I’ve mentioned before that I like the sportswriting in the NY Sun. Time to reiterate.

Last night I was watching the Yanks whomp the Pirates, 10-0, and in, I think, the top of the 5th a Pirate hit a fly ball to deep right field. Yankee rightfielder Bobby Abreu loped back towards the wall, then waved his glove at the ball as it bounced on the warning track, looking like it would have been well within reach of a determined effort. That was lame, I thought.

The idiotic and irritating YES announcer Ken Singleton said something like, “I thought Abreu had a chance at that ball, but it was too deep.”

Which, even to my untrained eye, looked just flat wrong.

So this morning I’m reading Steve Goldman’s column in the Sun about the virtue of employing utility players and I come across this phrase, almost surely written before the game last night: “A fast outfielder… can contribute to a team that has the famously wall-shy Bobby Abreu playing right field.”

Nice.

And by the way…how is it possible that all these years after Moneyball came out, the Times still has no one writing about sabermetrics?

Another Yankee thought: Joba Chamberlain is something special. In the bottom of the fifth, I believe it was, he retired the side on 11 pitches, absolutely blowing away the last batter on a fastball third strike that the guy was so late on, he might as well have waited for his next at-bat to swing.

Meanwhile, David Ortiz will be out several more weeks with a damaged tendon sheath. Sox fans go beserk when I say this, but…could this be a steroids-related injury? Check out his rookie baseball card below…looks kind of svelte, doesn’t he?

Much of the mainstream media continues to blow off the anti-Facebook lawsuit brought by three former friends of Mark Zuckerberg, but that lawsuit continues and the stakes are high.

“In the worst case scenario, this could be a fight for Facebook’s life.”

… Facebook and ConnectU recently appeared to have reached a settlement. But ConnectU attorneys then filed court documents asserting that a computer forensics consultant discovered instant message logs on Zuckerberg’s hard drive that might be relevant to the case.

Ever since Luke O’Brien wrote a hell of a piece about the origins of Facebook for 02138, I’ve been convinced that Zuckerberg did indeed steal the idea for the site.

The Georgia Aquarium is letting divers swim with its four whale sharks, and some environmentalists don’t like the idea.

Much of the trepidation has to do with the 2 1/2-year-old aquarium’s track record with whale sharks. Last year, two died for reasons that baffled staffers. Today, the best hypothesis, according to spokeswoman Meghann Gibbons, is that they reacted poorly to a chemical treatment used to combat parasites.

I’ve swum with whale sharks in the open ocean, but 12 divers a day in an aquarium? Sounds like a terrible idea.

Of course, an even worse idea is keeping whale sharks—which can grow up to about 60 feet long and annually migrate hundreds of miles—in an aquarium, period.

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P.S. By the way, this story comes from the Globe, but here’s a sign of the times: It appeared in at least five other newspapers in the last week before the Globe bought it off the wires….

What’s the greatest energy hog in Japan? The toilet.

Japanese toilets can warm and wash one’s bottom, whisk away odors with built-in fans and play water noises that drown out potty sounds. They play relaxation music, too. “Ave Maria” is a favorite.

….High-end toilets can also sense when someone enters or leaves the bathroom, raising or lowering their lids accordingly.

Problem is, these toilets are making it harder for Japan, a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, to meet its energy-reduction goals.

Also: not only do these toilets consume a lot of electricity…they make the, um, sedentary experience so pleasant that 25-30% of Japanese men now sit to urinate. Which can’t be a good thing.

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* Sorry about that.

Another shot from the Cuba trip. This is a silky shark, not generally aggressive towards divers…but still. Would you do that?

In the Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin unintentionally proposes one solution to the abundance of Harvard grads flocking to the soul-sucking canyons of lower Manhattan: the end of Wall Street as we know it.

Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation — and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world.

…Wall Street will clearly have to downsize.

Why is the Republican presidential candidate offering a $300 million government gift to someone who develops a next-generation car battery?

Republicans are supposed to believe in the free market, right?

Whoever develops a car battery that delivers power at 30 percent of current costs—the goal McCain set—would be more than amply rewarded by the private sector, without need of taxpayer dollars being used to create obscene wealth for one inventive individual.

It’s worth thinking about that $300 million amount as well. Where did it come from? McCain says it’s a dollar for every citizen. But it’s a sign of how we’ve all grown numb to the excesses of CEO pay and Wall Street buckateering (yes, I’m coining a word) that $50 million isn’t enough, or even $100 million.

No! It has to be (read in Dr. Evil voice, please) three hundred million dollars!

The blog “The Future Uncertain” has a contrarian take on the question of Harvard students, Wall Street, and public service.

Referring to Sara Rimer’s New York Times piece on Harvard grads flocking to Wall Street dollars, the blogger writes

…..a recently minted student named Adam M. Guren is quoted as saying that “[a] lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

Leave aside that the world is full of people who want nothing more than to be left alone by the sorts of people who go to Harvard to change the world. It turns out that investment bankers generally do a lot more to change the world than all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, all of his social workers, all of his AmeriCorps volunteers combined. Every major corporation that provides the things we depend on to keep civilization running got help at some point from some investment banker, who helped get scarce resources from where they were to where they could do more good. This is precisely why investment bankers make so much money. Why do social workers and teachers, in contrast, make so little? There are a variety of reasons, having to do with the number of people who can do those jobs, the fact that those who hold them take much of their compensation as greater leisure time or job security, and other things that don’t much apply to investment bankers. Every trader in the marketplace is serving something greater than himself by creating value for those he trades with.

The world positively needs our best and brightest to go into investment banking, entrepreneurship, and the other activities that move civilization forward. That Harvard’s new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, failed to recognize this and therefore devoted an entire commencement speech to this non-problem, make it clearer than ever how much Larry Summers is missed at the helm of the world’s most famous university.

We have met the enemy and he is us. We have these students full time for four years, in residence 24x7. We have them
in the classroom and the Houses and in Model UN and on the athletic fields. We can't
say that the only way to raise our students' sights is to sit on our hands waiting
for a Wall Street crash. We can't operate completely outside the forces of American
society. But we are supposed to be better than the societal forces pressing on us.
It's within our power to do something. We just don't want to do it, and 
our leaders have provided fun czars and the Queen's Head Pub rather than the
inspiration we all need.
—Harry Lewis, addressing fellow Harvard prof Richard Thomas, on what Harvard faculty can
teach students beyond the textbook.

Yale has started a new online publication about the environment, Yale Environment 360. (How’s that for a snappy name? Not.)

As Yale says in an e-mail to alums,

Yale Environment 360 aims to become one of the leading Web sites for commentary and reporting on the crucial environmental issues of the day. Yale Environment 360 features authoritative opinion, analysis and in-depth reporting by leading journalists, scientists, environmentalists and policy makers from around the world.

The mag is edited by the respected former editor of Mother Jones and Audubon, Roger Cohn, and features some big-name writers, such as Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert.

But the layout seems pretty sleepy for an online mag, and frankly, so does some of the content. How likely are you to read, “Climate Solutions: Charting a Bold Course“? Or Bill McKibben’s piece, which is so originally titled, simply, “The Tipping Point“?

More important, why exactly is Yale University funding a magazine about the environment?