Upton brothers homer in 9th, Braves rally to win

Y’all gonna make me lose my mind.

B.J. Upton led off the ninth inning with a homer and his brother Justin followed one out later with another long ball that helped the Atlanta Braves rally past embattled Chicago Cubs closer Carlos Marmol for a 6-5 victory Saturday night.

Marmol had been through a tough week. He was pulled from a save situation after facing four batters and not recording an out in Chicago’s win at Pittsburgh on opening day, but he earned a save on Thursday against the Pirates despite giving up two ninth-inning runs.

The Upton brothers, major offseason acquisitions for Atlanta, became the 25th tandem of brothers to homer in the same major league game and the first since Adam and Andy LaRoche accomplished the feat for Pittsburgh on June 17, 2009.

ESPN: WAR is the answer

WAR tells a new story about baseball. Better, WAR shows that new story, because it embeds every part of the game within its formula. Consider shortstop David Eckstein. The mainstream story about Eckstein—he’s small and not technically very good, but boy does he have grit—was told through adjectives, not facts. At the media-criticism site Fire Joe Morgan, there was a David Eckstein category comprising 20 separate posts on Eckstein hagiographies. That’s nearly 12,000 (hysterical) words mocking the reporters who celebrated the plucky Eckstein despite his weak arm, punchless bat and general failure to be athletic.

Now, here’s the twist: David Eckstein was actually very valuable, and it had nothing to do with the adjectives. In 2002 Eckstein (WAR of 4.4, according to analytics-based website FanGraphs) was almost as good as Miguel Tejada (WAR of 4.7), who won the AL MVP award that year. Tejada hit 34 home runs and drove in 131. But Eckstein was nearly his equal while driving in 63 and taking a running start every time he threw to first. How? WAR, and the components that it comprises, tells us:

1. Eckstein let himself get hit by 27 pitches, giving him a better OBP than Tejada and blunting Tejada’s power advantage.
2 . Eckstein hit into a third as many double plays.
3. Eckstein was actually a good defensive shortstop with more range than Tejada and more success turning double plays.

A writer who wanted to praise Eckstein, then, could have made some assumptions about Eckstein based on his height, weight and skin color (white), collected some flattering athlete-cliche quotes from Eckstein’s teammates and flipped through his thesaurus looking for new words—thaumaturgical! leptosome!—to describe the little guy. Or he could have started with WAR and explained how David Eckstein, ballplayer, was good at playing ball.

Baseball Players Are Also Worried About the Fiscal Cliff

Too bad we never saw the pitching matchup of Simpson-Bowles

B.J. Upton, the talented Major League Baseball outfielder, just signed a $75.25 million deal to play for the Atlanta Braves in the next five years. That’s a lot of money, even spread out over five years, and it comes with an unusual provision—a $3 million bonus to be paid before Dec. 31, 2012.

The date is a giveaway: If Jan. 1 arrives in the U.S. with a government plan to avoid the fiscal cliff, or if President Obama has his way and resets tax rates on the wealthy to Clinton-era levels, getting paid a day early will save Upton $120,136.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot of money for someone scheduled to receive a salary of $12.45 million next season, but it’s more than twice as much as the average American earns in a year. Someone in Upton’s coterie of agents, lawyers, and accountants has an eye on the nation’s upcoming austerity trigger.