New Minor League Baseball Stolen Base Record

Billy Hamilton has set a new professional baseball record for most stolen bases in a season. He now has 147 steals this year. The old record was Vince Coleman's 145 steals from 1983, and the Major League record is Rickey Henderson's 130 steals from 1982. Professional baseball players don't steal as many bases as they used to---the game is much more power-oriented than it was in the early 1980s---so this is even more impressive in the context of how the game is currently played.

Friendships in Baseball's Minor Leagues

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here's a very nice post by baseball player Randy Newsom at Dugout Central about the intensity and often fleeting nature of friendships in baseball's Minor Leagues. The movie Bull Durham has a lot to say about this as well. (For that matter, so does the Major League series of movies, though there are certain important differences between the minors and the majors here in terms of a collection of people struggling level by level without having the major stars around.)