Maury adds…“And when I’m talking “plunge” I’m not talking Loria’s neckline.”
As of today, the decline would be 31 percent below what the club ended with last season. But, they are currently averaging 18,864. As of May 5 of last season, they were averaging 30,681, down 11,817 from the previous year, or a decline of 39 percent.
So, it’s very possible the Marlins could end worse than the Rays. It’s early, and anything could happen, but odds are good the Marlins aren’t going to get any ...
I began thinking of this often this week as I was watching local high school teams play the game. Specifically, Michigan City and La Porte.
I became frustrated watching these players, particularly at the plate. In my opinion, too much first-pitch swinging is going on, which flies directly in the face of stats like on-base percentage, who many people - myself included - feel is a greater indicator of batting success than the more popular batting average.
Using Richard Goodwin-Shares…this rates very highly as a political speech.
Johnson is a proven leader, and I’m not referring to his career wins and losses or three World Series championships.
I’m talking about a man who was bold enough at 19 years old to challenge former Texas A&M baseball coach Tom Chandler for telling him he’d get a full four-year ride when the scholarship contract only promised him one guaranteed year at the school.
I’m talking about a man who was savvy enough to create a ...
If your crack’s from Otis Nixon, then your pipe could use some fixin’.
Nixon, 54, had a crack pipe in his pocket and a crack rock in his vehicle when he was stopped on I-575 early Saturday, according to a Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office reported obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A 911 caller reported a red Dodge Ram pickup truck driving erratically on I-575 north shortly after midnight and a deputy was dispatched and pulled the truck over, the report states. A state trooper ...
Chicago White Sox right-hander Gavin Floyd could be sidelined through the 2014 season after the team announced Monday he will undergo surgery to repair the ulnar collateral ligament and a torn flexor muscle in his right arm.
Floyd will undergo surgery Tuesday by Dr. David Altchek at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. The expected time of recovery for Floyd, 30, is from 14 to 19 months.
Floyd suffered the injury while delivering a pitch April 27 against Tampa. ...
Is this the suckiest bunch of sucks who ever did suck?
The Houston Astros have five pseudo regulars in thelr lineup — FIVE — who are striking out more than once per game. This is a rather astounding achievement, possibly historic, and it leads to my prediction that this team will get no-hit before the year’s out, maybe twice. They have already flirted with no-nos — Yu Darvish took a perfect game into the ninth against them and Justin Verlander had them no-hit for six innings on Sunday. ...
“It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearing Milkbone underwear.” ~ Norm
Yesterday was the annual “Bark in the Park” day in Atlanta, the only time—other than when the Reds are in town—when ticketholders must show proof they’ve been vaccinated against Parvo and Bordetella.
Josh Hamilton’s first month as a Los Angeles Angel was a well-documented disaster. The slugger, who signed a five-year, $125 million deal with LAA in the off-season, finished April with a .204/.252/.296 slash line, two homers, nine RBIs, six walks and 32 strikeouts.
Sure, Hamilton has long been known as a streaky hitter, but just how bad has this start been? Let’s break down the numbers a little further.
Hamilton’s .548 OPS for April was the second-lowest OPS he’s ever posted in a month ...
Axford does have Minor League options remaining, but Roenicke indicated that was not a consideration at the moment.
“No, it’s not [under discussion],” Roenicke said. “We feel he can get it back together. We saw him do it last year, and still feel that he can do it. … It’s the same thing that he was in [last season], whether it’s confidence, whether it’s mechanical. If it’s mechanical, Rick [Kranitz, the pitching coach] and Lee [Tunnell, the bullpen coach] ...
PATERSON, N.J., May 6 (Special.)—A home run batted out by a high school boy in a vacant lot won the game for his team in the ninth inning. The ball caromed off the head of Andrew Van Ninwegan, a baker, who was driving past the ball field, and landed on the back of the horse. The horse ran away and the baker, partly stunned by the blow on the head, tumbled off his wagon as it ran into a telegraph pole. The horse continued at a gallop until the wagon was wrecked.
PREVIOUSLY ON MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL: Clay Buchholtz was accused of cheating and there were rainouts.
TODAY: Buchholtz takes the mound for the first time since the accusations, while the White Sox/Royal and Rangers/Cubs are make-up games. There are 9 games overall today.
Loads of Natedictions…but here’s the baseball content.
We asked Nate Silver to gauge how predictable different things in life were: from politics to cricket, from terrorism to sexual orientation. Here’s how he scored ten different areas, on a prediction scale of 0 to 10
Baseball: 8-9
Silver made his name building a system to forecast player performance in baseball, called PECOTA. So, unsurprisingly, he thinks the game is pretty predictable.
In fact, he thinks the systems are so good now ...
The latest Rohrshach test the swiftly emerging Umps Behaving Badly narrative:
Bryce Harper was ejected in the first inning of the Nationals’ 6-2 victory over the Pirates Sunday afternoon after he drew the ire of umpiring crew chief John Hirschbeck with his reaction to a check-swing third strike. The incident left the Nationals without their best player and, owing to behavior from Hirschbeck that Manager Davey Johnson deemed overaggressive, raised the issue of contentious relations between ...
All the signs were there. Roy Halladay, a former Cy Young Award winner whose success has been predicated on his control, threw more than a handful of pitches Sunday that were miles out of the strike zone. When he did throw it over the plate, it was blasted into the outfield or over the fence by hitters who normally wouldn’t stand a chance.
So it wasn’t the 7.96 ERA over his last three seasons that made Mitch Williams retire. It was the fun factor! #tommyrot
This team I did pick to win the AL West because I thought the additions of Josh Hamilton and Jason Vargas would help them because they are both low-key players who would fit in to the Angels clubhouse — which I have since found out from a player who has since left was not a very cohesive clubhouse. And it shows on the field.
The Verducci Effect of discipline, in the classroom.
Verducci’s first gripe came with the perceived taboo by swinging 3-0. There is a .12 correlation between swinging 3-0 and R/G, but there is a .38 correlation between getting to 3-0 counts and runs. I think hitters should only be swinging 3-0 if they have a great ability to leave the defense out of the equation, a.k.a. hit the ball out of the park. Teams who hit more home runs generally score more runs, so encouraging all teams to swing more ...
It was easy to spend hours discussing the relative merits of Stan Musial, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Ted Simmons, George Hendrick, Mark McGwire and Adam Wainwright.
However, thanks to sabermetrics, those days are past. The concept of sabermetrics, a pure mathematical analysis of baseball, first surfaced in the mid-1960s. The science of sabermetrics, and it is a science, tells us that batting average and RBIs don’t ...
I thought only industry insiders voted for The Reuben Sturman Award.
Hideki Matsui, Most Valuable Player in the 2009 World Series, and his former manager Shigeo Nagashima received Japan’s People’s Honor awards at a ceremony today in Tokyo, public broadcaster NHK reported.
Matsui set a record for Japanese players with 175 home runs in 10 Major League Baseball seasons, seven with the New York Yankees, after smashing 332 homers in 10 seasons with the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. Nagashima, who ...
It’s Sunday. Among the pitchers in action today include Cat Latos’ dad, Lester (who faces the Rangers and Darvish), Darvish (who faces the Red Sox and Lester) and Verlander goes against the Astros, which doesn’t seem particularly fair.
The ESPN Game of The Week (8:00 PM) is Dodgers (Ryu) at Giants (Cain). That should be fun.
An article about the on-the-mound rage of one of my all-time favorite Rays
“I respect the game, and I respect the guys,” he says. “But if you hit a double and you’re standing at second base doing [bleeping] cartwheels and slamming basketballs and whatever else they do these days, I figure: Screw it. You’re not going to ##### when I’m out there doing my thing.”
Occasionally, saber nerds come out of their basements long enough to make children. And sometimes, those children play Little League baseball. Little League may only vaguely resemble “real” baseball, but that doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it.
“I’m sick and tired of hearing about strikeouts,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said recently as he slouched in the chair in front of his locker. “An out’s an out.”
The Braves say they are not careless free swingers taking hacks at pitches from their shoelaces to their shoulders. They are merely a collection of power hitters who take three full cuts without fear of embarrassment.
“It does no good when you have two strikes on you, nobody on, to ...
I was so excited about finding this I had to share. The quality isn’t good, but considering it’s officially unavailable on DVD, it’s certainly better than nothing. I don’t think I’ve seen this in nearly 20 years, and it’s as wonderful as I remember.
Gary DiSarcina would like to set the record straight: He was joking.
Baseball Prospectus more than 10 years ago introduced “The DiSars,” an award given to the player who went the deepest into a season without drawing a walk. The concept has continued to this day—all in the name of the then-Anaheim Angels shortstop who Baseball Prospectus said “proudly stated that it was a goal of his to not walk all season.”
