Your Monday Morning Mug of Nog

On the first day of Christmas KL gave to meeeeee ...

A Mug guest-written by a bum who last pitched for the Crew in two-thousand-threeeeeee.

Yep, it's that time of year.  KL is out a-layin' with the geese, and I drew the short straw and had to sort through the Snowman's massive Google Reader feed to find some Monday morning nuggets.  Let's dig into the stockings and see what I found.

You can file this one under "this is why they call him the Prince of Darkness": in case you've forgotten, T-Haud reminds you, in his Sunday notes column, just how bad the Bill Hall and Jeff Suppan contracts are.  In other news: farts are stinky.  Scott at In-Between Hops responds that while the Hall and Soup contracts are killers, Ryan Braun's deal provides the yin to the yang.

From around the Brewers Blogosphere:

• Steve from Keep Turnin' Up the Heat is pleased that everything's gone to plan this offseason...
• ...while Jonathan from Brewers Daily wonders who bats second in the 2010 lineup.
• Fatter than Joey spent part of his weekend watching all eight hours of "Avatar," but he still found time to compile a bunch of Misty May links to commemorate Matt Treanor signing with the Brewers.  You know it's December when this was the weekend's big news. 
  
• The RFB bunch seems to be on board with the Treanor/May move, and Bryan gives you a fun "supply the caption" picture.

KL was struggling with his Hall of Fame ballot last week, and he wasn't the only one: Drew Olson compares the voting debate to "arguing which shade of blue is 'the best.'"  Pfft.  That's easy.  It's cerulean.  Meanwhile, Pos is conducting the Rock Raines for the Hall train, and offers this trivia question to make his point.

Last week, the ChiSox agreed to take on Juan Pierre's albatross contract.  Some small-ball lovin' types in Chicago hailed this as a good move.  PaulNoonan at Brewed Sports took apart that thinking with a post that would make Ken Tremendous proud.  (And, speaking of Ken Tremendous, here's an FJM Classic on the player Pierre is apparently going to replace, Scotty Podsednik.)

Charlie Marlow FanShots this FanGraphs column on Manny Parra's "fat" fastball percentage (and try saying: "FanShots this FanGraphs column on fat fastball percentage" five times fast), which was a touch higher than the league average.  I'd be interested in seeing a similar analysis for Braden Looper and Jeff Suppan, but, unfortunately, there's no way to distinguish their breaking and offspeed pitches from their fastballs.

JD over at Bernie's Chalet is asking for questions for a mailbag post.  I'm a big fan of mailbags (especially questions that end with multiple question marks or multiple exclamation points!!1!1!!) and I'm a big fan of JD, so I'm all in favor of a Chalet mailbag.  (And you can also vote on JD's poll: what's the best comedy on television right now?  My vote is for "Modern Family," hands down.  I haven't LOLed at a show this much since "Arrested Development.")

The Walkoff Walk brigade is looking for a nickname for Seattle GM Jack Zduriencik, who seems to have impressed the pants off of damn near everybody this offseason.  Le sigh.  Le heavy, heavy sigh.

That segues nicely into today's SCHADENFREUDE ITEM: In Jack Z's most recent pilfering, he dumped the rotting corpse of Carlos Silva on the Cubs in exchange for noted crazy person (and on-base machine) Milton Bradley.  A lot of people didn't get the move -- not in the "why would you get rid of that guy?" sense, but in the "you dumped him AND willingly took back one of the worst pitchers in MLB?" sense.  Erik Manning from FanGraphs is one of those people.

Around the Bigs:

• It looks like the Mike Lowell to Texas deal has been torpedoed, thanks to Lowell's bum thumb.

• The A's reportedly have a deal with Coco Crisp.  (Brace yourself before you click that link; there are a lot of cereal jokes in that post.)
• Scott Rolen has agreed to restructure his contract with the Reds to free up some cash for the club in the 2010 season.  If Dusty Baker is going to continue to manage the team, I'd recommend putting that money in a CD.  They'll need it when Edinson Volquez has to be outfitted with a bionic arm.
• The Phillies picked up Jimmy Rollins' 2011 option.
• The Yankees reportedly have made a one-year deal with Nick Johnson, which likely spells the end for the Johnny Damon era in New York.

I still haven't found out where KL and FtJ find all those Brewer birthdays (but I did notice that it's MPD's birthday, and he writes about the Brewers sometimes, so I'm counting that one), so, for today's "on this date in history," I settled on this one: on December 21, 2002, Jeff Suppan was granted free agency for the first time. I liken this to Larry Hooper's dim mak in "The Men Who Stare at Goats" (which I thought was terrific, BTW).  If you've seen the film, you'll remember that Larry uses the infamous touch of death on George Clooney's character as Clooney's character leaves the army base ... except Clooney walks away, seemingly unharmed.  When asked why he didn't die immediately, Clooney's character explains that the dim mak "can take 18 years to take effect."  It's the same thing with Soup: in a roundabout way, we got the touch of death in 2002 when Soup first became a free agent.  We just didn't know until five years later.

And speaking of Soup, we're only three days away from SoupMas, that fateful day in 2006 when Doug Melvin decided to saddle the franchise with a $40 million anchor.  Celebrate responsibly.

That's all I've got, unless you'd like to help Gary Miller with his pronunciation of Rigobert Bahanag Song and Gianluca Pagliuca.