November 23, 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 (8) Why Baseball Needs a Visual Facelift (5) Building a Retrosheet database, the short form (4) Is peak at age 29? (7) 
Or you can search by:
Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets. Find premium Chicago Cubs tickets and other Chicago tickets at JustGreatTickets.com. Chicago Cubs Tickets Chicago Tickets  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Sunday, November 19, 20068 Years and $136 MillionESPN's Chicago radio station has evidently reported that the Cubs have signed Alfonso Soriano to an 8-year deal worth $136 million. That's $17 million a year. If true, that will make Soriano a Cub through the 2014 season. No other player is signed through even 2013, though one player, David Wright, has an option for that year. Wright will be 30 years old in 2013. Soriano will be 38 in 2014. One good thing: Soriano should put up some good home run totals in Wrigley Field. Saturday, November 11, 2006NUMB3RSDid you watch the TV show NUMB3RS last night? It was about a baseball player who is murdered (by some "bad" steroids) because, well, I'm not sure why. But it featured a dorky kid who is really into baseball stats and fantasy baseball, and who had developed a formula to detect which players are taking steroids. George Mitchell might be interested. But what was most interesting, at least to me, was that the website the dorky kid posted to was called "The Boxscore Times." Ring a bell? Plus, the name of the episode was "Hardball." Wow. Almost famous... Friday, November 03, 2006Buster Olney Doesn’t Get It AgainBuster Olney wrote an ESPN column today (subscription required) about the latest Gold Glove awards and how difficult it is to evaluate fielding. He tells an interesting story of how coaches make their Gold Glove choices off the top of their heads, and he also criticizes some of the latest fielding stats. Now, advanced fielding stats aren't perfect, but Olney makes his case by first finding fault with Range Factor (which was created over 20 years ago) and then totally screwing up a description of the most advanced stats (like MGL's Ultimate Zone Rating and John Dewan's Plus/Minus system). Olney says, Other statistical measures depend on an evaluator sitting in the press box effectively gauging whether a fielder might have/should have reached a ball... No they don't, Buster! Companies like Baseball Info Solutions do track where each ball lands on a field, and they then calculate how often each ball batted in that location was fielded for an out (they also factor in how hard the ball was hit, and what type of batted ball it was). Fielders are compared those average outcomes and then ranked accordingly. No one sits in a pressbox and determines whether a ball should have been caught or not. The disappointing thing is that Olney has covered the majors for years. How can he not know this???? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||