signed two months ago,” the Mayor told Rumblings the other day.

  “Here’s an idea,” we told him. “Do you have a catcher’s mask?”

  “I could do that,” he said. “I could catch. But my career would be over in about four innings.”

  Ah, The Mayor…

• Chris Shelton cleared waivers and is officially headed to Triple-A Oklahoma City. After all the heat the Pirates took in early 2006 for letting him go, I thought they would make a bid for him for no other reason than to balance the karma.
• People often ask me why I’d want to live in a place with 100 days of 100+ degree weather. For starters, 65-degree days in February. If you’ve thought of pulling up stakes and moving to Arizona, today’s Arizona Republic editorial is for you.

Finally, wanted to clue you in on a new site I’ve launched with Ian Casselberry of BlessYouBoys.com. We’re proud to introduce BaseballBlend.com: A Daily Jolt of Baseball Insight & Commentary.

As we say in the intro post, we love our Tigers but often want to cover topics and issues related to the other 29 teams and baseball in general. We hope you’ll check it out and add the RSS feed to your daily reading rotation.