A “Kiss ‘Em Goodbye” piece on the Reds to which I contributed ran at Baseball Prospectus and ESPN Insider on Saturday. Building upon something I noted for the year’s sabermetric highs and lows, these numbers jumped out at me: Key stat: .245 AVG/.301 OBP/.354 SLG That’s the combined showing of all Reds batting in the …
I have no love lost for J.D. Drew, to say nothing of the antipathy I hold for the Red Sox. But I absolutely respect the job that Sox GM Theo Epstein has done; how can you not, when the team has two rings on his watch, including the one that broke the 86-year Curse of …
So Chicago, with its history of backroom deals and corrupt politics, couldn’t land the 2016 Olympic bid by persuading the inherently corrupt International Olympic Committee, whose members are so crooked that — to borrow a wonderful phrase from the late Hunter S. Thompson — they needed servants to help them screw their pants on every morning? They …
As the 2009 season heads into its final weekend, the editors at ESPN Insider invited me to create a list of sabermetrically-themed highlights and lowlights. The piece runs here and here. A few of the high points were obvious, centered around the accomplishments of Joe Mauer (who’s on his way to becoming the 16th player …
On Tuesday night, I had the quite the treat. Not only did I attend an exciting (if rather meaningless) Yankees victory — complete with made-to-order Kyle Farnsworth meltdown — with friend and colleague Steven Goldman, but thanks to a connection on the inside, we had a view from the so-called Legends seats down the right …
In today’s Prospectus Hit and Run piece, I revisit an early-season look at the Rangers’ improvement in Defensive Efficiency (the rate at which a team’s defense turns batted balls into outs), itself a follow-up of sorts to the record-setting improvement pulled off by last year’s Rays. They’re no threat to break that record, but they’ve …
Continue reading ‘The Impact of Elvis, and Other Defensive Improvements’ »
Remember the saga of the Jason Tyner bobblehead? Blogger Clark Brooks, an avid collector of what the old-schoolers call “nodders,” reports that he too is in possession of one of those rare dolls. he left a link to a post discussing the resemblance of various players (and non-players) to their bobbleheads. “I wish I could …
As noted last week, I spend a lot of my time at BP exploring the margin between teams’ expected performance (as based upon variants of Bill James’ Pythagorean formula) and their actual performance, looking for reasons why it happens and cues as to what it portends. Having taken on the Pythagorean overachievers in last week’s …
Having spent his summer besmirching the character of Derek Jeter, Jim Rice continues to demonstrate why he’s as horseshit with a mic in his hand as he was as a Hall of Fame candidate. After watching leading AL Cy Young candidate Zack Greinke shut out the Red Sox while allowing two hits, Rice declares that …
Forgot to mention this in my last entry, but the Baseball Prospectus and ESPN Insider teams are collaborating on a series called “Kiss ‘Em Goodbye,” in which we provide postmortems for the teams that have been eliminated from contention. ESPN’s Buster Olney provides one take, a BP author summarizes our preseason expectations for the club …