(Note: With production having started on Baseball Prospectus 2002, The Daily Prospectus will run on an irregular schedule through February. Look for two to three columns per week in this space.) On Sunday, Mark McGwire confirmed the rumor that he had not signed the extension of his contract with the Cardinals, and would instead retire…
Wade through the stream of codeine-affected consciousness with me today: From Peter Gammons’s ESPN column, Saturday, Nov. 10th: "Players and their lawyers don’t understand this, but the fact is that the national economy has to have a dramatic impact on the market. Before this week, club marketing offices have been told to expect a downturn…
Hand Bud Selig and the owners of Major League Baseball a loaded gun and they will successfully shoot themselves every time. Some time on Tuesday morning, someone handed Selig an Uzi and several rounds of ammunition. Unfortunately, he survived…and held a press conference. What we got was even more disgraceful than the worst scenarios any…
The Internet has spoken. Your choices for this year’s Internet Baseball Awards.
Staff Ballots As many of our readers were submitting their ballots for the Internet Baseball Awards, 13 Baseball Prospectus staffers went into the polling booths themselves, voicing their opinions on who should win the major baseball awards this year. Here are the results: National League MVP Player Ballots (First) Points Barry Bonds 13 (13) 182…
Joe Sheehan Mat Olkin Keith Woolner Jeff Bower Jeff Hildebrand Michael Wolverton Derek Zumsteg Rany Jazayerli Clay Davenport Dave Pease Gary Huckabay Chris Kahrl Greg Spira Joe Sheehan American League MVP 1. Jason Giambi, Athletics 2. Alex Rodriguez, Rangers 3. Bret Boone, Mariners 4. Roberto Alomar, Indians 5. Jim Thome, Indians 6. Edgar Martinez, Mariners…
Bud Selig is a sniveling weasel. He professes to have been hurt by the Braves’ departure from Milwaukee in 1965, but got his own team by stealing it from another municipality–Seattle–just five years later. Now, he wants to take teams away from two other cities, again re-creating his pain for thousands, perhaps millions, of fans….
About three years ago, ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer told me he was planning to start his own Web site, one on which he could write about things that didn’t fit into his ESPN.com column. One of those things was our Kansas City Royals, which tended to occupy more space in his column than a…
WORLD SERIES "When you’re a little kid, you think about the seventh game of the World Series. It didn’t matter how the hit came." —Luis Gonzalez, Diamondbacks outfielder, on his Series-winning hit in Game Seven "I wouldn’t move on the bench. I wanted to get up and watch for the whole inning, but I was…
I’d imagine that many of you reading this column played baseball growing up. I did, as well as playing softball, and stickball, and Wiffle ball, and stoopball…basically anything that looked, smelled, or tasted like baseball was a good use of my time. Well, I thought so, anyway. In playing those games when I was very…
I know I’m supposed to fill this space with cogent analysis about the World Series, but I really don’t know what I can say. I’m not operating as an analyst right now, not at 9:49 on Thursday night, not after having watched the most incredible back-to-back World Series games since 1991. I’m just a fan…
He deserved to lose. I’ve spent most of the evening exchanging e-mails with my BP colleagues, e-mails with subject lines like "Silliness" and "Bob Brenly is an idiot." Believe me, I didn’t expect to be doing this: Brenly’s decision to start Curt Schilling on short rest was, to me, a decision to win the World…
And just like that, we have a series. Last night’s game was another in the endless string of pitchers’ duels this October, which comes as something of a surprise to the many people–OK, to the me–who dismissed Brian Anderson as a hunch play who had no business starting a World Series game. He ended up…
Stuff bouncing around my brain as I wonder how we might contract by 30 owners, not two: I’ve been reading about how the Diamondbacks are going to lose $50 million this year, and how they’re going to suffer in the future because of all the deferred money they have to pay, stretching into 2008. This…
The Arizona Diamondbacks are keeping it simple. Their philosophy of winning is not at all complicated. It isn’t predicated on some strange brand of aggressive baserunning, or a managerial zeal for sound fundamentals, or the ticking-time-bomb brand of big-inning baseball practiced by the Oakland A’s. No, the Diamondbacks’ theory on winning is this: hand the…
The contraction drums are beating. Just recently, you may have seen this trial balloon: Contraction would begin to reverse the damage done by two dumb and dumber expansions that cost nearsighted owners many times more than the relatively few pennies they pocketed. — Peter Gammons, Oct. 26, 2001. This is really a two-part statement, so…