Bulk in baseball is a source of constant amusement. Just think about late-career Cecil Fielder, or the guy who ate Mo Vaughn. How amusing was it to watch those bulky fellows try to move around the basepaths. And yet, for too long this has been a neglected area of research. Until now. Today, Baseball Prospectus proudly presents VORPSkin, a new innovation in performance analysis that attempts to answer the questions “Who is the biggest waste of skin in baseball?” and “What happens when Keith Woolner gets really bored during the offseason?”
One of the effects of the depressed labor market is that there are fewer bad signings by teams. The game’s middle class, that group of players with more service time than value, has been taking it in the shorts the past couple of winters, and that’s the subset that usually produces more howlers than any other. Nevertheless, we can still point to some free-agent deals and scratch our heads. Some things, I’d imagine, will never change.