Two wildly different players were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday—Derek Jeter, the near-unanimous, first-ballot shortstop who captained the New York Yankees to five World Series championships, and Larry Walker, who barely made it to Cooperstown on his tenth and final ballot fifteen years after his final MLB season. Jeter was easily…
On Friday, I introduced the All-MLB batters of the 2010s. Today, it's time for the pitchers. You should know the drill by now. Starting rotation 1. Clayton Kershaw One of the best ways to evaluate a baseball player is not how well he plays at his best, but at how well he plays at his…
On Monday, I posted an NL Central All-Decade team, which is inherently arbitrary and pointless and rewards players for spending time in the MLB division which generally spends the second-least in the sport on player salaries. I had fun, and I hope you did, but it was inherently an exercise in provincialism. Here's the real…
Some people like end-of-decade lists. Some people hate them, or argue that ACTUALLY the decade began in 2011 because there was no Year Zero (you know, before written history--this is why we frequently declare things like that the 1970 Baltimore Orioles were the best baseball team of the 1960s and that Goodfellas was the greatest film of…
In just under a week, a panel will decide the four teams that will participate in the creatively-titled College Football Playoff. Will the committee tasked with doing so pick the correct teams? Subjective, but they'll probably come pretty close. Is there anything stopping them from making hilariously bad picks for the sake of hilarity? Nope!…
Per a quick glance at FanGraphs, 379 players participated in a Major League Baseball regular season game for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2010s. Given that the Cardinals were the third-winningest team in the sport over the decade, and by some measures the most successful team in the sport since 2010, it should come…
When I was ten years old, I’d take a wiffle ball bat and a tennis ball, use my left hand to toss the tennis ball up in the air, quickly get into a batting stance, and swing. If it went 100 feet and relatively high, it was a home run. That’s what fantasies are for.…
So, um, that was fun. The rational part of me knew that last night was possible, and maybe even likely. I have the receipts to prove it. But the dumb fan in me couldn't fathom the Cardinals ever winning a game after Sunday night's heartbreak, much less the next game. I fancy myself an analytical person who…
In the twenty-first century, Major League Baseball’s front office personnel had a major breakthrough in pop culture relevance. With the enormous popularity of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, general managers became easily identifiable avatars for fans, particularly sabermetrically-inclined fans. The rising popularity of franchise modes in EA Sports video games, not to mention Baseball Mogul or Out Of…
Who is the team of the 2010s? This is an open-ended question but it is also a question which can be quantified. So I decided I wanted to quantify it. Of course, the 2010s are not yet over, and the next two-plus months of baseball, particularly the off-season, will go a long way in defining…
