November 22, 2009
Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT. Most Recent Comments
Introducing Visual Baseball (1)
HR/FB Park Factors (6) Why Baseball Needs a Visual Facelift (2) Building a Retrosheet database, the short form (3) Is peak at age 29? (7) 
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Thursday, September 30, 2004Giants/Padres postmortemThe Padres beat the Giants 4-3 in ten innings last night, hurting the Giants' chances for the wildcard. A lot of the coverage has focused on the game-ending play, in which Dustan Mohr made a questionable judgement call catching a foul fly ball (and subsequently hurting his knee). But that wasn't the key play of the inning. Here's a quick play-by-play of the last inning, including the change in the Padres' chances of winning: - As the inning begins, Padres have a 63% chance of winning. Home teams always have an advantage in extra-inning games. - Ramon Hernandez safe at first on Alfonso's throwing error. Padres's chances increase to 72%. 9% impact. - Torrealba makes a throwing error on Kerry Robinson's bunt, Robinson goes to second, pinch-runner Freddy Guzman to third. Padres chances increase to 93%. 21% impact. This is the key play of the inning. - Jay Payton grounds out, runner out at home (nice play by Torrealba to catch the ball at home). Chances decrease to 84%. 9% impact. - Flyout to Mohr, Padres win. 16% impact. Giant fans should particularly bemoan the error by Torrealba, who is really a fine defensive catcher. This is similar to last year's Bartman game in Chicago, in which Cub fans were upset with Steve Bartman, a fan who interfered with a foul ball, when they really should have been upset with Alex Gonzalez's key error that same inning. Wildcard RaceHouston has jumped into the lead in the NL wildcard race, and Angels now have sole possesion of first place in the AL West. In addition to updating the division race graphs daily, we've added a National League wildcard graph on the Team page, which illustrates the great comeback that Houston has made. Wednesday, September 29, 2004Mets Hire MinayaThe Mets are supposed to announce today or tomorrow that they have hired Omar Minaya to be head of baseball operations, with Jim Duquette moving to more of an administrative role. Minaya worked for the Mets for several years before taking the front office job with the Expos. Minaya is a good baseball man. But so is Duquette. The key question is whether any baseball man under the Wilpon regime will really be given the authority to run baseball operations and make the baseball decisions. Perhaps the Wilpons will have enough trust in Minaya to give him that control, because they apparently didn't have that trust in Duquette. The other big off-field news is the impending move (finally!) of the Expos to Washington D.C. Peter Angelos has been fighting this move tooth and nail, and I can't say I really blame him. The value of the Oriole franchise will definitely take a hit. It looks like MLB will pay to assuage the Oriole owner. You can follow this story, and other business-related baseball news, at the Field of Schemes weblog. Pennant Races GaloreAt the beginning of the month, I wasn't sure there would be much drama in the pennant races. Boy, was I wrong. The Angels are now tied for first with the A's, and the NL wildcard race is going down to the wire, with the Cubs, Giants and Astros pretty much on top of each other in the standings. The Dodgers apparently put away the NL West race last night, with an improbable 5-4 win over the Rockies. How improbable? They were down 4-0 at the beginning of the last half-inning; the probability of winning in that situation is less than 2%. Coupled with last Saturday's Cubs loss to the Mets, we're seeing some really wild comebacks in this last week. Saturday, September 25, 2004All Stats UpdatedAll stats and graphs are now current through games of September 23rd. In the American League, Johan Santana is now tied with Gary Sheffield for most Win Shares Above Average, and he's making a legitimate claim for the MVP title. In the National, Barry Bonds now has 51 Win Shares -- only the tenth time that a player has reached at least 50 in a season since 1900. Bonds has a chance to beat his previous best Win Shares total of 54, which he set in 2001. Bonds also now has 662 career Win Shares, passing Honus Wagner for third on the all-time list, behind only Babe Ruth (756) and Ty Cobb (722). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||