Many of you have seen the work of Jeff Hildebrand here at the Web site and in Baseball Prospectus 2000. Last night, he sent out this missive: OK, so the majors aren’t the only ones who can do some screwy things about playoffs. I just found out something really weird about the International League playoff…
Yesterday’s column set a DP record for responses, and I want to thank everyone for the feedback. In the flood of responses, a few readers hit on the same two points, so I want to talk a little about them here. The first common thread was that I’d misinterpreted the actions of Andres Galarraga in…
Last Wednesday I wrote in detail about the Braves/Rockies game the previous night, the one that went 12 innings and ended with Brent Mayne as the winning pitcher. What I didn’t get much into was the circumstances that led up to Mayne’s appearance. But after last night’s fiasco in Tampa Bay, I want to take…
Off the top of my head… So, if you’re the third-base coach for Bellaire, Texas, I’d imagine you’re pretty darn happy right now that George Steinbrenner is involved with the Olympics and not Little League Baseball. One of the things I want to look at in the next few months is whether there’s a growing…
It’s been mentioned to me that the "Daily Prospectus" hasn’t quite been living up to its name lately. It’s nice to know people care, and you can all look forward to a more regular schedule beginning next week and running through the end of the regular season. One of the great comeback stories of the…
One of the late-night discussions I’d imagine many of us have had at one time or another with our friends is talking about what time period we would have liked to live in. When I was younger, my standard answer was the 1950s, because it seemed like a fun time to be young in America,…
Last night, the Rangers’ Doug Davis beat the Red Sox, throwing 142 pitches for his first major-league complete game, 6-2. If you’re expecting a rant against Johnny Oates in this space, you may be disappointed by what follows. No, I don’t think it was a particularly good idea to let Davis finish the game. I…
One of the many benefits of Rany Jazayerli beginning his residency is that I no longer get daily e-mails bemoaning the use of Rey Sanchez in the two-hole or contemplating a world in which he actually liked the Royals’ manager. On the other hand, he doesn’t have as much time anymore to pepper me with…
Back in April–you remember April, don’t you?–you couldn’t click your mouse without reading about how baseball had simply become slow-pitch softball with warmer, more expensive beer. Scoring was up, ERAs were up, home runs were up and interns were being run ragged chasing the latest, greatest freak stat to prove that the game had gone…
A few weeks back in a column I wrote reviewing the first half, I made the claim that Kirk Rueter could be expected to decline from his good first half. I made this prediction based on his poor strikeout rate and strikeout-to-walk ratios. Rueter, of course, has pitched even better in the second half. In…
Hmmm…now what other team can I say nice things about, sending them into an ugly tailspin? OK, so maybe there were some good reasons to ignore the Padres, who have scored two runs since Sunday in losing a pair of games to the Braves. The last two nights’ starters–Jay Witasick and Woody Williams–have shown both…
Maybe it’s an Adam Eaton effect, maybe it’s my unnatural affection for Ruben Rivera or maybe it’s just that I’ll be in the city next weekend, but I would really like to know why no one, anywhere, considers the San Diego Padres a contender. The Padres are 57-61, in last place in the National League…
Wednesday’s column on the Pedro Martinez/Ramon Ortiz duel speculated on the game’s possible place on a list of 2000’s top combined Game Scores, since the two pitchers had combined to post a 160. Game Scores are a simple measure of the quality of a start, first published in the 1988 Baseball Abstract and calculated as…
When I was heading to Edison Field for last night’s Angels/Red Sox game, I fully expected to end up on my feet cheering for a great performance by a Dominican right-hander. I just didn’t expect to do it twice. Anaheim’s Ramon Ortiz outpitched Boston’s Pedro Martinez in what has to be one of the season’s…
In this era of digital cable and lightning-fast Internet connections, it’s quite easy to stay in touch no matter where you are. But a couple of times a year, I make a concerted effort to get away for a few days and pay as little attention to baseball as I can. I find that the…
Recently we’ve been running a series by Gary Huckabay in which Gary evaluates major-league fielders using a combination of the available metrics and his own visual observations. Defense has proven difficult to quantify, and without a "killer app" for the task, we’re left with a combination of flawed tools. One of the problems with evaluating…