Links to remember

Most link lists follow one of two philosophies. On the one hand, there are what I think of as news aggregators—lists that cover the news on a topic and try to be relatively comprehensive. In the Natosphere, Federal Baseball is a good example of a site that takes this approach. The other approach is to search the Web for unusual and interesting articles and use your link list bring them to the attention of your readers. Rob Neyer is probably the premier example of this approach, especially on his old ESPN blog (he doesn’t seem to do it as much now that he’s at Baseball Nation).

I’m going to use a little different philosophy here. I’m going to try to address one of my chronic issues with the Web—where do I find that really cool article I remember reading a few months ago? The articles I’ll be linking to are the ones that I think I may want to look at again three or six months from now. Think of it as a set of bookmarks that I’m sharing with the public.

So here we go.

•  Tom Boswell of The Washington Post uses the occasion of Harmon Killebrew’s passing to reflect on his development as a young baseball prodigy and the lessons learned for Bryce Harper.
• Dave Cameron of fangraphs.com compares Harper to other 18-year old prodigies, asking if Harper may be the best prospect ever. Some of the comparisons he makes include Alex Rodriguez, Adrian Beltre, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Pretty heady company.
• Rob Neyer of Baseball Nation admires the “perfection” of Liván Hernández—in the sense that Liván is perfectly average.
• Harper of Nationals Baseball dishes out some rare praise to the Nationals for giving Ian Desmond, Danny Espinosa, and Wilson Ramos time to develop.
• I must have watched Roger Bernadina‘s amazing catch two dozen times now, and I’m sure I’ll want to see it again.
• Speaking of spectacular catches, Danny Espinosa had two to remember in a May 7 game against Florida, robbing Hanley Ramirez and Emilio Bonifacio of hits.