Stuff from my latest three pieces at Baseball Prospectus: • In “Conquering the Cubs,” the latest edition of my “Pair Up in Threes” series, I examine the Brewers, Cardinals and Reds, all of whom are atop the Cubs in the NL Central race, a major surprise given that our PECOTA projection had the Cubs at an …
If all you watched was baseball pertaining to that Bronx team — and let’s face it, that describes a certain portion of this blog’s readership — you’d think that home run rates were off the charts this year given the major league-leading 1.81 homers per game that are being hit at Epic Fail Stadium. That’s …
Step right up and get your small-sample anomalies! That’s the subject of today’s BP/ESPN piece, which starts with a Yankee: We’re just past a third of the way through the season, and it’s no secret that the new Yankee Stadium has played as a hitter’s park thus far. After 29 games played in the Bronx, …
Continue reading ‘The Museum of Small-Sample Split Oddities’ »
Randy Johnson won his 300th game on Thursday, waiting out an outburst of ark-building weather before getting down to business. Though he entered the game with a 5.71 ERA, the highest of any pitcher going into his 300th win start, he dominated the Nationals for six innings, throwing just 78 pitches and allowing two hits …
Greetings from Minneapolis, where I’m spending about a week centered around my wife’s cousin Julie’s wedding. Our trip kicked off in fine fashion on Friday, as within an hour of arriving at the airport, we were kicking back at a St. Paul Saints game, drinking beer and eating bratwursts. Awww yeah! The Saints, an independent …
For my money, last year’s biggest story in baseball was the way the Tampa Bay Rays’ turnaround was triggered by a record-setting improvement in their Defensive Efficiency. Of course, it certainly helped to have a stockpile of young talent, a shrewd GM and an innovative manager, but none of them would have likely gotten such …
For today’s installment of “Pair Up in Threes,” I examine a trio of American League contenders whose bullpens have been extraordinarily awful thus far, the Yankees, the Indians and the Angels. For each team, I ran down their stats and rankings in two key BP metrics, Reliever Expected Wins Added (WXRL) and Fair Run Average …
I’m riding a hitting streak — four straight days of publishing at Baseball Prospectus, a first for me: • Tuesday’s Hit and Run explored April home run rates and found they were nothing remarkable within the context of the past decade and a half: Excluding the strike-affected 1994-1995 years, the 2009 season ranks seventh out of 14 …
Earlier this week, I had an epic-length free piece on Baseball Prospectus about the sudden flood of historical minor league data available online via the recently upgraded Baseball-Reference.com: While I’m hardly an authority on the topic, I’ve always had a soft spot for minor league baseball, probably because my formative years were spent in minor …
Today marks the 62nd 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. While Commissioner Bud Selig has reached the reductio ad absurdum in attempting to honor Robinson by mandating that every player wear number 42 in …