New Year's Day Links: Salary Cap, Worst Offseasons, Screwing Up, Subbing, and GIFs

Rise and shine, Twinkie Towners! It's time to shake off your New Year's Day hangover with some news from around baseball.

• Here's an article reminding you why a salary cap wouldn't work in MLB. This comes in lieu of the Yankees planning on blasting past the $2.9 million spending limit on international free agents, even though it would lead to a severe penalty. Basically, the main point is that if teams were limited on how much they could spend on players, they'd find other ways to invest their money to keep their competitive advantage.
• Hardball Talk ranks the 5 worst offseasons so far and believe it or not, the Twins make the list. I offer up a retort in my article this morning.
• Bill Bavasi, former general manager of the Seattle Mariners, showed some transparency us fans are not used to seeing when he admitted that he screwed up in trading away Shin-Soo Choo to Cleveland back in 2006. The return? Ben Broussard. Yeah, he definitely screwed up.
• You've probably already heard of the Alex Meyer substitute teacher story, but as a teacher myself, I just wanted to point out that him making $63 a day is insanely low for a sub, even when you adjust for him working in Indiana. If you were to sub at my school, you'd be making roughly $100-$120 a day, and that's true for most, if not all Minnesota schools.
• Finally, you know how much I love GIFs and Baseball Nation is doing a rundown of the best baseball GIFs from 2013. Just don't be turned off by all the nut shots, mmmkay?