Amongst thousands of other places, Zach Greinke’s impressive April has been discussed here and here as he won Pitcher of the Month for April. Joe Posnanski has a great post with Greinke fun facts. The most interesting nugget from Joe is that Greinke could let up 9 runs in the first inning of his next [...]
Do the First Five Rounds of Your Draft Make or Break Your Team
Year in and year out the Matthew Berry’s of the world (who, two months into CubicleGM, still have amazing, enviable jobs) always tout that its much less important what you do with the first five picks in your fantasy draft than what you do in the middle and late rounds of the draft. The thinking [...]
MLB Players That Could be Traded Because of Poor Attendance
My last piece discussed the surprisingly strong April MLB attendance figures. Number weren’t rosy for all teams, however, as the Nats, Tigers, Blue Jays, Braves, and Astros have all seen significant early season drops. Those squads are the teams most likely interested in dumping salary mid season in an effort to decrease their payrolls. The [...]
April MLB Attendance Figures Surprisingly Strong
One of the major offseason, spring training, and early season story lines for the MLB season was how the downturn in the economy would impact baseball. The worry was that high unemployment and tightening budgets would lead to a significant drop in ticket sales, with some projecting a 20%+ drop in attendance numbers. I discussed [...]
The Problem with Early Season Story Lines – 2 Weeks Isn’t Long Enough to Tell a Full Story
Not to beat a dead horse, but a mere 3 weeks into the season, many of the early season story lines have already begun correcting themselves. Sure, everyone appreciates a great storyline, an underdog overachieving, the promise of youngsters out performing the veterans. Unfortunately, in baseball, 10 games isn’t long enough to tell the whole [...]
Ian Kinsler & Early MLB Storylines Follow Up
The recent Ian Kinsler: Historic Fantasy Games & Innings post and the Early MLB Season story lines posts from earlier in the week led to a fair amount of follow up emails. So I thought I would speak to a few of those follow ups. Dedicated reader The Commish, who wrote out first guest post, [...]
Major MLB Story Lines of First 2 Weeks
A spin around some major early season storylines: Economy Induced Attendance Drop During the offseason, estimates of how the downturn in the economy (in case you hadn’t noticed yet the economy is in shambles) would impact attendace at MLB games varied significantly. Peter Gammons reported that MLB was informing teams to plan for a 17%-20% [...]
Ian Kinsler’s Unheralded (Relatively), Historic Game
AB R H RBI 6 5 6 5 That is Ian Kinsler’s line from the Rangers game against the Baltimore Orioles from April 15th. Kinsler hit for the cycle – one of three guys to do so in a 4 day span , just the fourth time that has happened in the history of the [...]
Minor League Watch – The Intros
Spring Training, when professional baseball players from around the world descend upon Florida and Arizona, provides a truly unique stage as today’s stars, today’s role players, yesterday’s stars, and tomorrow’s stars practice and play together for 5 weeks. It’s a chance for fans to reacquaint themselves with their squad and see how their offseason acquisitions [...]
That’s Why They Play the Games. Thankfully the Baseball Writers Don’t Choose the Playoff Teams.
Between March 30 and April 6 each and every year baseball pundits think long and hard. They take out their cauldrons, mix in last season’s results, add in each team’s off-season roster maneuvers, toss in some consideration for player growth/regressions, add in some magic potion, and voila, they have their pre-season predictions. Some pontificators use [...]
