10 years ago today, the Toronto Blue Jays made a very unfortunate decision. At the time, it was an understandable move, but my golly did it ever backfire on them badly. On Oct. 9, 2002, 10 years ago today, the Blue Jays released pitcher Chris Carpenter. Now, as you probably know, Carpenter had a rather […]

Tigers 5, Athletics 4: Don Kelly with the walkoff? Sure, why not? The A’s are in a deep hole now, down 2-0 in a best of five. How quickly the magic pixie dust from a late regular season run fades. Nationals 3, Cardinals 2: Gio Gonzalez walked the world, but the Nats rallied and Mike […]

We have an overflowing schedule to get through today, so I won’t waste time with introductory boilerplate. Game 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 F A’s 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 4 Tigers 0 0 1 0 0 0 2 1 1 5 (Detroit leads series 2-0) WPS […]

15,000 days ago was a brutally ugly day for pitching. One team set a mark that day that no team wants to set. On Sept. 14, 1971, the Cleveland Indians pitching staff issued more free passes than any other team has in one game since at least 1918. Admittedly, it was a long, seemingly never-ending […]

The Division Series round has begun, and the WPS recap here at THT continues. (Let me note here, as I did at the start of my current WPS trilogy, that I have a predecessor in the use of Win Percentage Added to calculate an index for the excitement of games. THT’s Dave Studeman beat me […]

In my column this week, I mentioned—as a throwaway line—that you could make a pretty team out of the players who have appeared on The Simpsons. Well, time to put my money where my mouth is. The only rule I’ve applied to this list is that the players in question had to actually have voiced […]

The playoffs have officially begun, and as I promised a few days ago, I will be reviewing all the games here at THT Live, using my Win Percentage Sum (WPS) system as a starting point for my comments. (For those of you who have dodged my articles before now, WPS is designed to measure the […]

This past year, I twice had the pleasure of serving as a judge in Vince Gennaro’s Diamond Dollars Baseball Case Competition. Vince’s idea is brilliant: develop a business school case study about baseball and ask teams of business school students to present their recommendations for the case. Just like they do at Harvard Business School, […]

Athletics 12, Rangers 5: Oakland shocks the world. No one on the planet had the A’s pegged as a playoff team and, as recently as a week ago, no one figured they had a chance in hell at the division crown. Well, that’s what you get for pegging and figuring. As for the Rangers … […]

25 years ago today was the climax to one of the great pennant race stretch runs of the 1980s. On Oct. 4, 1987, the final showdown took place between the Tigers and the Blue Jays. In late September, it didn’t look like this would be much of a race. They played a four game series […]