By age 26 Chico Harlan had made the major leagues of sportswriting: a beat reporter covering the Nationals for the Washington Post. He was an inventive, sometimes original writer who obviously worked hard to rescue the daily game story from its irrelevance in a wired world. Then he opened his mouth and chomped his foot. […]

I wanted to just straight up steal the title of this post, but I couldn’t do it. Thanks to Katron.org, we can now easily look at batted balls from one park and see what they look like in another park. Pretty cool, eh? This was done with home runs a while back using hit tracker […]

Over the summer, in a discussion about starters and relievers over at The Book Blog, I said this: I think a lot has to do with preconceived notations of what people think starters and relievers “look like.” Joba Chamberlain “looks like” a reliever. Jamie Moyer “looks like” a starter. I’m sure, on both a conscious […]

Last year, Baseball Prospectus shocked the world with their projected batting line of 311/.395/.546 for Oriole catcher Matt Wieters. Colin Wyers examined in depth how this indicated a severe problem with the Davenport Translations used to adjust the minor league data fed into the Baseball Prospectus PECOTA projection system. I’m no Colin, and I won’t […]

This morning I read in the Daily News that the Mets in 2009 had fallen under the spell of Tony Bernazard and this opposite-field hitting philosophy. “This is nuts,” I thought as I sipped my cappuccino. “I’ll post a THT Live on this later.” As it happens, as it always happens, somebody beat me to […]

In order to make room on the 40-man roster for newly-signed reliever Chan Ho Park, the New York Yankees designated Edwar Ramirez for assignment. Ramirez has his flaws, but in a marketplace where decent middle men snag three-year contracts, Ramirez could be a shrewd acquisition for the right team. Twenty-nine later this month, Ramirez has […]

Following Rick Porcello’s big league promotion, the Detroit Tigers’ farm system is considered rather fallow by prospect evaluators. Baseball America has the Tigers ranked 26th in the publication’s annual talent rankings, and ESPN’s Keith Law places the club 17th in his organizational rankings. But with Curtis Granderson in the Bronx, Placido Polanco patrolling the hot […]

Wednesday, I wrote about the ten players I’m keeping a close eye on this season. Or, rather, the first eight. In the spirit of creating this list in a way that enables us to follow along together, I opened up the last two spots for commenters’ nominations. The original eight were: 1. Manny Ramirez 2. […]

Bryan Smith wrote an interesting and thought-provoking article earlier today over at Fangraphs. Basically, Smith is trying to formulate a method to predict a median future performance for an individual prospect (he used Cubs shortstop Starlin Castro as his example). This is certainly an worthwhile idea and one that could potentially revolutionize the way prospects […]

What you get here is a little like an asteroid collision in progress, such as that recently observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. A couple ideas from different places crashed together in my head, a few parts stuck, and others went shooting off in random directions. I haven’t corralled them into nice orbits, yet. Instead […]