Picks to click—3/25/07

This is what I hope to be a somewhat-regular feature of Royal Ingenuity—giving you links to Royals stuff that you may or may not have seen. Let me know if you like it.

---First thing’s first. If you haven’t been to, bookmarked, and regularly checked Royals Retrospective yet, you’re missing out. I’m not old enough to have followed Royals baseball for a lot of the timeframe that is covered at Royals Retro, so when I read his posts, its like discovering this great past of a team I’ve been following for years. It’s like a scaled down version of being able to see your extended family tree for the first time. It’s a very odd, but very cool, feeling.

---Still have a fantasy draft or two ahead of you? Check out Tim Dierkes’ look at the top 20 fantasy baseball sleepers over at THT. Take note of number one and number 20.

---I love you, John Sickels. I love you, John Sickels. I love you, John Sickels.

---Aftermath to the above: Play pin-the-tail on Alex Gordon’s 2007 numbers!

---To water down the fact that I’m going to shamelessly plug my own blog (brief recap of Berroa’s career here), I’ll also point out another link at FanGraphs—this is a very interesting post at GasHouseGraphs (the Cardinals team blog at FanGraphs) about Gil Meche, Kip Wells, and Chris Carpenter. Very much worth a read, even if you’re not a fan of that evil empire from the other side of Missouri.

---Ken Rosenthal has a moderately lengthy and pretty decent column on Alex Gordon. Interesting quotes from a variety of sources—guys like Mike Sweeney, Buddy Bell, former GM Allard Baird, etc. Check it out.

---Rest assured. The Royals can count themselves among the hopeless.

---I guess SI.com is taking this list from BP’s projected VORP? Because my BP 2007 says Gordon is #1.

---Nothing personal against MLB.com, but I try not to link to them (owned by the thing they’re covering and all). However, I must make an exception for this. Take it from me: READ THE BOOK NOW.

---Not too big of a surprise. Aaron Gleeman picks Alex Gordon as the number one prospect of 2007.

---Non-Royals link: An unfairly-slanted article, set out to mock BP’s PECOTA by picking out an iffy projection (which Nate Silver, its creator, says he disagrees with). I wonder what predictions newspaper writers have put forth that would look even sillier than this nerdy computer game? I guess I shouldn’t be taking it so seriously. It’s unfair, but it is cute. A fun read.