A bit groggy here after a long week which began with a fun ballpark trip to a Baseball Prospectus event in Baltimore — one which included Orioles president Andy MacPhail, six BP authors, and XM Radio hosts Mike Ferrin and Grant Paulsen — and was capped by having stayed up past 2:00 AM on each of the …
Continue reading ‘From the Streets of Baltimore to the Sofas of Brooklyn’ »
Today marks the 63rd anniversary of one of the great days in American history, the day that Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier by taking the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It’s a day to pause a moment and reflect upon Robinson’s immeasurable courage in battling racism, and the impact his bold success had on …
Continue reading ‘MLB Should Step Up to the Plate on Jackie Robinson Day’ »
In the wake of Joe Mauer agreeing to an eight-year, $184-million contract extension with the Twins, I wrote a piece on Mauer’s Hall of Fame chances vis-à-vis JAWS, using his PECOTA projections to fill in the blanks because his major league career consists of five seasons and change. Amazingly, he’s already 31st in all-time WARP …
Over at Baseball Prospectus’ new One-Hoppers blog, I’ve expanded and revised my take on Willie Davis to include some comments from the New Bill James Historical Abstract as well as my own JAWS-flavored take: “He was sort of the Mike Cameron or Kenny Lofton or Devon of his day — a fine supporting player whose …
I’ve never worked in film, TV or video, but I have enough friends that do to know what a b-roll is: supplemental footage intercut with the main event in an interview, documentary or news report. As such, this video has been cracking me up for the past couple of months. Too good not to share. …
Willie Davis was before my time. He spent 18 seasons in the major leagues, from 1960 through 1976, with a brief comeback in 1979, so unless he made a cameo appearance in an Angels game I was watching in that latter year — he wasn’t in this Nolan Ryan near no-hitter — I never actually saw him …
At Baseball Prospectus, I’ve got a lengthy take on Nomar Garciaparra’s retirement, placing him in the context of the “Holy Trinity” of shortstops: Back in the mid-1990s, a trio of young shortstops burst onto the American League scene. Soon dubbed the “Holy Trinity,” Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Nomar Garciaparra were part of an elite …
… For one of the most memorable moments I’ve experienced in over 30 years as a Dodger fan. I speak, of course, of Garciparra’s 10th-inning walk-off homer off the Padres’ Rudy Seanez on September 18, 2006, capping a miraculous comeback in which four Dodgers — Jeff Kent, J.D. Drew, Russell Martin and Marlon Anderson — hit consecutive …
The Baseball Prospectus 2010 book promotional tour starts in earnest this weekend. On Sunday, February 28, I’ll join Cliff Corcoran, Steven Goldman, Kevin Goldstein and Christina Kahrl for a panel discussion at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University in New Jersey (if you need directions just know that when you …
Continue reading ‘Area Man to Answer Questions: The BP 2010 Promo Tour’ »
Earlier this month, my pal Jon Weisman migrated his great Dodger Thoughts blog from the Los Angeles Times to the new ESPN Los Angeles family. Among his first posts is one which directly involves me. Jon is the editor of the forthcoming Dodgers 2010 Annual from Maple Street Press, the same folks who publish Bombers …