They come out every week, Heater Magazine and THT’s Batted Ball Report. Today, it’s the BBR, available to those who have prepurchased the 2010 Hardball Times Annual. Seriously. If you are going to buy the Annual, why not help us out by buying it a little early and getting the weekly reports and stats, too? […]

Okay, so the title is misleading. They’re both numbers and can be subtracted from one another with wild abandon. Just don’t expect it to mean anything. What do I mean? The basic formula for FIP is: (13*HR+3*BB-2*K) / IP + 3.2 You can fancy it up a bit (or a whole lot, if you want […]

Brian Matusz will be making his third career start this evening for Baltimore. Coming off an outing in which he allowed three home runs and couldn’t pitch out of the third inning, he’ll be facing one of the hottest hitting teams in baseball, the Angels. Matusz, a left hander, was the fourth overall selection in […]

I’m playing around with a playoff odds calculator that I’ve created in excel — all will be divulged in an upcoming article. Anyway, to test drive my calculator I thought I’d take a quick look at the AL East. As of yesterday the standings were: American League East Pwins Diff NYA 72 43 .626 0.0 […]

The Red Sox have acquired shortstop Alex Gonzalez and roughly $1.1 million from the Reds for minor leaguer Kris Negron. Shortstop has been a trouble spot for the BoSox all year. On the year, the club has a -21.9 UZR, good (the better term would be bad) enough for 26th in the bigs. They’re 29th […]

Recently, in these electronic pages, Mr. Adam Guttridge wrote an interesting article about a Florida State League game he’d attended with Kiley McDaniel of Baseball Prospectus. In said piece — itself a picture of journalistic elegance — Guttridge provides sabermetric- and scouting-type analysis of some prospects of interest to the THT reader — in this […]

Padres rookie Mat Latos will make his sixth major league start tonight in St. Louis. Latos is currently 4-1 with a WHIP of 0.94, giving everyone a glimpse of what his future his in the big leagues might be like. He was an 11th round draft pick out of Broward College in 2006, and has […]

Long-time readers of the Hardball Times may know that I’ve done a lot of work with Win Shares, creating Win Shares Above Bench and ranking the all-time greats. Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is newest win-based stat of choice (I’m still a fan of WPA, too). I wrote about the difference WAR can make for […]

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about making WAR graphs. There were several requests for plot lines and the legend to be larger, and I’ve done that. Also, at Tango’s blog, there was some discussion about including the total WAR in the legend, and how to make that line up properly. It occured to […]

Much has been made of Yankees top prospect Austin Jackson. Jackson, an 8th round pick in 2005, made quite an impression during spring training posting a .333/.385/.667 in 36 at bats. Jackson’s name has been mentioned frequently as the Yankees center fielder of the future and he will very likely see time in the majors […]