Bill Mueller will be out for 4-6 weeks following knee surgery, which means Kevin Youkilis (The Greek/Jewish God of Walks) should get an extended chance to show what he can do. Youkilis is a very intriguing offensive player, for reasons you all know about, but I think I’m more interested in seeing how he handles […]

Kit Pellow just hit a double off the right field wall with two outs in the eighth inning — the first hit off Tom Glavine, who had walked his first batter only the inning before. Another near no-no for the Mets, who have never had one of their pitchers throw a no-hitter. That’s over forty […]

Win Shares have been updated through games of May 21st, and I’ve made a couple of important changes. First, I’ve credited players with negative Win Shares if their performance falls below the minimum standard. In the original methodology, those players had their Win Shares zeroed out. This is an important change, as I described during […]

All graphs and stats, except for Win Shares, have been updated through Friday’s games. Win Shares will be updated tomorrow. We’ve started tracking a couple of new pitching stats: Groundball/Flyball ratio and Pitches per Game Started. Here are the major league leaders in pitches thrown per start: Schilling C. BOS 113 Loaiza E. CHW 110 […]

Baseball lost one of its most articulate and passionate voices yesterday, when it was learned that Doug Pappas had passed away. Doug evidently suffered heat prostration while vacationing in Big Bend National Park in Texas. He was 43 years old. Doug was an active member of the Society of American Baseball Research, chairing its business […]

Earlier today, Robert Dudek reported here the leaders in strikeout percentage for the AL and NL. Most of the lists included the guys you’d expect, but the very first name floored me — heading into today, Tigers southpaw Nate Robertson led the entire American League in strikeout percentage, and by a decent margin. He’s pitching […]

If you read THT Live often, you know that I’m pretty high on Wichita State senior lefty Tommy Hottovy. Hottovy was exclusively a reliever in his NCAA career until last weekend, when he looked great in his first career start. Tonight, though, he was even better: a 7-inning complete game victory, with just one run […]

Here are the league leaders among starting pitchers (4 starts or more) in strikeout percentage [K/(BF-IW)]. Note that National League starters generally have higher strikeout rates than American League starters because they face pitchers instead of the DH. The median for these groups of starters so far this year: AL – 14.8%; NL – 15.5%. […]

Being a third-generation Dodgers fan myself, this article by Eric Neel really struck a chord with me. He says of his grandfather, “They were his Dodgers before they were mine.” Same here. My grandfather Sam was a fan from the Brooklyn days, and he (with some help from Koufax) taught my dad the ways of […]

I have now begun work on the 2004 data for NCAA hitters and pitchers, so hopefully there will be several articles coming out of that research here in the two weeks before the draft. As a sneak peek, although my full strength-of-schedule adjustments aren’t yet prepared, I have a quick-and-dirty method that gets pretty close […]