Faith and Fear in Flushing welcomes us all to 2012. One of my resolutions for 2012 is to stop accidentally typing it as Fear and Faith in Flushing, like I do about 40% of the time.
Tom Tango talks about the worst closer in baseball history. Surprisingly it is not Braden Looper!
Joe Posnanski sets the pace for all sportswriters in 2012 with this piece on sportswriter FC Lane. I think I linked the original FanGraphs piece a while back, which was also awesome, but Pos of course takes it to another level.
The White Sox continued their half-assed rebuild by trading Carlos Quentin to the Padres for a couple of minor leaguers. Fangraphs tries to make sense of the trade, while John Sickels takes a look at the prospects the pale hose acquired. The Sox then moved Jason Frasor to the Blue Jays for a couple of live arms.
MLBTR takes a look at the current free agent market for starting pitching and tries to narrow down the one year deal candidates. It's not exactly a beauty pageant out there right now. I bet Chris Young will be back on a minor league deal, but I don't know that any of those other names really excite me. Maybe Kevin Millwood, but 'excite' is way too strong a word to be used for Kevin Millwood.
The Phillies get some positive ink for letting the NHL turn their stadium into a hockey rink. If only they would just leave it that way.
And finally, as we are only a week away from the 2012 Hall of Fame announcemnt, you can track the early returns on balloting here. Good news for Tim Raines, bad news for Bernie Williams.