In my last year’s article about Stanford right-hander Mark Appel, I said: …I kept thinking to myself, “If you have a 96-98 mph heater but can’t reliably command it, do you really have it at all?” It’s to his credit that he has the intelligence and humbleness to understand when he can’t throw his best […]

40 years ago today, a very different kind of baseball game was played. Well, the game itself was the same—but the baseball itself was rather distinctive. 40 years ago today, the sport of baseball tried something different—playing a game with orange baseballs. The idea was the brainchild of maverick Oakland A’s owner Charles O. Finley. […]

Twenty-five years ago today, one of the most well-regarded managers in baseball decided to call it a career: Gene Mauch, a man who had managed nearly nonstop in the big leagues for over 25 years. Normally, managers don’t retire in early March, not if they are employed anyway, and Mauch was employed as the Angels’ […]

Gary Sparago is a 50-year-old corporate bond analyst who works for an asset management company in midtown Manhattan. Although never a Yankees fan, he watched a lot of their games last summer and started to suspect that Derek Jeter’s overall performance was not as good as the hype would lead you to believe (before the […]

Maybe there’s something going around, but National League third basemen seem to be getting more than their fair share of injuries of late. Fans and fantasy owners probably are a bit panicked right now as this plague spreads. The first wounded third baseman was St. Louis’ David Freese, who landed awkwardly on his tailbone trying […]

This past weekend, Virgil Trucks passed away at the ripe old age of 95—just shy of 96, in fact. He was a former AL pitcher, mostly with the Tigers, who was a terrific talent. In his New Historical Baseball Abstract from about a decade ago, Bill James ranked Trucks one of the 100 best pitchers […]

If you’ve seen recent pictures of Wally Backman, you’d be hard-pressed to think that he was once a speedy, 160-pound middle infielder. The Triple-A manager of the Las Vegas 51s looks nothing like he did in this 1987 Topps card. To put it lightly, he’s put on more than a few pounds in his post-playing […]

120 years ago, one of the best pure hitters in baseball history debuted: George Sisler. He twice hit .400 and retired with a career mark of .340. He recorded nearly 3,000 hits, and would’ve made it into that club if it weren’t for a weird mid-career eye problem. Despite that, Sisler’s great hitting career had […]

5,000 days ago, the baseball world welcomed a new major league stadium into its midst: Safeco Field in Seattle. July 15, 1999—the first game after the annual All-Star break—witnessed the Mariners breaking in their new digs. It was a massive improvement over their old place. For the last two decades and change, Seattle had played […]

There has been a lot of talk about Aroldis Chapman lately after Paul Dougherty wrote that the Reds intended to move him to the bullpen. No one else confirmed what Dougherty’s unnamed source told him and the announcement certainly hasn’t come down (Reds brass denied there was even anything to announce), so there’s still a […]