The Yanks were cooked. Down 2-0 with two outs in the ninth inning, it looked for all the world that they were headed to defeat, both for the afternoon and for the weekend’s interleague series against the San Diego Padres. David Wells had returned to Yankee Stadium wearing the navy-and-sand garb of the Padres but …
ESPN’s Buster Olney — yes, my favorite whipping boy of late — recently took an interesting look at bullpen usage, namely the pace at which the Yankees and several other teams are taxing their top three relievers so early in the year. Fifty-five games into the season (through Monday, June 7) — one game past …
Friday marked the 30th anniversary of one of the more colorful — or dubious, depending on your take — events in the history of baseball, the 10-Cent Beer Night Riot. On June 4, 1974, at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, a promotion — ten ounces of Strohs for ten cents — went predictably awry, resulting in a …
Say this for Jim Bouton: he knows a good story when he stumbles upon one. More than thirty years after Ball Four, Bouton returned to bookshelves last year with the acclaimed Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark, a diary of his battle to spruce up Pittsfield, Massachussetts’ Wahconah …
My travels have delayed these two pieces, each long enough to be one of my normal blog entries. Since they share something in common — writer pals of mine working on their first books — and since I’m not sure when I’ll next be online (I’m currently in Austin, Texas for a wedding), I’ve combined …
Not that I wish to keep the mood around here so melancholy, but having spent most of the last couple days away from my computer, I wanted to pass along a few more links on Doug Pappas — both from people who knew him personally and those who only knew his work — before I …
The world of baseball lost a giant of a writer and its foremost expert on financial matters on Friday when Doug Pappas passed away while vacationing in Texas’ Big Bend National Park. The cause was heat prostration. He was 43 and is survived by his mother, Carolyn Pappas. As the chairman of the SABR Business …
I watched most of the two Yankees-Angels series over the past couple ofweeks, and though the Yanks took four out of six, Anaheim certainly played them tough. Most memorably ,the two teams split a pair of series-opening extra-inning thrillers, and both Angel wins have come on the nights when the Yanks’ personal rent-a-bitch, Aaron Sele …
Continue reading ‘DaVanon and On: A Cross-Generational Tale From the Replacement Level’ »
Satan, check your thermostat. At a time when my regard for ESPN’s empire couldn’t be any lower, Baseball Prospectus‘ Will Carroll called my attention to the fact that that ESPN’s Sortable Stats now include pitchers’ DIPS ERA (or dERA as it’s sometimes called), as well as a stat called DIP% which expresses the ratio of …
Thanks to Studes of the great Baseball Graphs site, The Hardball Times has its first Win Shares reports of the seasons. I decided to take a quick breeze through the Yankees, foregoing the rounding which Bill James mandates in the Win Shares book, because at this early stage in the season the difference between, say, …