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A Couple SB Nation Links

As always, the people at SB Nation are doing a great job of posting interesting, yet informative, material on their respective sites.

At Marc Normandin's site, he unveils some new additions to the Ray Lankford Wing of the Hall of Fame. As he puts it, "The Ray Lankford Wing of the Hall of Fame is a place for the 'no real shot at the Hall of Fame, but a great career nonetheless' players, like Lankford." In particular, I like his analysis of Will Clark's place in history. Not only do his career totals look exemplary in comparison to other first basemen in the RLWHF, but they're also similar, if not better, than the career totals of first basemen in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It's a great injustice that his name will not appear on future Hall of Fame ballots.

Ray Lankford Wing of the Hall of Fame Inductions
Ray Lankford Wing of the Hall of Fame Inductions: Part Deux, the Starting Pitchers

Over at Blez's oft-visited site, Athletics Nation, he's posted an extensive interview with none other than A's GM Billy Beane. It's an interesting read and provides some insight into Beane's strategic mindset. One of the more interesting parts of the interview, I find, is when Beane discusses last year's minor league draft:

We have some good young pitching here, but injuries will tell you, along with the defections that have happened here, that you can never have enough of it.  We just felt like there was a lot of value in the high school pitcher and that's why we drafted so many after that round.  As far as their experience and our evaluation of that draft, I think we were very excited about the kids we got.  As far as raw ability, this is as good a group of power arms as we've had in a long, long time.  We've had a tendency of drafting the very polished college pitcher and we've had success doing that, we just didn't feel like those guys were out there when we were drafting this year.  At the end of the day, going to instruction league, the group of arms we had were the best in years.

Billy Beane Visits AN: Offseason Edition Part I
Billy Beane Visits AN: Offseason Edition Part II