Throwback Thursday (aka, links dump), Jan. 14, 2016

Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood that famous quote from Forrest Gump. If it’s a box of chocolate covered cherries, don’t you know exactly what you’re going to get?)

On the one hand, I’m happy to report that I’m catching up/running out of these old links. On the other hand, it’s been cool reminiscing.

I highly recommend Pocket as a way to hold onto links you come that you want to keep. Unlike bookmarks, Pocket keeps the entire page and makes it relative easy for you to find stuff you “pocketed.” I have keepers going back six years — more than 5,000 links — and I’ve decided it’s time to start cleaning house so here are some submitted for your amusement, perusal, and education. Some are not current, but in a sense, they’re timeless. Note: Sometimes individual sites remove the content or simply cease their existence, so Pocket isn’t 100 percent foolproof.

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♦ Wow, here’s a real throwback: an incarnation of the Baseball Bookshelf as it appeared among the hundreds of blogs on the MLB site. This one goes back to 2007. It’s like looking back at pictures of yourself when you were a little kid.

♦ In the previous entry, I mentioned 108, a wonderful and sadly defunct baseball glossy magazine. Here’s another one that seems to have done the way of the dodo, at least to go by this disclaimer. I first heard about it via The Classical, another long-form on-line publication. Sometimes I think the founders of these things go in with great intentions, then realize how difficult it is to keep it going, either financially or creatively. The novelty wears off and they disappear in real-time, but are forever trapped in the limbo that is the Internet.

♦ One of these days I’m going to do a project on ballplayers who have appeared on TV shows, either in cameos as themselves or in other roles. Just off the top of my head, I can think of Don Drysdale in The Donna Reed Show and The Brady Bunch, Sandy Kolufax on Mr. Ed and Dennis the Menace; Alan Trammel and Lou Whitaker on Magnum PI; and Willie Mays, who also appeared on Donna Reed, as per this from Bruce Markusen on The Hardball Times in 2012. Of course, it was relatively easy for California players to dabble, close as they were to the entertainment capital of the world. (and who could forget Keith Hernandez on Seinfeld?)

♦ Here’s another attempt to put together an all-Jewish team, from the imagination of The New York Times‘ Ken Belson, prompted by Kevin Youkilis‘ joining the NY Yankees (as reported by Richard Sandomir).

♦ Malcolm Gladwell published this obituary on Marvin Miller in The New Yorker.

♦ Fledgling sports journalist Matt Nadel conducted an interview with Susan Slusser, the first female president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, on the Baseball Reflections site.

♦ Appropriate for the time of year, this 2012 piece from The Atlantic on “What Makes Baseball’s Offseason So Fascinating?”

♦ Rob Neyer inspired me to one of my most-viewed entries on this blog thanks to his book, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else. Here’s a post of his from SB Nation that continues in this vein.

♦ “What if?” has been a question that has plagued mankind since we crawled out of the slime. (Look for The House of Daniel, a new novel by alternate history maven Harry Turtledove, due out in April). “Alternate Baseball,” a series from The Hardball Times, poses a number of thoughtful headscratchers. (You can find more entries on the topic by clicking on the writer’s name.)

♦ Finally, a trailer for a documentary I don’t recall seeing: Universal Babe.