The Top 10 All-time Worst* Seasons

One of the websites I find myself going to time and time again is Baseball Reference.   I recently was curious about single-season strikeout records and came to this amazingly valuble page.   [Seriously, click on this link and bookmark it, you will be glad you did!].  I started to look into the highest strikeouts with an […]

The Science of Baseball: From Ted Williams to Stephen Strasburg

A number of years back, Ted Williams, along with John Underwood published a book called The Science of Hitting.  It is still referenced today as “The Bible” in instructing people to accomplish what many believe to be  the most difficult thing to do in all of sports– to hit a thrown baseball.  One of the concepts that Williams stressed was […]

No-Hitter Flashback: Virgil Trucks

Matt Garza of the Tampa Bay Rays has just thrown Major League Baseball’s fifth no-hitter of the 2010 season.  That’s actually six no-hitters this year, at least in the State of Michigan.  Three of them have involved the Rays, twice as victim and now, finally, as victor. All this brings to mind that old Baseball Digest favorite, the […]

Brooks Robinson — Master of the Triple Play

Brooks Robinson, Baltimore Orioles’ great and Hall of Fame inductee was nicknamed “The Human Vacuum Cleaner” for his fielding prowess, winning 16 consecutive gold glove awards.  Obviously, any statistical analysis of players involved in the most triple plays would have to include Brooksie…right?  For sure.  Brooks’ fielding was involved in 3 Triple Plays during his illustrious […]

Four Strikeouts — A Baseball Rarity

With the incredible string of recent Perfect Games, including the one (almost) thrown by Armando Galarraga, we may have missed a similarly rare baseball occurrence–Four Strikeouts.  We are not talking about a batter striking out four times in a game; that inglorious feat is called a Golden Sombrero.  We are referring to a pitcher recording four strikeouts in […]

40 Years Ago– May 17, 1970 — Hank Aaron Reaches 3,000 Hits

“Trying to throw a fastball by Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster” was how Curt Simmons once described Henry Aaron.  Most people think of Aaron as the person who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record.  Actually, in many ways, Aaron was one of the most prolific hitters that baseball has […]

Top 10 Unbreakable Baseball Records — Do You Agree?

How can anyone pick a Top 10 list of Unbreakable Baseball Records.  It isn’t easy, but boy was it fun!  There is a saying that if you watch baseball, you’ll see something almost every day that has never been done before.  Recently, the Mets won two consecutive games with walk-off home runs by two different […]

Sabermetrics are here to stay. It’s time to get on the bus.

VORP? UZR? BABIP? No doubt you have seen some recent articles, including on this website, using terms that sound like they could come directly from NASA or the CIA.  These terms actually are part of an emerging lexicon that is revolutionizing baseball circles called Sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is the term given by baseball folks to the practice of churning […]

Plate Discipline: Musings from a Sports Bar

On a recent business trip to Orlando, I found myself sitting in a sports bar watching the game between the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies.  The TV sound was down which was pretty well moot since everybody’s conversation was wafting throughout the room (in particular, the kvetching of one Slappy the Boor, but I won’t go […]

Baseball Statistics: BABIP Updated

When we last visited this subject (see link here), there was considerable debate whether John Lannan’s abnormally low Batting Average for Balls Put into Play, or BABIP, was a statistical anomaly or whether there was something inherent in Lannan’s pitching technique and/or location that causes him to have the lowest BABIP in the league over the past […]

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