This is the debut of what will hopefully be a semi-regular look at University of Kentucky baseball.  Our first installment is bittersweet, as Kentucky’s 6-0 start to the season has been offset by news that they’ll finish the year without their best pitcher.
James Paxton, who I’m sure you’ve read about here, will not play for U.K. this [...]

This generation’s Oakland A’s have been a boring team on the basepaths, employing an organizational philosophy that eschews the risk of a caught stealing by leaving their runners parked on the bag. This trend suddenly changed in 2009, with the A’s attempting 181 stolen bases. This marked the highest franchise total in 16 years, and [...]

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 [...]

Kahlil Greene, former San Dieo Padres prospect, had his contract voided by the Texas Rangers on Thursday. His ongoing battle with social anxiety disorder has flipped his career upside down.

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, [...]

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 [...]

The Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) will once again be offering The Emerald Guide to Baseball as a free searchable PDF available for download on the SABR Website starting today.  The 2010 Guide is 580+ pages of every type of baseball information a fan could ever want (and it’s free!).
The Emerald Guide to Baseball [...]

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, [...]

After Game 163, I went on Marty Andrade’s podcast and said what I’d been thinking for a long time: We’ve judged Bill Smith too quickly.
His first winter on the job, he was essentially handed something of a crisis in the making. Torii Hunter was asking for an unholy sum of money and Johan Santana was [...]