Pardon me while I think aloud, but this has been on my mind lately. Recently, I wrote a couple of posts (this and this) on my blog Crashburn Alley detailing why I think it would be a good idea to trade Ryan Howard. It inspired a lot of debate and it was linked to heavily [...]

Kevin Youkilis is a good baseball player. A very valuable one at that. Since earning regular playing time in 2006, he has never had an on-base percentage lower than .381 and has finished with a .958 and .961 OPS the last two seasons. That would be enough to impress you, but he’s also regarded as [...]

My goodness, the Washington Nationals have been bad. Since moving out of Montreal after the 2004 season, the Nats have won 343 games and lost 466 for a .424 winning percentage. They have finished dead last in the NL East in four out of five seasons, and fourth once in 2007.  In that time span, [...]

BDD Clone Wars: Bill Baer and Cole Hamels… Crashburn Alley blogger and BDD contributor Baer had a solid ‘09. His combination of wit, snark and Saber-slanted analysis and excellent regular season writing at both his blog and BDD earned him a gig writing about the Phillies during the ‘09 postseason as a member of Rob [...]

The phrase “in the best shape of his life” and its variants are a sportswriting cliche these days. Players who had disappointing performances in 2009 will show up to spring training several pounds slimmer, will have adopted a new strenuous workout regimen, and/or will have developed a new pitch or batting stance. This gives fans [...]

The great Frank Thomas has called it quits, putting the last bit of punctuation at the end of the awe-inspiring sentence he called a career. Dubbed “The Big Hurt”, Thomas terrorized American League pitching for 19 seasons, 16 of which were spent in Chicago’s South Side with the White Sox. Now that his spikes are [...]

From 2001-09 with an average payroll of only $54 million, the Minnesota Twins somehow managed to win 88 games per season on average. In those nine seasons, they earned a post-season berth on five different occasions. The Florida Marlins and Oakland Athletics are the prototypical examples of teams that achieved a lot with very little, [...]

the players are the investments of 30 Major League teams and each team has a right to ensure that those investments are able to return a profit. As Jason Rosenberg would say, “It’s about the money, stupid!”

As Vegas Watch points out, PECOTA is the best in the business at doing what it does.

ERA estimators very much disagree with Happ’s 2009 ERA. Even the most optimistic estimator only puts Happ at 4.33, which is in the same neighborhood as Nick Blackburn, Mike Pelfrey, and Livan Hernandez.