Last week The New York Times ran an article about how the Republican Party is trying to derail Jim Bunning’s potential 2010 reelection campaign. Seems Bunning has become a cranky loose cannon, and even in the presumably safe state of Kentucky, his record, behavior, and temperament have folks worried that he’ll lose. As all hacky […]

On March 8, 1984, Richard Barbieri was born. He’s unlikely to see any time in the major leagues, but plenty of others born on March 8 have. Richard picks the best of them.

Shining a light into the lone dark alley of The Mahatma’s long and brilliant career.

My mom is great. If she’s ever out shopping and sees a random baseball book of any kind, she buys it for me. Not so much books of prose — she knows I’m critical of a lot of authors and worries that she might get me something I wouldn’t like — but if there’s a […]

Based on a database created a few months ago, Chris looks for some context-dependent similarity scores to compare offensive seasons with each other.

Just surfing before stepping out for the day when I came across this interesting little nugget in a travel piece about Hana, Hawaii in the San Francisco Chronicle: At the end of World War II, San Francisco industrialist Paul Fagan built the first-ever Hawaiian hotel outside Waikiki. He could hardly have chosen a more obscure […]

How they compared as the four major sports grew

On March 5, 2009 the second World Baseball Classic kicked off as Japan shut out China. The clear favorites in this year’s pool are Japan and Korea, two countries with well-known baseball histories, but today Richard looks at less baseball-oriented Asian countries.

At what point do editors start rejecting stories about Bernie Williams wanting to still play in the majors? I don’t think the dream of finding the Northwest Passage died this hard.

If only changing one’s luck were as easy as changing one’s name.