Up next in Movember MLB Mustache Madness is the starting pitcher matchup of our Former Player bracket.  Both of these entries give us a first for the tourney, one is our first ginger competitor while the other is our first player to cross over into show business.  The common bond?  Fantastic facial hair.

Jack Morris

Morris probably isn't ever going to get into the Hall of Fame, but he most definitely has a Hall of Fame mustache which is almost as good.

VS.

Pete Vuckovich

OK, seriously, do you just get handed an awesome mustache the instant you sign a contract with the Brewers?  Heck, Vuke's 'stache was so good that it landed him a prime acting gig in Major League, and as a slugger no less.

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After unveiling the Current Player side of our Movember MLB Mustache Madness bracket, we move on to the former player side.  And let's be honest, there have been some truly stellar mustaches thoughout the various eras of Major League Baseball.  To start things off for the former players, we turn to the always mustache-rich reliever position and two of the most famous mustaches in the history of baseball, nay, the history of history!

All apologies to other legendary mustached relievers like Al Hrabosky, Todd Jones, Rod Beck, John Franco and Dennis Eckersley.  This was easily the most crowded position in the bracket and cutting all of those guys was truly heart-breaking.

Rollie Fingers

If you think about baseball mustaches, there is little doubt that Rollie Fingers will be the first name that comes to most of our mind.  Calling his trademark handlebar mustache iconic doesn't even begin to describe it.

VS.

Goose Gossage

Not quite as famous as Fingers, Gossage was also renowned for his stellar 'stache with the added bonus that his is more of a tough guy look as opposed to Rollie's fancypants facial hair.  This matchup could come down to a mere matter of personal taste.

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Teams possibly in need of a closer include the Astros, Blue Jays, Marlins, Mets, Orioles, Padres, Phillies, Reds, Red Sox and Twins. That's exactly ten team. Here are ten free agents that are available for your closer consideration.

1. Jonathan Papelbon (31) – Paps wants to set the market for closers this season. Although the Red Sox want him back, they may not be willing to pay upwards of $13-plus million per season for a reliever.

2. Ryan Madson (31) – Madson has been one of the best relievers in baseball over the last four seasons. In 2011, he finally got his shot at the full time closer’s gig with Brad Lidge sidelined. If I were a major league GM, I’d prefer Madson to Papelbon, as he’s likely to cost less and produce at nearly the same level, if not better. 

3. Francisco Rodriguez (30) – K-Rod has had his issues. He’s outspoken at times, violent at times and he clearly is all about the money. Well, he may not get the $17.5M option that he was hoping for when he signed with the Mets, but he’ll still get “closer” money.

4. Heath Bell (34) – Bell saw a dramatic drop in his strikeout rate last season, about 10 percent from the year before, but he still managed to post a 2.44 ERA with 43 saves for a team that lost 91 games. The Padres want him back – they traded Mike Adams instead of Bell – and Bell says he wants to be back. He might very well accept arbitration or try and work out a two-year deal.

5. Francisco Cordero (37) – Despite a drop in strikeout rate of about three percent, down to 5.43 K/9, Cordero managed to post an excellent 2.45 ERA. Beware potential buyers, that ERA came along with an insanely low .214 BABIP. He relied heavily on the success of his slider and changeup in 2011, which is a risky proposition going forward since he’s never had that much success throwing more offspeed pitches than fastballs.

After being delayed 45 minutes because of a MAC football game that featured over 120 points being scored, ESPN's broadcast of the Gold Glove awards "ceremony" started at around 10:45 tonight. First off, why would you schedule something like this behing a live event that has potential to run late? That's just a ridiculous idea to begin with. I'm not sure why the need for a show like this was even needed, especially needing to be stretched to AN HOUR.

The panel featured Karl Ravech presenting, with John Kruk and Barry Larkin making their picks for the awards. Typically, their picks didn't focus on defense, with the duo talking about how great offensively their choices were, along with mixing in various vague descriptors like "you go to the ballpark to see him play defense". They also were stuck in the old school mentality, talking about errors and fielding percentage, which are two of the more inane ways to describe a player's defense in 2011.

ESPN would bring out a "special guest" to present each "segment" of awards. They didn't exactly bring out superstars either, with former Cardinal Mike Matheny announcing the catcher and pitcher winners, former Oriole Paul Blair, who was in his prime 35 years ago, announcing the outfield winners, and Omar Vizquel announcing the infield winners. None seemed very comfortable, with Blair coming off like a pretty big asshole talking himself up (including claiming to have never made an error, when he actually made 54 over his career). Vizquel seemed all out of sorts, stuttering through the announcements of winners and having Ravech fill in some of his blanks.

And then, there were the winners. I went over the nominees for the award earlier this afternoon. Here are the winners.

American League
P: Mark Buerhle
C: Matt Wieters
1B: Adrian Gonzalez
2B: Dustin Pedroia
3B: Adrian Beltre
SS: Erick Aybar
LF: Alex Gordon
CF: Jacoby Ellsbury
RF: Nick Markakis

National League
P: Clayton Kershaw
C: Yadier Molina
1B: Joey Votto
2B: Brandon Phillips
3B: Placido Polanco
SS: Troy Tulowitzki
LF: Gerardo Parra
CF: Matt Kemp
RF: Andre Ethier

Among the list of snubs, Brett Gardner was downright robbed in left field for the AL. He was far and away the best defender in baseball at any position, and he's going home empty handed. The same could be said for Peter Bourjos in center. Markakis winning is an absolute joke, and he clearly won the award because "he has a good arm"....considering that's all they talked about after he won.

Oh, and to put a cherry on top of this? Fans didn't even need to watch the awards show. The AP put out a press release before the show started....which ESPN put on their website. I wish I would have known about that more than 25 minutes into this, so I didn't have to sit through that disaster. 

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1. Kerry Wood (35) – When healthy, Wood has been a serviceable reliever capable of punching out over one batter per nine innings. He gave the Cubs a tremendous hometown discount last season and the two sides are a perfect match for each other in 2012.

2. Vincente Padilla (34) – We can’t take much from his 2011 numbers, as he only lasted 8.2 innings, but we do know from his 16 starts in 2010 that he can still get it done with an ever-evolving craftiness. That season, Padilla posted about eight strikeouts per nine innings while walking only about 2.8 per nine. He has had a tendency to give up the long ball, but perhaps that could be calmed a bit coming out of the pen. Injuries are a big reason why I don’t see him lasting as a starter; he has missed significant time over the past two seasons with neck and elbow problems.

3. Chad Qualls (33) – Qualls bounced back nicely after a disastrous 2010 season. He does a good job of keeping the ball one the ground (57.5 career groundball rate), but doesn’t generate many strikeouts nowadays.

4. Dan Wheeler (34) – A ROOGY if there ever was one. Wheeler has a career 3.53 xFIP against right-handed batters, but a career 4.73 xFIP against left-handed batters. His K/BB rate from 2011 was actually excellent (4.9), but lefties hit .278 against him, his highest average against vs lefties since 2004. He should bounce back in 2012.

5. Jon Rauch (33) – Rauch’s fly ball tendencies ended up hurting him big time after moving from spacious ballparks in Washington and Minnesota to the home run happy Sky Dome, er, Rogers Centre (it will always be Sky Dome to me). His HR/9 jumped to almost two per nine innings, a career high. Despite his intimidating size and look, Rauch doesn’t throw particularly hard or produce many strikeouts.

In some late news today, Ken Rosenthal of FOX is reporting that Tony LaCava of the Toronto Blue Jays has turned down the Baltimore Orioles offer to be their next general manager. LaCava will apparently stay with the Blue Jays as their assistant GM.

Now, why LaCava turned down the job is anyone's best guess, and it would be irresponsible of me to point to any one reason. But you have to think that LaCava realized he would have had a long-term rebuilding project in his future with the Orioles. By turning down the job, which he was the prime candidate for, things must be worse in Baltimore than we really know. Another possible explanation is that Orioles owner Peter Angelos, who is notoriously hands-on with the team, wouldn't give LaCava full authority to do what he felt like he needed to do to turn the franchise around.

If Angelos did in fact refuse to cede control to LaCava, you have to think that whoever the Orioles end up turning to for their GM position is going to have a lot of work ahead of themselves. This team really does need a lot of work, and Angelos needs to let someone work their magic on the Orioles and completely overhaul everything if they feel that is necessary. The status quo isn't cutting it in Baltimore right now.

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A lot of fans have really turned on the idea of the Gold Glove award. A number of the awards are given to players who have great offensive years, and they get the Gold Glove as almost a consolation prize. A good example of this recently is Carlos Gonzalez of the Rockies winning last year after a monster offensive year (.974 OPS) despite being below average in both advanced defensive metrics (UZR and DRS). And also, Derek Jeter, a hideous fielder for a majority of his career, has somehow won five Gold Gloves. Think about that.

But anyway, in the press release yesterday announcing the awards show, ESPN also announced a list of three nominees for each position in each league. A new wrinkle this year is breaking the outfield up into left, center, and right field so that three center fielders just don't win every year. Looking at the list of nominees, there are a few players that got nominated that don't exactly scream "elite defender" to me.

Catcher: Brian McCann of the Braves is nominated in the National League. According to Beyond the Box Score's season-ending catcher defensive rankings, McCann ranked 105th in baseball in catcher defense of the 114 catchers who caught in the majors this year. But of course, McCann had an .817 OPS on the season and has been one of the best offensive catchers in baseball over his career. Alex Avila was nominated in the American League, and like McCann, he was a beast with the bat (.895 OPS), but ranked 96th in the rankings. AJ Pierzynski was worse than both of them on both offense (.728 OPS) and on defense (111th in the rankings), and he probably got in just on his name value. The other AL nominee was Matt Wieters, who should easily win the award, ranking first in the BtB rankings. It'll be a tougher race in the NL, where Carlos Ruiz and Yadier Molina joined McCann in the nominees. Both were ranked in the top ten.

The Movember MLB Mustache Madness continues.  We close out the Current Player bracket with our outfield matchup (and hopefully close out all the wordplay jokes too).

Juan Pierre

Who's that man with classic facial hair?  Juan Pierre's 'stache!  Ya damn right.  They say Juan Pierre's 'stache is a bad mother-  Shut your mouth!  Just talkin' about Juan Pierre's 'stache.  Can you dig it?

VS.

Travis Snider

We wanted to give a strong sampling of all mustache types in this bracket and what we haven't seen so far is the underappreaciated pedostache.  With all due respect to Snider, sheerly because of his mustache, he is a windowless van or ice cream truck away from not being allowed within 500 yards of elementary schools and parks.

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Turns out Cubs fans won't be able to get their hands on an authentic Theo Epstein jersey after all.

RedEye (a free publication offered by the Chicago Tribune) reporter Tracy Swartz is reporting that Sports World will no longer be selling the Epstein jerseys. The store had been offering jerseys and shirseys bearing Epstein's name and the no. 12 for a couple of weeks.

So why are they pulling what could have been a popular (if not unconventional) product from the shelves?

The Movember MLB Mustache Madness continues.  Shortstop mustaches are in short supply, but they are a bit like the Marines.  The few.  The proud.  The current MLB shortsops with mustaches.

Brendan Ryan

Another contender to win it all.  Ryan is another player who offers us multiple looks and is the rare middle infielder who has grown, kept and cultivated a mustache for several years.  You have to admire that kind of commitment

VS.

Orlando Cabrera

We have to jump into the wayback machine for this one.  Orlando Cabrera has almost always had facial hair, but typically wears a scruffy goatee.  However, here we see a lethal combination of the Latino pencil mustache and sporting it in a defunct Expos uniform to boot.

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