It hasn’t been as bad as recent Aprils, but fantasy baseball players have taken their share of hits this month. Most recently, Bartolo Colon‘s rib cage tear has landed him on the DL for a couple of weeks. He joins Kevin Brown, Rusty Greer, Damion Easley and Brian Jordan as prominent fantasy contributors who, well,…
To quote a commercial I saw far too often this weekend: "Too much good stuff." That was baseball the past few days, one of those weekends that had all the variety and all the storylines that keep fans coming back year after year. The biggest story was in Minnesota, of all places, where Cal Ripken…
Over the past few days, we’ve been treated to the annual sight of watching baseball players play the game dressed like skiers, as a cold snap ripped through cities like Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee. I was born and raised in the Northeast, and while my playing career ended a long time ago, I can still…
The Red Sox have started the season slowly, squeezing a four-game losing streak between two Pedro Martinez starts. I’ve seen both games, and I’m pretty much convinced that he’s the dominant player–not just pitcher, but player–in the game today, and I encourage anyone with the opportunity to see him perform in person to do so….
in just three days, nine players have had two-homer games. There’s no one completely ridiculous performance on the list, and I’d like to think the big days by Tony Batista and Shannon Stewart herald the arrival of the Blue Jays as a force in the AL East. the Martinez brothers are struggling, combining to allow…
Last Friday, the Red Sox announced that right-hander Juan Pena would miss the 2000 season with a torn medial collateral ligament in his right elbow. Pena will undergo Tommy John surgery and attempt to resume his career in 2001. According to the team, the tear was caused when Pena took a line drive off his…
The season so nice, they opened it twice…. The biggest and best news of the day came out of Atlanta, where Andres Galarraga completed his comeback from cancer by popping a tie-breaking home run to help the Braves beat the Rockies, 2-0. The Big Cat is rapidly becoming one of my favorite players, in part…
We do a lot of analysis here, most of it from a more-or-less detached viewpoint. However, we are talking about people, people with lives and families and concerns and all the things you and I have. And sometimes, events conspire to make you really feel for some of these guys. Too mushy? Well, think about…
Over the past couple of weeks–the long and storied life of the daily column–I’ve made a couple of references to baseball games of long, and not-so-long, ago. I’ve been lucky to get additional information on both the games mentioned here, and luckier still to not have to look it up myself. First, there was the…
Yesterday was the deadline for the staff of Baseball Prospectus to submit their predicted standings for the 2000 season, an exercise that is usually met with equal parts seriousness and whimsy. You can see the results here this weekend, and about all I can say for sure is that everyone predicts all 30 teams to…
Before this column kicks off, I want to thank everyone for their feedback on Friday’s column, in which I stated Tim Raines was a clear Hall of Famer. The response was overwhelming, and I have been unable to return all the mail. What I can do is ask all of you to keep an eye…
With a nod to the thousands of fantasy players who will be attending auctions or drafts this weekend, here’s a short list of longshot breakout candidates–"sleepers," if you must–from the AL East. Calvin Maduro, Orioles — Maduro was an Oriole prospect in the mid-1990s before being traded to the Phillies in 1996. He floundered in…
As I write this, the Academy Awards telecast is just about ending. For those of you on the East Coast who were probably in the shower or on your way to work this morning during the last few presentations, here’s the recap: Hilary Swank, Kevin Spacey, Sam Mendes (for directing "American Beauty") and "American Beauty."…
Tim Raines called it a career yesterday, more than 20 years after he began it as a second baseman with the Expos. Without very much fanfare–a product of spending his best years in Canada and an unfortunate dalliance with cocaine–Raines carved out a Hall of Fame career as one of the best left fielders of…
One of the common critiques we get at Baseball Prospectus is that we can seem overly negative towards baseball maangement. Part of that is our crotchety nature–don’t ever leave an empty milk carton in Chris Kahrl’s refrigerator–but part of it is that most teams are mismanaged to one extent or another. Decisions are made that…