One Man’s All-Star Team: National League I don’t watch as much NL baseball as I do AL, so my picks here are more reliant on stats and highlights than they are in the AL. In retrospect, I think I’m also guilty of a distinct anti-Arizona bias. I wonder how the hell that happened… C: Paul …
Archive of entries posted by Jay Jaffe
There Goes The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived Ted Williams passed away today, at age 83. Our sabermetric methods show that he probably wasn’t quite as good a hitter as Babe Ruth, but he did lose about five years of his prime (24-26, 33-34) to military service, so I think the distinction is debatable. That …
Eating Raul’s Contract Depending on how you look at it, the Raul Mondesi trade between the Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays was either a lose-lose proposition for both teams or a win-win one. On the one hand, Toronto gave up a player who they accquired for superstar Shawn Green just two and a half …
One Man’s All-Star Team: American League I’m headed to Milwaukee on Wednesday, for a week-long vacation that will include not just the All-Star Game but the whole shebang–the Futures game, the Legends/Celebrity Softball Game, the Home Run Derby, batting practice, and something called the Fan Fest. In honor of my trip, I’ve petitioned the Food …
Dogs, Chickens, and Other Appetizing Tangents I came across a couple of interesting items while chasing down some of the tangents for my dream piece. Jim Bouton (who immortalized manager Joe Schultz’s “pound the ol’ Budweiser” directive) had been on my mind a few weeks ago, when admissions from Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti about …
In Your Dreams, Jaffe For a short time this morning, I was a New York Yankee. Those of you reading this, worried that some minor transaction slipped past you in the agate type on the Sunday sports page can rest easy–I slept through the whole affair. Baseball slipped into my slumber, and suddenly there I …
Comments Upgrade I upgraded the comments system today. Not that you’d really be able to tell, though the page does seem to load a little bit faster.
Moving Along I can’t presume to speak for the moronic radio shock-jocks or the rabid Roger-hating Red Sox fans out there, but the rest of us baseball fans are happy that the Clemens@Shea affair is in the rearview mirror. No, the Mets didn’t exact the kind of eye-for-an-eye revenge that the most bloodthirsty zombies who …
The Inevitable World Cup Column As sports-related fevers go, baseball is running a distant second in my household this month. My roommate Issa, a soccer fanatic, is in the full throes of World Cup fever thanks to the time-shifting magic of the TiVo system he purchased a few days before the tournament started. Committing to …
Headline of the Day: Ventura Can’t Predict What’s Going to Happen I wince as I think how many $3.99-a-minute phone calls I’ve made to Robin Ventura’s Psychic Hotline. I feel so suckered….