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May 13, 2013 7:35 am
Ben Lindbergh
The Cubs take another step toward contention by locking up their slugging first baseman for several more years.
Ben and Sam draft starting pitchers age 25 and under, then discuss whether there's any significance to the fact that we haven't seen a no-hitter yet this season.
The best and worst receivers of the week and the 2013 season so far.
No intro section this time; I should have a couple framing-related features on the way early next week, which I don't want to tease too much. Let's get right to the leaderboards and frames of the week.
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Starting a new series with a 12-pitch battle between Mike Moustakas and Chris Sale.
I’ve always loved long plate appearances. If one of the best thing about baseball is the batter-pitcher matchup, and one of the other best things about baseball is that it has no clock or appointed time for anything to end, then it stands to reason (sort of) that double-digit-pitch batter-pitcher matchups would be the absolute best thing about baseball. So each Friday, I’m going to highlight the most extended sequence of the seven-day period from the previous Thursday-Wednesday. If there’s a tie, I’ll pick the most interesting plate appearance.
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May 10, 2013 8:45 am
Ben Lindbergh
Robots aren't a realistic solution for all of umpires' ills.
The building I grew up in had manually operated elevators. They were quaint prewar contraptions that required an attendant to slide a metal screen across the entrance and a pull a hand crank to start the ascent and stop at the desired destination. (They looked a little like this.) When you got to your floor, you felt like you’d earned it. Or you would have, if not for the person paid to take you up and down.
Those elevators had been there as long as the building, so they had tradition and inertia on their side. And most of the time, they did the job as well as a more modern elevator. But they had a tendency to get stuck between floors, they broke down fairly frequently, and they were expensive to service. Eventually, it became clear that to complete another repair would only postpone the inevitable at additional cost, and the manually operated elevators were replaced by the boring kind with buttons. I don’t remember any outcry about preserving the historic human element of the elevators, probably because by that point the would-be preservationists were sick of climbing stairs.
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May 10, 2013 5:00 am
Ben Lindbergh
Life is hard, and so is fielding qualified players at all eight positions.
An Effectively Wild listener named Dewitt sent in this suggestion a few days ago:
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Ben and Sam talk to Sports on Earth Senior Writer Will Leitch about the evolution of baseball coverage and the fan's relationship with sports media.
Ben and Sam discuss the sunscreen scandal and how much clubhouse chemistry matters to the Astros.
Ben and Sam answer emails about what it would look like if a hitter got the yips, what Starlin Castro could turn into, errors in sabermetric research, and more.
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May 7, 2013 11:27 am
Ben Lindbergh
On five players attempting to do new things this season, and whether those things have worked.
Four teams asked five players to do things this season that they’d never done prior to 2013. This article is about how well those things have worked for the first six weeks, and whether they can continue.
1. Shin-Soo Choo: start in center field
It’s not that Choo has turned into a superb center fielder. That was never the plan. Starting Choo in center, a position he hadn’t played at all since 2009 and hadn’t played regularly since 2002 (as a 19-year-old in A-ball), was always going to be an exercise in extreme double-entry bookkeeping: Would the runs his bat added outnumber the runs his glove gave up? So far, the answer is an easy “yes.” Choo’s .347 TAv ranks 10th among players with at least 100 plate appearances, and he’s second only to Miguel Cabrera in VORP.
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With All-Star voting officially underway, Ben and Sam make their incredibly premature picks, with Jason Wojciechowski joining them to settle any disputes.
Ben and Sam discuss Scott Kazmir's win over the weekend, then talk about the Angels' outlook for the rest of this season and beyond.
Ben Lindbergh is the Editor-in-Chief of Baseball Prospectus. He writes regularly for ESPN Insider, has contributed to four BP annuals and 
Overthinking It: The Incredible New Neal Cotts
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