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The American League won the all-star game yesterday by a score of 3-0, securing home field advantage in the World Series. Amid a general love-fest, Mariano Rivera was given a lifetime achievement game MVP award for preserving a 3-run lead in the eighth inning. You can read the entire recap here, but the most important news from the game is that the Yankees, they of the fourth worst offense in all of baseball, will not lose Robinson Cano for any period of time after he was drilled in the quadriceps by Matt Harvey.
Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs is once again doing his trade value rankings. He puts David Price at #47 and Desmond Jennings at #46. In the next installment, Wil Myers comes in at #38.
It may be that I'm the last person to know, but our competitor site, The Process Report has moved to www.theprocessreport.net, with a new snazzy layout from Josh Frank. I had a moment of panic last week when I couldn't find them anymore and Google hadn't figured it out yet, either. This is probably wrong to do from a business competition standpoint, but they're great baseball analysts and all-around good guys over there, and we're a community, so go catch up on what you may have missed.
Jason Linden at The Hardball Times takes a look at historic statistical curiosities that might happen this season. My money is on two players striking out more than 200 times this season.
Jack Moore at Baseball Prospectus, Jack Moore has a good writeup of the history of sabermetrics. Tom Tango chips in some ideas on his blog, and asks what are the next great innovations in the field. I agree with Zimmerman's comment about injury prevention. I also think pitch sequencing is still a mostly untapped gold mine, about which there's a ton that can and will be learned.
Lastly, because baseball is dark and I think it's a great bit of writing, here's a link to a refutation of culturalist interpretations of the recent Asiana airplane crash. I love the extended golf metaphor at the beginning as a way to ridicule the subject of making sweeping conclusions from small sample sizes. Anyway, the blog post takes Malcom Gladwell to task and provoked a follow up post, a response from Gladwell, and then a response to the response, all of which is great fun.