At the end of this post is a table of the major league players who have been known as “Cliff”, listed in descending order of career WAR (total WAR for position players, pitching WAR for pitchers). Continue reading →

The first in a series(?) reviewing random games from the season just past. We begin at the beginning:

April 6: Arizona 5, San Francisco 4. The Opening Day starters were Tim Lincecum and Ian Kennedy, a pair of righties taken 10th and 21st in the pitching-rich 2006 draft. (Brandon Morrow went 5th, Clayton Kershaw 7th, Max Scherzer 11th … and alas, Luke Hochevar went #1.)

The shape of things to come: Tim Lincecum yielded 3 runs on 2 HRs in the 1st inning and 5 runs over 5.1 IP, taking the first of his league-high 15 losses. The two-time CYA winner would stumble into the All-Star break at 3-10 with a 6.42 ERA, reviving memories of Denny McLain‘s rapid descent. Few could have dreamed that The Freak’s stellar postseason work — out of the bullpen, no less — would help key another title run.

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The Dec. 26 edition of Jim Caple’s CSI: Box Score (spoiler alert!) featured the only home run ever hit by Steve Christmas, who had a brief career as a catcher and first baseman with the White Sox from 1983-86. That got me reminiscing….

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Upon hearing that Francisco Liriano had signed a 2-year deal with Pittsburgh, I checked his recent stats and guessed that he was the wildest starting pitcher over the last two years.

My guess was off by one spot. But look at the across-the-board closeness of these two-year stats:

What’s more:

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This post is the spot for voting and discussion of the third round of voting for the Circle of Greats, which adds players born in 1966. Rules and lists are after the jump. Continue reading →

After a seesaw battle with Frank Thomas, Jeff Bagwell won induction as the second member of the Circle of Greats, joining Mike Piazza. Bagwell played his last game in 2005, completing what was then perhaps the greatest career at first base in modern National League history. After the jump, you’ll find a table of the top NL WAR totals for 1900 through 2005 by guys who played at least half their career games at first base. Continue reading →

Since 1890, these are the largest annual changes in strikeout percentage:

• 1893, -38%
• 1901, +32%
• 1903, +21%
• 1946, +20%
• 1918, -17%

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Yes, I did say Opening Day. As New Year approaches, we can also celebrate that winter’s end is in sight; the days are getting longer and Opening Day is now less than 100 days away.

Meanwhile, the folks over at Retrosheet.org continue their painstaking labor of poring through images of old newspapers and recording the published boxscores in the Retrosheet database. The database is available to all and the people at Baseball-Reference.com do the programming work so people like me can pull up boxscores online and run searches of these games.  This little preamble is by way of mentioning that, just in time for the holidays, B-R recently updated their games database to include all boxscores back to the 1916 season.

So, hold those thoughts, 1916 and opening day, and I’ll tell you more after the jump of an unusual opening day matchup that year and in some others as well.

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With Nick Swisher’s new deal with the Indians, let’s take a look at some comps and projections for his career performance.

Nick Swisher / Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

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This post is a personal trip down memory lane and not stats based – I promise I will do one of those soon.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

***

I was a couple weeks shy of my 9th birthday when I finally attended my first Yankee game(s).

At the time, I was very frustrated with my father for waiting so long to take me to Yankee Stadium. I also remember thinking it was because I was a girl and that if his first born child were male, he’d have been to a few games by then.

My dad made up for it by taking me to a single admission doubleheader in August 1983. The Yankees were scheduled to play the Toronto Blue Jays and on top of being able to see two games in one day, my dad also invited Joe, the boy I had a crush on to go with us, along with two of my other male friends, Billy and John.

As a young girl, I led a double life, so to speak. I did girly things like play with Barbies and gossip about boys during lunch with my girlfriends but I also traded baseball cards and played kickball with the boys during recess.

We had passed the Stadium many times while taking trips into the city or out to Long Island to visit relatives so it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before. It always seemed so enormous to me and when I walked inside for the first time it was even bigger than I had imagined. 9-year-old Stacey was in total awe.

I soaked in as much as I could as we made our way to our seats. The grass seemed so much greener in person than it did on TV. And the blue outfield walls were more vibrant in person. The scoreboard was massive and home plate seemed so far away from our seats. I didn’t want to sit down, I wanted to explore.

Our seats were in the first row of the second to last section in left field at field level. In those days, the wall extended all the way back to the seats – there was no space for balls to fall into, no plexiglass, no fold up chairs – so if anything were to be hit our way, we’d catch it. Well, not me, as much as I loved sports as a little girl, I wasn’t allowed to participate because I had eye issues and my hand/eye coordination was pretty poor. That made playing the outfield in kickball during recess quite the adventure.

Anyway, without further adieu, here is the first New York Yankees lineup I saw in action:

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