We read darn near the entire internets so you don’t have to, presenting you with some of the best baseball-related material darn near every weekday in Peanuts & CrackerLINKS….

• Curtis Granderson joins Michelle Obama’s crusade against fat kids. [bugs&cranks]
• Will Hemingway puns make Sports Illustrated as bad as ESPN? [major LEAGUE jerk]
• The SEC: The New York Yankees of the South. [detroit4lyfe]
• Cardinals sign Skip Schumaker for two more years. [sports UNTAPPED]
• Hard-hitting investigative journalism: the free Grand Slam breakfast. [b&c]

Got a post you think is worthy of link dumpage? Please send links @ NESWblogs-at-gmail.com. Or just follow Chalk on twitter and send him a DM.

On today’s Today Show, ex-ESPN commentator Steve Phillips talked with Matt Lauer about his time in the same sex addiction clinic that Tiger Woods is reportedly at.  News surfaced last October that Phillips had an affair with a homely 22-year-old ESPN staffer.

My favorite Phillips quote from the interview: “”I’m working my tail off to save my marriage.”

We’re about to that point in the year where we go from Hell to Heaven. We go from sports purgatory, which is the month of February; and into a cornucopia of sports miracles.

First you’ve got the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Most people get all whacko about it. Personally, I love it as well but it serves as an appetizer for which to prepare for the main course.

The first Monday in April. Opening Day. The motherload. The grandaddy of them all.

And the first sign of these things to come? Fantasy baseball leagues opening up.

I played my first fantasy baseball season in 1999. I did my draft while watching the Ohio State Buckeyes lose in the Final Four to the eventual champion Connecticut Huskies and Khalid El-Amin, that bastard. From that time forward, I was hooked. Not just on fantasy baseball, but on that time of year. It might as well have been Christmas.

It was Spring Break. The girls were starting to wear their dresses again. There was dramatic basketball on television to watch. I landed Manny Ramirez and Pedro Martinez in the same draft. And Opening Day rested just right around the corner.

Just wait it out a little bit longer folks. The signs are everywhere. We’ve almost made it. And I’ll admit, February is absolute shit. There’s nothing on television to watch. I become an NHL hockey fan for a month and then abandon ship come March. There’s black snow resting in every Ohio parking lot. The days are still shorter and the nights longer. There’s two teams in the Super Bowl that I hate.

But we’ve almost made it. If we can just push up over this one last little hill; you’ll never hear me complain until next February.

In fact, I think I’m going to get in touch with my league members today. It’s like a little family reunion, getting together each March to select which men we will do battle with for the next 6 months.

It’s like being in love all over again each March. And there’s no better feeling in the world.

So I’m riding across town to the Kin’s house to celebrate this festivus, and we’ve got ‘major’ baseball news out of New York. It’s so groundbreaking that ESPN radio reports it as the only piece of 2:00 baseball news. Are you ready for this?

Brian Cashman says that the Yankees won’t be going to get a superstar to play left field in 2010.

I’m serious, that was major news reported on this the eve of Christmas 2009 on the Worldwide Leader’s air waves.

Well boo-friggin hoo! Isn’t that just a lump of coal in the old pinstripes stocking? Who gives a rats ass that the Yankees can’t expect the Matt Holliday’s or the Jason Bay’s of the world to be penciled in as their next left fielder.

You’re damn right it pisses me off. And maybe I’m a little jealous. But I’m just so tired of stuff like this being news. I love baseball as much as anything else on this earth. They could play 362 games a year and I’d watch whoever was on the tube. I can deal with the media’s bias to the 7 or so teams they cover; while disregarding the other 20-something.

But I just don’t understand how this is major baseball off season news.

When it’s national news that a team in your league won’t sign a top-tier free agent for their only hole on the damn field, you know there is something a little bit wrong about the competitive balance of the league.

To quote Clark Griswold: “Merry Christmas, and Hallelujah! Holy Shit! Where’s the Tylenol?”

This is day 7 of the “7th Inning Stache”s 100 days of MLB mustaches. All of the Staches will be cataloged in our MLB Mustache Hall Of Fame. If you have any tips on some fielding first basemen follicle follies please email us the tip @ NESWblogs-at-gmail.com.

I may be mistaken, but I think that Wade Boggs was born with a thick lip rug. Can you imagine Boggs without his flavor savor? And here we see him in his Tampa Bay Devil Rays uni, which is mostly a tribute to 7IS’s editor David Chalk, who kind of likes the Rays.

Each day we describe the stache in one word.

Wade Boggs’ stache = Thirsty ( descriptive video below the pic )