Daily Notes for March 29th

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.

San Francisco at Texas | 21:05 ET
After you’ve taken a nice, long nap after watching the second real baseball game of the season, tune in as the Giants and the Rangers play nine innings (or more) out in Surprise, Ariz. The game is set to be a battle of Matt’s, as the Rangers’ Matt Harrison squares off against the Giants’ Matt Cain. Both pitchers finished in the top 25 in WAR among pitchers last year, making this a gem of a Cactus League matchup. Bonus — this is the MLB.TV Free Game of the Day (note — there is one of these every day of the regular season), so you don’t even need to be a subscriber to watch it.

Things You Can Buy With 2.15 Billion Dollars
A lot of money was spent on the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles. Like, a bunch even. The Dodgers are now worth more than several countries, according to 2010 GNI figures from the World Bank. If they didn’t want to go the baseball route, the Mark Walter/Magic Johnson/Stan Kasten group could have purchased (in theory, of course — I don’t think you can actually buy a country, but then, I’ve been wrong before) Sierra Leone, the country known worldwide as “that country that Kanye West rapped about that one time.” Or, if they wanted to go the island route, they could have purchased Grenada, the Solomon Islands and Comoros, giving them islands in three distinct regions of the globe. And they still would have had plenty of money left over.

Other things that could have been bought with 2.15 Billion Dollars include:
• A brand-new 2012 BMW 7-Series for all 17,125 households in the town of Midland, Mich., home of the Dodgers’ Single-A affiliate, the Great Lakes Loons.
• A new 16 GB iPad for all 3,792,621 people who live in Los Angeles, as well as the 462,257 people who live in Long Beach, with enough left over to give away one to almost every fan who comes to Opening Day at Dodger Stadium.
• A copy of the DVD, “Magic Johnson: Always Showtime,” for all 85,789,573 people who live in Vietnam. I hear there’s a lot of Lakers fans in that neck of the jungle.

Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Oakland Radio
Recently, we released the results of our television broadcaster rankings — itself the product of reader crowdsourcing that started in late November. Now, FanGraphs is asking readers to rate the radio broadcast teams for all 30 major-league clubs (Click here for more on this project.)

Rate other teams: Washington / Toronto / Texas / Tampa Bay / Seattle / San Francisco / San Diego / St. Louis / Pittsburgh. / Philadelphia.