In Arizona:

• Josh Thole went 0-for-3 with a walk.
• Bobby Parnell started and tossed four scoreless innings, striking out three and allowing just a hit and a walk.

In the Dominican Republic:

• Fernando Martinez went 3-for-4 with a solo homerun and two runs scored (.394/.438/.652).
• Fernando Tatis went 2-for-4.

At MetsGeek, James Kannengieser breaks down the top ten Mets batter seasons.

Despite the fact that our economy is in the crapper and our financial institutions are largely responsible for flushing the toilet, the Mets have assured everyone that their landmark twenty-year, $400 million sponsorship deal with Citigroup is not in jeopardy. When reached for comment, the 53,000 employees whom Citi is laying off said, "Really? Really."

Marty Noble has a new mailbag up, where the questions are actually quite stupider than the answers.

Pedro Martinez will definitely pitch next season, for the Mets or somebody else.

Tom Tango's 2009 Marcel the Monkey projections are available, and FanGraphs already has 'em, both sortable-wise as well as within the individual player pages.

Also at FanGraphs, Eric Seidman looks at Joe Beimel, one of the more interesting names on the free agent relief market.

At Beyond the Boxscore, Peter Bendix has the first part of his series on the history of the National and American Leagues. It's a long read but a good one.

At Baseball Digest Daily, John Brattain compares the tenures of Bud Selig and former commissioner Peter Ueberroth.

The Kobe 9 Cruise of a new independent Japanese professional baseball league has drafted a 16-year-old girl, Eri Yoshida, who throws a sidearm knuckleball.

MLBAM has reached an agreement with Adobe to use Flash for all of MLB.com's embedded and streaming video. They were previously under contract with Microsoft to use Silverlight for video streaming. Uber-nerds can compare Flash and Silverlight.