You’d think that relief pitchers don’t homer all that often. Depending on how you define “often”, you might be wrong. Continue reading →

Sky Kalkman has just released an announcement of a new eBook called the The Hall of Very Good. The project is hosted by Kickstarter and if they reach their pledge level the book will be produced by July. Please follow the link, check it out, and if you’re interested, pledge your support.

This sort of e-publishing is a great way to support the writing community.

I am thinking of doing such a publication myself–one that gets pledged beforehand to ensure that there’s enough interest. Any folks out there think this is a particularly good or bad idea? I’ll need people who can help me with artwork, e-publishing, etc–feel free to let me know if you’re interested.

I found a straightforward way to redo the normalized strikeout rate study. Check out my previous post on the subject for the rationale.

For those who care, here is the updated method:

• Instead of taking a single league-average K/9 rate, I took 5 numbers for each player’s career–the league average from his first season, his final season, as well as the points 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 through his career. I then averaged those numbers and used that as the league average for that given player. This is of course not entirely precise, but is really a very good approximation.
• I made a lookup table in Excel, which made this exercise a lot easier. I then just listed one set of numbers for the league-average K/9 rate in each season, and then for each player did 5 lookups to get his 5 numbers.
• By using this method, it was easy to put the top 200 pitchers (by innings pitched) into the table. I could easily do more, as well.

Click through for the results. Continue reading →

UPDATE: I finally found a good workaround that has restored email service. I still don’t understand exactly what went wrong, but it was probably related to the extra spam filter I installed yesterday. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Folks, I am having some major problems with the site, specifically with comment email notification. I am not receiving them anymore but cannot figure out why.

Those of you who subscribe to comments on specific posts–are you still receiving those email notifications? (I am guessing not.)

I also don’t know how to fix this problem–I have done a lot of research on it but have not been able to solve things. I am not going to be writing any more if/until I can get this fixed. If you are a WordPress/PHP whiz and think you can help, comment on this thread and I’ll email you.

As strikeouts have become so much more frequent than they used to be, it’s useful to gain a little perspective on how the K rates of some of the best pitchers compare to the typical rates of their own era.

We know that guys like Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux were not strikeout artists, instead using fantastic control to position pitches precisely and (more often than not) induce weak ground or fly balls.

But how do these guys compare to others?

Click through to find out.

Continue reading →

Readers of his blog and its predecessor, the Baseball-Reference.com blog, will be very saddened to read the following note posted recently on another thread:

Frank Clingenpeel, Junior says:

February 20, 2012 at 8:15 pm

I am using this blog to present some other news — at least, for the folks here. Forgive me if this is inappropriate for this, but if you remember Frank Clingenpeel, Senior, I am his son. Dad also died last week from heart failure at the age of 84.

Again, forgive me if this is inappropriate, but I thought you would like to know.

Frank contributed so many wonderful stories on these pages–I wouldn’t even know where to begin. One that always sticks in my mind, though, is the fact that Frank’s father attended Johnny Vander Meer’s second no-hitter.

I’m sure I echo everyone’s sentiments in expressing my appreciation for what Frank brought to all of us and my condolences to all of his family.

Here’s a very trim-looking C.C. Sabathia working with newly-acquired Michael Pineda during spring training.

On this holiday, I always think of Dennis Martinez, because he’s the obvious player to consider when thinking of baseball “presidents”.

It has been well-documented that Martinez struggled with alcohol in the early part of his career and apparently it significantly affected his performance. For the first half of his career (1976-1986), he had a 92 ERA+ over 1873 innings. From when he joined the Expos onward (1987-1998) he had a 122 ERA+ over 2126 innings.

Think how good he would have been if he’d been better during his prime years.

Here’s on quick way of showing how marked his career age split is. Continue reading →

Gary Sheffield is an interesting case for the Hall of Fame. As with so many guys of his era, steroids come up a a big issue. Sheffield admitted to a grand jury that he unknowingly used a steroid cream during 2002. Many folks theorize that he had used other substances as well but there have been no formal accusations or admissions. There’s not a lot more we can say on the subject of steroids, though–exactly how it will affect his candidacy remains to be seen.

What we do know about Sheffield for sure are the facts: he topped 500 career homers with a 140 OPS+, was a 9-time all star (at two different positions), received MVP votes in 7 different seasons including 4 top-6 finishes, and he homered in every post-season series in 1997 as his Marlins won it all.

Still, he’s not a slam dunk candidate by any means. Click through for the debate and poll. Continue reading →

On August 8, 2007, Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run in the major leagues, passing Hank Aaron as the all-time leader.

Those are the facts….but does public perception match? Continue reading →