The Former Tribe Tales Growing up around Cleveland during the ’70s and ’80s was not the best place to learn about baseball—unless you assumed that most teams had trouble making payroll and regularly traded players as if they were the farm team for various clubs that could make payroll. But it was those times that […]

For much of his life, Mitchell Page battled addiction. He drank too much. He was a heavy smoker. Back in 2007, he took a leave of absence from his job as hitting instructor for the Nationals, taking time off for what were described as “personal reasons.” According to Cardinals coach Dave McKay, Page had straightened […]

In 1920, Major League Baseball decided that home runs equaled attendance. To help with home runs, baseball made the spitball illegal. The pitch was just so dangerous! So dangerous that major league baseball allowed teams to select pitchers who would still be allowed to throw the pitch! On Sept. 20, 1934 Burleigh Grimes threw the […]

In an earlier THT Live post, I talked a little about heat maps and how they can help us compare players more easily without getting our hands dirty. I thought I would share another visual that most will find less valuable in comparing players, and more for the fun of visuals (at least it was […]

Neftali Feliz debuted his cutter during Cactus League play on Wednesday. While Jeff Passan is convinced Feliz is best suited for starting, it may be a bit premature to declare the Texas closer a full-blown four-pitch pitcher. This is a new pitch, and scouts generally don’t laud his secondary stuff. Still, this moves Feliz into […]

The knuckle curve* just doesn’t get the love it should. Often called the dry spitter, this seldom-learned pitch could be described, depending on how it is thrown, as a fast knuckeball or a slow spinning curveball. In both cases, the grip usually involved two fingers bent so the knuckles were actually on the ball and […]

Today marks 10,000 days since the birth of one of the game’s brightest young talents, Zack Greinke. He has a losing career record at 60-67, but that’s largely because he spent his entire career with the sad sack (and just plain sad) Kansas City Royals. While his teammates’ offensive ineptitude is a large chuck of […]

A buddy of mine named Andy Moursund (a) has been a great baseball fan since attending games at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., back in the early 1950s, and (b) is the proud owner of a great collection of old Sporting News papers from his boyhood. Recently, while organizing his collection, Moursund decided to tote […]

With the passing Dodger great and Hall of Famer Duke Snider, some people are comparing his career to Jim Edmonds’. I can understand much of the comparison—the numbers seem to match up. The fact that Edmonds, like Snider, had to co-exist with other great players playing his position is a good comparison. The argument for […]

It is spring training, and that means some pitchers will miss a few starts to minor aliments. Before you breathe a sigh of relief after that pitcher is back, it pays to be cautious. Stephen Strasburg: During his first big league starts, he was having trouble getting comfortable on some pitching mounds. In his start […]