The Yankees and Phillies are each dealing with the health concerns of about $20 million worth of ballplayer. How they’re coping, along with updates on Jerome Williams, Michael Young and Victor Martinez, inside.
The Angels, Twins, A’s and Devil Rays all earned top marks for their work last week. Which team showed up on the other end of the curve? Hint: they’re in the wild-card chase. Steven Goldman explains all this and much more about the week that was in the AL.
Is there more than defense involved in the Nomar Garciaparra trade? What do the Reds have for the future? And who’s got the best-rested staff in baseball? Answers to these questions and more news from Boston, Cincinnati, and San Diego in your Thursday Prospectus Triple Play.
The Marlins upgrade their awful catcher situation, but at what cost? The Yankees unload an albatross in Jose Contreras. The Pirates get an average haul for an average pitcher. These and other news and notes out of Florida, New York and Pitssburgh in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Good teams shuffle bodies to get the weekend’s swag into uniform, while bad ones start taking a look at the stars of the future. All this, and Ryan Dempster, too, in the post-deadline edition of TA.
It’s a key time in the baseball season, as teams make decisions on how to get the most out of tired, banged-up ballplayers now while keeping an eye on the standings and the calendar. Will Carroll updates the injury status of more than a dozen of them, and has a kind word for Brad Radke, in today’s UTK.
The PECOTA projection that has garnered the most attention this year is the one for the Reds’ Wily Mo Pena. Nate Silver breaks down how PECOTA arrived at such an optimistic–and accurate–prediction.
After much dithering about, major league GMs were finally able to cobble together a respectable trade deadline after all. My Prospectus confreres have done an excellent job in deconstructing these deals with regard to how they’ll affect organizations at the major league level. Now I’m going to take a gander at the prospects involved.
Does Nomar Garciaparra have a real Achilles’ problem, or was he just trying to force his way out of Boston? Will Carroll clears the air on that, and provides updates on Mark Bellhorn, Sammy Sosa and Joe Mauer, in today’s UTK.
With no trades and just two games yesterday, Joe Sheehan pauses to catch up on some things. Notes on the Rangers, Barry Bonds and Terry Ryan inside.
But I’ve come to realize that they’re inseparable: Tweaking the rules is a smaller move in philosophy, but in implication and consequence can be just as large as the sweeping one. Which in turn is why this is such a fascinating discussion for me.
Who needs starting pitchers? They’re like the pace car at Indy: They get the thing in motion before the real guys come along to finish up the job. At least, that must be the rationale around Yankee Stadium these days. Only three teams in all of baseball find themselves in the predicament in which the Yankees are in–their best starting pitcher has a lower VORP than their highest-ranked reliever. The Yankees actually go this one better in that their two best relievers are rated higher than their best starter.
Everybody had something to say about the weekend’s biggest trades, from Nomar Garciaparra to Paul Lo Duca to Doug Mientkiewicz. All that, and Felipe Alou’s words of wisdom, in The Week in Quotes.
Division leaders the Twins, A’s and Cardinals all have key players working their way back from or playing through injuries. Will Carroll provides updates on these guys, as well as UTK regulars Andy Pettitte, Ken Griffey Jr., and Austin Kearns.
In a wild weekend of trades, a number of contending teams sat on their hands. Why, and what might change for them in August, in Joe Sheehan’s Monday morning column.
If there’s one thing George Steinbrenner has always been good at, it’s hiding his money. Whether it’s starting his own cable network to keep
his broadcast revenue out of the reach of his fellow owners, as he did in 2002, or paying himself a “consulting fee” to negotiate his own cable contract, as he did in the 1980s, The Boss has always been at the cutting edge of creative accounting, helping him evade attempts by fellow owners to force him to share the bounty that comes from operating the most lucrative franchise in baseball.
With his recently revealed plan to build a new $750 million stadium in the Bronx, though, Steinbrenner may have hit upon the biggest scam of his life.