I have a nasty spring cold, my allergies are acting up, I broke my glasses, and I’m in the process of moving. I’m still probably feeling better than Brad Fullmer, but that doesn’t do much for me. For those of you east of the Rockies who are gainfully employed, that’s a reference to last night’s…
Last day we’ll deal with this, I promise. One thing I probably should have included in yesterday’s column was a brief explanation of how park factors are calculated. A lot of the mail I received attempted to tie Veterans Stadium’s high walk park factor to the composition of the Phillies’ staff. While that seems to…
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six First, let’s recap the complete Top 40 lists for each publication, along with the grade for each player: Baseball Prospectus Baseball America John Sickels 1. Nick Johnson 1 1. Rick Ankiel 6 1. Corey Patterson 5 2. Rick Ankiel 6 2. Pat Burrell…
I returned from a road trip up the California coast to what I will gently call a flood of, um, "constructively critical" e-mail from Yankee fans, responding to last Thursday’s piece for ESPN.com. Buried amidst the profanity, though, was some good response to the Daily Prospectus of the same day, which dealt with Curt Schilling‘s…
DIGGING A HOLE "Nobody got injured." —Tony Muser, Royals manager, on the positives of losing four straight to the Yankees "Right now we’re like a dog that is down. When you get a dog down, you kick it. When you’re being kicked, you don’t like it." —Russ Johnson, Devil Rays infielder "Every time we play…
Each edition of the annual Baseball Prospectus covers more than 1,600 players, with full Davenport Translations and comments. Even with that kind of blanket coverage, every year players who miss the cut for the book make the cut in spring training, finding their way onto major-league rosters. Our staff has collected DTs and player comments…
Back in March, I did a column on the Arizona Diamondbacks that contained the following sentence: "The staff is the D’backs strength, but other than Randy Johnson, there’s no one here who’s a good bet for 200 innings of league-average ball." That generated a lot of reader mail, some of which sung the praises of…