Good morning.

Here are several go-to links to make the first Monday of December a bit more bearable:

  • Writing in Businessweek, Red Sox front-office executive and sabermetrics godfather Bill James shares his thoughts on Marvin Miller, the players’-union icon who died last week at age 95. (In case you missed it: NRO’s Nick Frankovich remembered a conversation he had with Miller here.)
  • The Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham reveals that his views on the use of performance-enhancing drugs and the Hall of Fame voting process have changed:
This will be my third year voting. In my first year, I mustered up a mighty wave of self righteousness and decided that no player I suspected of using PEDs would get my vote. I’ll show them.
Last year I moved my line and decided that unless there was some kind of tangible connection to PEDs, I would consider voting for a player. I changed because of Jeff Bagwell, a guy who sure looked the part of a drug user but was never linked to it. It seemed unfair to exclude him based only on suspicion.
Now I’ve decided to erase the line completely.
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and the rest of the scoundrels will get my vote. I’ll look at the players based on their statistical merit, how they compared to other players of their era and to other players in the Hall of Fame. I won’t sit at my desk and do Google searches to decide who is clean and who was cheating.
If you think that is a cowardly way out, I can’t argue with you. But it beats stabbing around in the dark and hoping to be right.

That’s it. Have a walk-off week!