I try not to burden my friends, so I’ve only hinted at it a couple of times in this space, but yours truly has been playing hurt since mid-June. In a horseplay-related swimming pool accident — exactly the kind your mother warned you about — I injured my right shoulder. Hanging out at my pal …
Will Carroll keyed me in to some interesting work being done by a guy named Avkash Patel at his blog, the raindrops. Inspired by a line from Billy Beane in Moneyball (“Baseball is a game of attrition, and what’s being attrited are pitchers’ arms.”), Patel took a look at a stat he’s calling Attrition Rate …
Rich Lederer of Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat has started a series in which he’s interviewing “the game’s best analysts and bloggers.” His first interview is with Lee Sinins, creator of the Sabermetric Encyclopedia and the invaluable Around the Majors mailing list, which he uses to promote the Encyclopedia (which alas has no Mac version, so …
After finishing Jane Leavy’s bio on Sandy Koufax within seven days of the baseball season’s end, I’m now tearing through Pat Jordan’s A Nice Tuesday. Twice this week, I’ve had my nose so deep into that book that I’ve gotten on subway trains traveling the wrong direction. I can recall doing that only twice in …
My friend Issa sent this site along. You can type in anything and it’s instantly generated on a church sign. The first non-obscene possibility that popped into my head was a joke about the Alou brothers.
The Yankees introduced their new hitting coach on Tuesday, a man who needed no introduction as far as most of the team’s fans were concerned: former first baseman Don Mattingly. The Yankee front office had been nudging him to join Joe Torre’s staff for a few years, but Mattingly, who retired to his Indiana farm …
Christian Ruzich, who’s been a good pal to a bunch of us in the world of baseball blogs, took a real hard one in the loss column this week. And I don’t mean a ballgame, so I’ll dispense with further metaphors along those lines and any mention of the his favorite team’s dramatic postseason misfortunes. …
Three days after letting manager Grady Little walk, the Boston Red Sox are in the headlines for trying to usher another key member of their 2003 Wild Card team to the outskirts of town. The Sox placed slugging leftfielder Manny Ramirez on irrevocable waivers on Wednesday, meaning that any team can claim him without costing …
Continue reading ‘Twenty Million Dollar Hitter with a Ten-Cent Head’ »
I waited until virtually the last minute to fill out my ballots at the Internet Baseball Awards this year, bleary-eyed from staying up to watch and then write about so many exciting ballgames. As a citizen of the online baseball community as well as the sheriff of this humble little outpost, I feel duty-bound to …
Continue reading ‘Internet Baseball Awards — One Man’s Ballot’ »
One of the comments in my previous piece discussing Grady Little’s firing led me to do some thinking about the right man for the now-vacant Boston job. Of all the names mentioned, there’s one — as yet unmentioned by the mainstream media — who scares the hell out of me as Red Sox manager. He’s …