A pitcher collecting 300 career wins is an extremely rare feat. In fact, I would rank it as the second rarest feat in sports. No hitters? 256 of those. Cycles? Hundreds. 6 Hit Games? 50+. Even 4 strike-out innings are more common. There are 24 members of the 300 club. Only perfect games, 16 ever, [...]
Posts under ‘History’
The Favre Saga Continues! The Longest Streak of Consecutive “Sikes” In Sports (Human?) History
And you thought Jordan took a while to come, and go, and come, and go… We loved it when he came back the first time. Watching that sleek, smooth basketball player swimming in his minor league White Sox uniform, wearing the double-ear flap helmet was a little sad. Before we knew it he was back [...]
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 [...]
Red Sock/x: Curt Schilling’s Place in this Painful Era
Congrats to Curt Schilling on a great career, his retirement officially announced earlier this week on his blog, 38 Pitches. For a tangent, kudos also to Deadspin for catching a SportsCenter moment that may well contribute to the job loss number for March (I’m Sure This Won’t Annoy Curt Schilling One Bit).
History Class: What Types of In-Season Acquisitions Help Teams Make the Playoffs?
Each year without fail, the MLB trade deadline is an exciting time. July 4th weekend has passed. MLB All Star break has passed. You have a good idea where your team stands, and yet all of a sudden, without failure your team has the chance to go Extreme Makeover, Baseball Edition. They can choose: buyers [...]
History Class – All-Time Fantasy Baseball Team: Pitchers
Welcome back, class. As a follow up to our last History Class post, today, we look at the best pitching seasons of all time, through the lens of a standard fantasy baseball scoring system. Again, we start with every season since 1871, apply standard fantasy points to each season, remove all of the season before [...]
History Class – All-Time Fantasy Baseball Team: Batters
This marks the first of a series of posts focused on the history of The Game (baseball, for you non-purists). Thanks to our friends (actually in no way are they my friends, just good people that provide free access to every player’s stats from every season since 1871) over at baseball1.com, I have more stats than Excel 2003 could handle. Luckily Microsoft foresaw this problem I was going to encounter and brought out Excel 2007.
Casual fans and talking heads alike, everyone loves comparing seasons. From everyone’s worst nemesis, Skip Bayless, to our good friends over at BaseballProspectus (again, not really friends, but they do amazing work) and their WARP1, WARP2, and WARP3, people must know who had the best season ever, how seasons compare, and whether Wade Boggs 1986 season was really better than Carlos Beltran’s 2003 season. Most (calling you Skip Bayless) simply play the homer card and rant and rant, albeit founded on nothing substantial. My completely imperfect, yet numerically-based solution: apply standard points league fantasy scoring to every season since 1871, and see where the dust settles.
