links for 2009-12-14

"The next nine weeks will be an ugly time for a lot of fringe players, who will wait for the phone to ring with word of job offers. For a lot of older players who have had long and productive careers, the phone probably won't ring. This is not a time when teams are willing to throw a token $1 million offer, or even $700,000, at a guy just because he has put in a decade of good service. Within the front offices of almost all teams, hard decisions are being made based on hard data in a way that we have never seen before." – data driven decision making in action