Hope you all had a great Fourth of July! In honor of our Nation’s birthday, I put my daughter in the cap of a defunct Canadian baseball team before heading out to the Independence Day parade. And my birthday is on Bastille Day, so yes, I am a double agent for Francophones the world over. […]

The bases were loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning. There were no outs. David Berner, the Jethawks closer, leaned in for the sign from his catcher. He got it, and gave the tiny nod of acknowledgment. Then the tall, broad-shouldered southpaw went to his set stretch position. He checked the runners, he kicked […]

Ty Wigginton will never get more ink. It’s the season for trade rumors, for evaluating the value of rent-a-players to teams that fancy themselves contenders, for sorting out the buyers from the can’t-decides from the sellers. Often, it’s the time of year when fans of teams in the last category watch their teams peddle their […]

As some of you know, the Hardball Times posted team stats and graphs the last six years, a practice we had to cancel this year when our economics could no longer support purchasing the data. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get them to you ever since, and I think I’ve hit […]

Ubaldo Jimenez has had, without a doubt, the most spectacular season of any starting pitcher in the major leagues. You know about the no-hitter, of course. And shiny-number devotees worldwide marvel at his 14 wins, all collected prior to the beginning of July. Yes, Jimenez has put together quite a nifty half-season. And yet, quietly, […]

Happy Friday. This is a bit of a departure from my usual stuff, but for a while I’ve been wanting to find a better way to visualize a team’s season schedule. A ways back I had a conversation with a casual fan who didn’t realize that a baseball season is organized into a series of […]

Indians 6, Blue Jays 1: This game freaked me out in that the score went final before 2:30 yesterday afternoon.  There’s almost something unnatural about a game being over that early in the day. I’d love to live on the west coast, but having baseball be over before noon out there would totally wig me […]

Mariners 7, Yankees 0: Having Cliff Lee and Felix Hernandez shut the Yankees down in back-to-back games was exactly how the Mariners drew it up this offseason. Only they figured it would happen in meaningful games in October as opposed to playing-out-the-string-already-time in late June.  But hey, dominance is dominance, and King Felix had it […]

The San Francisco Giants dealt veteran catcher Bengie Molina to the Texas Rangers Wednesday for 28-year-old reliever Chris Ray and a player to be named later. Molina, 35, was hitting a paltry .257/.312/.332 in 221 plate appearances for a .284 wOBA. Ray is currently sporting a 3.41 ERA for the Rangers in 31.2 innings pitched. […]

The DL Monster is feasting on the Phillies right now. Injuries have stacked piles of bodies in front of head athletic trainer Scott Sheridan and friends just one year after the group earned the Dick Martin Award. Jimmy Rollins has been lost twice to calf strains. Joe Blanton’s oblique got angry at him. A confrontation […]