Not all samples are small, but all samples are samples. Still, some samples are better samples than other samples. Russell Carleton showed us which are which last year, by which I mean that he showed, for a variety of stats, how big a sample we need for the signal to outweigh the noise. One happy outcome from that study is that walk rate for hitters is a stat that "stabilizes" faster than almost any other.

Let me put this right up front, because it's the eye-catching number: Bartolo Colon's percentage of batters walked through eight starts this season (i.e. through 47 1/3 innings pitched, i.e. through 189 batters faced, i.e. almost 30 percent of the way to the number of hitters he faced last year) is 1.1 percent.

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Baseball is, it has been said repeatedly, the quasi–team game, the sport that is more than one-on-one and yet, in the conflict that lies at its essence, not. You don't need me to pontificate on that general subject. What you do need me to do is guide you on a stroll through one of the team-oriented aspects of the game, with a promise of some historical greatness at the end. (Don't skip there, though—it's more rewarding this way.)

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On Tuesday, I read a good essay by Michael Bourne¹ at The Millions, a book blog, arguing that the current state of information distribution requires that book reviewers abandon their news-oriented approach to reviewing and move toward an analytic mode. That is, reviewers should assume that potential consumers of a book can find out all the basic details about a book's author, its plot, its writing style, and whether people like it by going to Amazon and Goodreads and any number of other sites. So assuming, reviewers should, if they wish to retain relevance, not bother with these basic details in their reviews and should instead:

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Sometimes you think big. You have hypotheses or theories about how the game of baseball works in some fundamental way or you have a deep analysis of a player or a team or transaction that shines a light nobody has yet shined.

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Here's Joey Votto, whose power travails you've probably heard about and whose weird stat line has been the subject of some head-scratching, through Monday's action: 63 plate appearances, 21 walks, one homer, one triple, one double. That's the highest walk rate in baseball (it's not close) and an isolated power of .146. This article isn't about Joey Votto. That makes this maybe a weird "lede" but bear with me.

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The history of the business of baseball is filled with at least as many scoundrels and thieves as the history of the game on the field. Google something like "worst owners baseball history" and you'll find reams of blog posts and articles with stories of racism, and rich men laying waste to cities, and incompetents, and all manner of other hoodlums. Of course, team owners never act alone. Cities and counties and states are run by the same power elite that produces the lead dogs of sports franchises, and leagues frequently have help from local politicians in their schemes to build boondoggle stadiums, place expansion franchises, and shift teams from city to city.

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Baseball knowledge expands rapidly, inside the organized professional realm and out. We know things about outfield defense and batted balls and catcher pitch-receiving and pitcher skill and the best way to score a run that we did not know 10, 20, 50 years ago. There is also plenty we do not know, sometimes particular to baseball and sometimes dealing with general human knowledge as applied to baseball. (Think about questions of psychology, for instance.) The question, or one of the questions, if you're in a front office, is how these areas of knowledge intersect with your willingness to pay D dollars for player P.

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BP Alumnus Marc Normandin and I are cat-lovers. No, no, we're not cats who make out with each other. We have cats, and we love them. We're also, duh, baseball-lovers. What better way to combine our interests than to have our cats make their best guesses at who the winners of the 2013 season will be?

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The moment you've all been waiting for has arrived: today I finish what I started last week and discuss three facts, two true and one less so, about the most anonymous member of each National League team's 40-man roster. Each of these players is in a way of thinking one of the top 1200 baseball players in the world.

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In Major League Baseball, the teams are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the players on the 25-man roster, who win games, and the others, who toil in the minors. These are their stories.

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You've heard this one, even if it's past its sell-by date by now: "Epic fail, bro."

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