Chief witness to Blyleven’s curveball.(Icon/SMI) Phil Roof didn’t hit much over his 15-year career with the Twins, Angels, Indians, A’s, White Sox, and Blue Jays—he batted .215 with a mere 43 home runs—but he did play a role in the development of a Hall of Famer. Roof was one of Bert Blyleven’s early major league […]

Yankees 4, Mariners 1: And then there were 17.  CC Sabathia carried a perfecto into the seventh — broken up right after he came back following a rain delay — and struck out 14.  The M’s struck out 18 times in all. But then again, they’re horrifyingly bad, so that’s understandable. Braves 4, Pirates 3: […]

Perhaps you’ve heard: The Seattle Mariners are on a major down spell lately. That’s putting it mildly: Monday night, they set a franchise record, losing their 16th straight game. Yeah, that’s bad. I mean it could be worse—they still have a better season record than the Orioles, Cubs or Astros heading into today. And the […]

Rangers 20, Twins 6:  A lot of people will probably make a football joke here like “heh, Texas missed the extra point and held Minnesota to two field goals!”  That’s hacky.  Try this: in the first five innings the Rangers scored like so:  3 3 3 5 4. Or, birdie, par, birdie, par, par! Lol! Hilarious, […]

At some point today, it’ll be 1,000,000,000 seconds since baseball experienced one of its biggest and most unlikely transformations. All those ticks of the clock ago, Dan Okrent drew up the rules for Rotisserie Baseball, beginning the fantasy sports craze. Started as something small among a group of friends, fantasy baseball—and fantasy sports as a […]

First off, I made a necessary correction in the in-season projection of fielding runs. Quite simply, the previous code was not correctly designed and was giving an incorrectly weighted sum of the past four seasons. The intention was to apply the same weighting system that is used for the in-season batting and pitching projections, but […]

I was reading Bill Chuck’s newsletter this morning and was struck by this statement: This season, the Blue Jays have been 5-5, 6-6, 7-7, 13-13, 20-20, 21-21, 22-22, 23-23, 24-24, 26-26, 28-28, 29-29, 30-30, 32-32, 34-34, 35-35, 36-36, 39-39, 47-47, 49-49, 50-50, and today they are 51-51 and 15-15 in their last 30 games. The […]

If you’d like a job in baseball and know your web-based applications, call the Indians about this job opening: Executive Development Fellow (EDF) – Web Software Development, Baseball Systems Full job posting and application process can be found online at www.indians.com/jobs. The primary responsibilities of the EDF are to assist the Software Development staff with […]

Cubs 5, Astros 4: The Astros should be bottled like some 19th Century patent medicine, guaranteed to cure all!  They can call it “Dr. Mills’ Blood, Liver and Stomach Invigorational Tincture” or something. Jeff Baker took a swig of it, obviously, and it gave him the gumption and pep to hit the game-winning single in […]

Pat Gillick supplied some humility, Roberto Alomar provided poignancy, and Bert Blyleven brought home the humor as the Hall of Fame officially expanded by three on Sunday afternoon. The three men delivered a trio of solid speeches at the 2011 induction ceremony, which was attended by a few thousand fans on a sunny and warm […]