Friday Morning Links, News, & Views

Active rigs: 184

Wells coming off confidential list have not yet been posted by NDIC.

RBN Energy: the competitive market for Canadian LNG exports. 

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or anything you think you may have read here.

Helmerich & Payne beats by $0.10, reports revs in-line : Reports Q3 (Jun) earnings of $1.44 per share, excluding non-recurring items, $0.10 better than the Capital IQ Consensus Estimate of $1.34; revenues rose 2.5% year/year to $840.2 mln vs the $844.98 mln consensus.

Enterprise Products begins open season for proposed expansion of Panola NGL Pipeline system: Co announced the start of a binding open season to seek shipper support for a proposed expansion of the portion of its Panola Pipeline Company, natural gas liquids ("NGL") system between Carthage and Lufkin, Texas. The project is designed to support Haynesville and Cotton Valley oil and gas producers by providing enhanced access to the NGL fractionation complex in Mont Belvieu, Texas. Originating near Carthage in Panola County, the NGL pipeline system extends 181 miles, serving multiple destination points at Mont Belvieu, including facilities owned and operated by Enterprise.

WSJ Links

In Arena, nice essay on the aggressive selling of Wm Faulkner's estate, and a review of the new Woody Allen movie. If I started going to movies again, I would like to see the new Woody Allen movie. 
For baseball enthusiasts, this is a great article -- Tampa Bay's Jose Molina is earning playing time because he is uniquely gifted at fooling umpires by framing pitches.

Disclaimer: this is not a sports blog. The author has no formal training in sport reporting, and knows very little about any of the sports he writes about. Do not make any Las Vegas bets based on anything you read here or what you think you may have read here. 

Back to the story:

Judging by the traits most fans notice, Molina fits the profile of a seldom-used backup. But when it comes to convincing an umpire that a ball is a strike, Molina is a magician.

"It just seems like every pitch you throw, he's able to catch it clean, frame it and make it look like a strike," Rays pitcher David Price said. "We love him for it."

Molina, one of three brothers that have all played catcher in the major leagues, is on pace to start 89 games at the position this season, which would represent a career high. Last year, the Rays started him 80 times and used him in 102 games, which marked his career high in games played.

Remember the link/story about aluminum prices and warehouse shenanigans? Apparently the federal government is not pleased either; investigation begins. 

His improbable, late-career emergence doesn't reflect a change in his ability so much as it highlights a change in the way the Rays—and a growing number of other teams—value what he does best.

Teams have long understood that catchers who receive the ball in a way that makes umpires more likely to view borderline pitches as strikes can be an asset. But only recently have researchers begun to quantify just how valuable that skill can be and just how much better some catchers are at it than others.

The most influential work on the subject was written by Mike Fast for Baseball Prospectus in September 2011. Using pitch location data, Fast determined the number of extra strikes each catcher got over a five-year period. Based on the estimated run value of each extra strike, he found that Molina had saved his teams 73 runs, more than any other catcher despite playing less often than many.

Great to see: Fox Sports will take on ESPN.

Canadian energy news keeps getting worse. Now it's an unstoppable oil leak (make that plural, leaks).
  
There is a very interesting story on the jobless (and the jobless rate) in Spain. If you bother to read the article, think of some similarities in the US, albeit on a different scale.