Introduction Doesn’t it always seem to happen to your team? Down by two in the 5th, your team gets a lead-off double followed by a walk. First and second, no one out – this is the start of a big inning. Next thing you know, after a lazy fly-ball to shallow left and a strikeout,…
When David Ortiz connected for his first home run of the season, in the middle of a six-run fifth inning that powered the Red Sox to Wednesday’s win over Toronto, he told reporters in Boston that for the time in nearly 40 games he looked “like a real hitter.” But if Big Papi is to…
Last year, before his team’s magical 2008 season began, Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon gave his players t-shirts featuring an unlikely mathematical message: “9 = 8.” Nine players, playing hard for nine innings each game, could make the Rays one of the eight clubs to reach the post-season, he told the team. After Tampa…
The lesson that many people take away from Michael Lewis’s best-selling book Moneyball is that On Base Percentage (OBP) is the only way to build a good baseball team. What is often missed is that the book is really a tale of economics, about finding inefficiencies in the market and exploiting them. In the late…
An Intro to Evaluating and Predicting Pitching Performance The crack of the bat as it makes contact with the ball at a live baseball game has to be one of the more nostalgic “American audible events.” There’s just something about it that makes us all remember summer afternoons at the ballpark: the smell of hot…