Happy Thanksgiving
To one and all, Here’s hoping you’re enjoying the holiday with friends, family, and/or loved ones. In observance of Thanksgiving (and Black Friday), the site’s going to go dark today and Friday, but we’ll be back in action on Sunday with our regular columns and a couple of “So You Need” features. In the meantime, here’s my hope that you all give thanks if you have cause, and enjoy these days for the best reasons. All the best, Christina Kahrl

JUMP Back
Back at the end of August, our friends at ESPN tasked me with building an MVP predictor in the spirit of a system such as Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor, one that awards points for various accomplishments in an attempt to identify who will win as opposed to who should win. Limiting my scope to the post-strike timeframe to take advantage of the fact that none of the ensuing winners were pitchers, that all of them save for the 2003 version of Alex Rodriguez came from teams that finished above .500

Winter Meetings
Normally, I’m making plans to go to the Winter Meetings this time of year. Instead, the Winter Meetings are coming to Indianapolis. I live about ten minutes away from this year’s location so instead of flying, I’ll just drive downtown like any normal day. It figures to be a very interesting session this year and we’ll have great coverage of it as usual. For those of you coming in or in the area, I’ll be speaking at the SMWW Baseball Career Conference, along with old pal Maury Brown

Comment Hiding Behavior Update
We have updated the Baseball Prospectus Manage Profile page to offer the ability to choose your preferred comment hiding behavior for both the normal article pages and the printed version of the article pages. We have gotten a number of requests from people who were often having to override the default behavior (usually because they either really love to read comments or really hate them), so hopefully the updated behavior will be more accommodating to these users.

Thirty Years Ago in the Minor Leagues
Among the many reasons to visit your local minor-league ballpark (the charm, the ridiculously cheap seats behind home plate, etc.) is the possibility of witnessing future greatness. Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to catch several big-league stars in action before most people had heard of them: Jay Buhner, Jake Peavy, Carlos Quentin, Felix Hernandez,