Cristian Guzman and Tony Womack may have been worthless to their real life teams, but they were all-stars in the land of HACKING MASS.
Ben wonders how players in the past have done when they’re on the rebound.
Jason Giambi and Ken Griffey Jr. won the Comeback Player of the Year Award in their leagues as voted by the fans. Is there a more objective way of handing out the award?
The Tech staff has been busy at Baseball Prospectus over the last few months. Here’s what they’ve been putting together.
With the season at the halfway point, Ben Murphy has a look at how people made their Predictatron picks.
The Orioles hang on to the top spot in this week’s Prospectus Hit List, but the rest of the AL East is on the rise.
Who’s up and who’s down? Find out on this week’s Hit List.
With the Orioles and Cardinals in the top two spots, this week’s edition of the Hit List is for the birds.
New faces and signings pose challenges in Anaheim, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Plus, can Dusty keep his pitchers healthy?
Continuing the work of Doug Pappas, we look at the teams that got the most–and least–bang for their buck.
Inherent in the desire to develop better baseball statistics–and as a result, improve baseball analysis–is the belief that this information is not only available but also not being used by the men and women who run baseball. As Moneyball and the resulting reaction has showed, some General Managers seem to be using the same methods for performance evaluation that were used 20 or 40 years ago. It therefore stands to reason that GMs are paying players not for actual performance, but rather for perceived performance as viewed through the rusty and decrepit glasses of decades-old beliefs about the statistics of the game. For this study we wanted to find out if General Managers were, in fact, paying players along the lines of their objective “value” (as defined by VORP), or if there were something else in play.
In Baseball Prospectus 2004, our authors ranked Devil Rays farmhand B.J. Upton as the No. 8 prospect in the game, while Baseball America on pegged him at No. 2 on their preseason list. Since then Upton’s done nothing to make those rankings look foolish, and at the tender age of 19, has already found himself playing shortstop every day at Triple-A Durham, where he’s currently hitting .315/.422/.565. Since being taken second overall in the 2002 amateur draft, Upton has been covered by John Sickels at ESPN.com and by David Cameron here at BP.
Baseball Prospectus caught up with Upton before a recent home game against the Syracuse Skychiefs, where we discussed tough pitchers, being a role model, and what it takes to improve defensive performance.