In the words of the Onion’s immortal Jim Anchower, “Hola amigos! I know it’s been a long time since I last rapped at ya…” • Late Wednesday night I was thumbing through this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated and came across a Tom Verducci piece about the Sammy Sosa situation that grabbed me: In mid-January, …
Visitors who come to this space expecting me to write about the Yankees may have noticed that I’ve had precious little to say about the pinstriped team lately. Part of it has been my absorption in several Baseball Prospectus-related projects, including taking up the Dodger beat for my Prospectus Triple Play — a task that’s …
It’s that time of the month again. My latest Prospectus Triple Play is up on BP today, and it’s free. As usual it’s a bit heavier on the Dodger analysis than on the others, but then again, they’ve been one of the busiest teams this offseason, and the statheads can’t get enough of Paul DePodesta. …
What is it with bloggers and fire? A little over a year ago, Christian Ruzich of All-Baseball.com lost his entire home in one of those California wildfires. A couple of nights ago the apartment of Larry Mahnken of The Hardball Times and Replacement Level Yankees Weblog burned down. Larry was unhurt, but he lost everything …
In response to Tuesday’s piece about the Dodgers, reader Andy Vogel piped up in the comments to call me on the following statement about Cesar Izturis: “batting him first or second, as Dodger manager Jim Tracy did all year, is a pretty awful idea.” Quite reasonably, Vogel asked the following: How do you square this …
This one is for the technically-minded… Even those of you who frequent this site might have missed the tweaks I finally got around to dealing with on Tuesday. The biggest thing is that the home page to this site is now http://www.futilityinfielder.com/home.php to enable my RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to display snippets of my …
My recent chat with Jon Weisman caught the attention of the L.A. Observed blog, which is focused mainly on “[m]edia, culture, books and the politics of Los Angeles and California”. In particular, our discussion of L.A. Times writers Bill Plaschke and T.J. Simers seems to have whetted the Observed’s appetite for more. Cool. Meanwhile, the …
Here we go again… for the third year in a row, I am presenting Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) via this website. DIPS was invented by an analyst named Voros McCracken, whose studies of pitching statistics suggest that major league pitchers do not differ greatly on their ability to prevent hits on balls in play. …
The Dodgers have been generating plenty of headlines this offseason, with GM Paul DePodesta completing a decisive overhaul of the roster he inherited upon taking the helm last February. He’s generated no small amount of controversy in the process. Even after the Dodgers won the NL West for the first time since 1995 and earned …
A couple of years back, Baseball Prospectus’ Dayn Perry took a look at the post-Moneyball backlash that pitted traditional scouting against performance analysis and coined a metaphor for the ages. “Should you run an organization with scouts or statistics?” asked Dayn, before providing the solution himself. “My answer is the same it would be if …