Jon Marthaler bakes up a batch of delicious links just for you. Other times, you can find him here and here. Jon?
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Happy Saturday! It's mid-February, so I think I'm supposed to be writing about how boring sports are between the Super Bowl and the NCAA tournament - but I just can't do it. Locally we've got the Wild making a haphazard playoff push, two Gopher teams careening towards their conference tournament, and the Timberwolves doing a fairly convincing impression of last year's awful squad; 'boring' isn't the word that comes to mind. 'Frustrating,' maybe. 'Bipolar,' perhaps.
Of course, maybe I'm just in a good mood because the Wild and the hockey Gophers both scored five goals and won convincingly last night. On with the links:
*Speaking of the Wolves... well, maybe the less said the better. Canis Hoopus is spreading the sarcasm so thick that they've given up on the trowel and are just throwing glops on with bare hands, and that's always fun.
*It's easy to assume that Tsuyoshi Nishioka is likely to have a swing that's similar to Ichiro's. Parker Hageman puts together the visual evidence to show you why that assumption would be completely incorrect. (Short version: Nishioka swings a little bit like Joe Mauer. Ichiro swings like a tennis player who has somewhere to be.)
*In honor of Valentine's Day, the visual artists at The Dugs put together some baseball valentines. Look for a special appearance by Ozzie Guillen in there, which may be the highlight.
*Spencer Hall has some ideas for improving the NFL, which involves, in his words, "stealing the best elements of Australian, Arena, and Canadian Football." I realize that this sounds like madness and/or the type of thing that gets written in February because there's no football to talk about, but it bears the hallmarks of enlightened thinking. Sample sentence: "The game has to be freed from its constraints, and that includes moving the launch point of the ball from a single, easily assaulted point."
*And finally, it's time for Links About Niche Sports! Steve Rushin at SI wrote about how an astonishing goal in England got his old dad to start talking about soccer. And over at ESPN, American cricket journalist (no, really) Peter Della Penna has your five Cricket World Cup storylines to follow, which I'm linking to in my continuing quest to throw in links that nobody will click on.
That'll do it for me. Enjoy your various Saturdays, because it sounds like spring ends tomorrow and goes straight back into winter. I should NOT have put the shovels into storage.
