This is way too complicated for 5:45 AM: A blockbuster, 12-player, three-team swap Wednesday night landed the Mariners seven players, including strong-armed, fleet-footed center fielder Franklin Gutierrez from the Indians, but it cost Seattle right-handed closer J.J. Putz, who was traded to the Mets . . . . . . Besides Gutierrez, the Mariners received […]

In head-to-head, which statistics show a strong correlation between team strength and head-to-head record? Which show won-loss records that mostly reflect luck?

Does the home crowd cheer their team on to victory?

How much more critical are those September games?

Relocations, higher quality of competition, and second place becoming second division. If the major leagues had featured divisions and an unbalanced schedule throughout history, here’s what might have happened.

Keith Law is a smart cookie, and today on his personal blog, he made a pretty sharp observation in connection with being admitted to the BBWAA: I am still unclear on why, exactly, I might need to be a member; after conversations with probably a dozen current members, I think the opposite is true – […]

Paul Daugherty has written the kind of column for which I have absolutely no use: Baseball has never been more disconnected. The national pastime has never been less representative of the nation. As agent Scott Boras marshals his small army of colleagues at the baseball winter meetings in Las Vegas, seeking to thin the wallets […]

I hate it when my day job interferes with my social life. Joe Torre seems to be taking it better: For the last 13 years or so, Torre has visited this gambling mecca in early December to play golf and craps and to bet on the horses with his own modern-day Rat Pack. For the […]

And directly on the heels of writing that mondo-long post about silly BBWAA voting, four people who would never employ dumbass reasoning like that are granted admittance to the tribe: Rob Neyer and Keith Law of ESPN.com and Will Carroll and Christina Kahrl of Baseball Prospectus have all been asked to join the BBWAA’s ranks. […]

‘Tis the season for ill-conceived Hall of Fame columns, and today