Aside from being busy, busy, busy with Baseball Prospectus 2009 work, I’ve done a couple of articles for BP that have been, or will be, mirrored over at SportsIllustrated.com. The first is on the AL MVP race, using BP’s Wins Above Replacement Player metric to evaluate the cases of the top-ranked candidates. The BP version …
I’ve got an AL East Hot Stove preview up at Baseball Prospectus and mirrored at SI.com. In the preview I address four basic questions for each team. Here they are in the context of what I had to say about the Yankees: What Do They Have? The Yankees’ top asset is money, including more than …
Waking up before 7 AM in each of the past two days to do early morning radio hits has me bleary-eyed as the playoffs begin, particularly given how late I was up working on my preview of the Phillies-Brewers series for Baseball Prospectus. Monday’s makeup game and Tuesday’s Game 163 playoff certainly didn’t help my …
One of the saving graces of writing about baseball from an analytical perspective is that something that might rip your heart out as a fan — say, the brazen stupidity of Dodger GM Ned Colletti or the failure of Alex Rodriguez in the clutch, with the Yankees’ season more or less on the line — …
Back from my west coast swing (no to be confused with my western swing). I had a great time visiting friends in Seattle, catching up with family and watching killer whales on San Juan Island, and packing my stay in Los Angeles with trips to museums — the Getty, MOCA, LACMA, the Norton Simon. Our …
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Just prior to heading out the door for my longest trip of the summer — two nights in Seattle, three in the San Juan Islands, and four more in Los Angeles (including a trip to Dodger Stadium to see them play the Nationals next Saturday) — I published one of my annual favorite columns, the …
Friend, colleague, YES Network columnist and cancer survivor Steven Goldman has a touching piece on the passing of Bobby Murcer in which he relates an encounter the two of them had last year. I’m not ashamed to say that it borught a tear to my eye: I told Bobby that I didn’t mean to intrude, …
Several years ago, the legendary Cleveland proto-punk band the Styrenes rose from the grave long enough to reissue some great old material via album entitled All the Wrong People are Dying. The title track (listen here) is dirge beneath vocalist Mike Hudson’s spoken-word eulogy for his 33-year-old recently deceased brother Joey, a fellow musician, and …
When the rain started pouring at Yankee Stadium during the top of the sixth inning of Sunday’s Yanks-Reds tilt, I felt like I’d already gotten my money’s worth. In addition to surviving what the late Hunter S. Thompson would have termed a king-hell hangover (wrought by my wife’s birthday party the night before) and some …
Three pieces of Prospectus-flavored content to note here, an average of one for each manager fired this week (Willie Randolph, Seattle’s John McLaren, and Toronto’s John Gibbons). With apologies to Bill Bavasi… • First off, here’s the transcript from Tuesday’s chat as well as a few slices: Dan (windowless office): Should we ignore the Hit …