FYI for Detroit Tigers bloggers (or anyone else who may need/care to know): The URL of detroittigers.com is now being changed to Tigers.com. It’s something that fans of baseball’s best team in the standings will surely notice, and it’s actually quite an undertaking in many respects, if not necessarily at MLBlogs. Several links have been changed on Nate Robertson and Jason Beck blogs.

It’s that time of year when blog topics are everywhere you look.

Bobby Abreu is officially on his way to the Yankees along with Cory Lidle, for four Minor Leaguers. For the curious, Abreu is 12-for-31 (.387) with a .500 OBP against A.J. Burnett, who is scheduled to start for Toronto in the opener of the series Tuesday at Yankee Stadium. Do you bat Abreu fifth? MLBlogs.com will be sizzling with thoughts about this one, and the beat goes on.

Here is the announcement from the Phils:

PHILLIES TRADE ABREU, LIDLE TO YANKEES FOR FOUR PROSPECTS

Veteran players rightfielder Bobby Abreu, 32, and righthander Cory Lidle, 34, were traded to the New York Yankees for four prospects – shortstop C. J. Henry, 20, left-handed reliever Matt Smith, 27, catcher Jesus Sanchez, 18, and right-handed pitcher Carlos Monastrios, 20 – Vice President & General Manager Pat Gillick announced this afternoon.

C. J. Henry, SS

B-T: R-R . . . 6-3, 205 . . . Born: May 31, 1986, Oklahoma City, OK . . . Resides: Oklahoma City . . . Originally selected by the Yankees in the first round (17th player overall) of the 2005 First-Year Player Draft . . . Was named the 2005 Oklahoma High School Player of the Year and also named by Baseball America as a first-team High School All American . . . Hit .481 at Putnam City High School in 2005 with 13 home runs and 41 RBI in 37 games.

Henry is hitting .232 in 76 games for the Charleston RiverDogs in the single-A South Atlantic League.  He has 19 doubles, three triples and two home runs with 33 RBI and 35 runs scored.  After hitting .211 through the first two months, Henry is hitting .254 in the last two months, collecting 11 of his doubles and 21 of his RBI.  He will be assigned to single-A Lakewood, also of the South Atlantic League.

Henry made his pro debut last summer with the Yankees’ rookie-level Gulf Coast League team, hitting .249 in 48 games. Baseball America named him the fourth-best prospect in the Yankees organization after the season.

Matt Smith, LHP

B-T: L-L . . . 6-4, 220 . . . Born: June 15, 1979, Las Vegas, NV . . . Resides: Henderson, NV . . . Originally selected by the Yankees in the fourth round of the 2000 First-Year Player Draft out of Oklahoma State University . . . Was the school’s all-time strikeout leader (348 over three years) when selected.

Smith has relieved for both the Yankees and triple-A Columbus this season.  He began the season with Columbus, was promoted after three scoreless appearances and relieved three times in the majors, returned to Columbus, recalled again on June 4 and back to triple-A on July 4.

Smith pitched a total of 12.0 scoreless innings for the Yankees over 12 games, allowing four hits and eight walks while striking out nine.  With Columbus, he went 0-1 with a 2.08 ERA in 24 games. 

Last season, Smith was converted from a starter to a reliever while splitting time between double-A Trenton and Columbus.  He was 3-1 with a 1.55 ERA in 18 appearances at Trenton before moving up to Columbus’ bullpen where he was 2-0 with a 2.60 ERA in 25 appearances.  He also pitched for Grand Canyon in the Arizona Fall League and for Team USA on the Olympic Qualifying team.

Jesus Sanchez, C

B-T: R-R . . . 5-11, 160 . . . Born: September 24, 1987, Valencia, VZ . . . Resides: Valencia . . . Originally signed by the Yankees as an amateur free agent, July 2, 2004.

Playing for the Gulf Coast Yankees this season, Sanchez was hitting .264 in 23 games with five doubles and 10 RBI.  He had eight multi-hit games.  He made his professional debut in 2005 with the Yankees’ team in the Dominican Summer League.

Carlos Monasterios, RHP

B-T: R-R . . . 6-2, 175 . . . Born: August 17, 1985, Miranda, VZ . . . Resides: Miranda . . . Originally signed by the Yankees as an amateur free agent, September 22, 2004.

Monasterios was also pitching for the Gulf Coast Yankees.  He was 1-2 with a 2.97 ERA in seven games (three starts).  In 30.1 innings, he allowed 23 hits while walking three and striking out 24.  Opponents were batting .207 against him.   He, too, made his debut in the Dominican Summer League last season, going 1-1 with a 0.59 ERA in 13 games.

Both Sanchez and Monasterios will be assigned to the Phillies’ Gulf Coast League team in Clearwater Fla.

Abreu/Lidle Stats

Abreu was hitting .277 with eight home runs and 65 RBI and a major league-leading 91 walks in 98 games for the Phillies this season.  He finished his Phillies career with a .303 career average, 195 home runs, 814 RBI and a .416 on-base percentage.  Abreu had 947 walks as a Phillie, second-most in club history.  He was acquired after the 1997 season in a trade with Tampa Bay for shortstop Kevin Stocker.

Lidle was 8-7 with a 4.74 ERA in 21 starts for the Phillies this season.  In 62 career starts for the Phillies, he was 26-20 with a 4.50 ERA and three complete games.  He was originally acquired on August 9, 2004 from Cincinnati for three minor leaguers. . . .

Elsewhere around MLBlogs…

Blog your thoughts about that or any other deal done or in the works, and Tom Singer’s Trade Deadline Reality Check is another place to leave comments/questions as tomorrow’s deadline nears. Catch T.R. Sullivan’s post about the Carlos Lee deal if you missed it. Who’s going where? And how much do you miss Peter Gammons at this time of year?

Bruce Sutter just took the podium in Cooperstown. It’s a good day to blog memories of the splitter-throwing reliever and also look ahead to next year’s class. Ripken and Gwynn are locks; is McGwire still a lock as well? Check out Hall prez Dale Petroskey’s blog live from the festivities, including his photo album.

Chase Utley just extended his hitting streak to 30 games. What’s amazing is that this season began with his teammate, Jimmy Rollins, in the upper 30s. One thing’s for sure: Utley won’t have his streak slowed by an offseason. At what point do you get really interested in hitting streaks?

One of our newest MLBloggers has an autograph-collecting theme at Sign here please. What’s the best autograph you ever got, and what tips do you have for getting signatures?

The Reds and Cards are going to be meeting in home-and-home series shortly. Who wins the NL Central this year? Two full months to go — what do you think of the playoff picture?

Who would have thought that Mark Prior (now 0-4) would have gone just 17-15 to date following that 2003 postseason for the Cubs? He was 18-6 with a 2.43 ERA and a 245/50 K/BB ratio in that first full season. A reminder to enjoy the moment; you never know what’s around the bend in baseball or life.

More new MLBlogs just added to the Active Roster, and please welcome the new Rookies!

Six Apart is scheduled to perform system maintenance on the database server that hosts MLBlogs.com, from approximately 8-9 p.m. ET on Saturday. During this time, Six Apart will be updating the firmware of the disk controller on that database server. The general manager of Typepad said they do not expect to be down during the entire hour-long window, but if you experience any outages at this time, then this is the reason and thank you for your patience during the maintenance.

OTHER UPDATES: Have been out all week, so apologies to any MLBlogs rookies not added yet to the master MLBlogs Active Roster. Those additions are still manual for now in our publishing system, so will catch up with you all today. (The "Rookies" section is always updated, though.) All new MLBloggers have been added to the MLBlogs Active Roster browse-by-team page. Great to see all of the newcomers and the different personalities. . . . Thanks to our friend Jake at Bucco Blog for being our MLBlogger of the Week Friday night on MLB Radio‘s "Under the Lights" show. There are two ways you can listen to the replay of his appearance. Either look at his post about it, or you can always click the drop-down and listen to previous guests under the Multimedia header on the MLBlogs.com homepage. . . . Good to see from comments on previous post here that our friend Arielle is back safe from Israel. . . . Highlight of the week was last night and taking family to their first trip to Yankee Stadium. Five seats behind home plate to watch Wang spin a two-hit complete-game shutout, and universal applause for A-Rod throughout. As it should be for a home team and its crowd, wherever that may be. It also was a chance to just really appreciate Derek Jeter for one night. The little things that he does, which don’t show up in a box score, are truly characteristic of a future Hall of Famer. In the first inning, he made a dazzling play up the middle to end an inning, and then in the bottom of the inning he grounded a ball to the right side to move Johnny Damon to third, leading to the first (and winning) run. . . . Carlos Lee trade: Huge. Catching up on that one, too. Someone tell me who’s closing for the Rangers while I catch up…

Have fun blogging and back next week. At the rate we’ve been going, the Twins will be the team to beat in baseball by the time I get back. One look at the League Leaders page on mlb.com’s main stats page and it’s easy to see why. Twins everywhere. Good luck to your own teams this week.

Mark

More proof that Yankee fans are everywhere >

If your team is not on the following list, it had better have great pitching. And if your team is on this list and it has dominant pitching, then your parade may be awaiting.

2006 MLB RUN LEADERS
1. Chicago-AL   542
2. New York-AL  520
3. Cleveland    516
4. Boston       514
5. New York-NL  510
6. Atlanta      508

Just wanted to say that my colleague Tom Singer’s Trade Deadline Reality Check blog is really good.

Noticed that the AZ Snakepit blog posted an entry about AZ MLBlogs.

Greetings to Hank’s Homies. That’s Hank Blalock’s official fan club crew.

Our friend John Nemo over at The King’s Game is the MLBlogger of the Week at 10:20 ET tonight on MLB Radio’s "Under the Lights." Please tune in unless you’re on a date or something, and even then feel free to email the show in advance and give your thoughts about whether the ridiculously hot Twins — now only FOUR games back in the AL Wild Card picture — are going to shock the world this half and keep winning all the way toward a title. They have the best 1-2 starters in the game now.

MLBlogs are versatile. The new Congratulations Card blog for Michael Young is now a graphic on the homepage of the Texas Rangers’ site. We used an MLBlog as a "fan guestbook" for the White Sox and Astros last October and it was an emormously popular way for fans of those teams to express congratulations on something that the players then would see in the clubhouse. It was also obvious why the new MLBlog started last week by MLB Envoy Bill Percy is better than us posting as an MLB.com article template…we see that his Croatian players have even found it and are commenting. Blogs can be used for a lot of purposes.

Happy blogging…

Thanks to our friend Jake at Bucco Blog for passing along the new Pew Internet & American Life  Project research findings, which was also highlighted on MSNBC.com today. Lots of interesting data about blogging you should know. For example:

• 8% of Internet users age 18+ (or about 12 million American adults) are bloggers
• 39% of Internet users age 18+ (57 million) read blogs
• 19% of Internet users age 12-17 blog and 38 percent of online teens read blogs
• Bloggers are evenly divided among genders (reflected here at MLBlogs)
• More than half (57%) of bloggers are under age 30
• 14% of bloggers are in age 50-64 group and 2% (not my parents) are 65+
• While 74% of Internet users are white, it’s 60% for blogging (Hispanic biggest jump)
• Bloggers are 51% suburban, 36% urban, 13% rural (urban biggest jump)
• 8 of every 10 bloggers have broadband
• 95% of bloggers get their news online (almost exclusively for me)
• 47% of bloggers get news from blogs
• 78% of bloggers send/receive IMs; 38% of all Internet users do
• 78% of bloggers used a digital camera in previous month

When asked, "What does your blog mean to you?" the largest group of bloggers (44%) replied that their blog is "something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on." Only 13 percent of bloggers reported updating their blogs every day — MLBlogs easily exceeds that.

One question missing in the research was: How many blogs do you maintain? I’d like to know that one. There are a lot of people who can’t get enough blogs. Lots of people here who blogs in lots of places. Here, myspace, facebook, wherever.

Around MLB and the ‘Sphere

Welcome Kevin Frandsen to the MLBlogosphere. He’s been up with the Giants’ parent club, back in Triple-A for now, probably will be back up again soon. Nice insight on his new blog Frannie on the Farm, feel free to welcome him to this Show. Thought it would be unfair to put him in the "Rookies" area of the MLBlogs.com homepage since that would make him a rookie twice.

One of your best fellow bloggers wears a big furry mascot uniform.

We’ve got a bunch of plans for that 466-pixel promo space on the MLBlogs.com homepage but always invite you all to make suggestions here. It’s your party.

Not sure if we jinxed Nate Robertson. His Gum Time blog was launched the day he won his last game to go 8-3, and he’s 0-3 since then in July.

For anyone new here since this was last pointed out: If you want to see ALL posts for any MLBlogger, just click on the title at the top of their blog and then add /archives.html to the end of that URL. It will show archives from every month. The Typepad side panel only allows a max of 10 previous months to appear as "Archives." And also for any recent MLBlogs Active Roster call-ups, there is no storage limit here so ignore anything that might tell you that you are approaching a max limit.

If you’ve been away from your MLBlog for a while and see that it’s not in the blue Active Roster panel on MLBlogs.com or in the Browse by Team choices, please leave a comment here to let us know you’re back. It will make it easier to add you back, as we generally comment out stale blogs in our code.

Have fun blogging. You are most definitely part of the in crowd.

Now that voting is under way, I just cast my own 30 votes in the DHL Presents MLB’s Hometown Heroes program (my story here) we just launched on MLB.com. Good luck. I found myself moving the cursor back and forth over the radio buttons for different legends, back and forth, finally deciding on one player who most says: I’m the Man. And speaking of that, anyone here who votes for any Cardinal other than Stan the Man (pictured) is toast. Just kidding. That’s what it’s going to feel like for a lot of you who will be incredulous about anyone other than your pick for that team. You get five names per club and choose one. Some of my toughest picks included taking Honus Wagner over Roberto Clemente, Cy Young over Teddy Ballgame, Tris Speaker over Bob Feller, Reggie over Rickey, Junior over Ichiro, Biggio over Ryan (who I liked as a Ranger instead), etc. Brooks or Ripken? I went with the MLBlogger even though being at Ripken’s 2,131 game in Baltimore is at the top of my personal highlight list in sports. How can you pick someone else over a guy who played 100 years for one team and had Norman Rockwell immortalize him signing autographs for fans? Our friend John over at The King’s Game commented here that the Twins choice is no debate, but my first reaction was, OK, who’s the mortal lock there then? I chose Carew (my boyhood idol) over Killebrew and Kirby. It’s going to be a very individual decision. I spent most of the 1990s at The Sporting News and whiled away hours in our archives exploring the careers of people who were larger than life. They didn’t just fade away. Who were your picks and why? Any reason not to choose Tom Terrific for the Mets other than longevity? The 30 choices will be announced on a primetime series on ESPN during the last week of the season and it should be incredible.

Lots of research will be done. Just think of how many younger fans will be educated about the game’s greats during this process, as just 29 of the 150 nominees are active players. That’s a good thing. Some fans probably are not going to be crazy about a fan in San Diego being able to vote on their beloved Red Sox or fans in Florida being able to vote on their beloved Indians. But this one is for all baseball fans to decide according to the rules, with voting online, at the ballpark, via mobile phone and more. This is the kind of impassioned debate that millions of fans have had through the ages just for fun. Now it’s time for the largest panel in the world to decide it. You. Every name on the lists hold unique meaning to certain fans of that particular team. It might mean more ballots than the All-Star voting; this is the stuff we love. Hope you all will blog about it after you vote. A lot of you are going to vehemently disagree with each other. Just have fun and remember who your forebears might have wanted you to consider with that vote.

It’s The Great Debate, now coming to MLBlogs.

Hopefully you noticed the help Michael at Some Ballyard offered other bloggers over the weekend regarding use of styles that can make your MLBlog text look better. Still have to spend some time on this one in that regard. Typepad is a funny thing, and especially when you consider that our former MLB.com intern Geoff Herberg basically did nothing to make his stand out at Opening Up a Can of Corn. We emailed Geoff to inquire, and in case you were ever curious as well, here is his email back from the sweltering land of Kansas:

As for the blog and how it looks, here’s what I did. I’m not sure why it looks this way but I guess I never fudged with it. On my very first post, when the blog was still entitled The Intern Cometh (still cracks me up…), I copy and pasted a summary of Eugene O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh from Amazon.com at the start of the post. Actually, I copied and pasted that blurb into a word document. And since then, the blog has looked like it does. Though, there are days when, for whatever reason, the writing on the blog would become duller, which would cause me great consternation. I fixed that by just starting my new thread of posts in the middle of the document where  it hadn’t been dull and haven’t had the problem since. I use Verdana font and I believe it’s in 10 point, but it’s not bolded. I’m not sure how much that helps, but that’s all I’ve really ever done as far as adjusting how the blog looks as far as the type.