The Rays’ GM talks about his influences from the past and present day, and the advance state of analysis inside the game.
Brewing up their latest bid for October, Milwaukee’s not cruising while suffering some bruising, plus news and views from around the majors.
Back in the mid-1970s I was an infielder for the New York Yankees. I was pretty good, too-leading the team in a number of offensive categories and appearing in a few All-Star games. My best season was probably 1977, when I managed to finish the season with a .633 batting average. So for at least…
When MLB.com asked Carlos Zambrano to point to one thing he did during his no-hitter that he’d want to repeat in the postseason, he said, “Strike, first pitch, strike, and challenge the hitters.” It is fascinating that Big Z responded this way because he had one of the lowest first pitch strike rates in the…
Voros McCracken wrote on Baseball Prospectus over eight years ago to release one of the most controversial findings in the history of sabermetric thought: he said that pitchers only control whether a hitter strikes out, walks, hits a homerun, or hits the ball in play, but have little to no control over whether a ball…
Analysts have made tremendous progress in the effort to quantify individual defensive performance. Since there’s often noise in the data, a gap still exists between the accuracy of advanced defensive and offensive metrics. As technology improves, though, the aforementioned gap will continue to shrink. Due to the progress made, defense became perhaps the most noteworthy…
The new Yankeee Stadium has received a lot of press this spring for the large number of homeruns hit there so far. On April 21, 2009, Buster Olney wrote at ESPN http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4080195 “The New York Yankees might have a serious problem on their hands: Beautiful new Yankee Stadium appears to be a veritable wind tunnel…