Purveyors of the knuckly arts are, above all else, survivors: Scott Baker’s Opening Night assignment has been called off. And so has the Philip Humber-R.A. Dickey roster competition. The right-hander was placed on the disabled list today after he experienced some stiffness in his right shoulder while pitching against Class AAA Norfolk on Wednesday. Baker […]

Last year the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bruce Jenkins ran a two-part piece in which he argued that teams should put more thought into their pitch counts, developing evaluation systems and protocols to determine when a pitcher is truly getting tired rather than simply impose a hard number of pitches on everyone. That’s actually a pretty […]

With the recent escalation in A’s relocation/ballpark news, it’s important to remember that generalists like me are dilettantes at best. Any time there’s an issue of any complexity, the blogosphere produces a focused star to really jam on it, and the star with respect to the A’s relocation drama is the New A’s Ballpark blog, […]

One of the bulwarks of the American justice system is that the ends of a prosecution — putting someone away for doing something wrong — do not necessarily justify the means of doing so. In fact, I would argue that the means are often more important than the ends, particularly in high profile cases which […]

We’ve gone over this about 1,378 times already, but guys like Wallace Matthews insist on saying that Joba Chamberlain would be more valuable in the bullpen than he would be in the rotation. Thankfully, Jason takes him to task, once again deploying the principle behind the name of his blog to good effect: With all […]

I’m not a big eater at ballgames. I almost always eat something elsewhere before going into the ballpark, so if I do get something during the game it’s usually a hot dog just for the hell of it or some peanuts to munch on or, if it’s really hot, maybe a small dish of ice […]

The New York Times has an overview of the retro-stadium craze of the past couple of decades, with particular attention paid to some of the parks’ unique particularities: The quirky signatures at older stadiums — like the Green Monster at Fenway Park in Boston — were adaptations to their narrow confines. But idiosyncrasies like Tal’s […]

Back when I was in private practice, I represented a park district that wanted to turn some old railroad lines in the middle of nowhere into a bike trail. They built about 85% of the trail, but the last little stretch was held up by this group of Mennonite farmers who lived next to the […]

Writing from the future — November of this year to be exact — The OC Register’s Sam Miller has fun with the 90th percentile of the PECOTA projections for the Angels: Nobody would have ever believed the Angels would win 120 games – a new Major League record – but with no holes in the […]

This is different: The Major League Baseball Players Association on Friday will open its first retail outlet devoted to selling player-only merchandise. The store, which will be inside Citi Field and be operated by Aramark, is an attempt to boost licensing revenue for the union and to promote star players, much as the N.B.A. and […]