Just over a year ago, I examined the track record of the Yankees’ front office when it came to dealing unproven talent. That Baseball Prospectus piece, “The Claussen Pickle: An Analysis of Traded Yankee Prospects 1994-2004,” remains a personal favorite, not only because it represented a huge amount of research and a novel approach to …
On Sunday, Wade Boggs and Ryne Sandberg will be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, and it seems like a good time to point a few things out as I drink my morning coffee. First of all, if you don’t understand why Wade Boggs belongs in the Hall of Fame — …
It took me twice as long as usual to make it to Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, an hour and a half as opposed to 45 minutes. The Lexington line subway was all fakakta, with a new excuse at every stop — signal malfunction, sick passenger, incident at 161st St. — but while I was …
Another week, another epic: the latest version of the Prospectus Hit List went up yesterday, chock full of trade deadline tidbits that had me updating into the wee hours. A day later I’m so busy and brain-fried that I’ve got little to add to that particular novella, except to say that once again the Yankee …
Shows you what I know. Al Leiter was not party to a double-digit shellacking at the hands of the Red Sox in his Yankee debut. Salvaged off the junk heap, the 39-year-old lefty with the 6.64 ERA reached back and found a part of himself that had gone missing — namely, the part that knew …
Friday evening found me at a wedding in New Jersey, one where I knew hardly anybody (including the bride and groom) and which featured several questionable aesthetic decisions (a 45-minute shuttle bus ride to the reception through rush hour traffic?). As I grumbled my way through a thoroughly lackluster salad, I turned to my wife …
The outcome of Thursday night’s Yankees-Red Sox game was pure Christmas in July for Yankee fans, and in Fenway Park no less. It won’t erase the sting of last October, but in the face of increasing adversity for the Yanks, it may not get any better all year. Whether or not they win the division …
On Tuesday evening, my pal Nick and I finally broke down and saw Star Wars Episode III: Just Give Us Your Money, the anticlimactic final installment of a groundbreaking, once-great series we had grown up on. Neither of us would dare subject our significant others to the movie — my wife fell asleep halfway through …
I spent the better part of the weekend at Yankee Stadium, watching the suddenly resurgent Yanks take on the Cleveland Indians. I already had tickets for Sunday’s game, but when Andra accepted an invitation to the beach on Saturday and my boy Cliff Corcoran offered me a shot at Old Timer’s Day in the bleachers, …
Like most baseball fans, I love baseball books, an affair that began around the time my grandfather started salvaging boxes of dog-eared paperbacks from flea markets in Walla Walla, Washington on my behalf. At age nine, I was reading Roger Angell’s erudite essays in The Summer Game and parsing the more complicated swear words of …