John Sickels is hosting an "All Questions Answered" thread today on his fabulous site, Minor League Ball.

Blez, over at Athletics Nation, has some great coverage of his time in Arizona. There is currently interviews with Barry Zito and Bobby Crosby, with Eric Chavez, Nick Swisher and Huston Street coming soon!

Meanwhile, over at Sons of Sam Horn, there is a very in-depth interview with Bill James. Here are some of my favorite parts:

Bill James: What has happened in the last fifteen years is that the expansion of the bullpens has all but eliminated platooning. Teams used to carry nine pitchers, not 15 years ago but 35 years ago. You have nine pitchers on a 25-man roster, that’s leaves 16 players for eight positions, and you can platoon at three or four positions. Bobby Cox in Toronto in the early eighties was platooning at five positions. Now, teams carry 12 pitchers. You’ve got 13 position players for nine positions, you’ve got a backup catcher and a utility infielder, your options for platooning are very limited.
        But what we’re doing now doesn’t make any sense, because you can gain many more runs by platooning than you can save by having an extra left-hander in the bullpen. Eventually, people will realize that what we’re doing now doesn’t make any sense, and then they’ll start cutting back the pitching staffs and expanding the benches, and then we’ll go the other way for 30 or 40 years until something else happens and history tears off on some other tangent."

James' answer here reminds me of a book I picked up yesterday called The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. When will the tipping point occur as far as MLB roster construction is concerned?

And...

James T: I remember announcers saying, for years, that in Tiger Stadium the Tigers were letting the infield grass grow very high.  Can teams really do that with impunity, create hay fields to protect their groundball staffs?

Bill James: I think so. . .there may be some MLB policy regulating the length of grass, but I’m not aware of it. Honestly, major league baseball—and all sports—would be far better off if they would permit teams to do more to make one park distinctive from another—even so far as making the bases 85 feet apart in one park and 95 in another. Standardization is an evil idea. Let’s pound everybody flat, so that nobody has any unfair advantage. Diversity enriches us, almost without exception. Who would want to live in a world in which all women looked the same, or all restaurants were the same, or all TV shows used the same format?
        People forget that into the 1960s, NBA basketball courts were not all the same size--and the NBA would be a far better game today if they had never standardized the courts. What has happened to the NBA is, the players have gotten too large for the court. If they hadn’t standardized the courts, they would have eventually noticed that a larger court makes a better game—a more open, active game. And the same in baseball. We would have a better game, ultimately, if the teams were more free to experiment with different options.
        The only reason baseball didn’t standardize its park dimensions, honestly, is that at the time that standardization was a dominant idea, they just couldn’t. Because of Fenway and a few other parks, baseball couldn’t standardize its field dimensions in the 1960s—and thus dodged a mistake that they would otherwise quite certainly have made.
         Standardization destroys the ability to adapt. Take the high mounds of the 1960s. We “standardized” that by enforcing the rules, and I’m in favor of enforcing the rules, but suppose that the rules allowed some reasonable variation in the height of the pitching mound? What would have happened then would have been that, in the mid-1990s, when the hitting numbers began to explode, teams would have begun to push their pitching mounds up higher in order to offset the hitting explosion. The game would have adapted naturally to prevent the home run hitters from entirely having their own way. Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

In other news...

I had a dream about 2 months ago that Richie Sexson homered in his first at-bat of the regular season as a Mariner. Unfortunately, in the same dream, Adrian Beltre grounded out to second base. Hey...you heard it here first!

There is a ton of Mariners coverage in the PI today. John Hickey says that the M's are a long shot to make the playoffs in 2005. I agree. I have them penciled in for third place with about 82 wins. But, who knows? By the way, Hickey says that the Beltre signing was two days after the M's signed Richie Sexson. It was, in fact, the next day - but who's counting? If anyone at the PI is reading this, I'm looking for a job and I would love to be a fact checker for the sports section!

There are also pretty cool articles in the PI about the M's prospects around the diamond, as well as on the mound. Looking over the M's pitching prospects, especially those coming out of the bullpen, it really reinforces my belief that a team should never pay large sums of money for a "proven closer." I am a big fan of building bullpens on the cheap.

And finally, there is a list of the promotions you can expect at Safeco Field this season. Doesn't the Emerald Queen Casino know that nobody likes "floppy" caps? On that note, I'm out...like floppy caps!