While the St. Louis Cardinals have steamrolled baseball for the first couple of months of 2013, the A’s have been winning games at an equivalent clip to STL for the past year. A .643 winning percentage over 168 games is an impressive accomplishment, especially considering that the A’s are still overshadowed by the Rangers, Tigers, Yankees, and Red Sox when people talk about AL contenders. However, none of those teams have even been with 10 games of Oakland over the last year.

Once again, ...

Some good stuff.

Part of the reason for Oakland’s intentional surplus was to try to approximate the production of its deeper-pocketed competitors, on a payroll of about $60 million, by the establishment of platoons. “We said, OK, if we can put together a 25-man roster of depth, maybe you build a platoon in two or three spots that ultimately gives you the production of a $12- to $15 million player,” explains assistant general manager David Forst. Bob Melvin, the A’s manager, intended to orchestrate at least four ...

It ain’t baseball.  It’s probably soccer.

Each year, as ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz has noted, more and more people are coming to Sloan. That’s literally true, but could be said figuratively of sports analytics in general. The days are long gone when seemingly unremarkable players could be signed on the cheap by the few teams smart enough to understand the value of, say, a high on-base percentage. “You used to know how other teams operated,” complained stats-friendly Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban ...