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So I take the wife out shopping today. She shops, I sit in the car and read Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008, everyone’s happy.
On page 145 of the Annual, I come across an amusing anecdote about a gentleman named Clay Dalrymple:
One July day in Baltimore in 1969, the umpires were faced with a problem. Clay Dalrymple was to catch for Baltimore that evening, but he emerged from the dugout with both a catcher’s mitt (on his hand) and a fielder’s glove (in his back pocket).
“I asked him about it,” reported home plate umpire John Rice. “And …read more

The Arizona Diamondbacks have been getting grief for outperforming their Pythagorean record by 11 games in 2007. Although it’s nice to see that Bill James’ creation has worked its way into the mainstream, it’s amusing (or not) to see the formula itself so poorly understood.
Instead of talking about “should win” and “luck,” we ought to be digging deeper. Perhaps there are reasons for Arizona’s success that aren’t immediately obvious? Wouldn’t be the first time.
In his 1982 Baseball Abstract, James identifies a team that regularly finished with better records than their run differential suggested they should. From 1977 through 1981, the …read more

How appropriate that so many great baseball platoons were in effect during the decade that brought us the movie Platoon. Steve Treder at Hardball Times (full disclosure: I contribute to THT) has published the latest in his look back at “extraordinarily productive left-right platoon partnerships.”
A couple things stand out to me. First, it’s amazing how much mileage Earl Weaver got out of John Lowenstein and Gary Roenicke in left field. Both were good players with flaws. The genius of Weaver, of course, is that he found a way to maximize their utility while minimizing their flaws. (As an aside, I’m …read more