The nineteenth-century ballplayer: mustachioed, musky, Irish or perhaps aggressively not Irish, brawny, inclined to swearing and drinking, did I mention mustachioed?; an image, conjured rather easily due to the proliferation of photographs of late-nineteenth-century male baseball players; the kind who fizzle and pop into the half-lucid late-night dreams that are Ken Burns’ Baseball reruns at…
In a snoozer of an offseason, why are relievers being snatched up more quickly than other players?
Player value depends heavily on your assumptions, and particularly on how you decide to measure and compile a player’s supposed contribution.
Can the whole be greater than the sum of its parts? Can it ever be less? Is a baseball team just the total of the 25 people who comprise its roster?
One of the creators of openWAR responds to the points raised by Michael Wenz this month.
Single-year outfield defense might be an intractable problem.
Should WAR(P) systems adjust their defensive measures? Okay. Now, which direction?
Why Jon Heyman’s questions about WAR are worth asking, and answering.
Ben and Sam discuss whether the second wild card has made the stretch run more exciting, then talk about why papers publish columns that criticize advanced stats without making an effort to understand them.
If we disagree with something a metric says, does that mean we have to discard it?