Arizona Diamondbacks The reigning division champion’s lineup is largely set. The one competition is in right field, vacated by leadoff hitter Tony Womack‘s move to shortstop. Former halo-wearer Travis Lee has to be considered the front-runner for the position, but David Dellucci and Bernard Gilkey are being given looks as well. If either Lee or…
Tuesday evening, the Braves’ John Rocker pitched for the first time this year, tossing a 1-2-3 inning against the Detroit Tigers. As you might have heard or read somewhere, Mr. Rocker got a late start to his spring, part of his punishment for saying some not-so-nice things about…well, just about everyone. Originally suspended for a…
ERA Central? OK, so it’s not as sexy a moniker as "Home Run Central," but this division doesn’t just have big bats as its calling card. Sure, all the midwinter hype was over the trade of center fielder Ken Griffey Jr. to Cincinnati, putting the three most heralded longball artists of the post-strike era in…
ANAHEIM ANGELS Assigned OFs Darren Blakely, Nathan Haynes and Juan Tolentino and IF Brian Oliver to their minor-league camp. [3/8] No surprises here, as the Angels demote two of their latest Norm Hutchins clones (Blakely and Tolentino), and the lone prospect they got from the A’s in the Oliveras/Velarde deal. Haynes may yet grow up…
SPRING TRAINING “It was beautiful to get that first hit in a Pirate uniform. It feels good to play that first game. You don’t really feel like you’re part of the team until you play in a game.” — Wil Cordero, Pirates outfielder “I like challenges. Pudge [Rodriguez] is one of the players I like…
We’ve taken a fine-toothed comb to our own list of prospects from last season, but in order to get the complete picture, we need to look at the prospects who didn’t make our list, not just the ones who did. For every one of our Top 40 Prospects who neither Baseball America nor John Sickels…
Late in 1999, we asked our readers to give us their picks for baseball’s Team of the 1990s. More than 1,000 people voted in the poll, held over three months, and the results have been tabulated. Over the next two weeks, we’ll present to you the Baseball Prospectus Team of the 1990s. First, the infielders:…
ANAHEIM ANGELS Assigned C Bryan Graves to their minor-league camp. [3/6] ATLANTA BRAVES MLB announced that it has fined the Braves $100,000 and banned them from signing players from the Dominican Republic for six months as punishment for signing SS Wilson Betemit before his 16th birthday. [2/25] MLB announced that an arbitrator has reduced the…
Atlanta Braves The NL champions head into camp with a lot of questions. The biggest seems to be what they’re going to do at shortstop, where Walt Weiss is 36 and a bad, bad player. The team’s only alternative may be to push 19-year-old Rafael Furcal, one of the top prospects in baseball but with…
ROCKER’S REDUCED PUNISHMENT “I disagree with the decision. It does not reflect any understanding or sensitivity to the important social responsibility that baseball … has to the public. It completely ignores the sensibilities of those groups of people maligned by Mr. Rocker and disregards the player’s position as a role model for children.” — Bud…
Valentine’s Day is behind us, and pitchers and catchers are well into their late-winter preparations. And while Mike Piazza and Ismael Valdes stretch, throw, catch and hit, fantasy players around the world are also gearing up for some springtime action. With all the preparation involved in playing games like roto or Scoresheet, the players we…
If this page is too wide for you to view easily, you can download a copy of the file in PDF format here. You need Adobe Acrobat, a free PDF viewer, to use this file. You can check Adobe’s web site for more information. An analytic model of per-inning scoring distributions for studying in-game strategies *…
Grapefruit and Cactus League games are just starting, a time when it’s tough to identify many of the players without a program, especially those with numbers higher than Tiger Woods’s scoring average. In hockey those numbers are often worn by the likes of Jaromir Jagr or Eric Lindros, but in baseball, they’re given to players…
Continuing our look around the divisions at what spots on whose rosters are being contested: Chicago White Sox The most obvious competition in camp is for the fifth rotation spot, where a notionally healthy and genuinely expensive Cal Eldred will do his level best to prove he deserves one-third as much patience as Jaime Navarro…
Exhibition games begin today, and performances over the next four weeks will go a long way towards determining who gets a chance at fame and fortune and who gets six at-bats a week. In the AL East, there are a couple of knock-down, drag-out job battles that will bear watching throughout March. Delino DeShields vs….
STRAWBERRY “I’m going to stand by him. I’m going to try to see that he rights his life. If it’s in baseball fine, if it’s outside baseball fine. It isn’t like George has given him enough chances, now dump him. Dump him… I don’t think so.” — George Steinbrenner, Yankees owner “That’s the question we’re…