Month: August 2013

Some good response on my bit trying to explain why Trout leads Cabrera in WAR (it’s 7.8 to 7.0 according to Baseball Reference this morning; 8.8 to 7.6 on Fangraphs) but I have to say that quite a lot of what I’ve seen shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Park Factors. I think the Twitter exchange…

Several Brilliant Readers have written in to ask — I think in a curious and serious way — how it is possible for Mike Trout to lead Miguel Cabrera in WAR. They readily concede that Trout is a faster baserunner and a better fielder. Still, they wonder (and I’m lumping seven or eight people together…

Bill James (the writer — not Seattle Bill James) writes in with an addendum to the young pitchers injury post: I know you weren’t trying to do an encyclopedia of these guys, but … two of the greatest sensational-young-pitcher-burns-out stories of all time: 1)  Bobby Shantz. It is difficult to describe how much the press…

There seems to be an impression out there that pitchers get hurt today more than they ever did before. It seems that every time a high profile pitcher gets hurt — the latest of these being Mets phenom Matt Harvey — that we get a rash of stories like this one from my friend Terry…

So, NFL season starts next week, and I woke up today thinking about October 19, 1980. No reason. Well, that’s not exactly true — every so often I wake up thinking about October 19, 1980. It was a pivotal day of my childhood, though I did not realize that for many years. Now, I think…

So, a few thoughts about the BR Hall of Fame voting so far … and some more thoughts about a pitcher named Rube. 1. The voting is hard on old-time players: The vast majority of players I’ve put on the ballot so far are in the Baseball Hall of Fame — of the 90 everyday…

My pal Brian Kenny is trying to start a movement to kill the pitcher win, and the general theme is something I heartily endorse. I don’t actually believe n KILLING the win — it has a lot of history — but I do believe that every time someone puts a little bit less stock in…

After I had some fun trying to predict what Ichiro Suzuki’s hit total might look like if he had played his entire career in the United States, a couple of different Brilliant Readers — independently, I assume — wondered if I might try similar estimations for guys who lost years in the war, namely: Bob…

I love every word of this comment from Brilliant Reader Alejo: Pete Rose played winter baseball for the Caracas’ Leones one season in the sixties. He was already obsessively competitive and is remembered as both a mensch and a defensive liability at second base. No one ever questioned his guts though. He would get out…

A handful of years years ago, I was talking with Pete Rose while he signed autographs in Las Vegas. I’ve done this five or six times now and it’s fantastic every single time. People will disagree about whether Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame but as a character, a storyteller, an observer of baseball,…