It looks like Tim Lincecum is going to put his slider in his ‘back pocket,’ at least to start the season. Manager Bruce Bochy speculated that the reasoning behind the move was that the pitch “probably puts a little more stress on his arm” and that his star pitcher was saving his bullets for the long season.

This will be a decision that will surely be revisited no matter which way the season unfolds, but it’s not as if the slider has been one of his best two pitches recently. Fastballs and changeups make up almost 80% of his repertoire, and it’s the changeup that has helped him remain dominant as his fastball speed has dipped in recent years.

But the implications of the decision — for both the pitcher and the sport — are important.

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Carson Cistulli is still rubbing elbows with Bill Parcells, Celine Dion, Bryant Gumbel and all the other beautiful people who populate Jupiter, Fla., but he will return tomorrow with observations about the human condition as it relates to baseball that are both insightful and humorous in nature. Today, you are stuck with me, and I will provide neither. Sorry about that.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Select Televised Games
2. Things You Can Buy With 2.15 Billion Dollars
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Oakland Radio

Select Televised Games
Notable games available on MLB.TV.

2012 National High School Invitational | 13:05 ET, 16:35 ET
Yesterday, the first-ever National High School Invitational kicked off at USA Baseball’s National Training Complex in Cary, NC. If you’re unfamiliar with Cary, it is located just outside of Raleigh, and is one of the primary towns in North Carolina’s fabled “Research Triangle.” This week, 16 of the country’s top high school programs have descended upon Cary to take part in a single-elimination tournament, and the winner gets bragging rights as the top high school team in the land. But while the tourney is single elimination, all teams will get four chances to play, which is just information overload for the scouting community. Several top prospects are scheduled to participate in the tourney, and you can watch two of today’s games live on MLB.com. Today’s games will be quarterfinal games, with the semis being broadcast live on Friday and the Gold medal game being live at noon ET on Saturday. Usually, we get nothing more than snippets of video from amateur players, so don’t miss out on the chance to watch several players that could go in the first two rounds this June. Check here for more details.

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Matt Cain will be a free agent at the end of this season. He’s been in serious negotiations with the Giants for months on a new contract. He’s set an Opening Day deadline for those negotiations. Here’s why Cain and the Giants need to get a deal done now.

Cain debuted with the Giants late in 2005 but pitched his first full season the following year. By 2007, he was pitching in the shadow of teammate Tim Lincecum and has done so ever since. But Cain is fourteenth in starting pitcher WAR since 2007 (20 WAR), and is tied with Cole Hamels for sixteenth in starter WAR over the last three seasons (12.3 WAR). Lincecum’s been better, but Cain could have been the ace on many good teams over the last five years.

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This is the third of four stories on Major League Baseball and social media. You can read the first two stories here and here. Full disclosure: Major League Baseball Advanced Media employs FanGraphs contributor Paul Swydan, who wrote this series.

As the social-media revolution began, few major league franchises were fortunate enough to have a championship-caliber team. And perhaps only one was down the street from a company leading that charge. In 2010, the San Francisco Giants went on a historic World Series run while its neighbor was going on a run of its own. That company was called Twitter.

The close proximity between the baseball Giants and the social-media giant gave the team the online head start that perhaps no other team enjoyed — though several teams have now been able to replicate. And the rewards are still rolling in for those franchises.

Case in point: one of the first Tweetups organized by a club was one that the Giants hosted with Twitter founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, “They have been instrumental in helping us understand how to use Twitter to communicate and engage with fans,” says Bryan Srabian, the Giants’ social media director. Twitter, too, most certainly understood the value of a live baseball game.

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With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.

League Trends

To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.

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There was a great deal of hand wringing among Giants fans during the offseason about what the team should do at shortstop. The incumbent, as it were, is Brandon Crawford, who jumped from Single A to the majors in 2011 after Pablo Sandoval broke the hamate bone in his right hand in late April, shifting Miguel Tejada over to third base. Tejada didn’t produce at the plate no matter where he played in the field and was cut in late August. In 220 plate appearances, Crawford posted a paltry .204/.288/.296 but showed value in his glove, recording 6 Defensive Runs Saved in 500+ innings.

Jose Reyes and Jimmy Rollins were available free agents shortstops. Fans were split on whether the Giants should pursue either one, or both, and if so, for how long and for what kind of money. Never mind the fans, though. Reports suggest the Giants front office never considered a serious offer to either Reyes or Rollins, although they tried to get Willie Bloomquist and thought about bringing back Edgar Renteria. Neither (thankfully) came to fruition.

All the noise over shortstop, however, may have obscured an equally pressing need for the Giants at second base. Freddy Sanchez is in the second year of a two-year deal with the Giants, after joining the team mid-2009 in a trade from the Pittsburgh Pirates. And while Sanchez has been moderately effective when he’s played, he’s had one injury after another, missing big chunks of time.

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Oakland was dealt a moderate blow this month when third baseman Scott Sizemore went down with a season-ending ACL injury. Our very own Jack Moore looked at some of the implications yesterday. With limited depth at the position, as noted by Jack, the A’s now are scrambling to find a replacement and the obvious options are not that enticing. The search may not be all that difficult or hopeless, though, since a cost-effective option can be found in nearby San Francisco.

Conor Gillaspie, 24, was a supplemental first round draft pick (37th overall) in 2008 — the same draft that saw the club acquire catcher Buster Posey with the fifth-overall selection. With 25-year-old Pablo Sandoval, already manning the Giants’ hot corner, Gillaspie is an afterthought who’s set to spend a second straight season at triple-A.

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Athletes that I would call both “fast” and “huge” are relatively common in football. I will try not to embarrass myself by talking about football at length, but take a guy like the 49ers’ Vernon Davis — a very fast tight end who weighs around 250 pounds. Some baseball players are that heavy and heavier, but they are not known as “fast” players. That is obviously connected to the different skills required for “game speed” in the respective sports.

Like many fans, I find “big-boned” baseball players quite entertaining. For example, Adrian Gonzalez and Pablo Sandoval are both wonderful players. Overall, Adrian Gonzalez is probably superior, objectively speaking. However, subjectively, I would much rather watch Pablo Sandoval, and I would be lying if I said that his “body type” had nothing to do with it.

While special events sometimes happen, the big guys in baseball rarely pull off “speed moves,” especially the main move — the stolen base. Leaving the (obvious and no-so-obvious) reasons for this aside, I thought it would be fun to look at the the top stolen base seasons by “big-boned” players in baseball history.

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Our braintrust is hard at work identifying the game’s best pitches for all of your February needs. Now it’s time to uncover some of the worst pitches in the game — with as little snark as possible. Because even the worst pitch in the big leagues is way, way better than most of us can manage. And if a pitcher owns a pitch on this list, they must be doing something else right in order to remain in the big leagues. Either that, or they’re not long for the bigs.

At least identifying poor pitches can be a useful and enjoyable exercise. And you’re supposed to do thirty minutes of that every day, so that’s an extra benefit for us.

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Prospects have never been trendier amongst baseball fans than they are right now. The MLB Draft is now televised, most baseball blogs and online publications now publish at least a Top 10 Prospects list for each organization, and struggling fan bases such as that of the Kansas City Royals have begun to see their attendance rise as their prized minor leaguers begin to reach the majors.

The same can be said for their popularity within major league organizations, too.

Teams have begun pouring so much money into the draft that the new CBA contains specific limitations to curb the spending spree. Teams now often value control years more than overall talent and have become extremely cautious in parting with top prospects to acquire proven talent. This generalization goes for both big-market and small-market franchises, too, which is something that was not often said in previous years.

Which teams have benefited most from homegrown talent in recent years? Which teams have drafted amateur players and developed them into major league talent the best?

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