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Link Roundup, 4/11/07: Around the Majors

-P- Chris Young sounds like a really smart guy.

But this is the story of San Diego Padres right-hander Chris Young, who in the summer of 2002 sat all alone in the back of the Class A Hickory Crawdads bus, as it drove from one South Atlantic League town to the next, writing his senior thesis -- the mega-paper every student must turn in order to earn a Princeton degree -- which was entitled, to the best of Young's memory, "The Impact of Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball on Racial Stereotypes in America: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Stories about Race in the New York Times."

"I could've put more effort into the paper, and I regret that," Young said one day this spring, sitting on a grassy hill down the left field line at the Padres' spring training park in Peoria, Ariz.

Well, maybe if he hadn't spent so much time working on the paper, he might've learned a second pitch, and he might still be a Pirate. Not that the Bucs have any excuse for giving up on him. By the way, the long-term deal for Young that I mentioned the other day turned out to be four years, $14.5 million with an $8.5 million option for 2011. Good deal for the Padres.

-P- Sports Illustrated wants to know if Oliver Perez might be an "ace in waiting." Thanks to Mets Blog for the link.

-P- Speaking of former Pirates pitchers, the Orioles have already lost Kris Benson. Now it looks like they've lost Jaret Wright as well. You can snicker if you want to about Kris Benson and Jaret Wright, but the Orioles already had to sign Steve Trachsel as an emergency measure when Benson went down. They're not exactly brimming with rotation depth.

-P- Dice-K is pitching tonight against the Mariners. Via Baseball Musings, Bill Nye actually has a great article about Dice-K specifically and about pitch movement in general.