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…
Transaction Analysis, August 19-21, 2002.
Even as they take the lead in the wild card race, the Los Angeles Dodgers are dying. Only Jim Tracy’s magic keeps the Dodgers from seeing how chronic their situation is.
In Tracy’s short time as a major league manager, he has demonstrated a gift for turning others’ garbage into gold. Just as Chavez Ravine (park factor 91) makes Dodger pitchers look better than they are, it conceals just how well Tracy has done with the hitters he has been given.
We plan on making the Mailbag a regular BP feature, but we can’t do it without your input. If you’ve got questions about any article on the site, click the e-mail link at the bottom of the page to write to the author and we’ll do our best to reply. If you’ve got a general…
There are many who have wailed in the press and on television, saying that major league baseball will suffer catastrophic public reaction and possibly be destroyed entirely if a labor action means there’s no baseball on September 11th. Does baseball owe it to us to play on that day, and is it appropriate for us…
Transaction Analysis, August 15-18, 2002.
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.
Few baseball arguments elicit more debates than comparing players across eras. No matter how much the numbers may suggest otherwise, a fan growing up in the 60s may never be persuaded that Barry Bonds deserves to be ranked alongside Hank Aaron. Likewise, a fan growing up in the 90s may never fully grasp the greatness…
Today, we’ll pick up last week’s discussion where we left off. (Take a look at last week’s article if you haven’t already.) To answer the question I ended last week’s column with, it is very important to understand that my support of the four-man rotation is not, in any way, mutually exclusive with my belief…
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…
SPEAK FROM THE MOUNTAIN "I heard some woman on the television the other day talking about everyone in the big leagues making at least $2 million a year. I mean there are a lot of guys that are barely making one tenth of that but because this woman says that on TV a lot of…
Even though a strike date has now been set, the MLBPA’s decision to postpone setting a strike date earlier this week suggests that unlike in 1994, the owners and players are at least speaking the same language. The biggest, and probably only, stumbling block to an agreement is the parties’ split over revenue sharing and…
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…
ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS
Placed INF-L Craig Counsell on the 15-day DL (neck), retroactive to 8/9; activated C-R Damian Miller from the DL. [8/14]
Craig Counsell is sort of the Snakes’ de facto utility infielder, playing regularly but splitting his time between second, third and short. However, with the Paycheck Twins–Matt Williams and Jay Bell–both back off of the DL, and with Junior Spivey holding down second while Tony Womack keeps getting starts at short, the Snakes can afford to be without Counsell for a couple of weeks while his neck heals up. The way things are going, their lead in the NL West seems more likely to go to ten games before Labor Day than come down to five or less, especially with six of their next nine coming against the Cubs.