A couple of months ago, I got on a plane to Orlando, not to see an anthropomorphic mouse and a duck who doesn’t wear pants, but to do actual work. It’s not often that I travel for work, but I do enjoy a good plane ride, because it’s one of the few times that I can sit down and read a book without feeling guilty. On this trip, my companion was Dirk Hayhurst’s Bullpen Gospels, which had been sitting on my shelf for a while. For those who haven’t yet read it (what are you doing with your lives?), Hayhurst discusses his travels through the minors and the real life that happens in between the last out and "play ball!" (and yes, I got that right). It could double as an anthropological field study of a very curious culture: the minor-league baseball player.

Let me pull back the curtain on how BP articles are made, at least at my house. This article came about when I was washing the dishes. It's my thing. I like to listen to podcasts and scrub down pots and pans. It's wondrously therapeutic after a long day at work, and BP alumni Joe Sheehan and Rany Jazayerli were keeping me company as I struggled mightily with the remnants of mac and cheese from my daughter's lunch plate.

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Depending on the day, Robinson Cano is often the third- or fourth-most-talked-about member of the Yankee infield.

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On last Friday's episode of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, our own Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller (and guest Marc Normandin) discussed Buck Showalter's decision to start Joe Saunders in the AL wild card play-in game against the Texas Rangers. They noted that Saunders—who'll get the call again tonight in Game Four of the Yankees-Orioles ALDS—does not have amazing stuff and allows a lot of runners to reach base, and also that he does not have an exceedingly high groundball rate. Still, he seems to induce more groundballs at opportune times, and as a result, he gets a lot of double plays to bail him out of some major jams. Perhaps Saunders changes his approach with a runner on first and no one out in an intentional bid to get a groundball. It would make complete sense that he would do so.

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Over the weekend, there were plenty of end-of-season retrospectives from columnists who cast non-existent ballots for the MVPs, Cy Young award winners, and Rookies of the Year. As might be expected, many of the columnists brought up the WARP (Mike Trout) vs. Triple Crown (Miguel Cabrera) angle. There was a common theme running through the pieces that argued for Cabrera: WARP is a complicated and math-heavy stat, and because it is so complicated, how can we be sure that Trout was actually the better player?

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"He just needs another year."

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In high school, I had a very wise history teacher whose motto was that the best way to win a debate was to be able to make the argument for the other side better than your debate opponent. So, I decided to challenge myself. Can I make a case that Miguel Cabrera deserves the American League MVP over Mike Trout using sabermetrics?

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Once again, let's talk about player development from a scientific perspective. For the past couple weeks, I've been looking at the "What Can Go Wrong" Series that BP's own Jason Parks wrote last winter the way that a trained developmental specialist would and discussing how certain problems that Jason identified can be measured, even if those data aren't publicly available.

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Let's play poker. With wild cards.

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Last week, I began a series on player development and what a stathead like me can say about how to assess a player's progress. One of the most maddening things about baseball fandom (and, um, on the inside of the game too) is when prospects who are supposed to take the team into a brave new era don't pan out. Every team has "the name that shall not be uttered" in polite company. He was a can't-miss blue-chipper whom everyone figured would be the next Willie Mays. Except that he turned into the next Willie Bloomquist.

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I want to do something experimental.

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Last week, in Atlantic magazine, two researchers published the results of a study with a very unsettling conclusion: there is subtle racism at work in the broadcast booth in Major League Baseball. The idea that Caucasian players are more often praised for being "gritty" and "scrappy," while African-American, Hispanic, and Asian players aren't similarly lauded, isn’t a new one. For the first time, someone decided to put the hypothesis to an empirical test.

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