Will say that the Nats being big spenders really warms my heart. Love that the Fish are being aggressive, too. The NL East doesn’t get enough credit for being the hornet’s nest it is.

Lastly, Selig really does need to expand the league to include the mystery team that gets cited any time talks heat up with a free agent. Craig Calcaterra has been writing about this over at Hardball Talk for a bit. The tweets coming out of Orlando have been positively hilarious. Have to say that the rumors definitely keep me engaged with baseball during what is otherwise a very slow offseason.

Fortunately, I have company. My friend and coworker Dan McQuade of Philadelphia Will Do is loaning me an Ed Delahanty biography! Cannot wait to read about a troubled ballplayer who died at Niagara Falls. I’m fascinated by Big Ed’s story and I love thinking about the dead-ball era, when baseball was a grinding game of bunts, steals and dirty pitches, to say nothing of rogue leagues and labor strife.

I also nearly joined the Society for American Baseball Research yesterday. I told you it was getting bad!

Not good enough? Jeff and his friends are really, really funny.

My take: I feel like I have the trickiest part–writing–down cold. I have a solid understanding of what stories are best told through text and which are better explained by video, thanks to my tenure at comcast.net. I know that people want regular content and they have expectations around how it’s delivered. That’s understood.

What I have questions about are best practices in the social web. If you can recommend reading either on- or offline, I’d appreciate it. Leave a note in the comments or @ me on Twitter. If you have favorite blogs that deal specifically in this, feel free to share those as well. My Google reader feels a little empty after I 86′d oh so many music blogs.

Don’t think I’m not doing some heavy lifting myself. I’m finding Kristina Halvorson’s work and the Brain Traffic blog a very useful font of info and links. I’ve also subscribed to several recommended company blogs, ranging from Southwest Airlines to Google’s Official blog. Love how they read!

My take? What’s left to be said? He was exactly who we expected him to be all season long. He put the team on his back during the regular season and he doesn’t want to stop there.

I will add this: the love that Roy Halladay and Carlos Ruiz share is a truly beautiful thing for the game of baseball. The elation they feel when they accomplish something spectacular is infectious. Is there anything more fun than seeing Chooch’s ear-to-ear grin?

If RSS doesn’t make it, I’ll lay the blame at Google’s digital feet. They came so close to so many good, platform-worthy ideas with Google Reader. Shared items with comments? Tumblr, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I’ve felt all along that Google just has no idea how to make their products social. You can’t even plug Google Reader into Tumblr and get it to render properly. I went from sharing and commenting on things in my reader to barely bothering to favorite anything in the last year or so.

RSS may have its shortcomings, but it’s far more efficient for someone like me who’s constantly reading the web. It offers better organization than either Twitter or Facebook. It makes it easier to evaluate the value of the information presented. I don’t need to click through to read anything on most blogs, which is a tremendous help. Sure, that doesn’t help the publishers and content creators hit their goals, but if you’re creating good content, people will engage it. RSS, for my money, is still the best way to deliver it to an audience that’s consuming the most content.

I’d be sad to see it go. It’s difficult enough to discover reliable sources as it stands now. If you watch Rick Sanchez I think you’ll agree that Facebook and Twitter aren’t improving the way we consume news by any stretch.

Pitchfork may have done a good job of including dance music in their top 200 tracks of the 1990s, but a certain someone was conspicuously absent. Have you ever heard of a recording artist named Garth Brooks? How about Shania Twain? Must I even mention Britney Spears?

I really loved their picks, but they struck me as the return of rockism. I feel that the “r” word, like Voldemort, has been whispered in certain circles in the past year or so about Pitchfork. This list confirmed that suspicion for me. Is it wrong to like popular music again? Should we just pretend that we could always live in an indie bubble and never be concerned with the likes of, say, Sugar Ray?

What I’d love to see Pitchfork come back and do next week is reveal their staff lists, or give us a best of the rest. As I wrote last night, the ’90s in retrospect were a wonderfully eclectic decade. Garth Brooks, gangsta rap, Guns N’ Roses, and grunge? Yes, please! I know it’s difficult to be perfectly inclusive, but you might think it’d be acceptable to at least genuflect to some of the best-selling artists of that decade.

As someone who went to a junior high and high school dances in the ’90s, it’s hard to imagine anyone omitting this gem.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Favorites of the moment include the entry for Oasis’ “Live Forever” and the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” to say nothing of New Order’s “Regret,” the song that introduced me to their entire catalogue. Those opening strains still stop me in my tracks.

Am I a little bummed no one has out and out shocked the readership by including the Verve Pipe? Am I amazed that neither Live nor Dave Matthews Band have made an appearance? Which U2 song will make the list? I hope they pick something from Zooropa. The ’90s weren’t perfect and neither were we. I hope they acknowledge that somehow.

Recently read Gil Scott-Heron’s profile in the New Yorker and was absolutely gutted. I’m among the few critics who didn’t immediately fall in love with his new album on Matador, and the article did little to convince me that it’s not the most exploitative release of 2010. Can’t help but feel awful for a guy who’s life is completely dictated to him by crack addiction. It’s like taking advantage of old bluesmen if you ask me.

Watch the video for “I’m New Here” above.