Baseball historian John Thorn has just published a baseball quiz called The Road to Cooperstown on his blog. It’s great fun; give it a try.

There’s a problem with the WBC tiebreaker system—and it’s not that Canada was eliminated despite finishing with the same record as the US and beating them. It’s this: Last night, Korea was guaranteed to advance unless they lost while allowing 8 runs. Had they not scored in the eighth inning and the game had been […]

My article on Non-Batting Batters was posted on Baseball Think Factory for review and comment. Among the many interesting and informative comments it drew was one from a poster with the handle of Gerry, who gently pointed out that the article was in error in identifying the Giants’ Freddie Maguire in 1923 as the very […]

The other most-anticipated book of the offseason is also available for pre-order. I’m talking about The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball by Tango, Lichtman and Dolphin. Both The Book and the Fielding Bible are must-haves for any serious baseball fan.

David Pinto has an excellent fielding stat called Probabilistic Model of Range, but you can call it PMR. It’s probably the most complete and thorough fielding analysis you can find on the Internet because it’s based on the exact location and speed of every batted ball. And he’s started to publish his 2005 results here. […]

Arbitration figures were swapped today, and one of the newest Nationals, Alfonso Soriano, asked for an incredible $12 million. Soriano achieved four (count ’em, 4) Win Shares Above Bench last year. According to Net Win Shares Value, that made him worth $6 million. When you factor in injury risk and the like, his most appropriate […]

Reviews of The Hardball Times Annual 2006 continue. The latest is from Many Go; Few Understand, a little gem of a blog. Among his many comments (and good feedback) is this quote: Like Bill James’ Historical Abstracts, it contains so much excellent material that readers will find themselves returning to the book time and time […]

For those of you who purchased the Hardball Times Annual 2006 (and there’s still plenty of time to order yours!), David Gassko has updated the Fielding Range outfield calculations. You can get the updated figures by following the instructions for downloading spreadsheets in the book.

I’ll be a guest on the AOL radio show “Sports Bloggers Live” tonight at 5:33pm (and available to listen to all weekend), talking about the Yankees’ signing of Johnny Damon and its impact on the AL East. Be sure to listen in!

You may have noticed that we have a new contributor at The Hardball Times. David Appelman, the proprietor of the excellent fangraphs site, will be penning his unique graphical player reviews for us on a daily basis. We think you’ll find David’s insights a great addition to our site.