Player Blogs and other fun

You may or may not have noticed, but I have a link at the bottom of my "Other Baseblogs" part of the sidebar that says "Player Blogs" -- for a while, I actually had links to player blogs along with fan/etc blogs, and then I realized that it was impractical to have them all over there, so I moved them off to a separate page (except for Bobby Valentine and Pat Neshek, because they are Special).

Well, I kept forgetting to update that page as I found more Japanese player blogs, and in addition, all the MLB players who blogged on mlblogs.com pretty much stopped in the offseason, and I don't know how many will be restarting, so I needed to change the status of a few of those too. This year so far I see blogs from CJ Wilson (of the Rangers, who just linked to Akinori Otsuka's blog, which is worth checking out for the cartoon banner alone) seems to have one for this year, and Curtis Granderson of the Tigers, and... it looks like John Rodriguez of the Cardinals might take his up again from last year, but that's about it. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

So I went ahead and added the whole plethora of Japanese player blogs (and a few NPB ones in English, such as Jeff Williams and CJ Nitkowski) that I'd pretty much bookmarked and never added, even though that means I definitely won't have time to read them all now. If nothing else, though, it was fun finding a few new ones, and catching up on the Tigers player blogs from around Valentine's Day thanking all their fans for chocolates. Tsuyoshi Nishioka actually writes in Osaka-ben. I'm fairly amazed that Takuro Ishii writes stuff daily, which is cool. A lot of players have some pretty fun stories from spring training, too.

Another neat thing is that while looking through official player pages and sites, I noticed that the Fighters, Carp, and Giants actually bother putting players' farm team statistics as well as their top-level statistics on their official pages. That's pretty cool. Aside from the last two seasons, I hadn't really been able to get my hands on much farm data at all, though I also haven't looked that hard, I guess.

Anyway, I'm betting a few more MLB player blogs will start up once the season starts, though who knows. I wish Nate Robertson would write one again -- I thought he was really entertaining last year. If I've missed any MLB player blogs in particular, feel free to let me know (there are probably some I've just forgotten that I never bookmarked). I left out listing a whole lot of NPB player blogs on purpose simply because there's just too many, so I tried to limit it to people I find interesting, since I actually try to regularly check in on the sites I link to.