Greetings, friends, and welcome to yet another Saturday. As the FSNorth crawl has been saying for a couple of days now: “We recognize that many in our viewing area are concerned about more than sports.” For those out in western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, we’re thinking about you and praying for you. You’ll get through this, Lord willin’ and the creek don’ rise.

For everyone else: Here’s the link to the Fargo/Moorhead/Grand Forks Red Cross. If you can help, you should.

Anyway, on with some links:

*Stay classy, Diego Maradona!

*Twins link of the week: John “Twins Geek” Bonnes peruses the spring stats … and ends up with a lot of burning questions.

*As it turns out, people actually want to watch the World Baseball Classic — it got better ratings than regular-season MLB games. Granted, these are the first games after a long winter, but still. From everything I saw, the players took the games quite seriously, and going by the ratings, the fans took the games seriously as well. Now, if only Bud Selig and the players’ union would take this idea seriously enough to not play it like a glorified spring-training exhibition, we’d be getting somewhere …

*We’ll end with hockey this week, as Chris at Western College Hockey points out a great series from the Globe and Mail about Canadian junior hockey, as well as another article on the choice between the CHL and the NCAA for young hockey players on both sides of the border. The upshot: the CHL is doing very well — revenues are up, goonery is down, and fan interest has never been higher. And yet, the 16- to 20-year olds who play in Canada get paid next to nothing, and less than a third go on to use what is supposedly the reward for years of juniors — college tuition assistance. There may be much stateside consternation about athletes being exploited by the NCAA, but there’s no doubt in my mind that a guy who spends four years in college hockey will be in better shape at the end than a guy who plays four years of Canadian juniors.

That’s enough for this week — enjoy your weekend. If you play for the Wild: Please win tonight. If you play for the Timberwolves: Honestly, go ahead and forfeit the rest of the way. We promise that we won’t notice.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.