A year ago, a horrible atrocity occurred which will never be forgotten. We at Prospectus Entertainment wish to extend our condolences to the families and friends of those who were lost on September 11, 2001. Our thoughts and encouragement go out to those people still gamely working their butts off to get better, and our…
Hi, everyone. I hope you all had a good Labor Day weekend.
Of course, I’m an A’s fan, so every weekend’s been good to me lately. And yet, even with the continuation of The Streak, I’m beginning to get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I did when Jeter made the flip to nail Giambi last year. Yeah, 19 in a row is tremendous, but if Oakland can do it, so can Anaheim or Seattle–and there’s still plenty of time. Sure, it’s better to be in first, but I’d feel considerably better if they could shred out another four or five wins immediately after this run ends.
OK, so we’re 48 hours from an entirely different type of DTs, and the whitespace on ESPNEWS is becoming far more pronounced than it already is. Let’s dive in…. Ted Frank wrote a piece yesterday piercing holes in the luxury tax proposal put forth by the MLBPA. Today, Doug Pappas aerates Ted a little bit….
Since I have a case of writer’s block that could cause Stephen King to cut back to a novel a week or so, I thought I’d lean on some administrative announcements today. We’re working on getting player cards up again. We realize they’ve been down a while, and we’re kind of rolling that project up…
I recently sat down for lunch with a very old friend of mine with an affinity for baseball, finance, and philosophy. Lunch took about half an hour, and the ensuing conversation took about two hours. Since I’ve mentioned him before in this space, and he’s fond of his privacy, we’ll call him “Dave” for purposes of this column.
I recently sat down for lunch with a very old friend of mine with an affinity for baseball, finance, and philosophy. Lunch took about half an hour, and the ensuing conversation took about two hours. Since I’ve mentioned him before in this space, and he’s fond of his privacy, we’ll call him "Dave" for purposes…
Channeling the spirits of Joe Sheehan, Jackie Harvey, and Peter Gammons…
Barry Bonds has a 290 point advantage in OPS over the #2 guy in MLB, Jim Thome. Dropping down another 290 points from Thome gets you to Tony Tarasco. Yeesh.
I spend a lot of time on the business side of baseball. I’ve also got some pretty strong opinions about how a business should be run. I was fortunate enough to hear W. Edwards Deming speak a couple of times, and I probably pay more heed to his words than anyone else’s, for better or…
I spent almost all of yesterday on the phone with a wide range of people with various connections to the CBA negotiations. I can’t really put a coherent picture together of exactly where things are headed, but from what I heard yesterday, that puts me right in line with everyone else. Instead of trying to…
Yesterday, the executive council of the MLBPA declined to set a strike date, choosing instead to continue on in good faith, with the hopes that no strike date would be required, and a settlement could be reached. Speculation is that an agreement could come as early as the end of this week, and the specter…
I got BP rolling many years ago in large part because of a forecasting system I had created called Vladimir. Vlad was basically a two-step system. The first step was categorization: What type of player is this? What is the shape of his performance? Is he a slow masher? A waterbug? A power-and-speed guy? How…
The ESPN.com version of the wire story has the headline “White Sox send Durham to Athletics for prospect, cash.” Um, no. Jon Adkins is 24, and had a career minor-league ERA of 4.13 coming into this season, during which he’s been lit up in Sacramento, with an ERA that would fit neatly above the median for the Texas Rangers and peripheral numbers that do not hold much promise. Maybe Adkins will be the one guy in a thousand who breaks the mold and turns into a legitimate quality major leaguer. It’s not likely, but you have to root for the guy.
Regarding saving $160 million (or more) through prudent contract management, MS (and many others) writes:
How on earth is Jeff Bagwell at $6.5 million a waste of a roster spot, time, money, etc.? Sure, his power numbers are way off, but he’s got an 872 OPS, and baseball can’t work that with the first signs of your best player ever showing a little decline, you release or trade him…. He’s still an above-average offensive player, and bound to turn it around in the next couple of months.
So how come the media, for the most part, doesn’t connect the dots, and call GMs on the carpet more for some of these downright miserable signings?
So how come every time it looks like there might be some sort of a labor stoppage in baseball, some group of people feels the need to put together some sort of “fan organization” with a bad acronym, with no apparent purpose except to whine?