Via email, Bill asks:

What would you name the new seven-team, basketball-focused conference rising from the ashes of the Big East?

Honestly, it’s really hard to keep track of what’s happening with all this, and whether they’ll have the ability to dissolve the conference, to keep the name Big East, to keep their automatic tournament bids, and which teams they’ll be able to bring on from outside the conference. I believe it’ll be more than seven teams when the dust settles though, so you can’t go with “the Magnificent Seven” or anything like that.

If they’re all Catholic schools in the new league, maybe there could be a tie-in there, like “The Big Priest” or something. Alternately, I kind of like “The Medium Sized East.” CATCH THE FEVER!

I do. Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels was great. It sort of took me a while to get into it, but Hayhurst is a very funny dude and paints a great picture of Minor League life.

Also, Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball is outstanding. I know someone will pep up and say something about Posnanski’s soft stance on Joe Paterno because the Internet, but that obviously has nothing to do with the content of the baseball book.

I mostly read fiction at home, and I’d definitely recommend Bernard Malamud’s The Natural over Chad Harbach’s recent bestseller The Art of Fielding. 

I’ve actually sponsored a bunch of baseball-reference pages, but I always snooze and let the sponsorship expire. The pages I’ve sponsored in the past are: Tommy Hanson, Fernando Martinez, Val Pascucci, the 2009 Mets, Bris Robotham Lord — “The Human Eyeball” and Buzz McWeeny.

I changed the message for the 2009 Mets a few times, but for a while I went with “Carlos Beltran: Because baserunning blunders happen more frequently when you’re always on base.” I was pretty happy with that, given the early goings-on of that season.

The Tommy Hanson page obviously had to do with his much-rumored relationship to the band Hanson. I don’t remember what I wrote for Martinez or the Scooch. Obviously the pages for Lord and McWeeny had jokes about their names.

I thought about sponsoring Jeff Francoeur’s page, but it turns out Jeff Francoeur’s page costs $265! It’s almost as much as Frenchy’s on-base percentage. It might be cool to sponsor the pages for the other Ike Davis and David Wright as shoutouts to Mets fans who click the wrong link.