Christmas Day Links: Hendriks, Million Dollar Arm Movie, NPB Pay Scale, and Job Seeking

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. I will be spending my first Christmas with my fiancee, which means instead of engaging in a 3-hour trek to southeast Minnesota, I will be staying in the Twin Cities today with her family.

From Moneyball, we learned that the Oakland Athletics contacted Scott Hatteberg to play first base on Christmas. Now, I don't think we'll hear any similar transactions announced today, save for perhaps a waiver claim, but we do still have some other news from around baseball to share as you doze off into your holiday ham slumber.

• Monday showcased a bunch of players switching teams via waiver claims, and one of those players was former Twins RHP Liam Hendriks, as he now moves from the Chicago Cubs to the Baltimore Orioles. While I was disappointed to see Hendriks leave as he's only 24 years old, a second team passing on him eases the pain as it shows that the Twins aren't the only team that thinks he won't cut it in the majors.
• I know what movie I'm looking forward to watching: Million Dollar Arm. It's based on the true story of Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh, the winners of the "Million Dollar Arm" contest, which was designed to find the hardest throwing pitchers in India. Though the contest was meant to showcase cricket players, Patel and Singh emerged victorious with their background as javelin throwers. The movie looks really interesting, and since it's a Disney movie, I'm under the impression that anyone that liked The Rookie will enjoy Million Dollar Arm as well.
• Though it's not the same thing as Chris Colabello's situation with the KBO, Patrick Newman of NPB Tracker gives us an idea of what non-Japanese born players earn in the Japanese NPB league. It's usually about $3 million or more if you were an All-Star in MLB, and about $100,000 to $300,000 if you have mid-level minor league experience. Thus, we could hypothesize that if Colabello had made it to the NPB, he'd have been in line for about $300,000 to $1 million, about what was reported if he moved to the KBO.
• Finally, my must-read for the day. Here's a story from the Winter Meetings about the "Job Seekers," the group of 20-somethings that descend every year in the attempts of scoring a job with a major league club. The article is lengthy but excellent as it showcases the struggle of getting your foot in the door. My dream of working for a major league team has dwindled, and this paragraph is a big reason why:

Here is ("Job Seeker" Max) Thomas' problem: When I walk away to talk to the next guy, or girl, or the next one after that, I'm struck by how many broadly impressive resumes are here. They often have wildly divergent credentials, but all sound perfectly reasonable -- insistent, almost -- as qualification for any baseball job. Worse, their end goal of running a baseball team means that they are all trying to fast-track to one of only 30 such jobs in the world. To put this in perspective: There are three times as many available United States Senate positions, and the qualifications for them are vastly lower.

By the way, "John Kruk's Free Job Advice" sounds like a bad idea even before walking into the, uh, "seminar."