Bill Simmons fields and answers a VORP question in his mailbag. Even ends it with a VORP joke that isn’t designed to make fun of VORP. Sure, he needed an assist from BP’s Joe Sheehan to do it, but let’s give him and the ESPN-Baseball Prospectus marriage some points for positively exploiting corporate synergy. Well, […]

AOL’s FanHouse started out as Jamie Mottram’s fresh-air response to MSM blather. Since its relaunch back in January, however, there is a lot more MSM there than there used to be: FanHouse.com, the recently-launched sports site from AOL’s MediaGlow publishing unit, announced six major additions to its growing roster of professional journalists. Joining FanHouse’s writing […]

Following up on deMause’s note about empty seats in Shea, Bob Raissman wonders how a less-than-capacity crowd at Yankee Stadium is going to look to the viewers at home: Ticket talk triggered a memory from long ago – Sept. 22, 1966. The Yankees would finish in 10th place that season and on that day, 413 […]

You saw this coming a mile away, but now it’s official: It was barely a year ago when I launched FiveThirtyEight.com, a political number-crunching website that I expected to receive a few hundred hits a day and occupy perhaps five hours of my time per week. Since then, thanks to a combination of being in […]

Hall of Fame third baseman, ten time All-Star, and 1949 batting champ George Kell has died. I knew him best as the play-by-play guy for Tigers’ games on WDIV in the 70s and 80s. He was paired with Al Kaline in those days, which made a rare double Hall-of-Fame broadcast combo. Kaline’s unsure commentary made […]

Next time you read a column in which some crusty writer complains that players today don’t have the positive team-first attitudes that guys in previous generations did, go searching through some archives. The L.A. Times’ Keith Thursby did, and he found evidence that

Alex Remington at the most excellent Braves blog Chop-n-Change interviewed yours truly recently, the results of which can be found here. Lots of Braves talk, a little blog talk, and I think I finally came up with a good answer for the “what would you do if you were commissioner for a day” question.

At least according to advertisers and the people who care about them: IT is rare that media buyers form a consensus on anything, but in the case of the neophyte Major League Baseball Network, which had its premiere in January, they seem to agree that they like its chances of becoming a successful player in […]

A run of the mill notes column yesterday, with this thrown in: The Reds have let teams know that they will wait and see whether they need to move Aaron Harang during the season. Harang is scheduled to make $12.5 million next season and $12.75 million with a $2 million buyout for 2011. After going […]

. . . this is simply an exercise in delusion: If San Diego’s offense were a restaurant, it would be getting one-star reviews from some observers. Scouts have generally been remarkably unimpressed by the Padres’ lineup. Then, there was the GM of another National League West team who said anonymously that the Friars “look like […]