Still going through the huge backlog in my RSS reader, I just wanted to point out a few more of the links that are worth your time.

Jason over at My Baseball Bias has posted a handy (and quite dandy) list of the 2008 payroll and I, being a finance nerd, am very grateful. Cot's is a good place to get multi-year and contract detail but having all the 08 numbers in one place is great.

The Baseball Crank posted an AL East preview using EWSL (Established Win Shares Levels) as a starting point.

Here's how it breaks out:

Yankees: 2008 W-L: 101-61
Boston: 2008 W-L: 88-74 (Whoa. The Crank took a lot of heat for this one. People even called him a Yankees fan! Trust me, if you've read Crank's stuff, he's a solid Mets fan... heck, he even titled the first section The Hated Yankees.)
Toronto 2008 W-L: 83-79
Tampa 2008 W-L: 71-91
Baltimore 2008 W-L: 68-94

Sigh. This reminds me of the predictions I made before the season last year... and they didn't turn out so well. Still, I would hit up the link for the analysis, of which this was my favorite part:

2008 is an exciting year for purist Yankee fans who have waited a long, long time to see the team break in a significant amount of young talent (Melky getting an everyday job, two rookie starters and maybe three if Joba slots in for Mussina), but it's also a year of risk. In a sense - and this was reflected in the desultory pursuit of Johan Santana - the Yankees and Red Sox almost seem to have entered into an unspoken detente this season, both deciding simultaneously to take a breather from big-ticket acquisitions, prepare for the decline in earnest of their aging stars, and start working more youth into their rotations and lineups - a Melky for an Ellsbury, a Hughes for a Buchholz, a Kennedy for a Lester, a Mussina for a Schilling, a Giambi for a Manny (both of whose contracts finally end in 2008). If there was a serious threat to their two-superpower system this would be risky, but as of now there still isn't.