The Yankees’ 2021 season came to a fittingly ignominious close with a convincing 6-2 trouncing by the Red Sox in the Wild Card Play-In game last night. I say “fitting,” because the punchless Yankees deserved no more after scoring only 7 runs in their final four “must-win” games and being outclassed by the Tampa Bay […]
Traditional baseball statistics are being devalued, as their relationship to actual player value is rightly questioned. A pitcher’s won-lost record is now regularly described as unimportant. One current example is the pitcher who pitches four shutout innings in a 7-inning doubleheader game but doesn’t qualify for a win, even though, percentage-wise, he has contributed more […]
August 21. The Twins’ brief spurt of encouraging wins against Houston, Chicago, Tampa Bay and Cleveland is giving way to the all-too-familiar collapse when facing the Yankees, which leads to a sober reassessment of not only where they are, but where they could be next year. In rereading my preseason predictions on this site, I […]
Ever since they appeared on Sports Illustrated’s cover in 2013, Miguel Sano and Byron Buxton have been linked as the future of the Minnesota Twins. Buxton had been rated the top high-school prospect in the country, the ultimate five-tool player, and the powerful Sano had been featured in a documentary, Pelotero, about the grooming and scouting […]
It’s hard to be too hopeful about the Twins’ 2021 season, because it’s hard to see where they have improved over the last two years. In fairness, though, it should be noted that the Twins have won more games in those two years than anyone else in the American League, so the bar is relatively […]
I can’t remember an NFL team being so overmatched on both the offensive and defensive lines as were the Vikings in their Christmas Day loss to the New Orleans Saints. The Minnesota secondary wasn’t much better, either. The Vikings gave us 53 points, the most since 1963, and that number would have been higher had […]
The Twins have said goodbye, for the moment at least, to leftfielder Eddie Rosario, who led the team in rbi’s the last two or three years. It used to be thought that the rbi was the statistic that best indicated a team’s most productive hitter, but not only did the Twins show little uncertainty in […]
The better team, the Dodgers, won the World Series last night, but they got more than a little help from the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays and his adherence to a pet peeve of mine, “analytics.” This is the trend that has swept the Major Leagues the last half-dozen years, although it was introduced […]
It’s hard to be discouraged about the Twins at mid-season, given their 20-10 record, second-best in the Majors, a winning percentage that would result in 107 victories in a normal full season. But cracks are appearing, and not just in the two losses to weak-hitting Cleveland following the mid-year mark. The first I’ve alluded to […]
An undiscussed consequence of the tendency to overshift pull hitters is what it means for the scoring. In a game last night the Angels played their shortstop in short right field, in between the first and second basemen. I presume a ground ball hit to the shifted shortstop will be scored 6-3. But now, what […]
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