fenskemelissa

Introduction Hey everyone, I'm Chris St. John ( @stealofhome on Twitter). First, I would like to thank Bill and The Common Man for the opportunity to write at TPA. I will probably be fairly intermittent with my posts, but I just couldn't pass up this great chance to contribute on such a well-respected site. They asked me to come aboard to have someone who could "really dig in and work with the stats," so I have been thinking really hard about my first post. Something deep. Something technical... Read Full Story

Sal Bando ! As a birthdate, February 13 suffers from a shortage of great players -- Bando's 242 career homers are more than four times as many as #2, and no pitcher amassed 50 wins or 500 strikeouts -- and is largely devoid of current  players, so it's not likely to get better any time soon. What it's not  missing, though, is interesting stories. Tragic figure Donnie Moore would have turned 58 today; villainous figure (and just plain terrible baseball player who nonetheless got to play for 15... Read Full Story

By The Common Man Yesterday, we learned that George Brett and his company are being sued for making false medical claims about "Ionic Necklaces," which are similar to the Phiten necklaces that MLB players have been wearing since 2010. Brett's necklaces, according to Brett, "help customers relieve pain in the neck, shoulders and upper back, recover from sports fatigue and improve focus. The company has also falsely claimed its bracelets, which include two roller magnets, would relieve wrist... Read Full Story

by Cee Angi 2012 marks the end of my baseball card collecting era. Baseball cards are the only thing I collect, actually. I had a vinyl record collection that I got rid of after the fifth time I moved and got tired of lugging crate upon crate of albums with me. I had an impressive book collection, but I donated the majority of them to a library charity in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I keep my possessions to a minimum: too much clutter makes me anxious and I don't have a real... Read Full Story

by Jason Wojciechowski Do you remember when Rick Ankiel was awesome? I do, by god. Twice, in fact. I remember when he was a 20-year-old phenom pitcher, throwing 175 innings, striking out ten men per nine, and matching the .382 slugging percentage that Rookie-of-the-Year Rafael Furcal pounded out. I was 18 at the time, doing my level best to finish my first year of college without utter academic disaster, drinking Bombay Sapphire while composing papers on Russian literature, but we all keep... Read Full Story

By Bill Yesterday, via the excellent @junkstats  (who basically just comes up with great stuff like the following all day), I happened to notice this: To which @jordansmed added this: This is the kind of thing that probably  shouldn't  be that surprising -- we know the style of play has changed a ton over the last century, and one of the biggest differences is that players (even good ones) used to bunt a  lot  more -- but it caught me off-guard a bit. Twenty-one is a lot  of outs for the best... Read Full Story

Personally, I'm sad to see Mark Smith leave the Platoon Advantage. He's a good guy, but mostly I am jealous that he is leaving the annals of the Internet to live-out the fantasy of every pant-less blogger living in their parents' basement. While Mark is living the dream as a pie-eating southern gentlemen, the rest of us are stuck here on the Internet. The only saving grace is that perhaps my plan of kidnapping Brian McCann so I can keep him in a jar in my basement and ask him questions about... Read Full Story

By Mark Smith It came out of nowhere. and even as I type this, I keep wondering if it's for real. While sitting at home on a normal Thursday night, I received a phonecall from the 404 area code, and thinking it was a telemarketer, I googled thephone number to see if anything popped up. And there it was -- the AtlantaBraves. My phone had stopped ringing by then, and when I looked again, therewas a voicemail. The Braves were asking to interview me for an internshipwithin their baseball... Read Full Story

By The Common Man I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out what to say about Josh Hamilton. It’s been exceptionally difficult. All I feel is sadness for the man and for his family. That’s, apparently, not what I should be feeling. I think Jeff Passan wants me to be angry at Hamilton for not caring enough about his sobriety, or maybe angry at the concept of addiction. But Passan’s writing is so muddled that it’s impossible to tell if he’s got an actual point to make about Hamilton’s... Read Full Story

By Mark Smith At this point, I hope you understand Wins Above Replacement. If not, I’lldirect you to FanGraphs or some such site that can give you a betterexplanation. If you don’t understand the exact differences between fWAR andrWAR (or bWAR; I understand that they’re the same thing and what the “r”stands for, but which is the “right” one?), that’s okay. I don’t really either.All I really know is that they’re just a good way to compare players, and youcan’t cross-compare (3 fWAR does not... Read Full Story